by Rick Dakan
Sonia
“She’s a bit florid with her prose, isn’t she?” I said, starting to read the letter again from the top, bringing it closer to my eyes. “And very demanding.” I’d never read any of Sonia Greene’s writing, but it didn’t seem like the kind of artless prose an avid amateur author would produce.
“You see!” Sinclair said, leaning over my shoulder. “You see! It’s quite genuine, I assure you, and it shows just how depraved and domineering she was. And of course there are the symbols you see there. I used those to create my sigil. She even quotes the Necronomicon there at the end.”
“So she does,” I said. There was a familiar smell coming from the letter. Faint but familiar.
Sinclair reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out another envelope, this one sealed with a dollop of red wax. “I have the sigil here, gold leaf embossed on thick card stock. I’m sure once we show this to Shelby it will be of great help in dispelling whatever arcane influence Kym has overcome him with,” Sinclair said, reaching for the letter.
I moved it beyond his grasp. “Hold on,” I said. “What’s that smell?”
“You know old letters, they do pick up scents,” Sinclair said, reaching again.
“It smells like tea,” I said, finally placing the odor. I sniffed again and looked close at the letter’s discolored edges.
“I do believe the seller mentioned something about keeping it in an old box his mother had used to store tea bags, so that might make sense,” Sinclair assured me.
I picked up the envelope again and sniffed it. It also smelled faintly of tea, but not as much. I looked close at the dark letters on the outside of the envelope and then compared them to the ones on the page.
“I think we’d best contact Conrad so we can get the sigil to him,” Sinclair said. “I’m sure the ritual could start at any moment.”
The ink on the page was more faded than the ink on the outside of the envelope. They both showed signs of aging but felt strangely new. They smelled of tea. I read the closing quote from the Necronomicon again, one I’d seen before.
“This quote here at the end,” I said. “That was on one of the pages I got a picture of that you translated for me, wasn’t it?”
“I believe it might have been, yes,” Sinclair said. “Further proof of the letter’s importance.”
“And it’s weird that she refers to her ‘race’ in that way. I don’t know many Jewish friends who would refer to themselves that way.”
“Well, this letter is over eighty years old. Times were different then, less politically correct.”
“Politically correct,” I repeated. “That’s an almost meaningless term. I kind of hate it. Do you have the receipt for this letter, something that proves you paid over a thousand dollars for it?”
“I’m afraid I do not. The seller insisted on complete anonymity.”
“Huh,” I said, looking at the letter and the envelope again. The yellowed pages. The brown stains. Even the words reminded me of those glass-encased pages of the Necronomicon that Conrad had taken pictures of.
“I think you’ve been had, Calvin.”
“Had? I’m not sure I follow.”
“I think this letter is a fake.”
Sinclair dove forward to snatch it from my hand, but I pulled it away out of his reach. “Hey!” I shouted. “Back off.”
“It most certainly is NOT a fake!” Sinclair shouted.
I moved around the dining room table so it was between us. “I’m certain it is. My brother’s a professional comic-book grader, and while forged documents aren’t his specialty, he and his coworkers know how to spot fakes, so we can check with them. But I’m pretty sure this is a fake. You’ve been swindled.”
“Impossible,” Sinclair said, moving around the table toward me and again grabbing in vain for the letter. “Return that to me at once. I insist!”
I kept maneuvering to stay out of his reach, the two of us doing a comical little dance around my tiny dining room. “Come on, Calvin, it’s pretty obvious. Who would write a letter like this in the first place? It’s straight out of a bad horror story. She’s not a real person, she’s a caricature out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for God’s sake! Your mysterious contact was just playing to your… ” I stopped moving. No, not the mysterious contact.
Sinclair seized on my moment of epiphany and literally tore the letter from my grasp, leaving me a single corner of paper pinched between finger and thumb. I looked at him in incredulous horror. This strange little man with his shabby clothes and his utterly affected manner of speech, living in his mother’s house and trading old pulps on eBay. This racist, boorish faux-intellectual who’d come off so wise on the phone and now seemed nothing more than a heaving, paranoid wreck, panting breathlessly in my dining room and staring at me with wild-eyed defiance.
“You swine,” I said. “You swindling little fake.” Now it was my turn to stalk him around the table, but this was no longer a game. He had time to take three steps backwards before I was upon him, grabbing him by the lapels of his threadbare jacket and pushing him against the wall. He crumpled the letter in his fist.
“No! No!” Sinclair said. “It’s not like that. There is a letter. But he wouldn’t sell it to me. I swear, I saw the letter and I copied it. I copied it! But the letter’s true, I swear.”
“No it’s not,” I hissed into his face, just inches below mine. I had fifty pounds and five inches on him and he was shaking under my grip. I wanted to drive him right through the wall I was so angry, and I might have if he hadn’t relented at once.
“There must be a letter like it!” He protested, a defense so bizarre it confused me for a moment, deflecting my rage.
“What?”
“I know it. I know it. I do. I know it. She must have been controlling Lovecraft’s dreams! How else to explain it all? How else to explain the Necronomicon? All the pieces fit. All of them. There is a letter, there is, but it’s lost. Or maybe it never existed as a letter. Maybe it was a conversation or a telephone call. But it’s lost now, so I had to recreate it for you. For Conrad. To save your friend from that negro woman’s influence!” He was starting to hyperventilate, he was talking so fast.
“How much did you make up?” I asked him. “How much did you just pull out of your ass?”
“It has to be this way, I know it. It’s just like in Lovecraft’s stories. The brilliant but disturbed artist returns to his ancestral home and gets swept up under the influence of ancient powers. That’s Shelby Tyree! And Kym! And then, his first massive Cthulhu ritual, and then the manifesto. You can’t tell me that’s all an elaborate hoax on his part! You can’t think he would conceive of such powerful imagery on his own? And the way he and that woman hypnotized you and the others at their rituals! What are those but the most classic, the most Lovecraftian of occult practices! What else makes any sense at all? He has the pages of the Necronomicon for God’s sake!”
“Like you had the letter,” I said. “There is no Necronomicon, just like there was no letter.”
“Are you mad?” Sinclair asked, seeming genuinely startled. “You saw them! I translated them. The Greek monks… ”
“All supposition. All guesswork. All assuming connections based on the barest of coincidence. There never has been a Necronomicon, has there?”
“Of course there was!” Sinclair shouted.
“It’s all made up. All invented by Lovecraft. By Lovecraft and then obsessed fan boys like you and Shelby. All made up like your insane, racist, pitiful forgery of a letter!” I released him long enough to shift my grip and take him by one flabby bicep in my right hand. With the other I picked up his valise and marched them both to the front door.
“What are you doing? We’ve got to help Conrad. Without the sigil, Shelby will never be free!” He waved the sealed envelope in my face and I slapped it away. It was insane nonsense, all of it. I had to warn Conrad.
I managed to open the door without dropping the valise and sho
ved Sinclair out it. He spun away from my grasp, nearly falling over. I tossed the valise after him and slammed and locked the door. I heard his pounding and yelling but ignored it long enough to get my cell phone and hit redial. But Conrad’s phone was off — went straight to voice mail. I pocketed the phone, grabbed my keys, and opened the front door once more.
Sinclair stood there in mid-pound, and I spied a moment of relief cross his features. I disappointed him at once, shouldering him aside and locking the door behind me. My neighbor Joe had come out to see what the fuss was all about. I ignored Sinclair’s pleas and told Joe that if this stranger didn’t leave the apartment complex at once, he should call the cops. Then I got in my car, nearly catching three of Sinclair’s fingers in the car door, and sped away toward the Cthulhu compound.
Chapter 24
All my guilty doubts charged forward from the back of my mind as I raced as fast as traffic and stoplights would allow toward Shelby’s house. Nothing was what it seemed. Scratch that. Maybe everything was in fact just what it seemed rather than what we’d suspected. Nothing Sinclair had told me could be trusted now, nothing. And with his wild theories and bold frauds cast aside, one third of the tripod of suspicions was kicked loose. On the one hand, that left Shelby’s own actions, which, while curious and confounding in the extreme, offered no sure proof of ill intent. Even my own experience in the pool could well have been a drug-induced sex game rather than a human sacrifice. On the other hand, there was Ash and his accusations. Accusations without proof, from a “cult member” who by his own admission had been all but forced from the group, a fact that surely clouded his own interpretation of events, even assuming he was telling me and Conrad the truth as he saw it and not just leading us on in hopes of getting more money out of Conrad.
But Conrad knew none of this. Conrad was hidden in the compound, his mind spinning with false conclusions and fired by what I’d told him and by Sinclair’s paranoid fantasies. I had no idea what he planned to do or what Shelby might do if he discovered Conrad’s intrusion. The Necronomicon might not be real. The cult might or might not be real. But I was certain that Shelby was really angry with Conrad. The attack by the pool during my rescue. The media attention. The lawsuit. In Shelby’s shoes I’d have been a roiling cauldron of anger.
The gate was locked — of course — so I just laid into my horn and hoped someone would come out. It was just past 8:00 p.m. now, and the night was dark and overcast with no visible moon. In the few moments I wasn’t honking, I could hear muffled sounds of drumming coming from inside the compound walls. If they were inside the temple, would they even be able to hear me? If they didn’t, the neighbors certainly did. I saw at least one head poking out a door down the street, trying to see what asshole was honking his horn. I imagined a call to the police might be next, especially if I offended Mr. Malinowski’s ears, so I finally gave up.
I got out of the car and looked up and down the wooden fence. I thought about climbing on top of my car and using that to get over the top, but the curious neighbor was still watching. He’d definitely call the cops. I remembered Conrad’s chosen path of entry and followed the fence until it came to the artificial lake that bordered one edge of the property. From the dim light of Mr. Malinowski’s house across the water I could make out the line of trees along its the shore that hid the entrance to the property. I tried calling Conrad one last time, but his phone was still off. So, as quietly as I could, I stepped into the muddy lake. My feet sank into the slimy ground, but by sticking close to the tree line I never went deeper than my knees as I edged my way towards the fence.
Clambering out of the water onto the soft ground within the trees and brush, I almost became trapped in a new obstacle. Conrad’s use of the lake as an infiltration point had apparently not gone undetected. There were now thick strands of barbwire strung tight through the gap between the two fence ends that exposed the lakefront. With only eight or so inches between each strand, I wasn’t sure how to proceed. I could still hear the faint drumming sounds, presumably from within the temple, but there were no other signs of life. I decided I’d have to try and climb over. I took off my shirt and wrapped it round and round my right hand to offer some protection as I began to scale the barbwire. It was only about five feet high.
I was just trying to figure out how to swing my leg over the top without getting caught when unseen hands seized me and yanked me forward. I yelped in surprise and then screamed in pain as my abdomen and lower body were scraped across the top of the fence, shredding my pants and leaving a deep, bleeding scratch on my stomach.
The two figures in dark, hooded robes let me fall prone on the other side of the fence. I rose to my knees and felt my stomach with my left hand. There was blood. I looked up into the gloom but couldn’t make out their shadowed faces.
“I need to talk to Shelby,” I said. “It’s important.”
They exchanged unseen looks and then lifted me to my feet and frog-marched me towards the front gate. “No!” I shouted. “I need to see Shelby! There’s something he needs to know! Something terrible will happen if I don’t see Shelby!”
They ignored me, continuing to force me forward, so I started to struggle. Neither of them was ready for me to fight back, and being stronger than either of them, I broke free, shoving one to the ground in the process. I turned and sprinted towards the temple. Or where I remembered the temple as being. It should have been to my right, toward the back of the house. But all I saw ahead of me was pitch blackness. A wall of black. As I raced closer I saw that it wasn’t a wall at all, but rather long sheets of black cloth suspended from some hidden line or rope coming from the rooftop. I skidded to a stop as I reached the cloth barrier and saw that it was fastened to the ground via a series of plastic tent stakes. I was searching for some breach in the wall when my two captors caught up with me and seized hold once more.
I twisted and flailed, heaving my body weight into the cloth and dragging the two robed assailants with me. No need for a breach now. The tent stakes tore loose as did the fasteners that held it in place up above, and fifteen feet of heavy black canvas came spilling down on top of the three of us as we tumbled to the ground. I continued to kick and lash out as we fell, and either my blows or the general chaos of the collapsing cloth caused both of them to let go of me. I clawed my way across the grass beneath the covering toward whatever lay beyond, and was the first to emerge into the light.
To my left I saw the wide open doors of the Temple of Cthulhu. The building had originally been a large garage, capable of holding two semi-trucks (minus the trailers of course) side by side. Shelby or whoever he’d bought it from had installed a raised wooden floor, and stout wooden pillars like craved tree trunks lined the two long walls, supporting a loft area where a tangle of plants and shadowy sculptures hid multi-colored flickering lights and who knows what else. Emerging from the far wall, straining towards the open garage doors, was the giant head of Cthulhu I’d first seen at the art opening only a little over a month ago. But it had found more of its monstrous form. Great, dragon-like wings spread out across the wall behind it and up to the vaulted ceiling where they curved in over the temple floor below. Two bulbous, pulsing arms stretched forward along the level of the raised loft areas, tipped with talons that ended in lidless glowing yellow eyes extending more than halfway down the length of the room toward me. And below the head was the corpulent body of the monstrous alien god, erupting forth from the raised wooden floor as if it was emerging from beneath the ground. It did not look remotely lifelike, but it was entirely intimidating, even awe-inspiring.
In the porticoes behind the wooden pillars I saw more robed figures moving. Some played drums, others seemed to shift in and out of the shadows, diligent in their unguessable purposes. I imagined they all carried jagged, sharp ritual knives hidden somewhere in the folds of their cult garb. There were maybe twenty of them all told, and for that instant anyway, none of them had noticed me. No, it was Shelby and Kym who had their attention.
“Can we bring up the red some please,” I was surprised to hear him say. “It’s too yellow.”
I watched as the ambient lighting in the room took on a darker shade of crimson. Then I was slammed back to the ground. Now everyone noticed me.
My captors dragged me back to my feet, this time with much firmer grips that, try as I might, I couldn’t shake off. Maybe when I got my wind back. But at the moment, I was wheezing for the breath they’d knocked out of me.
Shelby took off his mask and looked genuinely surprised. “Rick?” He turned fully to face me and took a few measured steps closer and motioned for the two cultists to bring me forward. I didn’t fight this time. After all, I was here to talk to him.
