Carter & Lovecraft (24 page)
He looked at her closely. “I don’t even know why I’m worried about you believing this stuff. You already believe it.”
Lovecraft looked away, finding distraction in the invoice and the clutter of the counter.
“That’s why Colt freaked you out when he came in here. You had a bad feeling about him, and then he as much as told you that he knew how to buttfuck causality. You were scared because you knew it was true. Well, it is. He almost killed me with that party trick.”
“How did you get out?”
Carter felt very tired. It had taken a while, but he was finally running out of adrenaline and reaction was setting in. “I don’t know.” His voice was weary. “I have no idea how I got out of there. I woke up over an hour’s walk away. I don’t know how I got there.”
Lovecraft’s brow furrowed heavily, and she ran her finger back and forth along one section of the counter. Then she spoke with great reluctance, as if letting out a secret that could never be recalled.
“Waite’s Bill?” asked Lovecraft.
* * *
Carter admitted to being surprised several times in his life, perhaps even stunned on a very few occasions, but he doubted he had ever been honestly astounded, even by recent events. They had happened, and he had dealt with them to the best of his ability. Lovecraft had astounded him. He looked at her as if he’d never seen her before for several seconds. Then he went to the door, locked it, flipped the sign to
Closed
, and said, “Tell me everything you know.”
* * *
Lovecraft was sitting at the small kitchen table in the apartment above the store. Carter couldn’t settle himself enough to sit while she spoke. Instead he stood, and sometimes he paced.
“Everything … is kind of fucked up,” said Lovecraft. “And by ‘everything,’ I mean
everything
. Nothing is right, nothing is as it appears. I don’t just mean in some nihilistic, conspiratorial, paranoid kind of way. I mean fundamentally. And the joke is, it used to be worse.
“Then, back in the twenties, a group of guys figured out what was wrong, and how they could fix it.”
“Hold on,” said Carter. “You keep saying things were wrong. What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, things were out of kilter. What you’ve experienced, but a lot worse.”
“No,” said Carter. “No, I don’t buy that. That kind of shit would be all over the history books and old accounts.”
“A lot of it is,” said Lovecraft quietly. “The ‘Age of Superstition.’ But most of it was hidden or dismissed and, afterward, it got hard to remember it in any case. You want to hear about these guys or not?
“So, there was already a high level of background weirdness. These people, they were already sensitive to it, and then Charles Fort had published
The Book of the Damned
just after the First World War, which just made concrete a lot of their fears. They corresponded with Fort, met with him secretly.”
She paused. Carter’s brow had furrowed at the first mention of Charles Fort, and the furrowing had deepened at the second.
“If you have no idea who Charles Fort was, just say so,” said Lovecraft.
“I have no idea who Charles Fort was.”
“Fine. He wrote a bunch of books that suggested that science wasn’t all that, and that it—and we—might be missing a few tricks. That there might be more things in Heaven and Earth than you can see through a telescope or a microscope or in a particle accelerator.”
“Religion?”
“Not really.”
“Magic? He believed in magic?”
“Not necessarily, but he didn’t disbelieve it, either. That’s the important thing. Fort was all about keeping an open mind.
“Anyway, they discovered there was a way to wind things back, to cover up the holes in reality where it had worn thin. You have to bear in mind that quantum theory was a new thing back then. A lot of mathematicians and physicists hated it, because it damaged the solidity of Newtonian physics. Einstein didn’t like it, Schrödinger hated it. The thing about Schrödinger’s cat was an argument
against
quantum theory, not to show how cool it was. He was another one who got pulled into the little circle of guys who could see things were already bad, and that something had to be done.”
Carter looked at Lovecraft, coldly appraising her. The enthusiastic bibliophile and businesswoman was absent. Now her whole demeanor was of somebody carefully explaining how they had accidentally killed your mother, and trying to make you understand it was out of her control. Every fact had to be defined, annotated, restated to avoid ambiguity.
“Who are these ‘guys’ you keep talking about?” asked Carter.
Lovecraft said nothing for a long moment. Then, very reluctantly, “One was Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The writer. My ancestor. The other was his friend. Randolph Carter.” She looked sideways at Carter. “Your great-great-great-uncle. He’s there in your family tree, if you want to look. You wanted a connection between you and this bookstore. There it is.”
“You said Randolph Carter was fictional.”
“I half thought he was. H. P. L. made some reference to him in his private journals that were inferred to mean he was using the name as a pseudonym for somebody he didn’t want to name, borrowing the name from his fiction. Turns out, no, he meant what he said.
“Between them they did something. There are no surviving notes to explain what, but they did it on Waite’s Bill, and it changed everything. Not in a rhetorical sense. They changed
everything
.
“When it was explained to me by my uncle Alfred, he called it a ‘perceptual twist.’ A different perspective that works for everything, and is entirely objective. They imposed a new paradigm.”
“Just like that? They changed reality in their lunch hour?”
Lovecraft glared at him. “You just don’t understand how fucked up it was. It took years to prepare, but only a few hours to do. Believe me, The Twist was waiting to happen. They just shoved it a little way down Entropy Hill, and it settled there really happily.”
Carter heard “The Twist,” and didn’t think of a dance craze. He thought of Hammond. “So explain Colt.”
Lovecraft shrugged. “Maybe
really happily
was an exaggeration. H. P. L. and Randolph, they were doing what nobody had ever tried before. What nobody had even attempted. There’d been a few people down the centuries who had misgivings about things, but they usually lived in times where saying it would be the same as saying, ‘Hey, everyone! God fucked up!’ Not real clever.
“It wasn’t perfect. Maybe it’s possible to push back here and there if you can see the flaws in the original Twist. I think that’s what Colt’s doing. Everything rests pretty much on probability, and probability is his main thing, from what you’ve told me.”
“Why Waite’s Bill? Why is it so important?”
“I don’t know. I only know it gets a lot of mentions in H. P. L.’s notes. He never says why it’s important. He knew why it was, and didn’t bother noting it. I wish he had. When you said you’d followed Colt there, I knew where it was all going.”
Carter walked up and down once more. He was trying to control his anger, but it was difficult because he didn’t know where the anger was coming from. Maybe it was because Lovecraft had deliberately kept him in the dark. Maybe it was because he believed what she was saying and really didn’t want to. Either way, the anger got away from him.
“This is such bullshit,” he said. “I’m out of this. You want the store? It’s yours. I’ll give you a good price for my half, and then I am done.”
Lovecraft looked at him as if he were an imbecile child. “Yeah. Right. This is absolutely something you can walk away from.”
“I have nothing to do with this, and I didn’t even know my ‘fictional’ great-great-great-uncle did until you just told me. I don’t have a dog in this fight, Emily. I
am
walking away.”
“Tell me how that works out for you when you get dragged back into it again. Dan, don’t be a fucking idiot. There’s somebody out there who wants you involved. They won’t let you walk. They pulled you into the Belasco investigation. They’ll do it again the very next time Colt does his numbers voodoo.” She laughed bitterly. “Or maybe they won’t have to. What do you think Colt’s doing right now? He set out to kill you, and you escaped. That makes you a double threat. You were enough of a problem for him to want to kill you already, but now you wiggled out of it in a weird way, and he’s going to be wondering how the actual fuck you did that.”
“I don’t know how…”
“I know! He doesn’t. No Scottish giant is going to walk in here and tell you you’re a wizard, Dan, but Colt’s going to be pretty worried that’s exactly what you are.”
“A wizard. Fuck’s sake, Emily…”
“Colt breaks basic physical laws to do what he does. If that isn’t magic, what is it? And if it is—for want of a better term—magic, what does that make him? It’s not about pointed hats and Gandalf, man. It’s about lifting some heavy math and somehow being able to see through The Twist. He doesn’t see things as they appear. He sees them as they really are—profoundly fucked and held together with one Band-Aid.
“Look, H. P. L. was a romantic. He
wanted
there to be magic in the world. He hated how science had overwhelmed it. Wait a minute.” She went to the bookshelves in the apartment and took down a black volume. “This is a fragment of a novel he
really
wanted to write, but he never did. Wrote less than five hundred words of it, and never any more. Listen to this.” She found the page, and started to read.
“
When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of Spring’s flowering meads; when learning stripped Earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone away for ever, there was a man who traveled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled.
”
She closed the book and looked at Carter. “You get that? That’s the opening to
Azathoth
. That’s a love letter to magic. He wrote it in the early twenties. And he went off to find real magic with his pal Randolph Carter. They found it. And—what do you know?—then they spent years trying to destroy it again. They saw stuff, Dan, and it made them decide that science was boring, but better.”
Carter stopped pacing. He pulled up a chair and sank into it, defeated. “Fuck. Why couldn’t I have inherited a bar instead?”
“So,” said Lovecraft. She watched his face carefully. “What are you going to do?”
“Do? Same as I was before. I’m going to close Colt down before he hurts anyone else. None of this changes that. I don’t care if he is offing people with pixie dust instead of a gun like a good American; he tried to kill me, and he came into the store to threaten you with math and philosophy. The motherfucker’s going down.”
“My hero.”
“Yeah.”
* * *
Lovecraft was counting out bills from the cashbox in the store while Carter looked on with interest.
“That’s a lot of money to hold in petty cash,” he said. By his guess, there had to be somewhere around ten thousand dollars in the box.
“It isn’t petty cash. It’s for buying books off the books, if you follow. Some dealers want cash in hand. They can be kind of secretive.” She looked at the amount on the invoice again, swore under her breath, and carried on counting. “What do you want this thing for, anyway? Colt’s a dick, but he’s also a very smart, very talented mathematician. I don’t think you’d be able to just say, ‘Abracadabra,’ and do the shit he does.”
“I’ve got a theory about the pattern on it, but I’m going to need a copy as a reference.”
“Just the pattern? Did you really have to have your copy in aluminum, too?”
“The file was already set up for the metal sintering process. Redoing it for plastic would have been a false economy. Besides, this way it’s good and solid and won’t deform. Plus, if push comes to shove, I can beat him to death with it.”
“I didn’t hear that,” said Lovecraft. She snapped an elastic band around a roll of bills and handed it to him. “This is coming out of your side of the business.” She took a small pad from the cashbox, arranged a sheet of carbon paper in it, and started writing heavily with a ballpoint.
“Here’s a thing,” said Carter, pocketing the money, “unless he had a secret hiding place somewhere, I didn’t see Colt’s cube in his house.”
“You think he carries it with him? Maybe in his car?” She finished writing and slid the pad and pen across the counter to Carter. “Receipt. Sign right there.”
“Maybe.” Carter took up the pen and signed. “But I don’t think so. I think he does his heavy-grade juju somewhere safe, and the cube’s there.”
Lovecraft nodded. She didn’t need it spelled out for her. “That’s not a plot of land with a wholesome history. Maybe you can fix Colt without having to do it on his home turf?”
“That’s the way I was thinking. I don’t plan to go back there,” said Carter, but it was a lie.
He couldn’t see any way of finally concluding matters
without
going back there. Colt was the immediate problem, but Waite’s Bill was one going back decades, generations, maybe centuries, maybe even longer. Mathematical genii come and go, but the land lives on. There was something wrong about that place. The “Perceptual Twist” had occurred there, and it seemed it could be at least partially twisted back there. It was where parallel lines met, and circles meekly allowed themselves to be squared. It was the dark heart of esoteric fuckery, and Carter would bring his judgment down upon it.
The cube was ready a week later. Carter returned to Providence after spending the last few days working in New York, picked the cube up from the Material Sciences laboratory, and took it back to show Lovecraft. They studied it over lunch at the Italian restaurant a two-block walk from the bookstore.
“It’s … heavy” was Lovecraft’s first comment.
