The Arcanum (5 page)

9

FROM THE GANGPLANK of the Marie Celeste, Doyle marveled at the monstrous growth of New York City since his last visit, only six years before. Overnight, it seemed the metropolis had blossomed into an electric, sky-scraping, man-made forest. It was humbling. Disturbing.

He stepped up onto a trembling running board and into a Dodge sedan taxi off Pier 14. “The Penn Hotel, please.”

“Yes, sir. Welcome to New York, sir.”

A confirmed car fanatic, Doyle had bought a capsulelike Wolsey for country drives in England. Now he leaned over the front seat to watch the driver use the self-starter, for the newer cars no longer required the drivers to jump out and crank. Suddenly, and with unexpected speed, the driver released his foot from the low-speed pedal and the sedan launched into a circus of traffic.

Trolleys rumbled down the streets like the mechanical invaders from an H. G. Wells novel, while the newer and faster Briscoe and Maxwell automobiles swerved wildly around the slower and rarer horse-drawn carriages.

Times Square was a sensory assault of light and sound. Gigantic banners, the size and the like of which Doyle had never seen, were rimmed with thousands of sparkling lights advertising Lucky Strikes and Fatima Turkish Cigarettes, B. F. Keith’s Palace Theatre and the Million Dollar Mystery. There were crowded dance halls with recorders blaring “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” and “I’ll Say She Does.”

The whole world, Doyle mused, rushed headlong into an industrialized age that transformed daily life—daily. First the steam engine, then the gas-engine automobiles, electric typewriters, paper clips, Quantum theory, silicones, animated cartoon film, the hydraulic centrifugal clutch, Relativity, Vitamin A, tear gas, stainless steel, tanks, and air-conditioning. It was a non-stop maelstrom of progress that left the whole world breathless.

The Futurists saw this galloping pace as the signature of an idealized age, just within reach. Others saw it as the beginning of The End.

Doyle eyed these changes with a distinct caution. He knew firsthand that scientific genius was no guarantor of morality. Quite often it could be a harbinger to madness. And such an age required greater vigilance over the occult world than ever before; magic and science were quarrelsome sisters ever entwined. Mankind was scraping the surface of the Mysteries and naming what it found. It made men proud to catalog and quantify their world. Command it. Bend it. Shape and dissect it. This was science. The Mysteries, however, were likely to recoil from this leeching curiosity. Recoil and strike.

Doyle remembered the words of a colleague.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability
of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining
in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday
the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such
terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that
we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly
light into the peace and safety of a dark new age . . .”

BANISHED AND FORBIDDEN knowledge, this was H. P. Lovecraft’s food and drink, his very reason for existence. Nothing else mattered to him—certainly not friendships or loyalties.

He was an enigma from the very beginning—a dark prodigy gifted beyond fairness with a mind like a knife and a flawless recall. His scholarship at nineteen had shamed occult masters four times his age, and his arrogance had enraged the rest. He suffered no fools, and offered the bluntest of opinions without concern for emotions or feelings, for which he showed utter disdain.

But that was Lovecraft’s paradox, for within his genius lay a boy on the verge of madness, completely isolated from the world. Doyle had never trusted him, but knew that he now needed him, more than ever.

As dusk spilled down the long walls of the Flatiron Building, Doyle warmed at the thought of his first trip to America: the most publicized literary tour since Oscar Wilde’s in 1881. Now he was anonymous, as he meant to be; as he had to be.

ONLY A FEW blocks south of Doyle’s taxi, Detective Sergeant Shaughnessy Mullin pinched his nose with a handkerchief to ward off the body’s stench. The place reeked enough of fish without the rot of a human to make it worse. It was a hell of a scene. The rats had already taken their due.

Lanterns swung in the haze as more blue boys gathered on Pier 5, and a dense mist sat over the Hudson. Two officers tried to straighten out the body, but it was clenched like a fist.

Backwards.

It was a terrible death. The woman was naked, found curled around a buoy thirty feet off the pier. The parts of her face not eaten away showed an expression of agony unmatched in Mullin’s experience.

And Mullin had plenty of experience. His consciousness was tattooed with the sort of images that, when witnessed at a young enough age, can shatter psyches. Mullin carried around a special one—one that asserted itself more than the others. A domestic dispute call two years before. A tenement building. The husband had fired a shotgun into his wife’s face at close range. Mullin recalled marveling at the pieces of head scattered over the living room carpet. Red meat tossed with tufts of hair. An eye. A few teeth embedded in the wall. Bones and a tongue hung from the lampshade. Amazing what drunk husbands could do to wives.

Mullin had an ex-wife, and God knows he had a drunken fury. Many were the nights he’d waved a pistol in her face. She’d left him; no explanation had been necessary. Mullin was unfit for most of the demands of society. He kept that image, though, in his back pocket. He wasn’t sure why. He just couldn’t seem to shake it.

This one would linger awhile, too.

The corpse was bent from the lower back almost like a wagon wheel, her heels nearly touching the back of her head. Her hands were clenched into fists by her cheeks, like a child in a frozen tantrum. Mullin had only seen this sort of rigor with strychnine poisoning. While attempting to straighten her out, one of the blue boys had pulled too hard, and everyone winced at the loud crack of her snapping ribs.

Mullin scowled. “Leave ’er be.”

The blue boys retreated. Mullin was pugnacious and fierce, thanks to a life lived hard. Born premature into a destitute and starving family in Cork, Mullin fought God’s will at every turn. An early battle with diphtheria robbed him of hearing in his left ear. While siblings were killed by influenza, Mullin survived. And once they managed to cross the ocean, the trials didn’t stop. One of Mullin’s eyes was clouded thanks to a street-gang fight in Brooklyn’s “Irish Town.” He gained a reputation as a street fighter, making up for his short reach by getting inside on opponents and working the body. Though Mullin’s father died soon after their arrival in America, his “Ma” was still an enormous influence in his life. He was devoted to her and she, in turn, still boxed his ears.

In 1919 Manhattan, the journey from street thug to police officer wasn’t a long trip. Mullin had convenient ethics and few qualms over solving complicated problems with violence. He wasn’t a champion of reform. He disdained idealists. Accepting a bribe now and again didn’t hurt anybody. And though Mullin, like most other cops, treated poor people the same as criminals, he had a soft spot for mothers—especially those struggling to feed fatherless children.

His thick red moustache twitched as he gazed on the girl. “Where is her ma?” he wondered aloud. He squatted down and turned the body so the lantern could shine on her back. The damage was merciless. Some butcher had carved her like a pumpkin, torn out her spine. This was no drunken rape gone awry, no drug fiend robbing for a fix. Even the wharf rats of Fourth Ward were above such depravity.

No, this was the work of an intelligent maniac, operating out of some private belief system. There was a purpose to this crime, and messages on the body that Mullin wasn’t yet able to read. And he was running out of time—because this wasn’t the first.

Sweater Martha, a kind but senile old woman who wore a dozen sweaters at one time and sniffed out orphans in the dangerous haunts of Chinatown, the Bowery, and Chatham Square, had been found in a ditch, torn open like the young girl at Mullin’s feet. At first, the police thought it might’ve been one of her troubled youths. Most if not all of them had prior records and severe emotional problems, but Mullin was beginning to think otherwise.

The similarities between the cases were disturbing, but this time, there was one difference.

This time there was a witness.

“I’ll see ’er now,” Mullin growled as he stood up.

He followed one of his boys down the pier to a medical wagon and rapped on the door.

A pale doctor, roused from sleep only one hour prior, stepped out of the wagon. Over the doctor’s shoulder, Mullin saw a woman, a prostitute by the looks of her, seated upright with bandages over both eyes. Her lips quivered as words spilled out in a breathy whisper. The doctor shut the door.

“Can she talk?” Mullin asked.

“She could die of shock tonight,” the doctor said as he ran a hand through his graying hair.

“That wasn’t my question.”

“Trust me, Detective, what she’s saying doesn’t make any sense. There’s no reason to traumatize the poor woman further.” The doctor glanced back at the wagon, then turned again to Mullin. “For goodness’ sake, she gouged her own eyes out,” the doctor said. “With her own hands; with her own nails. What in God’s name could she have seen that would cause her to do such a thing?”

“That’s what we’d like to know.” Mullin nudged the doctor to one side and opened the carriage door. He climbed in and sat across from the woman.

Her straw-colored hair was dry and tangled, clotted with blood where she had torn it out. Her lime green dress was ripped up the leg. She seemed to be clasping her bloody hands together, maybe praying. Mullin strained to make out the gibberish still streaming from her lips.

“Yaji-ash-shuthath . . . yaji-ash-shuthath . . . yaji-ash-shuthath . . .”

Mullin patted the woman’s knee, to no effect.

“Yaji-ash-shuthath . . . yaji-ash-shuthath . . . yaji-ash-shuthath . . .”

Mullin’s hand fit easily around both of hers. He shook her gently. Something fell from her hands and landed on the floor of the wagon. Mullin picked it up. It was a pendant, on a long, leather thong. He twirled it before his cloudy eye.

A coin.

But it wasn’t like any coin Mullin had ever seen. It looked old, for certain, and he dropped it in his shirt pocket for safekeeping. Then he leaned back and gazed at the woman, who continued to rock in her chair and mutter:
“Yaji-ash-shuthath . . . yaji-ash-shuthath . . . yaji-ash-shuthath . . .”

The wagon door opened, and an out-of-breath deputy thrust his head inside, sweat streaming from under his helmet. “Detective, there’s a lead on a suspect.”

“From what?”

“Anonymous tip.”

Lucky breaks and brave citizens were the stuff detectives depended upon far more than investigative wits, but as Mullin stepped out of the wagon and glanced back at the terror-stricken prostitute, something told him there would be nothing tidy or simple about this case.

10

FARNSWORTH WRIGHT, AN untidy man in once-expensive clothes, plucked a manuscript off a formidable pile and settled into his tilting chair. With his heels on the desk, he licked his forefinger and opened to page one. He read the first sentence. Frowned. The second sentence sealed it. Farnsworth heaved the manuscript across the office, where it struck a bookshelf. The pages swooped to the floor in company with dozens of similarly disposed of manuscripts. Farnsworth poured himself a generous Jim Beam and settled into another weighty tome. Then across the air it flew, striking the same spot on the shelves before plummeting to the floor. Farnsworth chugged his whiskey as a shadow crossed the frosted glass window of the office door, followed by a gentle knock. Farnsworth’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Hell is it?”

The door opened and Doyle stepped inside. “Good evening.”

“You write?” Farnsworth barked.

Doyle hesitated. “Well, yes, actually.”

“Homicidal maniac story. Ten thousand words. On my desk Monday.” And Farnsworth went back to his reading.

Conan Doyle stood there a moment, then double-checked the sign on the door, which revealed it to be the office of Farnsworth Wright, editor-in-chief of
Thrill Book
—a bimonthly journal of horror stories.

Farnsworth glanced up again, irritated. “I only pay you if I like the story. Got it? Three cents a page. No longhand. And don’t try to be cute and throw in vampires or some crap like that. I got fifty-two hundred vampire stories, and I don’t need another. I want straight maniacs. Nothing too spooky. Just murder. A chase. What? I gotta write it for you?” Farnsworth polished off the whiskey. “And for God’s sake, grab me with the first sentence. Nobody knows how to start a damn story anymore. Boom, hit me. Get the damn thing going! I don’t need the life story of the maniac. Kill the girl. Chase the maniac. Don’t tell me how his grandpa lit his toys on fire. First sentence. Boom! Not enough writers listen to this kind of advice. I like you, pops. What’d you say your name was?”

Doyle brightened. “Ah—”

Farnsworth Wright slapped the table hard. “They don’t understand I have to sell these magazines. This ain’t art. Grab me. Shake me. Scare me. Wiggle me around. This isn’t complicated. My God, these first sentences I’m reading, some of ’em go on half a page. You know how long it takes me to read half a page?” He stopped, fished his pocket watch from a gravy-stained vest, and flicked open the face. “Jesus, is that what time it is? You know how to get a guy going. Anyway, get me the story and we’ll talk. I’ll see what I can do. No promises.” He plucked another manuscript from the dwindling pile and read the first sentence. “Jesus Christ!” Farnsworth’s chair slammed back down on all four wheels as the manuscript came to a messy end on the second shelf of the
Thrill Book
library—narrowly missing Doyle, who had quickly dodged left.

Doyle rapped his walking stick hard against the floor. “That’s quite enough of that,” he declared.

Farnsworth looked up, confused. “So, what? Go on. Tell me your great idea. Thrill me. Drive me wild.”

Doyle smiled. “My good fellow, in your wildest dreams you couldn’t afford me.” He offered his hand. “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.”

THE WHEELS OF Farnsworth’s chair slid out from under him and Farnsworth fell backwards in a heap. His earnest attempts to rise, halted by his head meeting his desktop with a
klonk,
stirred pity in Conan Doyle’s heart, and he chastised himself for using his celebrity in that way.

Farnsworth rose up with a hop, the greasy panel of hair that normally covered his scalp lolling long across the left side of his face. He collected himself and marched across the office in a businesslike way. “Farnsworth Wright.” He shook Doyle’s hand with vigor. “I can’t explain, sir, I can’t. There are some . . . This is truly . . . You’re why . . . You understand . . . I can’t.”

“That’s fine. I do appreciate it.”

Farnsworth continued to spew half thoughts as Doyle led him back to his desk. “I’m looking for an author you’ve worked with, or at least may have heard of. A gentleman named Lovecraft. Howard Phillips Lovecraft.”

Farnsworth’s neck swiveled. “You know H. P. Lovecraft?”

“As an acquaintance.”

“I never . . . he never said anything. Nothing at all. Truly.” Farnsworth began searching the office. “He never mentioned you. I would’ve. I certainly would’ve published him if I knew.”

Doyle found himself in a snowstorm of manuscripts as Farnsworth tore the office apart. “I just need an address, Mr. Wright.”

Farnsworth kicked one tower of books to the floor, and then another, before barking triumphantly and slamming a manuscript onto the desk. Its title was
At the Mountains of Madness.

Doyle nodded. “That’s the fellow.”

“I can’t believe he never told me. If I knew he shared such distinguished friendships . . . but it’s the season, you know. His work. It’s bleak. Terribly bleak. People want homicidal maniac stories. Redemptive stories. Not this. I mean, I don’t know what to make of this.
Mountains of Madness
? It’s just not anyone’s cup of tea. Desolate alien cities hidden away in the Arctic?”

“Try seeing them in person,” Doyle offered.

“Pardon?”

He smiled. “I’m not his literary advocate. I just need the address.”

“Yes, of course.” Farnsworth hastily provided it and turned back to his manuscripts, eager to end the meeting after his embarrassing introduction.

NIGHT CLOAKED THE city. Doyle stepped off an empty trolley onto Delancey Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He turned to watch the creaking trolley rumble down the Bowery into Chinatown, and the lawless wards of Chatham and the Five Points. This was as far into the ghetto as he intended to go. And if atmosphere was the goal, Delancey possessed it in spades.

The streets were quiet, and barrel fires lit the darkness.

Electric lampposts had not yet been erected this far south. It was still the dark frontier of Manhattan, without a social safety net of any kind—where the bottom dwellers needed different sustenance and where nourishment came via thievery, drugs, and prostitution. Violent crime and murder were common, their numbers never tallied. The disappearances of immigrant children were never investigated, and when those same children’s bodies washed up on the charnel shores of the Hudson, they were tossed onto wagons and forgotten.

Long ago, Doyle knew poverty—a result of his father’s debilitating alcoholism and insanity. The family worked hard to support ten children in a tiny flat in Edinburgh. There, from the age of thirteen, Doyle had worked three jobs up to and through his university years, until he earned his physician’s degree.

Yet this new world with all its plenty and promise was a different animal, and the helpless ones who crawled to her breast did not understand the nightmares that hid in the long shadows of liberty. The carrion of the occult lived here, and it was safest not to ask why the children vanished. Some nightmares do not end; some nightmares go on eternally. And in these sad ports of loneliness and suffering, certain organisms grew and thrived. Which was why Howard Phillips Lovecraft called it home.

Doyle stood outside a collapsing tenement. Only one meager light glowed from the top-floor window. In the wavering silence, a trash can lid fell to his left, and a figure in rags swayed into an alley, face obscured by darkness. Doyle turned to his right and felt more eyes upon him. They were in the alleyways and under the stoops. Quiet, watching. He could make out two faces filled with dull rage, lit by the glow of a dying barrel fire. Though tall and powerfully built, he was still sixty years old, and dressed in a thirty-dollar Worsted wool suit. This marked him as prey. But beneath the surface was strong fiber. Doyle reeked not of fear but of steel. He was a gentleman warrior, and knew how to out-think dull-witted predators like these. Perhaps because of this, they only waited while he crossed the street to Lovecraft’s last known address.

A hobo slept on the stoop of 1414, cradling a bottle of scotch. Doyle stepped over him and passed through the unlocked front door. He was assailed by the heavy odor of excrement and urine; the floor of the corridor was shiny and slick with it. He put his monogrammed handkerchief to his lips and took shallow breaths. Twenty feet down the hall was the door to the firstfloor apartment, and inside a woman moaned loud enough to vibrate the walls. There were men talking to her in rough, low voices. The moans spiked into sobs, which were swallowed up by laughter and slaps.

Doyle set his jaw and stepped past the door and onto the stairs. The banister shook as he grasped it and climbed to the second-floor landing.

Something cadaver-pale flashed in the corner. A man with wild, bloodshot eyes moved toward him. “Money. Give me money.” Doyle stopped him with his stick, pinning him to the wall. The addict wriggled. Doyle swept past him and continued climbing to the third floor.

Lovecraft’s door was ajar, and the apartment had been ransacked. Numerous shelves lay empty or facedown on the floor. Books were everywhere. The card table by the window had been upended. Jars of God-knows-what lay broken on the kitchen floor.

A .45 snub-nosed revolver pressed to Doyle’s temple, and the wielder patted Doyle down expertly with his free hand. “Evenin’, sir.”

“Good evening,” Doyle replied politely.

A heavyset officer emerged from the closet, holstering his weapon.

“Lookin’ fer Mr. Lovecraft, are you, sir?” The man with the gun retrieved Doyle’s wallet and perused the contents.

“I am, yes. Is there a problem, Officer—?”

“Detective, if you please. Mullin’s my name. You, ah, English, then?” Mullin surveyed the travel visa. “Mr. Doyle?”

Doyle sensed this wasn’t a plus in Mullin’s eyes. “Scottish.” He tried his usual, “I’m a writer, actually. Perhaps you may have heard—”

“I don’t read.” Mullin holstered his .45. “ ’Ow d’ye know this Lovecraft feller, then, sir?”

Doyle watched as the uniformed officer picked up one of Lovecraft’s paperweights—a gnarled, petrified human hand. “I don’t know him well, Detective; hardly at all, really. We corresponded. Lovecraft’s a bit of a fiction writer, and some pieces I found to show talent. I like to counsel young artists on their work, knowing what a lonely business writing can be . . .” He could see his rambling might pay off; Mullin’s eyes were already glazing over. “After several letters back and forth, Mr. Lovecraft invited me, if I ever returned to the States, to stop in and have a tea, discuss writing and such. Turns out, I’ve some business here. I arrived only a day or two ago, and decided to take Mr. Lovecraft up on his offer. I do hope nothing’s happened to him?”

“ ’Appened to him? No, he’s safe at the sanitarium fer the criminally insane. ’Acked up two persons in this past week, though.”

Doyle flinched. “That’s impossible!”

“Well, as you say, Mr. Doyle, you didn’t know the man very well. In any of his letters, did Mr. Lovecraft express any sort of grudge against the Catholic Church?”

Doyle watched the uniformed officer wince as he paged through a seventeenth-century torture manual. The floor was littered with first-edition texts on demonology and necromancy. “Not that I’m aware of, no.” The real answer was different. Lovecraft despised organized religions of all kinds. And yet, Doyle knew, something else was at work here. “What’s the evidence against him?”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss that, sir.” Mullin glanced at his officer, who was examining a broken jar containing what appeared to be a human organ. Mullin turned back to Doyle. “But it don’t take a genius to conclude Mr. Lovecraft weren’t no ordinary fellow.”

Doyle inched toward the door. “Well, this is terribly shocking; I would never have guessed. He seemed rather harmless on the page. In his letters, you know.”

Mullin did not seem averse to letting Doyle go. “Where might ye be stayin’, sir, case we’d like to ask a few more questions?”

“Outside the city, actually. With friends.”

“There an address, sir?”

“I’m sure there is, only I don’t know it. I’ve forgotten.” He turned to leave.

“Mr. Doyle, sir,” Mullin barked.

Doyle turned back. Mullin walked toward him, slowly. He stopped and examined him. Then, “Your wallet, sir,” Mullin said, handing him back his identification.

“Of course. Forgetful as always.” Doyle smiled, parroting Jean’s words. He dropped the wallet into his coat pocket, and the metal of his money clip clinked off something else.

Mullin heard this. His eyebrows arched.

“Oh.” Doyle chuckled. “It’s nothing.” He produced the Roman coin on its leather rope that he’d found in Duvall’s office.

Mullin’s expression didn’t shift, but suddenly Doyle sensed danger.

“Where’d ye get that, sir?” Mullin asked in a low, quiet voice.

Doyle kept his face equally passive. “A keepsake.” He watched Mullin examine the coin. “From my daughter.”

“Well, isn’t that a lovely present?” Mullin turned and showed his partner the coin.

The officer wore the same blank expression as Mullin as he stared at Doyle. “Sure is.”

Doyle could see Mullin’s right hand sliding up his hip, toward the holster of his .45, as the detective turned back to him. “Now, then—”

There must have been something in Doyle’s furtive glance that alerted Mullin, because his fist clenched fast over the author’s wrist.

“Wally!” Mullin shouted.

Just as quickly, Doyle swung his cane across the back of Mullin’s hand, bruising the bone.

Mullin screamed and released his grip as the officer lunged. But Doyle spun to meet him, driving the end of his cane deep into the officer’s midsection. Then he spun a second time, hooking the officer behind the knees and dropping him like a sack of potatoes. The officer crashed down atop books and broken glass.

Mullin was still between Doyle and the door. The detective pulled out his pistol, but Doyle swung his cane again, swatting the .45 across the room then driving his shoulder deep into Mullin’s sternum. The two men hit the wall hard, and before Mullin could get a handhold, Doyle drove his knee into the detective’s belly. He wrestled himself free and flew out the door, down the stairs, and out into the streets.