Carter & Lovecraft (31 page)
“Got your pistol?”
“Never took it off. Spare mags in my jacket pocket. Left-hand side. Yeah, I’m that organized. You?”
Carter ran through a mental checklist, tapping holster and pockets as he went. He hesitated once, wondering if he’d done the right thing leaving the cube behind, but it was a brief hesitation. “I’m good.” He and Lovecraft looked at each other. “Right. Here we go.”
They moved farther down the riverside in the direction of the estuary until they were close to the end, where Carter judged the end house would be. They entered the stand of trees crouched, and moved from cover to cover. Neither felt at all like soldiers, but only like kids playing soldiers. They felt ridiculous. Only the heft of the weapons reminded them that it was an unusually serious game they were playing. As the trees started to clear and they caught glimpses of the narrow road with the houses on the other side, they paused.
“You can get a little closer than this,” said Carter, “but do it on your belly. I’ll go back, go around, and approach down the road like a normal person. Got your earpiece?”
Lovecraft took a Bluetooth earpiece from her pocket, the blue LED covered with a small tab of tape to hide it, and put it on.
“Cool. I’ll call as I approach the house, and leave my phone open. You should be able to hear any conversation. You good?”
Lovecraft nodded. She wasn’t feeling good at all, but they both knew that. “I’m good.” She adopted a Western twang. “Go get ’em, Floyd.”
Carter nodded and disappeared back the way they had come. Lovecraft waited until he was out of sight, took a deep breath, and went on her belly, the shotgun held in one hand. It was strange seeing it there, smooth, black, metallic against the dirt and leaf mold. She crawled forward four or five yards and took station behind one of the many oaks on the spit of land.
* * *
Carter moved within the trees as much as possible, angling his return so that he estimated that he would emerge somewhere near Lovecraft’s Ford. While he wanted to be exposed as little as possible, the price was staying within the tree line and, like much else on Waite’s Bill, that was inherently unpleasant. Anywhere else, the predominantly oaken stand would have been pleasant and natural. Here, even the trees felt wrong. There was a sense of moving through growth rather than life, like negotiating the strands of a cancer or a parasitic fungus rather than a small wood of honest trees.
He was pleased when he was finally able to leave the trees and emerge into the open. He was more pleased still that he had judged it to a nicety and was opposite the Ford. He was less pleased that he was no longer alone. He wasn’t pleased at all that the figure standing by Lovecraft’s car and studying it with mild curiosity did not appear to be human.
Carter stopped dead. The creature turned its head slowly to regard him. It was the color of a dead fish, and its eyes were large and cloudy. It stood much taller than a man, perhaps almost eight feet or so, and it was hairless and naked. Water still beaded on its smooth, batrachian skin, still dripped onto the unhealthy grass. Carter could see the trail it had left on the turf from the river’s edge where it had surely emerged.
Man and monstrosity regarded each other for half a minute, more. Carter quite forgot he had a gun. He was barely aware that he had legs and that running was an option. That seemed too trivial a response. He was standing before something that could not be. Running or shouting or shooting were the actions of a character in a TV show or an urban myth. The correct action, the only reaction, was to let the moment last like the keening, perfect note of a tuning fork.
But even such a note must eventually fade.
“Hi,” said the monster. It had many teeth in its mouth, small piercing cones of bone or perhaps cartilage.
Carter didn’t trust himself to say anything. He only nodded.
“I know you,” said the monster. “I met you before.”
“I … don’t remember that.”
“Sure you do.” The monster’s voice was strange, grating and liquid, an inhuman larynx forcing out human sounds and crushing them slightly in the process. “Sure you do. It was right here.” The monster looked around and Carter saw a flexible crest like a fin running down the rear of its head and onto its spine. There was something so organic and natural in it, any last lingering hope that he was just looking at somebody in an incredibly sophisticated rubber suit faded in that observation.
The monster looked down and Carter saw there was an abandoned battered blue and white sneaker there, failing at the toe cap.
“Sure you do,” said the monster again, and it was right.
“You wanted to go swimming,” said Carter.
“I can now. I’d wanted to for so long, but the women wouldn’t let me. Said I’d drown. Said I wasn’t ready. But there was a change and I could swim, so I did. If I don’t eat now, I don’t get hungry, but I get small.” It looked out at the river. “There’s lots to eat out there. I got really big, didn’t I?”
Carter saw the massive muscles sliding under the anuran skin. In the obtuse light he saw for the first time the thin gills at its neck that throbbed with every beat of a cold, inhuman heart. “Yes,” he said, “you got really big.”
The monster regarded him with distant, alien curiosity. Sometimes nictitating lids swept across the cloudy eyes, but rarely. “I met you before,” it said again, and then, “You’re that Carter guy, aren’t you?”
“What?”
“The women talk about you. I forget what they say. It wasn’t interesting.” It swung its head toward the river and gazed at it with yearning for a long moment. “Sometimes I think I hear others calling, others not from Waite Road. It’s not real. There aren’t any others, only us, and there ain’t many of us. Only, like…” It looked at its hands as if to count. “Not many.” It turned back to Carter. “I’m gonna go swim now. Bye.”
It fell to all fours, and Carter had a momentary impression of great webbed fingers splaying out as it half hopped, half ran like a dog to the water’s edge. There it did not hesitate, but lowered its head and launched itself in a powerful jump, driving itself through the surface of the Providence River. It barely left a ripple despite its great bulk, only a sudden swell beneath the surface as it swam away, its great legs pushing back the water as it shot down into the dark depths that were so much more fascinating to it than the world of man had ever been.
Carter took some awkward staggering steps until he could lean on the Ford, where he stood and hyperventilated for a few seconds until he could bring it under control.
He had a choice. He could either conclude that he had hallucinated and that he was, to a greater or lesser extent, insane. Or he could accept that he had actually just seen a real, intelligent creature that might be described as a “monster.”
He wasn’t sure why this was so much more difficult to accept than swimming through thin air in Colt’s house. He could only think that he had accepted that phenomena as being caused by science, even if it was a broken piece of science of which Colt had taken advantage. He didn’t understand all of science. Hell, no single scientist understood all of science. He didn’t really understand how electronics worked, he didn’t entirely understand how a flat-screen TV worked, he didn’t have the faintest idea what quantum theory was about. YouTube was full of amazing demonstrations of science, of which Coke and Mentos were the very least. It didn’t take such a great leap of faith from there to Colt’s drowning-in-air trick.
So, that was one thing. A chat with a hulking amphibian humanoid was something far, far different. It didn’t make sense. There was no background to it beyond the
Creature Double Feature
s of the past and febrile tabloid stories. Earth was a small world. There was no space for another sentient species, and the monster was part of a species, not some mutation, not some freak. How was that possible? It wasn’t, yet he had seen it with his own eyes. The paradox whirled in Carter’s mind like a broken escapement. He could feel it spinning eccentrically, chipping away the certainties and sureties around it that he needed to function. Carter could feel himself becoming insane.
He was saved by the sound of a small and irritating electronic tune playing in his ear. He accepted the call without thinking.
“Where the hell are you?” said Lovecraft in his earpiece. “How long does it take to walk around? I can’t even see you on the street from here.”
“I … thought I saw something.” He watched the flow of the river and allowed it to calm him, working hard not to think what was beneath the surface. “It was nothing, though. I’m okay.” He took a second to swallow, and asked with a lameness that was evident even to himself, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” She said it with flat suspicion. “Can we get on with the intricate master plan now?”
“Yeah.” Carter took a deep breath, feeling his heart rate settle. “Yeah, let’s do that. I’ll be out front in a minute or so.”
He checked his Glock once again, more from a sense of needing routine than concern. Then he walked down the short curving dirt track and emerged where the access road joined with Waite Road. A moment more brought him out of the shade of the trees, and the street lay before him. He stood for a moment and looked at the nondescript houses. The lack of any sign of children had struck him as a mild curiosity the first time he’d been here. Now it seemed significant and sinister.
Carter steeled himself, and walked toward the end house on the left-hand fork of the street. He could see no one, but there was again a strong sense of being watched. No signs of life anywhere, no movement and no sound but for the swaying of the tree branches and the sighing of the breeze, but the black windows seemed to gaze upon him with infinite calculation and threat.
He knew Lovecraft likely had eyes on him by this time, but the thought of the extra gun did not settle his nerves at all. He felt like only he and she were on that whole spit of land, and yet he felt that other life crowded around them, too. Different life. The image of cancerous growth grew in his imagination again, of parasites, and forms alien to human perception and experience.
He stood at the end of the driveway leading to the last house, resisted the very powerful urge to glance back at Lovecraft, and walked up to the front door. The driveway was entirely empty of vehicles, he noted. Now at last he felt certain of what to do. He rapped smartly on the door and waited.
There was a silence, although Carter had the impression of a dull concussion more than a sound, as if something heavy had fallen inside. The seconds passed and the temptation to turn, shrug at Lovecraft, and go home where things made marginally more sense washed over him. He resisted this, too. He was just raising his hand to knock again when he heard movement on the other side of the door, and then the click of the lock being disengaged. He lowered his hand and prepared to deliver his rehearsed line about a moment of their time and an ongoing investigation.
The door opened, and there was William Colt, smiling at him.
Carter started to speak, but surprise prevented him from getting further than his lips forming the necessary shape for him to utter the first phoneme of “What the fuck?”
“Hi, Dan,” said Colt, and shot him.
Carter tasted blood. He was confused and disoriented, and he took the taste to be a sign that all was far from well, although he had trouble remembering why. The left side of his forehead out toward the temple hurt, too. There was cheap carpet against the right side of his face, and there was a bad smell: something dank and unclean, like rotting vegetables or a faulty drain, but neither of those.
As he recovered awareness, he struggled fitfully and thereby lost any chance of pretending to still be unconscious. His hands and ankles were bound. Not handcuffs; something broader and more giving than steel bracelets. Leather restraints?
“Oh, here you are,” he heard somebody say. “At last. You banged your head as you fell, Dan. Sorry about that. Wasn’t part of the plan. You okay?”
Colt
, Carter realized. It was William Colt’s voice.
He tried to speak, but his mouth was entirely dry, and he had to work his tongue to try to make saliva.
“I Tasered you,” said Colt, sincerely apologetic. “Sorry about that, too, but you’d have made trouble. I wasn’t sure what I expected to happen. Haven’t done it before. Something nice and convenient like you going, ‘Oh!’ and folding up conveniently. But you didn’t. You kind of spasmed and your whole body arched over sharply, like”—there was a rustle of clothing and Carter guessed Colt was demonstrating—“and you banged your head on the doorframe. You bit your tongue, too. I’m really sorry about that, Dan. I didn’t want to hurt you. I still don’t.”
Carter opened his eyes slowly, the light sliding in as pain. It hurt too much and he closed his eyes again. He heard a ruffling of cloth, and the click of thin plastic regaining its shape. The mouth of a bottle was put to his lips.
“Here,” said Colt¸ “it’s water. Drink.”
It was warm, but it was water. Carter thought of poison or drugs, but Colt could have killed him at any point, so he drank.
When he had swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, Colt took the bottle away. “You shouldn’t have too much, not after taking a knock on the head like that. You might throw it up again. How are you feeling?”
“Like shit.”
“Yeah. I imagine so.” Colt exhaled heavily. “I had everything figured out until you turned up, Dan. Sorry, but I thought you were just another idiot trying to get in my way. I was wrong about that. That’s okay. It was a learning experience. I’ve learned humility. I’m not God. Hey, if God had gotten a lesson like that and learned humility, it would be a better world, wouldn’t it?”
“You believe in God?” Carter couldn’t keep the surprise out of his voice.
“No.” Colt half laughed. “No. I’m no theist. Especially not now. If there is a God, or gods, they’re as flawed as all get-out. Not sure you can really think of anything that error-prone as any sort of gods you’d want to worship. But there are things powerful enough to be gods. I’m pretty sure about that. I’ve seen their fingerprints.” The sound of the bottle’s cap being screwed back on. “I just haven’t seen
them
.” Another half laugh. “Maybe just as well, huh?”
