Carter & Lovecraft (34 page)

Keeping moving was obviously the right thing to do; they were being pursued. But were they? In the quiet of the halts both keened their hearing as much as they might, yet neither ever heard the least sound behind them.

“You know what’s worrying me?” asked Lovecraft during the second break in darkness since they’d taken the left-hand fork.

“There’s so much to choose from,” said Carter. “Okay, what specifically?”

“The reason they don’t seem to be chasing us. I have, like, a mental image of a scene from some shitty 1930s B movie. You know the kind of thing—Fay Wray and some hero with a firm chin have escaped from the bad guy and run off into the forest or caves or a jungle on an alien world. The bad guy’s guards—they all wear silver clothes and stupid helmets—are going to chase them, but the bad guy—I’m thinking of someone like Leslie Banks here—says, ‘No. Those woods or caves or whatever are home to the voracious snorkfangs. Leave them to the snorkfangs!’ And then he laughs, and all his guards laugh because it’s in their job description.”

“Snorkfangs?”

“Or whatever.”

“You think they’re not following because there’s something in these tunnels already?”

“No. I was just saying it’s like those movies where … Shit, you don’t think something’s in here with us, do you?”

“No. I don’t.” He forbore to mention his concerns over whatever had made the tunnels. There was no point in frightening Lovecraft.

“Well, something made these tunnels,” said Lovecraft. She didn’t sound frightened, only angry and determined. “Wish I had my Mossberg. It would be awesome in a tight tunnel like this.”

“You’re handling this well,” said Carter.

“I have a little trick. I’m doing my best to pretend this is all some sort of live role-playing thing. It’s all special effects and makeup. You’re handling it pretty well, too. What’s your trick?”

“I don’t have one,” he said, and as soon as he said it, he realized it was true; he didn’t. The realization startled him. He was accepting it all; the Perceptual Twist, Colt’s ability to take advantage of it, the man who wasn’t a man on the riverside, the Waites and their inhuman nature, the tunnels cut by something other than human tools. He acknowledged it all, accepted it all, assimilated and then acted on it all. It concerned him, but only in the same way as if he’d found out Colt and the Waites were dealing crystal meth and were prepared to kill to protect their trade. The danger was there, and he reacted to it as he would any danger. Its origin seemed not to trouble him at all.

“I don’t know how that works,” he said. “I should be freaking out, shouldn’t I?”

“You’re a descendant of Randolph Carter,” said Lovecraft. “I think there’s more to that than just taking his name. In the H. P. L. stories, Randolph Carter’s special. He’s a dreamer in a technical, practical kind of way, and he sees some pretty fucked-up stuff, but he always keeps his sanity. Randolph Carter was a very special little snowflake, and maybe you are, too.” She sparked the lighter into life, tapped Carter on the nose, and grinned.

*   *   *

The injured man and Keturah had been taken up into the main body of the house to be tended to. The man would be fine. Keturah’s brain had been disrupted by the passage of a .380 slug into the skull, where it lacked sufficient energy to escape and had instead ricocheted around inside the brainpan, causing massive damage as it did so. It might even have killed her; she was lucky to survive. They put her to bed in a dark room and left her there. It would take a while, perhaps as long as a couple of months, but her brain would re-form completely and her memory would be patched by the RNA analog stored in her bones. The Waite women were not fragile in any sense.

In contrast, the injured man was only human, but extended contact with the women was rectifying that. He had to be prevented from trying to push his finger into the bloodless bullet holes, marveling at them as a child does at the socket of the first lost tooth. He would not obey a command to leave them alone, so finally they restrained him, strong leather restraints being a household item on Waite Road.

Keturah’s place was taken by Charity Waite, who had so recently visited the neighbor Owen Worley to persuade him he had never seen Kenneth Rothwell coming out of Waite Road. Her “persuasion” had been more in the manner of an erasure of the memory, and she had caused Worley much disruption to the workings of his mind and his personality, but that was acceptable. His wife had since separated from him while he “pulled himself together,” but that was never going to happen. He spent his days watching the isthmus now, standing slack-jawed and dead-eyed on his untended lawn, waiting for a sight of Charity. Maybe she’d marry him, she thought. She was, after all, over the age of consent. Far, far over.

Charity looked around seventeen years old, perhaps a little more, perhaps a little less, right up until the moment one looked into her eyes. They were not the eyes of a young person. If one looked closely enough, they were not the eyes of a person at all.

She’d sent another of the men down into the cellar room first, the men being both less bothered by damage and generally more expendable. He’d come back with blood on his shoes to report that both Keturah and Richard were shot, and the Lovecraft woman and the Carter man were missing.

“They’re in the tunnels,” Charity said to Colt. He was sitting on the sofa, clutching a glass of water and shaking. “We’re goin’ t’have to go after them, y’know?”

“You don’t need me for that,” said Colt. The surface of the water rippled with his tremors. “Send your men after them. You’ve got guns.”

Charity smiled as if she were talking to an adorably stupid child. “Yeah, we got guns. Trouble bein’ that they’re probably goin’ t’end up at the Fold. You really want a shootin’ match in there?”

“Twist,” said Colt, glancing up at her. “It’s called the Perceptual Twist.”

“Semantics, darlin’. They’ll find it, jus’ like they seem t’find every one of our little secrets. They’re special, y’know.”

“There’s nothing special about them.”

“We kinda think there is. They’re descendants of the folks who made the Fold …
so
sorry … the Perceptual
Twist
back in the day.”

“They’re not mathematicians. They can’t—”

“Billy, Billy, Billy. We ain’t mathematicians, either, but we got by with it all these years. It’s not always down to the numbers. Some folk can just feel their way ’round The Twist. We can, and ’less you can tell me how Daniel Carter didn’t die in your house, I’m guessin’ he can, too. Better than us. What if he finds The Twist and ties it up tight, huh? That makes life bad for us, and it turns you back into just another number monkey again. You wanna carry on being a god, you better get your ass down those tunnels and stop them.”

Only Colt’s mother had ever called him “Billy.” He bridled at Charity’s use of it, but not as badly as at the sudden fear of Carter and Lovecraft somehow strangling The Twist. Charity was supercilious and patronizing, but he forgave her these aspects because she and her extended family had welcomed him here when the indicators—he could hardly call them “clues”—he deciphered from the cube first led him to Waite Road.

They had known why he had come, had seemed to understand and even anticipate his oblique references to an interest in the history of that little tongue of land. The men were of no use—he was barely aware of the names of any of them, an interchangeable mob of Daves, Bobs, Johns, and Eds—but the women were not the landed trailer trash they first appeared to be. They showed him books, memoirs and diaries, some very old indeed, that told of the land’s past. The women guarded these books with the care they would have given their children, a distinct absence on the street. Colt started to understand the nature of the Waites quickly, and that there never had been and never would be a new generation. At least, not in the conventional sense.

It should have shocked him, or even just surprised him. But the revelations of the cube had spoken to him and his horizons had not merely broadened, but disappeared. He stood at the precipice above the infinite, and then saw even the precipice was only an illusion. He stood above everything on a pinnacle of self, and he felt secure on that needle, one of only a handful in the world who might, and who had the intelligence and talents to understand what he was seeing and how to manipulate it. The chances of the cube being discovered and by a convoluted path coming to his attention or somebody else like him were infinitesimal. Colt understood that, but it didn’t disturb him. After all, the effects of the Perceptual Twist made a joke of probability, so he didn’t think long or hard upon the subject. It was nothing but a retrograde effect of the causal ructions he had inevitably made, the anthropomorphic principle writ large in that the observation and the interpretation of that observation were joined at the hip. It had happened because he had used it because it happened.

Charity did not see fit to tell him the more mundane, and far more horrifying, truth: one of the Waite men, still a Waite if no longer entirely a man, had placed the cube in the deep sea trawl while it was deployed.

The captain had passed it on to the college because he had been told to and knew far better than to question any orders coming from that quarter. If he had, the best he would have suffered was empty nets until bankruptcy. The worst was the love of a Waite woman, where the terms “love” and “woman” are euphemisms. Contingency plans had been laid to bring it to Colt’s attention if need be, but his natural curiosity and arrogance had led him straight to it. Then it was purely a matter of waiting.

Charity’s thought processes were in no way human. Where a human mind would pursue a single thought in a train of association and examination, Charity and her sisters maintained a glowing hum of cross-referenced cognitive processes that constantly mapped and modeled possibility and contingency. Elegant and alien, a system once inadequately represented as a frozen moment on a wall in Red Hook. Charity had known there was no possibility of Colt failing to use the knowledge of the cube to his own advantage; she understood him far too well. Once it and he had crossed paths, they only needed to wait until the inevitable day when a red Mazda3 made its way across the isthmus, and William Colt started asking questions. They answered freely, because he never even thought to ask the right questions. They knew he never would, until it was far too late.

“Fine,” said Colt. He said it in the peevish tones of a man bullied into doing the washing up. He picked up the cube from the table with markedly less enthusiasm than he had shown in the past. “Fine, I’ll go after them, but I’m not going alone.”

“Course not,” said Charity. She smiled and his flesh crept.

*   *   *

Lovecraft had been dismayed when she found she couldn’t turn the Zippo’s flame down. “Why the hell not?” she had said as she looked for some sort of control. “Every lighter I’ve ever seen had a little doohickey on it. What the fuck, Zippo?”

“Those are propane or butane,” said Carter, who used to smoke. “That’s a naphtha lighter. You can’t control it the same.”

“I never thought my life might come down to what kind of lighter I could get my hands on,” said Lovecraft. The flame was dying. There couldn’t be more than a minute left in it.

“We need to keep moving,” said Carter.

The flame flickered.

“Wait, wait, wait,” said Lovecraft. “That was a breeze. That was a breeze, right? That’s not just it running out of gas?”

Carter looked into the darkness. He could smell salt water. He tried licking his finger and holding it up. The pad felt cold after a moment. “There’s a breeze,” he said. “Let’s go.”

His sense of direction was completely shot. He’d always flattered himself on keeping track of which way was north even on cloudy days when he couldn’t see the sun, but this was like a funhouse maze. The tunnel had split, split, split again, and if he had met the fucking Minotaur coming the other way, it would not have surprised him.

The floor sloped up and down, and he was confident that it could easily have gained or lost—he had no idea which—enough depth to be crossing back over itself for all he knew. The feel of cool air was something new, however. Unless the Waites had left their front door open and the breeze was coming in from the cellar, then he knew he was heading away from them. That was good. That there was a breeze was also good; that meant they were above the water level and, he guessed, heading for someplace-out-of-doors. He hoped they were off the spit and would come out in somebody’s backyard. That would be the best.

Then they saw light ahead, gleaming from the smooth, glassy surface of the melted rock, and Lovecraft clicked out the guttering Zippo with a sigh of relief. Carter signaled her to halt for a moment while their eyes grew accustomed to a natural light far brighter than the Zippo’s flickering flame, then to follow as he advanced, the Beretta braced in both hands, leading the way along his eyeline.

The tunnel jinked and they suddenly saw the exit. It wasn’t the ending of the tunnel, but more as if the tunnel had grazed the surface, leaving a gap in its wall. Carter once again thought how organic the way had been, and how it did not feel like a human tunnel—a way of getting from here to there—but instead the by-product of the passage of something else, something he did not even care to make conjectures upon because he doubted he would like any solid conclusion that might form from the evidence.

Besides, it didn’t matter. There was a way back to the surface, and that was all they needed. They could get out into the city, make contact with Harrelson, and formulate a new plan. Carter liked the idea of filling the back of a pickup with Molotov cocktails and burning every fucking house on Waite Road down to the foundations.

They made their way to the exit cautiously, both because the light of the day was so intense on their eyes and because there was a good chance the Waites knew about the exit and might have people waiting.

At the edge of the opening Carter paused, his back braced against the curved wall of the tunnel, his eyes wide to become as accustomed as possible to the light, then narrowed them as he swung out suddenly, gun up, safety off.