Haggopian and Other Stories (66 page)

Paynter leaned closer. “Oh?”

“Like Cindy Patterson, yes. She’s a young American, a publisher who produces the games and associated products. She controls a lot of rights, and she’s heavily into spreading her empire abroad. A shrewd young lady. She’s also the moving force behind the conventions, helps coordinate them. That’s why they fall so conveniently, with gaps of a couple of weeks in between, so that she and a couple of guys from her outfit can hop from one to the next without overlapping. Also to enable her to spend a week or so in each location, promoting her stuff. The Americans are big on advertising, you know? And it seems this RPG thing is rapidly becoming big business.”

“And you think these Americans are connected, right?”

Slater pursed his lips, slowly shook his head. “If they are, I really can’t see how. What? They should run around killing off their future livelihood?”

“A spot of judicial culling?”

Slater frowned. “Where’s the motive? These were fans. They weren’t rival publishers, weren’t exerting pressures. Guttmeier was a top player, he was good advertising! And Minatelli was nuts on Moribund’s stuff.”

“Moribund?”

“The name of Cindy Patterson’s publishing house. So no motive there—or if there is, it’s not yet apparent. And anyway, you can strike the Americans because they missed the Berne convention. There were problems back in the US of A, apparently, that needed sorting out. They only just got back in time for Rheims.”

“How do you know all of this?” Paynter ordered more drinks. “I mean, who’s your informant? You obviously didn’t speak to anyone who might be involved, for you’d tip their hand. So who gave you all of this stuff?”

Slater grinned, said: “Elementary, my dear Andrew. If you want to know the state of the church’s rafters, don’t ask the bellringer, ask the deathwatch beetle! The people on the inside. So who to speak to on the inside? Someone who wasn’t at any of the foreign conventions. Karl P. Ferd, is who.”

“Who?”

“Ferd, the editor and publisher of
Dugong.
The entire scene is an open book to him. You know,
Dugong
is one of as many as eighty fanzines—in this country alone! Anyway, Karl seems a genuine young guy, and he knows just about everyone in or on the fringe of the game—or games. Fans and pros alike. I’ve talked to him and I like him, so much in fact that I felt something of a shit laying my scam on him. I told him I was doing some research for someone who’s doing a book on the whole gaming thing. It would mean a lot of publicity for
Dugong
and a couple of the better amateur ’zines.”

Paynter nodded. “So you’re building up a stack of background information here,” he said, “but as yet nothing solid on the case itself. And yet I sense you’re onto something. Something you haven’t told me?”

Slater grinned, nodded. “Ferd tells me there’s a certain nut name of Kevin Blacker who’s a kind of gamer’s guru. He’s full of shit about the Tootle-tootle Mythos, attends all the cons—can’t play worth a bent penny but talks a good fight—and talks, and talks, and talks. And apparently he’s a true believer.”

“A what?”

“He thinks it’s all real. Or at least, that’s how he makes it sound. The Mythos is real! Cthul—who do you say it?—is real, existing between the spaces we know, waiting to take over the world again, and—”

“Hold it!” Paynter cut in. “Surely Cthulhu’s dreaming in his house in R’lyeh?”

“OK, his minions, then,” Slater shrugged. “The rest of the gang. They’re ex-directory, sort of, but they keep in touch. And when the stars are right and the cult is big enough—”

“What cult?” Paynter was trying hard, but Slater could move fast when he wanted to.

Slater sighed. “The Cthulhu cult, obviously! Like I said, this ding-dong Blacker thinks the stories—the original Lovecraft, Smith, Howard and etc. you name it, stories—were based on the real thing. Facts which only a handful of people were privy to. The guy’s crazy! So says Karl P. Ferd.”

Paynter was thoughtful. “Crazy enough to kidnap people, or at least make them disappear—maybe even kill them? And the motive?”

Slater inclined his head, opened his slitted eyes wide and said:
“Ah!”

“Was he on the convention lists?” Paynter pressed. “Did he attend?”

“No to the first; yes, probably, to the second. See, Ferd says he doesn’t operate like that. He’s a guru, likes to appear mysteriously and vanish the same way. He just shows up, stays a couple of hours or maybe a day, expounds to his followers and anyone else credulous enough to listen, then moves on. So while it’s unlikely he’d appear on the official lists, it’s just as unlikely that he’d miss a con. He goes to all of them! He was in Milan, I’ve learned that much. And I’m betting he was at Berne and Rheims, too.”

“You didn’t mention the motive.” Paynter wanted to pin Slater down. “
Ah!
isn’t a motive.”

“Guttmeier is or was the world champion player. He knew the stories, books and rules backwards. Gaming-wise, he went where angels fear to tread because he had the measure of Old Tentacle-face and the rest of the starspawn. But Blacker says it’s not just a game. Maybe this is his way of proving a point, eh? He’s convinced himself, so now he has to convince the others. Don’t mess with Tootle-tootle, ’cos he’ll get you! Same goes for Tony Minatelli: he’s crazy keen on the game and one day could be a challenge. Blacker can’t stand people who look like they might steal his glory. He
has
to be the centre of Cthulhoid attention, and—”

“Cthul
hoid
?”

“Pertaining to Cthulhu. See, even I can say it now! Anyway, you get my point.”

“So…it seems you have a lead.” Paynter seemed disappointed.

“Oh, hey!” Slater said, with exaggerated gaity. “Oh, joy, let’s all be happy-happy! Jimbo has a lead!” He stopped mincing about on his barstool and turned his half-shuttered eyes on Paynter again. “So what’s eating you?”

“Well, actually,” Paynter began—and broke off. “Hell, I suppose it did sound like that, didn’t it?”

“It’s OK,” Slater nodded. He smiled with one side of his mouth. “I get the feeling I’ve popped your bubble. So what was your theory?”

“Theory?” Paynter snorted. “My trouble, you mean! See, I’ve had a—well, a sort of sneaking admiration for the Adamskis, the Rampas, Von Danikens and Charles Forts of this world. And it’s a bit disappointing to be put down. To be put
right
, I mean. When I was a kid I read Westerns. Loved the J. T. Edson things. They were so…
authentic
! Then I discovered Edson was an overweight postman from Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire. A nice man, but hardly Zane Grey. And
never
John Wayne! I feel the same about these other guys. It would just be sort of nice if something like this turned out to be true once in a while, you know? So this last week I tossed logic out of the window and went for the esoteric instead. And I thought I’d found something—one thing, anyway—that was kind of scary. Except it now seems silly.”

“Are you telling me you wish there really was a Cthulhu and Co? That
has
to be scary! OK, I know what you mean. So say on, I’m all ears. What did you think you’d found?”

“Oh, there’s no ‘think’ about it. It’s there, all right—except I suppose it has to be a coincidence. Do you know what ley lines are?”

“Ley lines? Oh, yeah. Imaginary lines on the surface of the earth that connect up points of pre-historic or religious interest. Like churches or other places of worship, or maybe the sites of primitive rituals.”

“Rituals of sacrifice?”

Slater squinted at Paynter. “What’s on your mind?”

Paynter shrugged. “A coincidence, that’s all. But if you line up Milan, Berne, Rheims and London—”

“A ley line?”

“That’s right. Not quite accurate, but close enough.”

“Well, you really did toss logic out the window, didn’t you? What if those places had formed a circle, or a triangle? Coincidence, that’s all.”

“Synchronicity,” said Paynter. “Or something…”

“Never heard of it.” The other shook his head.

Now Paynter shook
his
head. “Wrong word anyway,” he said. “It means events happening in different places at the same time, apparently connected but purely coincidental. Something like that anyway. But what we have here are predictable events occurring at a predictable time and place.”

“Too deep for me,” said Slater. “And wrong in any case. These disappearances were only ‘predictable’ in hindsight! If you know that they happen at conventions. I don’t go with that. It’s like saying: ‘how queer, last week Saturday followed Friday followed Thursday followed…’ See what I mean? It’s not queer at all, because that’s the way things are.”

“Charles Fort and his fishers from outside,” said Paynter. “Adams Adamski and his UFO.”

“Cranks,” said Slater.

“The time-scale fits, too.”

“Oh?”

“If you look at those places again on a map, and measure the distance
between…it’s weird, that’s all.”

“Well, go on.” Slater nudged his elbow. “Don’t keep me in suspenders.”

“Just suppose,” said Paynter, “that every now and then a sort of door opens between worlds, between universes. A gap in…hell I don’t know! In what we call space. A fissure into—or out of—the spaces
between
the spaces we know.”

Slater sighed. “Well, you did warn me. You did say that this was peculiar stuff. So you think maybe Tootle-tootle’s crowd are fishing through the fissure, eh?”

The faraway look left Paynter’s face and he grinned sheepishly. “Maybe I should see a shrink, right?”

“Tell me about this time-scale you mentioned,” Slater urged.

Paynter continued to look sheepish. “If there was a crack in space-time,” he continued, “a door to another dimension…I mean if the two surfaces of ours and some other universe were slowly sliding together and causing a fissure—”

“Hold it!” said Slater. “Milan: mid-July. Berne: end of July. Rheims: third weekend in August. London: mid-September. Distances?”

Paynter shrugged. “Calculate approximately ten miles every day and it all fits in. Dates and places, the lot.”

For a moment Slater frowned, but then he shook his head and grinned. “You see what we have here?” he said. “Listen, we have an invisible steam-driven spaceship flying at ten mpd (that’s miles per
day
) across Europe, crewed by awesome creatures from the dawn of time, fishing through a fissure.”

Paynter scratched his chin. “Yes,” he said. “Sorry.”

Slater stood up. “You’ve had too much to drink. And I don’t intend to, because tomorrow I have a date with a bunch of even weirder characters. I’m grateful for your thoughts on all of this, but me?—I reckon I’ll stick with Kevin Blacker. For now, anyway.”

“I’ll finish my beer,” said Paynter, staying where he was. He watched Slater walk away from the bar, turn at the door and wave. And he thought:
Synchronicity, or something. Now what the hell is the word?
And he answered himself:
Coincidence! That’s the word. Just coincidence—you ding-dong!

• • •

Slater didn’t wait until Saturday but went up to London that night. He booked into a local hotel and checked the registration book. This was nothing more than habit, but it produced results. Cindy Patterson’s name was in there, along with Hank Merne’s and Darrell le Sant. Slater guessed they’d be her two from Moribund. “A convention?” he innocently inquired of the receptionist.

“Something of the sort,” she answered. “At the Horticultural Society Hall. Greycoat Street. We have a half-dozen of them staying here. They’ll probably be in the bar later.”

“Oh?” he said. “A quiet lot?”

She sniffed. “A funny lot! We’ve had ’em before. But they’re no trouble.”

He dumped his case in his room, left the hotel and inclined his face into the fine, drifting rain, heading for Greycoat Street. At the Hall: there was no missing or mistaking the gamers. They were setting up, getting organised, fixing up their tables and props. Some were dealers, with their stuff in boxes piled under their tables, not yet displayed; others were players, moving through the crowd looking for their friends; very few of them would be more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old. It was a pretty much male-
dominated scene, but there were some girls there: girl-friends most of them, but also one or two players, Slater guessed.

Slater hung his overcoat over his arm, stood to one side and smoked a cigarette. He knew he stuck out like a sore thumb, and that it was a big disadvantage, but the fact was that even if he wasn’t “an old guy” still he couldn’t have pictured himself as part of this crowd. Even if he were young again, you wouldn’t find him here.

A good many of the youths were just that: pimply, gawky, gangling, uncoordinated and mainly out-of-work youths. Respectable, most of them, Slater supposed, by their looks, anyway. Not criminal types, he’d stake it all on that. But who could go on looks anymore? The young man with the dark, brooding eyes and the black, waxed, pointy beard, for instance: he was probably respectable. And the two overweight guys who could be brothers, like a pair of mobile haystacks, hairy, ungainly and unwashed, but probably respectable. In their way. And there were rich kids, too, all smartly if casually dressed, fairly well-groomed, poised and polite, with plums in their mouths and their pockets full of money. A crowd that cross-sectioned the spectrum, this one. And the games seemed innocuous enough.

But…of course there were the freaks, too. Not physical freaks, RPG freaks. Like that bunch there with the green-dyed faces and Spock ears: Trekkies, obviously. And the little tubby guy with the rubber mouth-mask fringed with bouncing, writhing tentacles. Old Tootle-tootle himself. The latter, meeting friends, invariably greeted them with: “N’gah, R’lyeh, Cthulhu
fhtagn
!” Terrific…

And how about the one with the gold and silver balloons clustered about his head? He wore a T-shirt printed with “Yog loves Lavinny”, and behind the balloons a rubber mask festooned with boils and quivering, protruding pustules. Slater thought:
but I’ll bet your Mum loves you.