Summoned (18 page)

This time Sean shot all the way to his feet. He wheeled on Jeremy. “That’s it, Dad! That’s just how I saw it the first time.”

“Hold on,” Litinski said, but excitement had crept into his voice, too. “What does Mr. Geldman look like?”

Helen hoped she didn’t look as sideswiped by the uproar as Jeremy did. “I guess he’s forty or forty-five, around my height. Brown bushy hair. He always wears a white lab coat. I see him outside on nice days, washing the windows or polishing the scale, and he says ‘hello, beautiful weather,’ small talk, but he does it well. He has a bit of an accent, Czech or Hungarian, I’m not sure which.”

Sean pointed at Jeremy like a preacher exhorting a congregation. “See? It’s
him
. I’m not crazy.”

“Sean, sit down,” Jeremy said, standing up as if ready to enforce the order.

Sean reanchored himself to the chair, but he kept talking: “We went to Geldman’s before we came here. Only the pharmacy was boarded up.”

Helen glanced at Jeremy, who gave a shrug, and Litinski, who said, “Sean’s telling the truth.”

Marvell had warned her that the Mythos attracted crackpots. He hadn’t yet taught her how to dislodge them from her office. “Look, Professor Litinski. I walked by Geldman’s this morning. It was open. Mr. Geldman was loading fortunes into the scale. He gave me one. In fact—” Helen flipped to the back of her notebook and plucked out a slip of crisp pink paper. “I kept it, for luck.”

“May I?” Litinski said.

She handed the slip over, as much to shake her sudden reluctance to part with it as to oblige Litinski.

“‘The extraordinary is coming your way,’” Litinski read. “‘Meet it with open eyes and mind.’”

Helen took back the fortune. “It doesn’t mean anything, of course.”

“Ms. Arkwright, an hour ago I saw the pharmacy boarded up, and the café owner said it’s been like that for years.”

Jeremy spoke slowly, as if reluctant to support Litinski’s claim but unable to deny it. “It’s closed,” he said. “I saw it, too.”

Three people with an identical delusion—that merited a case study. Helen tried to recall any conversation she’d had with Jess at Tumblebee’s, any reference to that charming Solomon Geldman across the street. Wasn’t it queer that neither of them had ever mentioned the pharmacy?

With her visitors united against her, to whom should she appeal? Litinski seemed the least agitated. “Professor, I know what I’ve seen.”

“You’ve seen the pharmacy up and running. Jeremy and I and the people at Tumblebee’s have seen it closed. Sean’s seen it both ways. The place seems to have multiple realities. That shouldn’t be, but it is.”

Helen didn’t feel like arguing the nature of existence with a philosopher, sane or otherwise. “No,” she said. “Let’s try the obvious first. I’ll call Mr. Geldman.”

“Where?” Sean asked.

“At the pharmacy.” She hauled the Arkham-Kingsport Yellow Pages out of her credenza and turned to the pharmacy listings.

She found the
G
s, but Gleasonville Drugstore followed Gargery’s Drugs with no Geldman’s in between. None of the picture ads were for Geldman’s, either.

“Something wrong?” Litinski said.

“Maybe with my eyesight.”

Sean came to the desk. “It’s got to be listed. I looked it up in the Yellow Pages at your house. There. It was right there. I remember. It had this fancy border and a drawing of the pharmacy.”

Helen looked at the blank yellow square under Sean’s fingertip. An ad-sized vacancy in a packed book? “I know this is the same edition, the latest one.”

Sean rubbed the blank square as if friction might activate invisible ink. Then, for the third time, he bolted upright. “It’s only open when Mr. Geldman wants it to be!”

“What?”

“The pharmacy. And even then, only certain people can see it’s open.”

Litinski beamed at Sean’s insight. Jeremy looked baffled. As for Helen, it was true the library always kept the AC cranked, but she shouldn’t have felt an icy finger trace her spine from nape to tailbone. “That’s ridiculous,” she heard herself protest.

“No, it’s magic,” Sean said.

“Wrong. Magic makes sense; it’s self-consistent.” Ah, she was echoing Marvell—he’d told her that right in this office, leaning backlit against the window, his hair a dark halo around his head.

Jeremy’s hair was too unruly to appear angelic, and he was making it worse by shoving his fingers through it. “Look,” he said. “All I want at this point is for
something
to make sense.”

“I concur,” Litinski said. “I propose we start by going to Geldman’s together, the four of us.”

The extraordinary is coming your way.
Helen drew her hand from the fortune on her desk. She had books to read, notes to organize. But did she really think that after this meeting she’d be able to concentrate? “What if I find it open?”

“You might,” Sean said. “It might always be open for you.”

And what on earth, or elsewhere, would that mean? “All right,” Helen sighed. “Whatever state the pharmacy’s in, I could use an iced latte.”

Geldman’s
wasn’t open. From the damage time and neglect had wrought, it hadn’t been open for years, could never have been open for her.

Litinski and the Wyndhams sat at a table outside Tumblebee’s. Helen sat inside, in the dim corner booth, as far from Jess’s concerned looks as she could get. In front of her was Marvell’s card, and it was 2:30 in the afternoon here, so five hours ahead in Scotland he’d still be up, still be able to talk her back into the real world.

Helen clasped her cell phone to her ear; it was cool, a comfort. Four rings in, a woman with a heavy burr answered: “McGrigor residence.”

“Hello,” Helen said. Her mouth felt numb. “I’m calling from Miskatonic University for Professor Marvell?”

“Ah, Theo. And would you be Helen Arkwright?”

“Yes. Yes, I am.”

“I’m Leezy McGrigor, Robert’s wife. Theo’s told us we’re beholden to you for his visit. He couldn’t have managed it, he says, if he hadn’t gotten such a good assistant.”

The tingle of a blush drove off some of Helen’s numbness. “Perhaps he told you I might call if anything came up at the library?”

“He did. I hope there’s nothing wrong, dear.”

“No, no emergency. Could I talk to him?”

“It’s a pity you didn’t call yesterday. Theo and Robert have gone Munro bagging.”

The hell? “Munro bagging?”

Leezy McGrigor gave a hearty laugh. “Munros are mountains more’n three thousand feet. Foolish people go about climbing them, just to say they’ve bagged the lot. Robert and Theo are tenting out on Beinn Dearg. And they don’t even have phones with them! It’s their little game, pretending to be Hillary on Everest. If they should topple themselves, I won’t know of it until someone finds the bones.”

Helen managed a chuckle. “I see. When will they be back?”

“A week. But they may ring me up before, if the weather’s wet and they stop at an inn. Shall I tell Theo to ring you back?”

“Please, Mrs. McGrigor. Thank you.”

“My pleasure. Take care, dear.”

Helen flipped shut her phone. Yesterday it would have been a pleasure to dwell on Leezy McGrigor’s friendly familiarity and the confidence Marvell had expressed in Helen. Today the conversation brought nothing but disappointment. Marvell couldn’t help her.

As soon as she sat down at the table on the sidewalk, Sean asked, “Did you talk to him, Ms. Arkwright?”

“I’m afraid not. He’s gone mountain climbing.”

“Great,” Jeremy said.

Litinski pushed a drink toward her, the iced vanilla latte she’d ordered. Condensation ran down the cup in milky beads; she was loath to touch it. Without looking, she tilted her head toward Geldman’s. “All right. First leap taken.”

“I’m sorry,” Litinski said. “We’ve shoved you into a pit, haven’t we? Or pulled you in after us.”

Maybe she would have ended up in the same pit, Sean or no Sean. Marvell was going to give her Uncle John’s papers. Would they prove, not that John’s work had cracked him, but that it had shown him things like Geldman’s?

Sean capped and uncapped his bottle of Coke. “I’m sorry, too. I’m screwing everybody up.”

Jeremy’s jumbo black coffee seemed to have done him good—some of his former wryness was back: “With Orne and Geldman around, don’t be so quick to take all the credit. The important thing is, what do we do next?”

“We admit magic’s real,” Sean said without hesitation. “Geldman’s proves it, right?”

Litinski responded first. “I can say this much: Geldman’s makes me readier to believe.”

“That doesn’t follow for me,” Jeremy said.

Sean spun the Coke cap tight, and his voice rose. “Dad, we can’t just believe what we want. The Servitor won’t go away.”

An elderly couple two tables down turned to stare.

Sean dropped some decibels. “It could go after some kid. Or, I guess, it could come after me again.”

In the sunshine Sean looked paler than he had in Helen’s office. Whatever the truth was, he was scared straight through. Silence settled over them, broken only by the jittering of Jeremy’s cup on the aluminum tabletop. He, too, was frightened. Nothing strange there. His son was in trouble. Nothing strange, either, in Litinski’s involvement. He was family. What about Helen, though? Did she have to yield to the whirlpool suction of their problem?

On her back, like the radiation of an alien star, she felt the scrutiny of the pharmacy. Blurred as they were by sooty cataracts, its windows watched her, or something behind them did. She cleared her throat. “Maybe you know something about my great-grandfather Henry Arkwright?”

“He was Dr. Armitage,” Sean said. “In Lovecraft, ‘The Dunwich Horror.’”

“That’s what Uncle John told me. I remember it upset my father when I brought it up. He didn’t like John’s jokes about our family history of monster hunting. Now I’ve got to wonder if they were jokes, what John actually believed. He said he accepted Henry’s conclusions about Dunwich: The Whateleys had terrorized their neighbors, killed cattle, faked evidence, committed arson, all to validate their delusions that they were wizards favored by the Outer Gods. But one detail in Lovecraft’s story is true: Henry Arkwright did consult the
Necronomicon
to understand what the Whateleys
thought
they had summoned.”

Hope sparked in Jeremy’s eyes. “Your great-grandfather used the book to uncover hoaxers?”

Again she thought of the private papers in Marvell’s care. “According to the official records.”

“Could you do the same? Find out what’s going on with Sean?”

Litinski piled on. “If you’ll come to Providence, Ms. Arkwright, you’re more than welcome to stay with my wife and me.”

“That would be awesome,” Sean said.

The hope in his eyes was different from his father’s. Sean didn’t doubt the supernatural nature of his dilemma: Geldman’s had clinched it for him. It had half-clinched it for Litinski. Jeremy was still struggling. And where did she fall on the spectrum? The ruined pharmacy refused to go away. Damn it, it
had
been open this morning! Geldman had been at his usual post outside, and he had given her the fortune, which had made her laugh, a laugh Geldman had shared, damn him, and now he was a ghost.

The extraordinary had come her way. She was supposed to meet it with open eyes and mind. Would it be reckless to obey the fortune and go to Providence? She barely knew Jeremy and Sean, had only today’s encounter by which to judge Gus Litinski, but her gut said they weren’t out to harm her and she already liked Litinski. He reminded her of John on his good days, when he’d shaken off whatever shadows dogged him.

If she turned her visitors down and tomorrow found the pharmacy restored, that wouldn’t change the truth of today. Was it a truth she could ignore? Helen felt inside the hip pocket of her jeans. Geldman’s fortune crinkled under her fingertips. “Professor Litinski, if you could promise your place isn’t Hill House…”

“Nothing like it,” Litinski said.

“Please come,” Sean said. “And could you bring the
Necronomicon
with you? Not the real one. But I read on the library Web site you’ve got disks of it.”

She had some rules to lay down if she was going to do this. “Most of the Mythos collection is on old microfilm, which we’re scanning to new film and CD-ROMs. The
Necronomicon
was the first scan finished. I can bring disks, but they’re going to be locked to my password. We consult them if I decide we need to, not before. Agreed?”

Sean answered at once: “Agreed.”

“And the requests to view the
Necronomicon
?” Litinski said. “Can those travel?”

“The last three years I can access online. When should I come, then?”

As if the answer were self-evident, Sean said, “Today.”

“Short notice.” All right, so her feet were already getting a little cold, but she did have a solid excuse. “My car’s in the shop until Wednesday.”

Sean was undeterred. “You can ride with us. Can’t she, Uncle Gus?”

Litinski snuck Helen an apologetic look. “Certainly you could, Ms. Arkwright. But I understand if you want your own transportation. Would Thursday be all right?”

She didn’t get a chance to reply. “That’s three days,” Sean groaned. “Lots could happen.”

“Or not,” Jeremy said.

But he didn’t sound too sure of that. Open eyes, open mind. If she was going to jump— “It’s fine,” Helen said. “I won’t feel comfortable until I figure Geldman’s out. If it’s linked to your situation in Rhode Island, the sooner we look into that, the better.”

“You’ll come today?” Sean asked.

Again, the hope in his eyes. She had to at least try to live up to it. “I’ll need to pack some clothes and go back to the library for the disks.”

Sean bit his sore-looking lip. “Thanks, Ms. Arkwright. Really, thanks a lot.”

When the others started for Litinski’s car, Helen hung behind. She’d finally gotten up the nerve to face Geldman’s. Beyond the urns a shadow more man-like than the rest receded before she was sure she’d seen it. In one of the unboarded windows upstairs, something white moved, like the whisk of a skirt. Moved and was gone.