The Martian Falcon (Lovecraft & Fort) (3 page)

‘You think the NCPE has swept it under the rug.’

‘Precisely. For them, it’s a piece of damned data.’

‘A what?’

Fort smiled. ‘By “damned” I mean
excluded
. It’s something they can’t explain with current scientific methods, so they exclude it from their consideration. It’s a familiar phenomenon in science, Mr Capone.’

‘Yeah, well, I don’t give a fuck about science, Charlie. I want out of the frame for this caper, and I want out
quick
. That’s where you come in.’

‘Me?’

‘Yeah, you.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Fort, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. ‘What can
I
do?’

‘Let me explain it to you, Charlie,’ said Capone, in the manner of a teacher addressing a particularly dense student. ‘Normally, I’d take care of somethin’ like this by takin’ out the opposition. Normally, I’d just whack Johnny Sanguine…’

‘Whack him?’

‘Give him the big toothpick,
stake
him – you know what I’m talkin’ about.’

Of course I know what you’re talking about, for Christ’s sake!
thought Fort.
But whacking a vampire? My God…

‘You’re not… by any chance… suggesting that
I
stake him… are you?’

Capone laughed long and hard at this. ‘Oh, Charlie boy!’ he said, shaking his head. ‘That’s what I like about you: you got a great sense of humour. No, I ain’t suggesting you stake him. You don’t got what it takes to kill Sanguine.’

‘Then what do you want from me?’ Fort asked, deciding that it was way too early to feel relieved.

Capone leaned forward and placed his angular metal elbows on the desk. ‘I want you to find out if that son of a bitch really has the Martian Falcon. And if he does, I want you to find a way of provin’ it. I’m gettin’ out of the frame for this, Charlie, and you’re gonna help me!’

CHAPTER 3
Memories of Cydonia

There was a letter waiting for Lovecraft in the dingy lobby of his apartment building. The return address on the envelope was that of
Weird Tales
. Unable to wait, he thrust his newspaper under his arm and tore the envelope open right there and then. The first line told him everything he needed to know.

‘Another rejection,’ he whispered, shaking his head and scowling at the signature of the magazine’s editor, Farnsworth Wright. ‘You’re a buffoon, Wright,’ he said. ‘You can’t understand what I’m trying to do, even when I explain it to you.’

He trudged forlornly up the stairs to the third floor (the elevator didn’t work, of course) and along the corridor, trying to ignore the troglodytic shouts that emanated from several apartments – some of which actually contained troglodytes.

The door to his own apartment was ajar, the wood around the lock cracked and splintered.

Oh no
, he thought.
Oh dear Lord!

Lovecraft pushed open the door a few inches and peeked into the apartment, grateful for once that it consisted of only one room, the entirety of which he could see from his vantage point. It was empty; whoever had broken in had clearly come and gone. Lovecraft’s books had been yanked from their shelves and scattered across the floor; the threadbare sofa had been overturned, and the closet doors were open. The two spare suits that had hung there were gone, along with his overcoat.

You took my suits and my coat?
Lovecraft thought with a heavy sigh. He looked down at the light summer suit he was wearing.
This will be less than serviceable come winter… assuming I’m still here in this rat hole of a city
.

There was a payphone in the lobby downstairs. Lovecraft turned and trudged back along the corridor. Once he had called the police, he would return to the apartment and see what else, if anything, had been stolen.

He thought again of the ad he had placed in the
New York Times
and wondered if it would lead to any paid work.
Who am I kidding?
he asked himself miserably. There was clearly nothing else for it: he would have to consult the paper again, this time to search the situations vacant section.

Once again, he would have to try to get a regular job.

*

It was a little after ten o’clock when Fort got back to his office. His secretary, Penny Malone, stood up from her desk in the outer office as soon as she saw him: the expression on his face told her that something was wrong.

‘What is it, Charlie?’ she asked, her frown echoing that of her employer, darkening her normally bright features.

Fort looked into her cobalt-blue eyes and tried to smile, with limited success. ‘Nothing, sweetheart, nothing.’

Penny placed her hands on her slim hips, dark red varnish camouflaging her nails against the deep crimson of her dress. Her frown deepened. ‘Charlie…’

‘Everything’s fine,’ he lied. ‘I got a new case.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What kind of case?’

‘A customer wants me to track down a stolen item.’

Penny regarded him with unblinking eyes for a few seconds. ‘What customer?’

Fort sighed. ‘Al Capone.’

Penny gasped. ‘
What?’

Fort sat on the edge of the desk, his shoulders hunched. ‘And he wants me to track down the Martian Falcon.’

Penny sat down slowly in her chair. ‘Tell me this is a joke, Charlie,’ she said, very quietly.

‘I wish I could, Pen. But it isn’t. Capone’s goons grabbed me this morning…’

‘I thought you smelled funny.’

‘… and took me to the Algonquin. He’s catching some heat for the heist, but says he wasn’t behind it. He reckons it’s down to Johnny Sanguine, and he wants me to prove it.’

‘Oh
Jesus
. The Diesel-Powered Gangster wants you to go up against the Vampire King of Brooklyn?’

‘Talk about a rock and a hard place,’ Fort chuckled mirthlessly.

Penny shook her head. ‘You said it, hon. So… what are you going to do?’

Fort ran a twitchy hand through his thick dark hair. ‘Not a whole lot I
can
do… except take the case. I can’t say no to Capone – I’m very attached to my kneecaps, and I want it to stay that way.’

‘And what if you manage to pin the theft on Sanguine? What do you think
he’s
going to do?’

‘I’ll just have to make damned sure he doesn’t find out it’s me.’

Penny shook her head again, more emphatically this time. ‘You can’t do it, Charlie, you just
can’t!’

‘Like I said, angel,’ Fort sighed. ‘I’ve got no choice.’ He looked at his secretary for a long moment. ‘You know, Pen, it occurs to me that you haven’t had a vacation in quite a while. Why don’t you take a couple of weeks off?’

‘Oh no you don’t, Charlie Fort!’ cried Penny, jumping to her feet, hugging him and placing a kiss on his cheek. ‘You don’t get rid of me that easily…’

‘I’m not trying to get rid of you,’ Fort replied, taking out his handkerchief and fussily wiping her lipstick off his cheek.

‘Yes you are! You’re worried about this case, and you want me out of harm’s way. Tell me it isn’t so!’

Fort held up his hands. ‘Okay, okay! Look, things may get ugly, and I don’t want you here if they do.’

Penny shook her head. ‘You’re such a hon, Charlie, but I’m not going anywhere.’

They looked at each other for a long moment.

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Penny repeated, her voice quiet and intense, denying even the possibility of further argument.

Fort lowered his eyes. ‘What would I do without you, Pen?’

‘Now, don’t go getting all maudlin on me, Charlie,’ she admonished.

Fort looked at the lipstick smeared on his handkerchief, folded it carefully and placed it back in his pocket. ‘Any messages?’ he asked.

‘Yeah. I took a couple of calls from people answering your ad for an assistant in the
Times
.’

‘And?’

‘One sounds promising. He’s not from New York. Sounds like he’s from New England, kind of cultured-sounding, actually. I set up an interview.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘He should be here in an hour.’

‘Good. What’s his name?’

‘Howard Lovecraft.’

*

Fort closed the door to the inner office, went to his desk and sat down heavily. He found himself thinking about Penny, and her late husband, Archer Malone, who had been his partner. When Archer had been killed during their investigation of a Cavorite smuggling ring in the Bronx two years ago, Fort had been there to comfort Penny. It had been a rough time for them both – as rough as times come – but Fort had done all he could to see her through it.

When Archer was alive, Penny had sometimes joked with Fort that he was the only other man she could ever have seen herself with; there had been a time, maybe a year or so after his death, when she and Fort might have got together. But something stopped them, something which neither of them could define: maybe it was the memory of Archer and the grief which still hovered in the back of Penny’s mind, or maybe it was the nature of Fort’s work and the dangers it involved, and the fear felt by both of them that one day she might find herself alone all over again.

Whatever the reason, the moments had come and gone until, perhaps taking the hint, they stopped coming altogether.

Fort looked at the hazy figure moving behind the frosted glass of his office door. He sighed. ‘The road not taken,’ he said very quietly to himself. ‘Had to be that way… had to.’

He swivelled back and forth in his chair for a minute or so, like a clerk who’d been given some onerous task and was reluctant to buckle down and get started. He checked his watch, even though he knew the time, and gave another sigh, heavy and miserable.

Suddenly recalling the events of earlier that morning, he took the library index card from his pocket and quickly read the notes he had written following the poltergeist visitation at the drugstore, then stood up and went over to the enormous bank of file cabinets which covered one entire wall of his office. He opened the drawer marked P and placed the index card inside, then opened a larger drawer and withdrew a thick folder, which he carried back to his desk.

With an hour to go until this Lovecraft character showed up for his interview, Fort decided that the best thing would be to re-familiarise himself with the details of the X-M expedition. The folder contained press cuttings, magazine articles, public information from the National Committee on Planetary Exploration and photographs of Rocketship X-M and its ill-fated crew, along with stunning images of the surface of Mars.

Fort took a leather pouch of Bull Durham tobacco and brown papers from his jacket pocket and rolled himself a cigarette. He lit it, inhaled, blew out a thin stream of smoke, and began to read.

The ship had blasted off from the rocket complex at Cabo Cañaveral on Florida’s Atlantic coast on April 16th, 1920. Powered by the latest atomic motors, the X-M had made the flight to Mars in a little under three months – itself a triumph of human ingenuity and endurance. The onboard electro-telescopes provided a huge amount of astronomical data, including the discovery of the strange dark bodies drifting through the plane of the ecliptic between the planets, for which science had yet to come up with an explanation.

It was on Mars itself, however, that Captain Thorne Smith and his crew made their greatest discovery. From high orbit, they detected peculiar regularities amongst the mountains, plains and impact craters which covered the planet’s surface. When the ship’s telescopes were directed at these features, they were revealed to be the time-worn remains of buildings. Fort remembered the excitement that had spread across the world when the newsreels reported the X-M’s discovery of the relics of a long-vanished civilisation on the Red Planet; he remembered waiting, along with millions of others, for news of each new radio dispatch from the expedition. Even now, two years after the X-M’s triumphant return, he still felt the same excitement at the thought that there had once been another civilisation out there in the vast interplanetary night.

The ship had landed in the region called Cydonia by astronomers, after the ancient city-state on the island of Crete. She came to rest on a flat, level plain a few miles from one of the larger collections of squares, circles, triangles and pentagons which were scattered across the landscape. It quickly became apparent to the crew that these curious shapes were actually the roofs of large structures which had been buried millennia ago by the constantly-shifting sands of Mars. When the astrogator, Felix Bukowski, discovered a means of entry into one of the structures, Captain Smith immediately decided that the expedition program should be altered so that their planned month-long stay on Mars could be devoted entirely to the exploration of the ruins’ interiors.

That the city had been dead for millennia, perhaps millions of years, there could be no doubt. The alien necropolis was vast in extent, and the crew of the X-M had little doubt that their exploration was barely scratching the surface of what had once been a sophisticated planetary civilisation.

For the next four weeks, the crew explored the ruined city, naming it Cydonia after the region in which it lay, mapping it, taking the most interesting-looking artefacts and storing them carefully on the rocketship.

It was in a gigantic vault several hundred feet below the surface that the artefact which came to be known as the Martian Falcon was discovered, sitting serene and inscrutable upon a cylinder of black basalt. With no thought as to the consequences – for what consequences could there have been in that aeon-dead place? – Captain Smith ordered the artefact to be taken back to the X-M, for they saw nothing else like it during their necessarily brief stay, and Smith thought that the way it was displayed implied that it was unique – or at least of extreme importance to the beings who had fashioned it.

The world listened breathlessly to each excited dispatch from the Red Planet; and everyone agreed with Captain Smith when he said that what they had discovered on Mars would keep scientists, anthropologists and archaeologists busy for decades to come.

No one gave any thought to the fact that they were, in effect, vandalising the most important archaeological site ever discovered.

At least, no one human…

Of course, Rocketship X-M’s homecoming hadn’t turned out to be quite as triumphant as the world had thought. Not that there weren’t celebrations and ticker-tape parades through the streets of every major American city, radio and magazine interviews and congratulatory messages from pretty much every government on Earth. There was all of that, naturally, at first.

And then… then something strange happened. The public appearances by the X-M’s crew dropped off suddenly, and requests for interviews were declined – always with the same excuse: that Captain Smith and his crew were busy planning the next expedition to Mars, and could no longer spare the time to talk to journalists. The excuse was logical enough: Smith and the others were spacecraftsmen, and their job took priority over their inevitable celebrity; but the suddenness and completeness of this turn-around was perplexing to many. They were no longer seen in public at all, and even their families became disinclined to speak to anyone outside the rarefied community of the National Committee on Planetary Exploration.

That was when the rumours started, with some journalists working for the less reputable papers suggesting that something strange might have happened to the X-M’s crew while on Mars, while others noted that the Falcon was the only Martian artefact to be sealed within a lead-lined casket prior to its transfer to the Metropolitan Museum…

Fort leaned forward over his desk, examining a photograph of the Falcon – although he knew every line and feature of its beautifully-sculpted form. It was about fifteen inches tall, its wings folded behind it, its head facing forward, its eyes of obsidian so highly polished that they looked real… looked like they were actually observing you.

‘Where are you?’ Fort whispered. ‘Are you with Sanguine? Is it really that simple?’