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he Repository was the strangest place I’d ever been. It was located in a fine old mansion on Mt. Vernon, in Baltimore, close to D.C. but not too close. It had been purchased when those old houses were cheap, back in the late ’70s. This one was so big it was a white elephant among the sizable herd of pale pachyderms in what used to be a very tony part of a city on the skids. It was quietly patched up, fitted with enough security systems to foil the hordes of junkies in the neighborhood, then put into service as a place to keep things that ought not be.
Row after row of steel shelves filled the once elegant rooms; ranks of filing cabinets made the largest ones into labyrinths. Upstairs, there were offices for the small staff of experts who tried to make sense out of it all.
The library was almost untouched, the shelves full of old books, the rolling ladders ready to give access to volumes placed above arm’s reach.
Dr. Stoll was waiting for me. We shook hands, and made a little small talk.
“I’m sure you’re curious about being called here.”
“I haven’t been here in years, I’m glad for the opportunity.”
“Look at this.”
He pointed to a ragged, discolored volume smelling of age and mold, “Ever see this before?”
“That’s the Cthaat Aquadingen. I saw it once a long time ago.”
“And this?”
“And that’s the Gorl Nigral—I thought it was at Miskatonic, in the restricted collection.”
He put another ancient book next to it.
“My God! That’s the Necronomicon! I know that’s at Miskatonic, how did it get here?”
He replied by placing three more books on the table. They were identical.
“Okay, the Franklin Mint has a new line of products?”
“We collected these at used book shops in Germany, France and Canada. Now, watch this video. It was shot by a security camera at a flea market in London. They were having problems with gangs of shoplifters, and they caught this bit of business.” There was a TV with a built in DVD player on one of the shelves, and it sprang to life at the touch of a button on a remote—this guy knew how to set up a good show. “Watch the guy with the satchel.”
A man in his sixties approached the market, and began to examine books on a table. He was a weasely looking guy, with a three-day growth of patchy beard and straggly, stringy hair, dressed in a shabby dapper outfit that seemed to be on the third owner. His satchel might have been made out a saddlebag once owned by Cole Younger, and he wore a pair of round John Lennon shades, emphasizing his beady-eyed face and lumpy nose.
He looked at a few battered volumes, read some pages here and there—until the proprietor turned away, whereupon his grubby hand went into the satchel like a rat through a mail slot, extracted a book, and laid it on the table. He picked it up, leafed through it, put it down and slouched away.
“Well, that’s new,” I said. “A shop-dropper.”
“We have several more, but this has the best picture quality.”
“Did you get the book?”
“No, by the time we saw the pictures, it was long gone.”
“That makes as much sense as canned bananas,” I said, wondering at what I’d just seen.
We sat down to tea and biscuits in the kitchen.
Stoll said, “You know how many stories begin with someone finding one of these tomes in a used book market? It’s a cliché, but it’s happened, and more than once.
“It’s now apparent that this is more than an accident, and that there’s cultist activity involved, perhaps more than cultists at work.”
“Yes, the cults have declined for a while,” I said. “At least as far as quality recruits are concerned, they need some highly placed people to advance the agenda.”
“They can offer a lot to someone who doesn’t scruple over where the benefits are coming from, even though they rarely keep the bargain.”
“The wages of sin is death.”
“Y’know, I still think that should be ‘are’ death,” Stoll said, putting a finger to his lower lip. “But who am I to argue with Scripture.”
“I wonder what these shitbirds are up to, besides the usual corruption and destruction of humanity,” I asked, and took a sip of my tea.
“It must be important, considering how indolent they have been for a while.”
“Shub-Niggurath has been active enough in the area I live in.”
“She’s one of the least maleficent of the pantheon. She has to do with nature and life sometimes—not often, but sometimes. And Nyarlathotep is an errand boy for the rest of them; his powers are few.”
“So who do you suspect?”
“Who else? Cthulhu!” Stoll leaned forward a bit, “Cthulhu is death, he resides in the deepest abyss, where there is no light or air, and where horrors from the dawn of time still swarm. He himself is dead, most of the time. He also has the largest and most active cult.”
“So these people may be like the Gideons, only instead of Bibles, they plant the Bad Books to lead unfortunate people into the service of Cthulhu?”
“Precisely!” Dr. Stoll managed a bit of a flush in his pale face.
I had to agree, but it didn’t make me happy.
We kicked the idea around, wandering through the place, looking at the arcane and occult things on the shelves.
I recognized a brass and steel device, some sacrificial knives, hideous things preserved in fluid, some of them not quite dead.
There were books, grimoires, learned treatises that had gotten their authors ridiculed, hatched up or worse, and thick albums of illustrations unfit to be seen.
“We almost had Rhan-Tegoth,” Stoll said, ruefully. “Some Jewish scholars had gotten him into a crate, don’t ask me how, and put him into a dormant state. But he woke up and escaped, killed three of the Rabbis who were guarding him, smashed through a wall and took off into the dark.”
“He’ll be back—you know that, right?”
“Yes, actually, I do.”
I walked through the city, thinking. The Christmas lights were up, some homes and businesses had decorated their windows and Santa Claus was smiling.
If I had had a better childhood, I might have felt nostalgic. As it was, I could remember drunken rages and my mother’s mad savagery. My parents resented the drain on Dad’s booze fund, or Mom’s endless shopping addictions—not that she didn’t demand plenty of hooch for herself. No wonder my father was in a state of perpetual anxiety. He was like a rat on a wheel, and he couldn’t get off alive.
Sometimes they’d have sane interludes, and feel guilty about me and everything else in their screwed-up lives. It was hard to love them, but I did sometimes. They tried, just not hard enough.
The last time I’d been in Baltimore on company business, the Repository was still being finished. I stayed in one of the upper bedrooms, in fact, until I had my own place. The room had an airtight moth-proof closet, with a dry rotted rubber gasket and a pump to exhaust most of the air from the space, so that furs and fine woolens would be safe during the subtropical Baltimore summer. I noticed an emergency handle on the inside of the door. Good thinking.
It was 1975, the last year of the sixties, really. Baltimore’s industrial base hadn’t gone to Hell just yet, and the tatty old town was staggering along in its woozy denial of changing times. Pitchers of beer and piles of steamed crabs were still her summer diet. Loads of antiques were creeping through various hands by sale, theft or abandonment. Pretty much anyplace above the ground floor was empty, or used for storage.
Apartments rented cheap. I started remembering Terri, the woman I was with, then, and how we made a couple of wonderful Christmases during our short time together.
And Christmas in Brazil, with Sophia. It’s in the summer there, so no snow memories, but lots of love.
Now, time to make some memories with Lisa. This would be our first real holiday season together, and I was hoping for a good one. But then I was thinking of Baltimore again—back to business.
Nickel City was tarnished, but still very much alive. Soon there would be dreadful wounds from plant closures, middle-class flight, and crack; but then she was still up and ready to answer the bell. She staggered, took a couple of ten-counts after knockdowns, but with some help from a couple of good cut men, she went the distance.
In 1975, the issue was still in doubt. Something very nasty was making the rounds of Charm City, and Sophia Papadoupolus was there.
She was already a legend, the granddaughter of the master criminal Hermes Papadoupolus, known as Old Papadoupolus, who masterminded the huge San Francisco Stickup, and the cold blooded elimination of the very accomplices who made it possible. His son kept a lower profile, but his influence was felt all over the Mediterranean region. He settled in Egypt for a time, and took a belly dancer for a mistress. Hence, Sophia.
She grew up in the dark streets of Old Alexandria, and became one of the most powerful members of the Cult of Cthulhu.
We were bound to meet, so we did.
To the north of the city, just at the edge of Old Pikesville, there was a house, once big and rich, finally a crumbling ruin without the good grace to fall over. Many said it was haunted. It wasn’t haunted, but it was cursed by evil deeds, blasphemous rites, hidden violence, lies and callous exploitation of the innocent and the weak.
The story was pretty simple: five generations of two-doctor marriages built a home the size of a high school, complete with an elevator, a greenhouse, two sun porches, a kitchen fit for an Army camp, servant quarters and even a private medical examining room.
The last generation begat Miss Jackie. She was intelligent, but wild and angry, a bad seed from infancy. At 29 she inherited the house and several trusts, and the leisure time to investigate wickedness to her dark, putrid heart’s content.
For years, a floating scum of weirdos, lunatics and ne’er-do-wells washed in and out of the place, as Jackie withdrew to the master bedroom and presided over the whole thing like the queen of an ant heap. Sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, black magic, Voodoo, necromancy and Satanism flourished there. It became a hot-ticket place to be. Then Jackie found Cthulhu.
Baltimore was an open-air nuthouse in those days. Violence was casual and commonplace. The drug underground was becoming a shadow government and it seemed like everyone had something to hide.
The gay community was powerful and pervasive. After all, they had gutted out the worst times in downtown, and they had influence now, hard-earned and deserved. AIDS cut them down in windrows ten years later, but that was the future.
As heroin snaked into the swinging downtown crowd, darker influences tinged the optimism of the failed counter-culture.
These were the days before the sounds of gunfire were unremarkable in the inner city, so our little war with the cult was fought with knives, blackjacks, blowguns, spring whips, throwing stars and silenced pistols. People were killed; it was serious business, and hard fought.
Then Miss Jackie died. She went in her sleep, with enough chemicals in her bloodstream to qualify for a Super-fund site.
The old house was a glorified squat for years. Finally the damned thing burned down one night, about twenty years later. An upscale health care complex is there now.
But the cult never quite gives up. They were trying another run at Baltimore. I can’t say I fancied their chances; the tipping point had been reached a while before. The city was no longer what it had been. The abandoned, derelict, forgotten and neglected places were rapidly disappearing. That was bad for the cult, as was a general decrease in urban chaos and violence.
In some parts of the city, even the monsters were uneasy.
It was time to put some wingtips on the ground, and do some listening.
“Hello, Sophia.”
She was still thin as a blade, her hair still black as midnight inside a wolf’s mouth, with eyes to match.
“It’s been a while,” she said.
“A long time,” I agreed.
“Last time I saw you, you cracked me across the hands with a steel spring whip.”
“You were trying to stab me.”
“It still hurt atrociously. I hadn’t cried like that in years.”
“I actually felt bad about it.”
“You shouldn’t have; I meant to gut you like a chicken.” She laughed music.
I got her an espresso, and myself a chai latte, and we sat down, overlooking the busy concourse of the Galleria. We could see the shoppers at the Inner Harbor darting about across the street.
“Busy little pismires,” Sophia mused. “Buying bushels of worthless trash to justify their inconsequential lives.”
“You only buy the best, Sophia, I remember that.”
“I still recall those silk pajamas you bought me for Valentines. I was so sad when they wore out.”
“I still have the scar you gave me.”
“Those were great days,” she said wistfully.
“I remember them, too.”
“So, why the meeting? And how many bodyguards do you have in the crowd?”
“I came alone.”
“I brought two. And you’re lying.”
“So much for trust, heigh-ho,” she said. Her utterly worldly, Greek-Egyptian features twisted wryly. She was being kittenish.
“I have one,” I admitted.
“If this is about the big fellow, we haven’t seen him yet.”
“I’m just here to tell you, keep your operations here to their present level.”
“Oh, no problem there,” she said. “The stars are wrong for our principal. Why don’t we go to a hotel?”
“There’s someone,” I told her bluntly.
“Bugger!” she snarled, then composed herself.
The rest was negotiation.
Lisa was feeling a little left out this time, but there wasn’t anything for her to do, yet.
Reports came in from various places, of activity that might have had to do with the various books. A ceremony went very, very wrong in Berlin; a woman died under circumstances suggesting the Tindalosi Hounds in Lille; and the monkeys of Mumbai went on a three hour rampage for no good reason.
“I wonder where they keep the stock?” Lisa asked. “They must have a distribution point, a warehouse, something like that.”
“I keep wondering where they produce these things. They’re exact copies; it takes a carbon-14 test to tell if it’s a new one or not.”
“Could the gentlemen from the other firm have some sort of duplication process?”
They could. They did.
Sophia had a hand in it, of course. During that time I was in Baltimore, she was there trying her damnedest to exploit Miss Jackie’s work for her side. She very nearly succeeded.
She stayed behind. The darkness there was perfect for her purposes. I saw her a few times, just to exchange veiled threats and old memories. Bittersweet.
And now, I thought, the endgame.
I told Lisa all about this. She was not pleased.
“That bitch! You do not proposition another woman’s lover. It’s tacky!”
“Not to mention worshiping an evil, extraterrestrial monster who intends to annihilate the human race, and institute a regime of utter horror.”
“That’s no concern of mine; you are!” She actually fumed for an hour or so.
It didn’t help that her attempts to find out anything about the influx of eldritch tomes hit a stone wall.
Stoll sent me some video from a recon satellite. R’lyeh was up. We watched what appeared to be a roiling black cloud pulling itself through the sky with pseudopods it constantly extruded and re-absorbed.
“Nyarlathotep,” I told Lisa. “That’s the form he takes when Cthulhu is active. We think it’s a sort of celebration.”
“It’s horrible!” she said, “I’ve never seen anything that looked so evil!”
“The Cult will be very active now,” I said. “This is the time when they have real power, and there’s a considerable danger of them opening the barrier and letting Yog-Sothoth into this plane.”
They call it Dead Lion.
It was once the richest small town in America—more millionaires per capita than any place in the States, wealth built on cigars and woodworking—and it didn’t have a sewer system until the 1960s or a public library well into the ’70s.
Red Lion is a sad, forgotten sort of a place, dull, hostile and closed off. Even the influx of people from Maryland, fleeing taxes and seeking affordable homes, hasn’t brightened it in the least.
The occult has always had a grip. Vacant homes or buildings immediately become haunted in the popular imagination, and there are plenty of those.
To the southeast of the old downtown there is a rather desultory factory complex. Several enterprises have come and gone. Even people who work there often lose track of what parts are active and what parts are closed down.
One of the interesting aspects of life in Red Lion is that everyone thinks they know everyone else’s business, but they’re usually wrong.
Rumors can and do persist for decades. Superstition and twisted folklore are the preferred sources of information. To make it simple: the town is full of ignorant, backward hill-jacks. Everyone else got out decades ago, except for the retired folks.
In one of the old factory buildings, where few would notice, a complex circle seal was carefully drawn on the floor in blue chalk. When the Sun was gone, there would be rites here.
We twigged to the ceremony by accident. We had a tail on a bush league Crowley who was steering marks into the Cult. He headed to Red Lion, and we took it from there. Throwing together a raiding party on such short notice was a strain, but we had assets close enough to raise a squad, and we had firepower to even the odds.
Sophia had parked her Mercedes coupe at that factory. Not many of those in a hick town like Red Lion, and it was spotted.
Later, a van arrived, probably with the sacrificial victim, the one who would provide the pain and blood needed to open the Way.
The cultists began to arrive that afternoon, driving everything from VW buses to Rolls sedans, some from as far away as Vancouver and Nicaragua. Others had flown in from Europe and Asia. It was going to be a long trip for nothing, hopefully. We got ready to move, just after sunset.
Up to our primary positions, waiting for the word to close in, weapons checked, no more changes in the plan. We cut the lock off the gate with a tungsten carbide rod saw, moved in, and replaced it with a lock and chain of our own. We meant to haul in this catch.
The chanting began, then the carousel of colored lights, and the screams.
We got ready with the heavy ram, but suddenly there were a lot more screams, and the lights became a furious display of violent colors.
I gave the signal to break the door, but we were too late.
There was a lot of blood, a few body parts, masks, robes, some wigs, eyeglasses, a prosthetic leg and several pairs of dentures.
Sophia was in the corner. Every bone in her body was broken.
“Something went wrong,” she wheezed.
“Do tell?” Lisa said.
“She suits you,” Sophia said, blood beginning to flow from the corner of her mouth. “But please remember me?”
“Nobody could forget you, Sophia,” I said.
She smiled, and died.
A cleanup crew would be by to handle the organic parts of the mess, discreetly. We gathered up such objects as seemed significant, including several boxes of those false tomes, for the Repository. |
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