“I’ve had better incarnations,” I admitted.
“Should you even be at work?”
“Considering the day I’m having so far,” I said, “I’m thinking about returning to the hospital and asking if they can put me back into a coma.”
“Ouch. Hey, that whole thing down in Antarctica was weird,” he said. “Freaky.”
“You think?”
“No, I mean I’m genuinely freaked. I’m into the whole Cthulhu Mythos thing and—”
“The what?”
“Didn’t Mr. Church tell you about the book, At the Mountains of Madness?”
“Only a little about the author. H. P. Lovecraft, right?”
“You ever read his stuff?”
“A few short stories maybe.”
“Okay, short version is that Lovecraft created a kind of fantasy backstory to his horror stories. Gods, alien races, monsters, other dimensions. Like that. His stories were self-referential. You see, there’s this race of ancient space beings called the Great Old Ones who used to rule the Earth. They lost control of the world over time and some of them left and others went to sleep. One of the biggest and baddest of these gods is Cthulhu, and he’s asleep in the undersea city of R’lyeh. A lot of the stories deal with people who stumble onto a cult who worship one of the monsters, or in some cases have managed to interbreed with them or their even more monstrous servants, or they catch a glimpse of one and go totally gaga nuts. In the stories these creatures either live in places here on Earth that are so remote no one ever goes there — except the poor dumb son of a bitch of a protagonist — or they exist in a parallel dimension. Sometimes Lovecraft kind of confused the two. You’re just lucky you didn’t run into any shoggoths down there.”
“What a shoggoth? Or do I even want to know?”
“Not really. The shoggoths are this race of shapeshifting monsters created by another race of ancient creatures called the Elder Things.”
“Not the Great Old Ones?”
“No. It’s complicated, I know. The Elder Things were more like space travelers who settled on Earth a billion years ago. They built huge cities, and believe me, Joe, I’ve been losing sleep ever since I heard how you guys described the city you saw. It fits.”
I said nothing, trying to let it sink in. Trying to decide what I believed. What I could allow myself to believe.
“This whole cycle of stories is the Cthulhu Mythos,” Bug said. “Lovecraft invited his writer friends to tell their own Cthulhu stories. A lot of them did. A whole lot. People still do. There are thousands of Cthulhu stories, and a lot of them are actually better than the stuff Lovecraft wrote. Even Stephen King. You can see the influence everywhere. You know those Hellboy movies you like so much? That’s inspired by Cthulhu. But, between you and me, Lovecraft was a misogynistic, racist jerk who couldn’t write dialogue worth a darn.”
“Useful to know,” I said. “But, kid, I’m pretty sure I don’t believe any of this shit.”
“You were in the city, Joe. Bunny got his face eaten off by a giant penguin, and Erskine got funding to develop a whole line of psychic weapons. Want to hear a wild theory, Joe?” asked Bug, leaning close to the screen as if afraid of being overheard.
“No,” I said weakly, “I really don’t.”
“I’m kind of thinking it’s real. Or some of it, anyway. Like I said, I’ve read all of this stuff and there have been people over the years who’ve suggested that Lovecraft wasn’t so much making this up as having visions. They did a History Channel special once about how the artists from the surrealism movement believed they were painting images from other worlds they traveled to in dreams. And Erskine had programs called ‘Dreamwalking’ and ‘Dreamshield.’ I’m just saying. There was something down there, and between you and me, I’m really glad you called in an air strike. Imagine what would have happened if terrorists or even a foreign power got their hands on these kinds of weapons?”
I looked around my office for something to drink, but there was no booze. Someone had even swiped all the beers from my fridge. Maybe they thought I was never going to come out of the coma. Inhuman bastards. Ghost came over and leaned against me. To comfort me or maybe to receive some for himself. I ran my fingers through his thick fur. “Bug,” I said, “you’re hitting me with all this, but where does it take us? What do I do with it?”
He shook his head and it was clear my question punched him in the gut. He sagged and looked lost. “Oh, man… I really don’t know. I just look stuff up. You’re the field guy.” He tried on a smile but it didn’t fit well. “Everything’s gotten weird lately, you know? All those screwed-up missions. We’ve faced some big things before, but nothing like this. We took down the Seven Kings, we busted up the Jakobys and Majestic Three and the Red Knights, but man… what’s happened to us? We dropped the ball on so many jobs they’re not letting us anywhere near the ISIL thing. And the Gateway stuff is past tense. That place is gone. Are we just spinning our wheels? God, I never felt so lost before.”
Bug and I studied each other through the digital magic of the teleconference screen, saying nothing for a long time. Then he cleared his throat.
“You ought to talk to Junie, she’s into a lot of this weird stuff.”
“I know, but I’ll have to get clearance from Church. In the meantime, all we can do is work on this. So let’s work it. What have you dug up on Erskine?”
Bug tapped a few keys and scanned the data. “A lot and not much. Erskine was rich and well connected. His whole family is made up mostly of industrialists and defense contractors. They’ve been making all kinds of dangerous toys for the government going back to the Civil War. They were heavily into Pittsburgh steel before that went south, then they moved into advanced R and D.”
“Doing what kind of research?”
“You name it. Radar and sonar systems. Anti-radar and sonar systems. Control systems for tanks and fighters. Aerodynamics for stealth aircraft. New hull designs for attack and missile subs. Composite materials for fighter craft hulls. Erskine had a couple of dozen subsidiary companies, but he directly oversaw the electronics division.”
“Particle accelerators?”
“Not Erskine, but his partner, Raoul San Pedro, worked on some of that. He was down at Gateway, so I guess he’s dead. Pretty much everyone on Erskine’s team was there.”
“San Pedro? Isn’t that the guy whose office Top and Bunny were at today?”
From Bug’s expression it was clear that he knew about the encounter with the Closers. “San Pedro worked on several accelerators. His great-grandfather worked on the nine-inch cyclotron at UC Berkeley back in the early thirties, and contributed to the eleven-, twenty-seven-, and thirty-seven-inch versions. His grandfather helped build Berkeley’s Isochronous cyclotron in 1950. And his dad is on the patent for the super proton synchrotron they built at CERN.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, barely following. “Bunch of brainiacs, got it. What about the machine we saw down at Gateway? Was that an accelerator?”
“I did image comparisons of the drawings you, Top, and Bunny made of the one you saw at Gateway and that thing you saw looked like a hadron collider, but it wasn’t exactly the same. Maybe that’s because your sketches are kind of, well, sketchy. Anyway, I talked to a bunch of eggheads and the thing nobody understands so far is that the one down there was built more like a tunnel that curved down into the earth, right? It wasn’t a circular loop?”
“No, unless it was unfinished.”
“Still wouldn’t make sense. You wouldn’t build one at that angle. These things are circular with no sharp bend, and never upright. And they are massive. We’re talking thousands of tons of material, and they build them flat so gravity doesn’t warp the structure. That’s how they get the particles up to speed, by running them in a circle as close to the speed of light as you can manage, and then you collide them with particles going in the opposite direction. The machine you saw isn’t configured for that. You said that the one down there blew air at you?”