“Save myself.”
“Including you. Especially you.”
As the men argued, Capone edged to position himself equidistant from all three. Torrio had asked him to gather information. The only weapons he’d brought were his switchblade and a knuckleduster.
Crowley glanced at the man beside him. “Professor Bauer, these inscriptions on the side have significance, do they not?”
“Of course,” Bauer replied quizzically.
“Please excuse me if my pronunciation is off. ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh…’”
“No!” shouted Suydam. “Crowley, you idiot!”
“‘…wgah’nagl fhtagn!’”
From the solid wall at the end of the tunnel, a greenish-grey tentacle, as thick as a man’s torso, began to materialize. It was quickly followed by a second. Then a third.
“Give me the box!” Suydam ordered. “Before it’s too late!”
“Run!” Crowley yelled at Bauer and Capone, pointing past Suydam down the tunnel with his revolver. Then: “Catch!”
Suydam leaned forward, knees bent, prepared to catch the stone box despite his apparent age. Rather than toss the box in his direction, however, Crowley swung around to hurl it at the grasping tentacles. They wrapped around it easily.
“Nein!” cried Bauer. The professor leapt after the artifact, intending to wrestle it free.
“Wolfgang!” Crowley had no time to say more. Another tentacle lashed out, and the traveler from the past became a smear on the floor.
Crowley raced after the teenager. He shot past a bemused Fiske, who was coming to investigate the screams, and gestured the policeman to follow. They reached the ladder a moment before Blake, just in time to see the youth scramble up and disappear. At least, Crowley saw him. Neither of the men showed any awareness of the intruder. Robert Suydam’s distraction spell still functioned.
Possibly Suydam did, as well.
“What was all that noise about?” Blake demanded. The same question was written on Fiske’s face.
Crowley glanced back over his shoulder. The tunnel was eerily quiet now. His expression turned stoic.
“I fear I loosed, er, loosened something, stumbling in the dark. I thought the roof about to collapse. Silly me. I can confirm that I found no evidence of sinister foreign spies. Or non-sinister ones. Did either of you discover anything?”
Blake shook his head. “If we had more than a few hundred agents scattered over the entire country, we could do a more thorough search…”
“Not every tip pans out,” Fiske consoled Blake. “Your man is right. We’ll wind up just sealing the tunnel shut again.”
“Yeah.” Blake nodded. “First, though, I’m getting electric lights installed and giving the place one last going over. We may have to come back someday. Unlikely as that is.”
“I suppose you can waste your time on that,” Crowley said, resigned. “I remind you, however, though your country is not yet directly involved in our Great War, you are providing aid. There are German saboteurs in this city, planning something destructive before the year is out. You should concentrate your efforts on finding them.”
“Oh, we will, Aleister, we will,” Blake assured him. “The Bureau is all about stopping the bad guys.”
Crowley considered this might be a good time to arrange another mystical retreat. The astrologer Evangeline Adams, for whom he’d done freelance work, owned a cabin upstate. If he ran into that teenager, he’d advise him to leave town, as well.
In case Suydam held a grudge.
In his mansion overlooking New York Bay, Robert Suydam waited, sprained ankle throbbing under its bandages, hands gripping the armrests of his cushioned chair, sharing Clarence’s thoughtful silence. Actively seeking revenge for today’s interference would be a waste of time, time he was running out of. Still, should he ever again cross paths with Crowley, or that arrogant youngster Al…
Presently, Suydam had larger concerns. A ship was due from Sudan next week, carrying yet another package for his unholy collection. The loss of the Lustrous Triacontahedron was a setback, but there are many routes to immortality.
Provided one is willing to pay the price.
Or make others pay it.
Just the Weight of God BRYAN D. DIETRICH
I have examined Google Maps and Google Earth with greatest care, yet have never again found Angell Street. Even without GPS, it should be easy. Oklahoma City is laid out like a grid, like the tesserae mosaics my father used to design for those tight-asses out in Nichols Hills or the comic book panels he loved so much. Unlike Memphis or Seattle, Oke City isn’t some strange concatenation of tentacled roads flailing madly around rivers, changing names, leading nowhere. I’ve wandered one end of the city to the other, searched every impossible place from brick town to the Paseo, from the Fire Fighters’ Hall of Fame to the edge of Norman where they keep the nuthouse. I’ve looked everywhere but cannot find the neighborhood, the singular street, or that strange little store, where, during my final semester as director of the Rose theater, I read the first pages of the last book my father never wrote.
The night it happened, sleet and freezing rain had turned half of Oklahoma into a fairy wonderland, if said wonderland had been imagined by Edward Hopper. I awoke in my car in a haze of tequila and beer and bewilderment. All I knew for sure was the time, three a.m., because something, probably my face, had slammed into the dash clock, and now it stared back at me, as blinking and confused as I was. I couldn’t remember much else. Didn’t even recall driving away from the bar, let alone making it from Norman to downtown OKC, evidently on booze control.
The airbag on my two-decade-old Saturn didn’t deploy, but at least I’d remembered my seatbelt. Getting the damn thing unlatched was difficult. Finding the door handle was just as hard. Then, stumbling and sliding away from my heap that now appeared a full foot shorter than I remembered, I could see that I’d bounced off a Nissan Titan and run headlong into a streetlight. Old school, real metal, not that breakaway stuff. Doubt if I even dented the pole. But the huge concavity in my hood looked like Jaws had made an appearance, and my windshield was smashed to shit. The hole where the window used to be seemed to grin at me with shiny blue and green teeth. I stared at my once clear hope of shelter with a kind of confused certainty, desperate ennui, my thoughts strangely sober, my instincts decidedly drunk.
Sleet continued to shovel down out of the ether, and I understood all I had between me and the elements was my USC windbreaker. No hat, no gloves. The tips of my fingers felt like glass. Wind wailed past streetlights, around red brick corners, and the chains on a nearby post office flagpole chattered like rattling bones. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine those two poor boys King Richard murdered in their tower, maybe that song by Gordon Lightfoot, the one about reading minds and a castle dark and a ghost with chains upon its feet.
The survivor bound in filial obligation for some term…
I hadn’t been feeling myself for years. Not since Dad was diagnosed. How long had I been dragging those chains? Just how much of a ghost had I become? Some days it felt like Dad and I had traded places. Didn’t know whether I was coming or going. Right now I really didn’t know. I didn’t recognize anything. It had to be downtown. About the only place with brick buildings and the old-style streetlights, but something was offkilter. And it wasn’t just residual drunk. Didn’t they mothball the downtown post office back in the Eighties? Fuck, and that’s what you’re worried about? Your car is totaled. It’s three in the morning. It’s sleeting. And you don’t have a clue where you are.