“Thank you but no. I never partake of alcoholic beverages, even for the purposes of refreshment. However, a cup of coffee, perhaps a double espresso, would be most welcome.”
Armstrong ordered López’s coffee and asked for another tequila with lime to be brought to their table.
“I liked your tales very much, it was quite an experience reading through them I can tell you. Of course they’re overly derivative, but I imagine that you easily could tone down all the Lovecraft elements…”
“I’m afraid, Mr. Armstrong,” López said, with a chill tone entering his voice, “that alterations of any sort are completely out of the question. The stories must be printed as written, down to the last detail, otherwise this conversation is simply a waste of my time and your own.”
The drinks arrived. López calmly began to shovel spoonful after spoonful of sugar into his cup, turning the coffee into treacly, caffeine-rich syrup. Armstrong looked at him incredulously. Now he understood what was going on. San Isidro was definitely having a joke at his expense. He must have coached this López character, telling him all about H. P. Lovecraft’s mannerisms and …to what end?
“Why are you persisting with this absurd Lovecraft impersonation?” Armstrong blurted out. “It’s ridiculous. San Isidro put you up to it, I suppose. But what I can’t figure out is why, so let me in on the joke.”
López looked up from his coffee and his eyes were deadly serious. And here it comes, boy and girls, thought Armstrong; here comes the line we’ve all been waiting for:
This is no joke, Mr. Armstrong, far from it, for I am in reality Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island.
“Surely the only rational answer has already suggested itself,” López replied, very calmly and without any melodrama, “you are in fact sitting across the table from a certifiable lunatic.”
Armstrong leaned back in his seat and very carefully considered the man opposite. His manner betrayed no sign of humour and he spoke as if what he’d suggested was an established truism.
“Then despite your behaviour, you know that you’re not really Lovecraft?” Armstrong said.
“Howard Phillips Lovecraft died in agony on the morning of Monday the 15th of March 1937 in Providence’s Jane Brown Memorial Hospital. I cannot be him. However, since Tuesday the 15th of March 2003, I have been subject to a delusion whereby the identity of Lovecraft completely supplanted my own. I currently have no memories whatsoever of having once been Felipe López of Mexico City. His family and friends are complete strangers to me. Meanwhile everyone Lovecraft knew is dead. I have become an outsider in this country and in this time. Unless one accepts the existence of the supernatural, which I emphatically do not, then only the explanation I have advanced has any credence.”
Armstrong was taken aback by these remarks. This was like no madman he’d heard of: one who was not only able to recognise his derangement, but who also was totally a slave to it. It was more like some bizarre variant of a multiple personality disorder.
“What did the doctors here have to say?” Armstrong asked.
“They did their best, but with no appreciable effect, let alone any amelioration, upon my malady. They tended to agree with my analysis of the situation,” López said, after taking a sip of his coffee.
“What about López before this happened? Did he have any interest in Lovecraft prior to your—umm—alteration? I can’t believe something like that would come out of nowhere.”
It was annoying, but Armstrong found himself questioning López as if he were actually addressing Lovecraft inhabiting another body.
“Quite so. I have discovered that López was a fanatical devotee of Lovecraft’s life and work. Moreover, he was one of that rather contemptible breed of freaks who adhere to the outlandish belief that, rather than writing fiction, Lovecraft had unconscious access to ultra-mundane dimensions. The group to which he belonged, who styled themselves ‘The Sodality of the Black Sun’, advocated the piteous theory that Lovecraft was an occult prophet instead of a mere scribbler. This indicates to me a brain already on the brink of a potential collapse into total chaos. You see before you the inevitable consequence.”
There are a lot of sad crazies out there, thought Armstrong, who believe in nothing except the power of their own imaginations to create whatever they want to create from a supposedly malleable reality. A whole bunch of them had doubtless fastened upon Lovecraft’s mythos for inspiration, but he doubted that any others had wound up like Felipe López.
“Well,” Armstrong said, “I don’t know what to make of all this. But surely one consideration has occurred to you already? If you really were Lovecraft, you’d know certain things that only he could possibly have known.”
“An ingenious point,” said López, “but with all his contemporaries in the grave, how then to verify that information? Mr. Armstrong, I must remind you that the idea of Lovecraft’s consciousness not only surviving the death of his physical form, but also transferring itself to another body, is patently ridiculous. I make no such claim.”
López stared at him wordlessly and then, having finished the dregs of his coffee, got up and left.
* * *
When Armstrong arrived back at Enrique and María’s apartment, he found the door already ajar. Someone had broken in, forcing their entrance with a crowbar or similar tool judging by the splintered wound in the side of the door’s frame. He was relieved to find that the intruders had not torn the place apart and seemed to have scarcely disturbed anything. When he examined his own room however, he noted at once that the López manuscripts were missing. He unmistakably remembered having left them on his bedside table. However, in their place, was a note left behind by whoever had stolen them. It read:
Do not meddle in our affairs again, lest the darkness seek you out.
Obviously, this was a targeted burglary by the people who’d left that answerphone message warning him off having dealings with López. They must have wanted to get hold of the López stories extremely badly, and, whoever they were, must have also known that San Isidro had passed them to him, as well as knowing that Armstrong had an appointment with López, thus giving them the perfect moment to strike while he was out.
It was difficult to figure out what to do next. Everyone in Mexico City realises that to call the police regarding a burglary has two possible outcomes. The first is that they will turn up, treat it as a waste of their time and do nothing. The second is that things will turn surreal very quickly, because they will casually mention how poorly paid police officers are, and, in return for a “donation”, they are able to arrange for the swift return of your goods with no questions asked. Given that the burglary was not the work of organised crime but some nutty underground cult, Armstrong thought better of involving the police.
Great, thought Armstrong, now I’m in trouble not only with the local branch of occult loonies, but with San Isidro and López for having lost the manuscripts. The first thing to do was give San Isidro the bad news. Since a matter of this delicate nature was best dealt with face-to-face Armstrong decided to make his way over to the poet’s apartment, after he’d arranged for someone to come over and fix the door.
* * *
A cardinal, though unspoken, rule of travelling by metro in Mexico City is not to carry anything of value. If you’re a tourist, look like a tourist with little money. The security guards that hover around the ticket barriers are not there just for show. They carry guns for a reason. D.F. is the kidnapping capital of the world. Armstrong had always followed the dress-down rule and, although he stood out anyway because he was a pale-skinned güerito, he’d encountered no problems on his travels. The stations themselves were grimy, functionalist and depressing. Architecturally they resembled prison camps, but located underground. Nevertheless Armstrong enjoyed travelling by metro; it was unbelievably cheap, the gap between trains was less than a minute, and it was like being on a mobile market place. Passengers selling homemade CDs would wander up and down the carriages, with samples of music playing on ghetto blasters slung over their shoulders. Others sold tonics for afflictions from back pain to impotence. Whether these worked or not there was certainly a market for them, as the sellers did a brisk trade.