One of the carriages on the train that Armstrong took must have been defective. All its lights were out and, curiously, he noticed that when anyone thought to board it anyway changed their minds at once and preferred to either remain on the platform or else rush over into one of the adjacent carriages instead.
Armstrong alighted at Chapultepec station, found his way through the convoluted tunnels up to the surface and turned left alongside the eight-lane road outside. The noise of the traffic blocked out most other sounds, and the vehicle fumes were like a low-level grey nebula held down by the force of the brilliant afternoon sunshine. People scurried to and fro along the pavement, their gazes fixed straight ahead, particularly those of any lone women for whom eye-contact with a chilango carried the risk of inviting a lewd suggestion.
A long footbridge flanked the motorway, and was the only means of crossing for pedestrians for a couple of miles or so. At night it was a notorious crime spot and only the foolhardy would cross it unaccompanied. However, at this time of the day everyone safely used it and a constant stream of people went back and forth.
Juan San Isidro’s apartment was only five minutes walk from the bridge, and was housed in a decaying brownstone building just on the fringes of La Condesa. Sometimes Armstrong wondered whether the poet was the structure’s only occupant, for the windows of all the other apartments were either blackened by soot or else broken and hanging open day and night to the elements.
He pushed the intercom button for San Isidro, and, after a minute, heard a half-awake voice say:
“¿Quién es?”
“It’s me, Victor, come down and let me in, will you?” Armstrong replied, holding his mouth close to the intercom.
“Stand in front where I can see you,” he said, “and I’ll give you mis llaves.”
Armstrong left the porch, went onto the pavement and looked up. San Isidro leaned out of one of the third floor windows, his lank black hair making a cowl over his face. He tossed a plastic bag containing the keys over the ledge, and Armstrong retrieved it after it hit the ground.
The building had grown even worse since the last time he’d paid a visit. If it was run-down before, now it was positively unfit for human habitation and should have been condemned. The lobby was filled with debris, half the tiles had fallen from the walls and a dripping waterpipe was poking out from a huge hole in the ceiling. Vermin scurried around back in the shadows. The building’s staircase was practically a deathtrap, for if a step had not already collapsed, those that remained seemed likely to do so in the near future. As Armstrong climbed he clutched at the shaky banister with both hands, his knuckles white with the fierce grip, advancing up sideways like a crab.
San Isidro was standing in the doorway to his apartment, smoking a fat joint with one hand and swigging from a half-bottle of Cuervo with the other. The smell of marijuana greeted Armstrong as he finally made it to the fourth floor. Being continually stoned, he thought, was about the only way to make the surroundings bearable.
“Hola, compañero, good to see you, come on inside.”
His half-glazed eyes, wide fixed smile and unsteady gait indicated that he’d been going at the weed and tequila already for most of the day.
“This is a celebration, no? You’ve come to bring me mucho dinero, I hope. I’m honoured that you come here to see me. Siéntate, por favor.”
San Isidro cleared a space on the sofa that was littered with porno magazines and empty packets of Delicados cigarettes. Armstrong then sat down while San Isidro picked up an empty glass from the floor, poured some tequila in it and put it in his hand.
“Salud,” he said “to our friend and saviour Felipe López, el mejor escritor de cuentos macabros del mundo, ahora y siempre.”
“I want you to tell me, Juan, as a friend and in confidence, what happened to López and how he came to think and act exactly like H. P. Lovecraft. And I want to know about the people that are after him. Were they people he knew before his—um—breakdown?” Armstrong said, looking at the glass and trying to find a clean part of the rim from which to drink. At this stage he was reluctant to reveal that the López manuscripts had been stolen. San Isidro was volatile, and Armstrong wasn’t sure how he might react to the news.
San Isidro appeared to start momentarily at the mention of “H. P. Lovecraft” but whether it was the effect of the name or the cumulative effect of the booze and weed, it was difficult to tell.
“So he told you, eh? Well, not all of it. No recuerda nada de antes, when he was just Felipe López. No importa qué pasó antes, sure, there was some heavy shit back then. Si quieres los cuentos, primero quiero mucho dinero. Then maybe I’ll tell you about it, eh?”
“I’ll pay you Juan, and pay you well. But I need to understand the truth,” Armstrong replied.
What San Isidro told Armstrong over the next half-hour consisted of a meandering monologue, mostly in Spanish, of a brilliant young gringo who had come to Mexico in the 1940s to study Mesoamerican anthropology. This man, Robert Hayward Barlow, had been Lovecraft’s literary executor. Armstrong had heard the name before but what little he knew did not prepare him for San Isidro’s increasingly bizarre account of events.
He began plausibly enough. Barlow, he said, had taken possession of Lovecraft’s papers after his death in 1937. He had gone through them thereafter and donated the bulk to the John Hay Library in Providence, in order to establish a permanent archival resource. However he was ostracised by the Lovecraft circle, a campaign driven by Donald Wandrei and August Derleth, on the basis that he had supposedly stolen the materials in the first place from under the nose of the Providence author’s surviving aunt.
However, what was not known then, San Isidro claimed, was that Barlow had kept some items back, the most important of which was the Dream Diary of the Arkham Cycle, a notebook in longhand of approximately thirty or so pages and akin to Lovecraft’s commonplace book. It contained, so San Isidro claimed, dozens of entries from 1923 to 1936 that appeared to contradict the assertion that Lovecraft’s mythos was solely a fictional construct. These entries are not suggestive by and of themselves at the time they were supposedly written, for the content was confined to the description of dreams in which elements from his myth-cycle had manifested themselves. These could be accepted as having no basis in reality had it not been for their supposedly prophetic nature. One such entry San Isidro quoted from memory. By this stage his voice was thick and the marijuana he’d been smoking made him giggle in a disquieting, paranoid fashion:
A dream of the bony fingers of Azathoth reaching down to touch two cities in Imperial Japan, and laying them waste. Mushroom clouds portending the arrival of the Fungi from Yuggoth.
To Armstrong, this drivel seemed only a poor attempt to turn Lovecraft into some latter-day Nostradamus, but San Isidro clearly thought otherwise. Armstrong wondered what López had to do with all of this, and whether he would repudiate the so-called “prophecies” by sharing Lovecraft’s trust in indefatigable rationalism. That would be ironic.