“How does all this tie in with López?” Armstrong said.
“In 1948,” San Isidro slurred, “there were unos brujos, se llamaban La Sociedad del Sol Oscuro, cheap gringo paperbacks of Lovecraft were their inspiration. They were interested in revival of worship for the old Aztec gods before they incorporated Cthulhu mythology. The gods of the two are much alike, no? Sangre, muerte y la onda cósmica. They tormented Barlow, suspected that’s why he came to Mexico, because of the connection. Barlow was a puto, he loved to give it to boys, and soon they found out about the dream-diary. That was the end. Blackmail. He killed himself in 1951, took a whole bottle of seconal.”
“But what about López?”
“They had to wait cincuenta años para que se alinearan las estrellas. Blood sacrifices, so much blood, the police paid off over decades. But it was prophesised in his own dream-diary: El espléndido regreso. Even the exact date was written in there. López was the chosen vessel. ”
“How do you know all this, Juan?”
“I chose him from amongst us, but I betrayed them, the secret was passed down to me, and now I need to get out of this pinche country rápido, before mis hermanos come for me. López, he wants to go back to Providence, one last time,” San Isidro giggled again at this point, “though I reckon it’s changed a lot, since he last saw it, eh? But, me, I don’t care.”
He’s as insane as López, Armstrong thought. This is just an elaborate scheme cooked up by the two of them to get money out of someone they think of as simply another stupid, rich foreigner. After all, what evidence was there that any of this nonsense had a grain of truth in it? Like most occultists, they’d cobbled together a mass of pseudo-facts and assertions and dressed it up as secret knowledge known only to the “initiated”. Christ, he wouldn’t have been surprised if, at this point, San Isidro produced a “Dream Diary of the Arkham Cycle”, some artificially-aged notebook written in the 1960s by a drugged-up kook who’d forged Lovecraft’s handwriting and stuffed it full of allusions to events after his death in 1937. They’d managed to pull off a pretty fair imitation of his stories between themselves and whoever else was involved in the scam. The results were certainly no worse than August Derleth’s galling attempts at “posthumous collaboration” with Lovecraft.
At last, as if San Isidro had reached a stage where he had drunk and smoked himself back to relative sobriety, he lurched up from the easy chair in which he’d been sitting. He ran his fingers through his beard, stared hard at Armstrong and said:
“We need to talk business, how much are you going to give me?”
“I’ll give you enough to get out of Mexico, for the sake of our friendship, but I can’t pay for the stories, Juan, anyway someone has stolen them,” Armstrong replied.
Probably you or López, he thought cynically.
The only reaction from San Isidro was that he raised his eyebrows a fraction. Without saying a word he went into the kitchen next door and Armstrong could hear him rattling around in some drawers.
“If you’re going to try to fleece me,” Armstrong said, raising his voice so that he could be heard in the adjacent room, “then you and López will have to do better than all this Barlow and the ‘Sodality of the Black Sun’ crap.”
When San Isidro came back into the room, his teeth were bared like those of a hungry wolf. In his right hand he was clutching a small calibre pistol, which he raised and aimed directly at Armstrong’s head.
“Cabrón, hijo de puta, di tus últimas oraciones, porque te voy a matar.”
Sweat broke out on Armstrong’s forehead. His thoughts raced. Was the gun loaded or was this only bravado? Another means of extorting money from him? Could he take the chance?
Just as Armstrong was about to cry out, everything went black. Despite the fact that it was the middle of the afternoon, with brilliant sunshine outside, the room was immediately swallowed up by total darkness. Armstrong could not believe what was happening. He thought, at first, that he had gone blind. Only when he stumbled around in the inky void and came right up against the window did he see the sunlight still outside, but not penetrating at all beyond the glass and into the room. Outside, the world went on as normal. Armstrong turned back away from the window and was aware of a presence moving within the dark. The thing emitted a high-pitched and unearthly whistle that seemed to bore directly into his brain. God, he thought, his train of reasoning in a fit of hysterical chaos, something from Lovecraft’s imagination had clawed its way into reality, fully seventy years after the man’s death. Something that might drive a man absolutely insane, if it was seen in the light. Armstrong thought of the hundreds of hackneyed Cthulhu Mythos stories that he’d been forced to read down the years and over which he’d chortled. He recalled the endless ranks of clichéd yet supposedly infinitely horrible monstrosities, all with unpronounceable names. But he couldn’t laugh now, because the joke wasn’t so funny anymore.
So he screamed instead—
“Juan! Juan!”
Armstrong bumped into the sofa in a panic, before he finally located the exit. From behind him came the sound of six shots, fired one after the other, deafeningly loud, and then nothing but dead, gaunt silence. He staggered into the hallway and reached the light outside, turned back once to look at the impenetrable darkness behind him, before then hurtling down the stairs. He now gave no thought, as he had done when coming up, as to how precarious they were. He did, however, even in the grip of terror, recall that the building was deserted and that no one could swear to his having been there.
* * *
After what had happened to him, Armstrong expected to feel a sense of catastrophic psychological disorientation. Whatever had attacked San Isidro, he thought, carrying darkness along with it so as to hide its deeds, was proof of something, even if it did not prove that everything San Isidro had claimed was in fact true. At the very least it meant that the “Sodality of the Black Sun” had somehow called a psychic force into existence through their half-century of meddling with rituals and sacrifices. Armstrong had no choice but to discount the alternative rational explanation. At the time when day had become night in San Isidro’s apartment he had been afraid, but nothing more, otherwise he was clear-headed and not prone to any type of hysterical interlude or hallucinatory fugue. Rather than feeling that his worldview had been turned upside-down however, he instead felt a sense of profound loneliness. What had happened had really happened but he knew that if he tried to tell anyone about it, they would scoff or worse, pity him, as he himself would have done, were he in their position.
Enrique and María returned to their apartment on schedule and Armstrong told them of his intention to remain in Mexico City a while longer. They noticed the curious melancholy in him, but did not question him about it in any detail. Nor would he have told them, even if prompted. Armstrong moved out the next day, transferring his meagre belongings to a room in a seedy hotel overlooking La Calle de Bucareli. From there he was able to gaze out of a fifth-floor window in his cuartito and keep watch on the Café la Habana opposite. His remaining connection to the affair was with Felipe López, the man who had the mind of Lovecraft, and he could not leave without seeing him one last time. He had no idea whether San Isidro were alive or dead. What was certain was that it was inconceivable that he attempted to make contact with him. Were San Isidro dead, it would arouse suspicion that Armstrong had been connected with his demise, and were he alive, then Armstrong had little doubt that he’d want to exact revenge.