Days passed, and Armstrong’s vigil yielded no results. There was no sign of López and he had no way of contacting him directly, no phone number, and no address. He was fearful that the Mexican police might call upon him at any instant, and scanned the newspapers daily in order to see if there were any reports mentioning San Isidro. He found nothing at all relating to him and recalled what he’d been told about the authorities having been paid off with blood money over decades. When Armstrong left his room it was only to visit the local Oxxo convenience store in order to stock up on tortas de jamón y queso, Faros, y tequila barato. The last of these items was most important to him. He spent most of the time pouring the tequila into a tumbler and knocking it back, while sitting at his pigeon-shit stained window, hoping to see López finally enter the Café la Habana in search of him. All he saw was the endless mass of frenzied traffic, drivers going from nowhere to anywhere and back in a hurry, oblivious to the revelation that separated him from such commonplace concerns, and which had taken him out of the predictable track of everyday existence.
And then, twelve days after he’d rented the room in the hotel, he finally saw a slightly stooped figure in a grey suit making his way towards the Café la Habana. It was López; there could be no doubt about it.
* * *
López was seated in a table in the corner of the Café, reading a paperback book and sipping at a cup of coffee. As Armstrong approached he saw that the book was a grubby second-hand copy of Los Mitos de Cthulhu por H. P. Lovecraft y Otros. The edition had a strange green photographic cover, depicting, it appeared, a close-up of a fossil. López immediately put down the volume once he caught sight of Armstrong.
“San Isidro seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth,” he said. “I’ve been endeavouring to contact him for the last two weeks, but all to no avail. I admit to feeling not a little concern in the matter. Have you crossed paths with him of late?”
Armstrong could not take his eyes off the man. Could “The Sodality of the Black Sun” have succeeded? Was the creature that conversed with him now actually the mind of Lovecraft housed in the body of some Mexican occultist called López? God, what a disappointment it must have been for them, he thought. What irony! To go to all that trouble to reincarnate the consciousness of the great H. P. Lovecraft, only to find that after his return he denied his own posthumous existence! But why keep such a survival alive, why allow the existence of the last word on the subject if it contradicted their aims? It made no sense.
“I’m afraid,” said Armstrong, “that San Isidro has vanished.”
“I don’t see…” said López.
“Not all of Lovecraft came back, did it? I don’t think they salvaged the essence, only a fragment. A thing with his memories, but not the actual man himself. Some sort of failed experiment. You’re the one who’s been leaving me those warning notes, aren’t you?” Armstrong said, interrupting.
“You presume too much, Mr. Armstrong, and forget,” replied López, “that I have not, at any stage, asserted that I believe myself to be anything other than the misguided individual called Felipe López.”
“That’s just part of the deception!” Armstrong said, getting to his feet and jabbing his finger at López, “that’s what you know Lovecraft would have said himself!”
“How on earth could I be of benefit to the designs of an occult organisation such as ‘The Sodality of the Black Sun’ if I deny the very existence of supernatural phenomena? You make no sense, Sir.”
López’s lips had narrowed to a thin cruel line upon his face and he was pale with indignation. His voice had dropped to a threatening whisper.
Everyone in the Café la Habana had turned around to stare, stopped dreaming over their pipes, newspapers and games of chess, and paused, their attention drawn by the confrontation being played out in English before them.
“The Old Ones are only now being born, emerging from your fiction into our world,” Armstrong said, “the black magicians of ‘The Sodality of the Black Sun’ want to literally become them. Once they do, the Old Ones will finally exist, independent of their creator, with the power to turn back time, recreating history to their own design as they go along.”
“You, Sir,” said López, “are clearly more deranged than am I.”
“Tell me about the notebook, Lovecraft, tell me about your ‘Dream-Diary of the Arkham Cycle’,” Armstrong shouted.
“There is no record of such a thing,” López replied, “there are no indications that such an item ever existed amongst Lovecraft’s papers, no mention of anything like it in his letters or other writings, no evidence for…”
“Tell me whether history is already beginning to change, whether the first of the Old Ones has begun manipulating the events of the past?”
As Armstrong finished asking his question he saw a shocking change come over López’s features. Two forces seemed to war within the Mexican’s body and a flash of pain distorted his face. At that moment the whites of his eyes vanished, as if the darkness of night looked out through them. But then he blinked heavily, shook his head from side to side, and finally regained his composure. As he did so, his usual aspect returned. The change and its reversal had been so sudden that, despite how vivid it had been, Armstrong could have just imagined it. After all, his nerves were already shredded, and he jumped at shadows.
“I can tell you nothing. What you are suggesting is madness,” López said, getting to his feet and picking up the copy of the book he’d left on the table. He left without looking back.
* * *
Armstrong did not return to London. He acquired a certain notoriety over the years as the irredeemably drunk English bum who could be found hanging around in the Café la Habana, talking to anyone who would listen to his broken Spanish. However, he was never to be found there after nightfall or during an overcast and dark afternoon. At chess, he insisted on playing white, and could not bear to handle the black pieces, asking his opponent to remove them from the board on his behalf.
•
The Hands That Reek and Smoke
W. H. Pugmire
I.
Lisa came to me on that fateful night of revelation, her purple hair as wild as her intoxicated eyes. Her pixy face had lost is usual mirth. She was dead serious. “You must see Nyarlathotep,” she panted, refusing the chair that I had offered her, preferring to pace the wooden floor instead. One hand clutched a canvas that was covered with a sheet of cloth.
“It amazes me,” I answered, “that hair as short as yours can look so disarrayed.”
“Screw the hair,” she shot back, at the same time running a gloved hand through the unruly mess. “You’ve been moaning for months about your inability to write. I tell you, go see Nyarlathotep, and he will drench your dreams with wondrous vision.”
I blew air. “I doubt that the parlor tricks of some cult figure will inspire new work from my dead pen. No new Lord of Disillusion can save me. Stephen was here, too, yakking about this bloke of yours. Seems he’s arrived three months ago to set up in some building downtown. No, I have no need of tricks.”
“You know, it’s really stupid the way you allow your cynicism to keep you cooped up in this depressing little apartment. Things are happening, can’t you feel it?”
“I feel only this intolerable heat wave. Such appalling weather for mid-October. Autumn is my favorite time of year; it heralds absolutely the death of torturous summer, that wretched period when ugly human apes strip off their gaudy attire and shriek to cancerous sun. How you can wear such thick gloves when it’s so hot quite bewilders me.”