The Book of Cthulhu 2 Page 10

  Alien emotion swims up from Sadie’s heart, and catches in her throat. The skin beneath the metal swells and chafes.

  “I know,” she replies. “I know.”

  Deep within the heart of the factory, Sadie shakes the scaled hands of many important men. Secretaries slither before her, leaving trails of damp that evaporate quickly in the factory heat. They give her gifts of seashells, and lovely historicals of the factory’s beginnings, bound in gilt-edged skin. Sadie eats lunch on a courtyard crowned by pyramids of slag, at a coral table set just for the daughters. Metal fines cling to their skin, settle in their food. Sometimes, Sadie lays down her fork and gasps for a bit of air. Just nerves, she tells herself, and wills herself to breathe.

  Afternoon fades, as small trams whisk them down mile-long shafts to a room of pale rib and abalone, where dry air gives way to plump humidity, ocean-sweet. Sadie licks her lips, and tugs at the heavy gold around her neck. Her father holds her hand as they cross the floor, and when they reach the double doors at the far wall, it’s as if she’s traveled to the end of Time. Behind them, vice-presidents and company managers hover, their daughters clinging anxiously to their coats.

  “Open the door, Sadie.”

  Sadie wipes the sweat from her hands, and pushes. Brisk wind and the roar of surf rush in as Sadie leads them onto the balcony. Below, black sands speckled with skulls descend in jagged dunes down to the endless sea. It is everything her father promised, and more.

  “Can we go down?” Her lungs expand, and baleen inside her corset snaps.

  “Lead the way.” He points to wide steps plunging into the coarse sands. Sadie skips down the steps and into the dunes, all the girls following behind like a veil of trailing flowers. Overhead, pipes larger than the train thrust from the factory walls, plunging straight into iron-grey waves. As she reaches the beach’s edge, factory horns sound one by one, great spine-shuddering cries that send the waters rushing back. Sadie stops and turns. All along the curving coast, green light explodes from pockets of the factory—signal fires lighting the way.

  The men spread out across the beach, directing their daughters to the edge of the tide line. Before them, dark shapes rise from receding waves—cobblestone roads slick with foam, low houses clustered like rotting mushrooms, and beyond… The sandy ridge breaks off and free-falls into the rift. Sadie spies chimney stacks peeking up from the depths, bioluminescent smoke coiling in the air, freed of the weight of water. Soft movements appear, as flippers and webbed feet emerge from gaping doors. More employees of her father, ready to greet them all. Sadie spies the liveried young man from the train car, and her heart skips a beat.

  Some of the girls cry as their fathers pull chains up from the sands, hooking them at the loops in their golden hydra chokers. The chains stretch out along the ancient roads and over the edges of the rift, ending in the city below. Sadie trembles slightly as her father stretches out his hand, links of black metal dripping off his palm. Beneath her choker, skin stretches wide, half-developed gills sucking at the moisture in the air as they vaguely remember what to do.

  “I’ll always love you. Remember that, in the last moments.” Her father looks down at her, the tentacles of his beard coiling into a hundred tender smiles.

  “Of course.” Sadie covers his hand with her own. In the dying light, the silver of her bones shine through the flesh, luminous and pure. “When my bones are added to the city, you’ll see me. We’ll never be apart. It is my honor to join the work.”

  “You are my greatest gift, my greatest sacrifice.” As he kisses her forehead, his tears fall onto her skin. Sadie feels the chain slide through the hoops as he carefully hooks it. Somewhere, beneath the rift, strong tentacles hold the other end. Sadie prays to the Mother that whoever accepts her, he is vast and terrible. After all, her father runs the factory, and she is her father’s daughter. She sets the example till the day her chained bones, heavy with spawn, are pulled back from her bridal grave.

  “Our work renews our world,” her father says. “Our daughters renew our lives. In His name we bring them together. In His name, we take our daughters to work.”

  Sadie steps onto the slick cobblestones, and the employees of New Y’ha-nthlei Steelworks follow, each of them walking their daughters into the rising waves.

  •

  The Big Fish

  Kim Newman

  The Bay City cops were rousting enemy aliens. As I drove through the nasty coast town, uniforms hauled an old couple out of a grocery store. The Taraki family’s neighbors huddled in thin rain howling asthmatically for bloody revenge. Pearl Harbor had struck a lot of people that way. With the Tarakis on the bus for Manzanar, neighbors descended on the store like bedraggled vultures. Produce vanished instantly, then destruction started. Caught at a sleepy stop light, I got a good look. The Tarakis had lived over the store; now, their furniture was thrown out of the second-story window. Fine china shattered on the sidewalk, spilling white chips like teeth into the gutter. It was inspirational, the forces of democracy rallying round to protect the United States from vicious oriental grocers, fiendishly intent on selling eggplant to a hapless civilian population.

  Meanwhile my appointment was with a gent who kept three pictures on his mantelpiece, grouped in a triangle around a statue of the Virgin Mary. At the apex was his white-haired mama, to the left Charles Luciano, and to the right, Benito Mussolini. The Tarakis, American-born and registered Democrats, were headed to a dustbowl concentration camp for the duration, while Gianni Pastore, Sicilian-born and highly unregistered capo of the Family Business, would spend his war in a marble-fronted mansion paid for by nickels and dimes dropped on the numbers game, into slot machines, or exchanged for the favors of nice girls from the old country. I’d seen his mansion before and so far been able to resist the temptation to bean one of his twelve muse statues with a bourbon bottle.

  Money can buy you love but can’t even put down a deposit on good taste.

  The palace was up in the hills, a little way down the boulevard from Tyrone Power. But now, Pastore was hanging his mink-banded fedora in a Bay City beachfront motel complex, which was a real estate agent’s term for a bunch of horrible shacks shoved together for the convenience of people who like sand on their carpets.

  I always take a lungful of fresh air before entering a confined space with someone in Pastore’s business, so I parked the Chrysler a few blocks from the Seaview Inn and walked the rest of the way, sucking on a Camel to keep warm in the wet. They say it doesn’t rain in Southern California, but they also say the U.S. Navy could never be taken by surprise. This February, three months into a war the rest of the world had been fighting since 1936 or 1939 depending on whether you were Chinese or Polish, it was raining almost constantly, varying between a light fall of misty drizzle in the dreary daytimes to spectacular storms, complete with DeMille lighting effects, in our fear-filled nights. Those trusty Boy Scouts scanning the horizons for Jap subs and Nazi U-Boats were filling up influenza wards and manufacturers of raincoats and umbrellas who’d not yet converted their plants to defense production were making a killing. I didn’t mind the rain. At least rainwater is clean, unlike most other things in Bay City.

  A small boy with a wooden gun leaped out of a bush and sprayed me with sound effects, interrupting his onomatopoeic chirruping with a shout of “die you slant-eyed Jap!” I clutched my heart, staggered back, and he finished me off with a quick burst. I died for the Emperor and tipped the kid a dime to go away. If this went on long enough, maybe little Johnny would get a chance to march off and do real killing, then maybe come home in a box or with the shakes or a taste for blood. Meanwhile, especially since someone spotted a Jap submarine off Santa Barbara, California was gearing up for the War Effort. Aside from interning grocers, our best brains were writing songs like “To Be Specific, It’s Our Pacific”, “So Long Momma, I’m Off to Yokahama”, “We’re Gonna Slap the Jap Right Off the Map” and “When Those Little Yellow Bellies Meet the Cohens and the Kellys”. Zanuck h
ad donated his string of Argentine polo ponies to West Point and got himself measured for a comic opera Colonel’s uniform so he could join the Signal Corps and defeat the Axis by posing for publicity photographs.

  I’d tried to join up two days after Pearl Harbor but they kicked me back onto the streets. Too many concussions. Apparently, I get hit on the head too often and have a tendency to black out. When they came to mention it, they were right.

  The Seaview Inn was shuttered, one of the first casualties of war. It had its own jetty, and by it were a few canvas-covered motor launches shifting with the waves. In late afternoon gloom, I saw the silhouette of the Montecito, anchored strategically outside the three-mile limit. That was one good thing about the Japanese; on the downside, they might have sunk most of the U.S. fleet, but on the up, they’d put Laird Brunette’s gambling ship out of business. Nobody was enthusiastic about losing their shirt-buttons on a rigged roulette wheel if they imagined they were going to be torpedoed any moment. I’d have thought that would add an extra thrill to the whole gay, delirious business of giving Brunette money, but I’m just a poor, twenty-five-dollars-a-day detective.

  The Seaview Inn was supposed to be a stopping-off point on the way to the Monty and now its trade was stopped off. The main building was sculpted out of dusty ice cream and looked like a three-story radiogram with wave-scallop friezes. I pushed through double-doors and entered the lobby. The floor was decorated with a mosaic in which Neptune, looking like an angry Santa Claus in a swimsuit, was sticking it to a sea-nymph who shared a hairdresser with Hedy Lamarr. The nymph was naked except for some strategic shells. It was very artistic.

  There was nobody at the desk and thumping the bell didn’t improve matters. Water ran down the outside of the green-tinted windows. There were a few steady drips somewhere. I lit up another Camel and went exploring. The office was locked and the desk register didn’t have any entries after December 7, 1941. My raincoat dripped and began to dry out, sticking my jacket and shirt to my shoulders. I shrugged, trying to get some air into my clothes. I noticed Neptune’s face quivering. A thin layer of water had pooled over the mosaic and various anenome-like fronds attached to the sea god were apparently getting excited. Looking at the nymph, I could understand that. Actually, I realised, only the hair was from Hedy. The face and the body were strictly Janey Wilde.

  I go to the movies a lot but I’d missed most of Janey’s credits: She-Strangler of Shanghai, Tarzan and the Tiger Girl, Perils of Jungle Jillian. I’d seen her in the newspapers though, often in unnervingly close proximity with Pastore or Brunette. She’d started as an Olympic swimmer, picking up medals in Berlin, then followed Weissmuller and Crabbe to Hollywood. She would never get an Academy Award but her legs were in a lot of cheesecake stills publicising no particular movie. Air-brushed and made-up like a good-looking corpse, she was a fine commercial for sex. In person she was as bubbly as domestic champagne, though now running to flat. Things were slow in the detecting business, since people were more worried about imminent invasion than missing daughters or misplaced love letters. So when Janey Wilde called on me in my office in the Cahuenga Building and asked me to look up one of her ill-chosen men friends, I checked the pile of old envelopes I use as a desk diary and informed her that I was available to make inquiries into the current whereabouts of a certain big fish.

  Wherever Laird Brunette was, he wasn’t here. I was beginning to figure Gianni Pastore, the gambler’s partner, wasn’t here either. Which meant I’d wasted an afternoon. Outside it rained harder, driving against the walls with a drumlike tattoo. Either there were hailstones mixed in with the water or the Jap air force was hurling fistfuls of pebbles at Bay City to demoralise the population. I don’t know why they bothered. All Hirohito had to do was slip a thick envelope to the Bay City cops and the city’s finest would hand over the whole community to the Japanese Empire with a ribbon around it and a bow on top.

  There were more puddles in the lobby, little streams running from one to the other. I was reminded of the episode of The Perils of Jungle Jillian I had seen while tailing a child molester to a Saturday matinee. At the end, Janey Wilde had been caught by the Panther Princess and trapped in a room which slowly filled with water. That room had been a lot smaller than the lobby of the Seaview Inn and the water had come in a lot faster.

  Behind the desk were framed photographs of pretty people in pretty clothes having a pretty time. Pastore was there, and Brunette, grinning like tiger cats, mingling with showfolk: Xavier Cugat, Janey Wilde, Charles Coburn. Janice Marsh, the pop-eyed beauty rumored to have replaced Jungle Jillian in Brunette’s affections, was well represented in artistic poses.

  On the phone, Pastore had promised faithfully to be here. He hadn’t wanted to bother with a small-timer like me but Janey Wilde’s name opened a door. I had a feeling Papa Pastore was relieved to be shaken down about Brunette, as if he wanted to talk about something. He must be busy because there were several wars on. The big one overseas and a few little ones at home. Maxie Rothko, bar owner and junior partner in the Monty, had been found drifting in the seaweed around the Santa Monica pier without much of a head to speak of. And Phil Isinglass, man-about-town lawyer and Brunette frontman, had turned up in the storm drains, lungs full of sandy mud. Disappearing was the latest craze in Brunette’s organisation. That didn’t sound good for Janey Wilde, though Pastore had talked about the Laird as if he knew Brunette was alive. But now Papa wasn’t around. I was getting annoyed with someone it wasn’t sensible to be annoyed with.

  Pastore wouldn’t be in any of the beach shacks but there should be an apartment for his convenience in the main building. I decided to explore further. Jungle Jillian would expect no less. She’d hired me for five days in advance, a good thing since I’m unduly reliant on eating and drinking and other expensive diversions of the monied and idle.

  The corridor that led past the office ended in a walk-up staircase. As soon as I put my size nines on the first step, it squelched. I realised something was more than usually wrong. The steps were a quiet little waterfall, seeping rather than cascading. It wasn’t just water, there was unpleasant, slimy stuff mixed in. Someone had left the bath running. My first thought was that Pastore had been distracted by a bullet. I was wrong. In the long run, he might have been happier if I’d been right.

  I climbed the soggy stairs and found the the apartment door unlocked but shut. Bracing myself, I pushed the door in. It encountered resistance but then sliced open, allowing a gush of water to shoot around my ankles, soaking my dark blue socks. Along with water was a three-weeks-dead-in-the-water-with-rotten-fish smell that wrapped around me like a blanket. Holding my breath, I stepped into the room. The waterfall flowed faster now. I heard a faucet running. A radio played, with funny little gurgles mixed in. A crooner was doing his best with “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries”, but he sounded as if he were drowned full fathom five. I followed the music and found the bathroom.

  Pastore was face down in the overflowing tub, the song coming from under him. He wore a silk lounging robe that had been pulled away from his back, his wrists tied behind him with the robe’s cord. In the end he’d been drowned. But before that hands had been laid on him, either in anger or with cold, professional skill. I’m not a coroner, so I couldn’t tell how long the Family Man had been in the water. The radio still playing and the water still running suggested Gianni had met his end recently but the stench felt older than sin.

  I have a bad habit of finding bodies in Bay City and the most profit-minded police force in the country have a bad habit of trying to make connections between me and a wide variety of deceased persons. The obvious solution in this case was to make a friendly phone call, absent-mindedly forgetting to mention my name while giving the flatfeet directions to the late Mr. Pastore. Who knows, I might accidentally talk to someone honest.

  That is exactly what I would have done if, just then, the man with the gun hadn’t come through the door…

  I had Janey Wilde to blame. Sh
e’d arrived without an appointment, having picked me on a recommendation. Oddly, Laird Brunette had once said something not entirely uncomplimentary about me. We’d met. We hadn’t seriously tried to kill each other in a while. That was as good a basis for a relationship as any.

  Out of her sarong, Jungle Jillian favored sharp shoulders and a veiled pill-box. The kiddies at the matinee had liked her fine, especially when she was wrestling stuffed snakes, and dutiful Daddies took no exception to her either, especially when she was tied down and her sarong rode up a few inches. Her lips were four red grapes plumped together. When she crossed her legs you saw swimmer’s smooth muscle under her hose.

  “He’s very sweet, really,” she explained, meaning Mr. Brunette never killed anyone within ten miles of her without apologising afterwards, “not at all like they say in those dreadful scandal sheets.”

  The gambler had been strange recently, especially since the war shut him down. Actually the Montecito had been out of commission for nearly a year, supposedly for a refit although as far as Janey Wilde knew no workmen had been sent out to the ship. At about the time Brunette suspended his crooked wheels, he came down with a common California complaint, a dose of crackpot religion. He’d been tangentally mixed up a few years ago with a psychic racket run by a bird named Amthor, but had apparently shifted from the mostly harmless bunco cults onto the hard stuff. Spiritualism, orgiastic rites, chanting, incense, the whole deal.

  Janey blamed this sudden interest in matters occult on Janice Marsh, who had coincidentally made her name as the Panther Princess in The Perils of Jungle Jillian, a role which required her to torture Janey Wilde at least once every chapter. My employer didn’t mention that her own career had hardly soared between Jungle Jillian and She-Strangler of Shanghai, while the erstwhile Panther Princess had gone from Republic to Metro and was being built up as an exotic in the Dietrich-Garbo vein. Say what you like about Janice Marsh’s Nefertiti, she still looked like Peter Lorre to me. And according to Janey, the star had more peculiar tastes than a seafood buffet.