I Am Providence
Author: Nick Mamatas
Date: 2016-08-02 12:58:38+00:00
Keywords: Crime; Fantasy; Horror
Description: “An astonishingly timely book . . . The murder-mystery-at-a-convention is a venerable subgenre. The best of them combine solid mystery stories anyone can enjoy with a dash of in-jokes, cameos, and thinly veiled versions of figures in the field to assume those in the know. I Am Providence is among those best.”— Locus An author's murder during an H. P. Lovecraft fan convention reveals dark secrets beneath the printed page in this biting murder-mystery satire. At the Summer Tentacular, murder is non-fiction. For fans of legendary pulp author H. P. Lovecraft, there is nothing bigger than the annua
Publisher: Night Shade
Rights: All Right Reserved

Also by Nick Mamatas:

Novels

Move Under Ground

Under My Roof

Sensation

The Damned Highway: Fear and Loathing in Arkham (co-written with Brian Keene)

Love is the Law

The Last Weekend

Collections

3000 MPH in Every Direction at Once

You Might Sleep…

The Nickronomicon

As Editor

The Urban Bizarre

Realms (co-edited with Sean Wallace)

Spicy Slipstream Stories (co-edited with Jay Lake)

Realms 2 (co-edited with Sean Wallace)

Haunted Legends (co-edited with Ellen Datlow)

The Future is Japanese (co-edited with Masumi Washington)

Phantasm Japan (co-edited with Masumi Washington)

Hanzai Japan (co-edited with Masumi Washington)

I Am Providence

Nick Mamatas

Night Shade Books
an imprint of Start Publishing

Copyright © 2016 by Nick Mamatas

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Publishing LLC, 101 Hudson Street, 37th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

Night Shade Books is an imprint of Start Publishing LLC.

Visit our website at www.nightshade.start-publishing.com.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mamatas, Nick.

Title: I am providence : a novel / Nick Mamatas.

Description: New York, New York : Night Shade Books, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016003876 | ISBN 9781597808354 (paperback)

Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Horror. | FICTION / Occult & Supernatural. | FICTION / Suspense.

| GSAFD: Occult fiction. | Suspense fiction. | Horror fiction | Mystery fcition.

Classification: LCC PS3613.A525 I5 2016 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016003876

Print ISBN: 978-1-59780-835-4
eISBN: 978-1-59780-583-4

Cover illustration by Magdalena Pqgowska

Cover design by Lesley Worrell

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

1.    The Whisperer in Darkness

2.    The Call of Cthulhu

3.    The Outsider

4.    Cool Air

5.    The Thing on the Doorstep

6.    The Haunter of the Dark

7.    The Terrible Old Man

8.    The Unnamable

9.    He

10.    What the Moon Brings

11.    The Tomb

12.    The Festival

13.    From Beyond

14.    The Other Gods

15.    The Evil Clergyman

16.    The Colour Out of Space

17.    Re-Animator

For Molly Tanzer, L & O.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious, especially you. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

1. The Whisperer in Darkness

On any other weekend, my body would have been discovered more quickly. The smell alone would have tipped off a maid or some other member of Hotel Bierce staff within hours, except that The Summer Tentacular was in full swing, and the attendees of Providence’s premiere literary conference about pulp-writer, racist, and weirdo Howard Phillips Lovecraft tended to stink up a joint when they manifested en masse.

I should know. For years, I was one of them. Almost one of them anyway. My claim to fame was a single book, published by a small press. You’ve probably never heard of it, and I don’t mean that in an arch, hipsterish sort of way. My book was a literary mash-up of the sort that was popular some years ago called The Catcher in R’lyeh. Salinger’s protagonists and Lovecraft’s had a lot in common. They tended to be bookish intellectuals, and were often driven mad thanks to their encounter with the ineffable. Bananafish, Deep Ones, just squint and they’ll look alike. The authors were mirror images of one another, both recluses with cults of personality. Lovecraft, the anti-Semite, was briefly married to a Jew. Salinger, the Jew, was once married to a Nazi. Close enough to alike for me to combine via nucleic exchange, and to integrate me into the small but intense community of Lovecraftians—writers, fans, collectors, obsessives, and even the occasional religious entrepreneur looking to graft Lovecraft’s squamous and cyclopean imagery onto a vaguely Satanic nihilism.

Take that, Mom and Dad! Thanks for dragging me to church for all those years.

If I sound waspish about The Summer Tentacular, I should note that I am deceased and that someone at the convention killed me. I didn’t see what happened, but I definitely felt it, for a few frantic seconds before…well, I am still here, indeed. But not the way I was. I feel like I have just been woken up from an incomplete nap by a voice on a distant radio, but that voice on the radio is also mine.

I’ve been visited three times, the drawer I’m in opened for me to be removed and scrutinized. I don’t know what’s happening, except that I think I heard the voice of my friend Colleen Danzig, who was sharing my room, but not my bed, at The Summer Tentacular. And some people I don’t know. Police I guess, but a few sounded more familiar than that.

I am absolutely terrified. Is this what death is? Consciousness, forever, floating somewhere in the body, being able to listen until one’s ears rot away, but not see or speak or move? Is that how every dead grandma and leukemia baby in the cemetery is experiencing the world now? When a bunch of us—Colleen and Bhanushali and Ginger J, David Cob and Ms. Phantasia and another half-a-dozen people—went to Lovecraft’s grave two nights ago, was there something left of him, under our feet, listening?

Oblivion is now something I’m anxious for. Whomever it was that killed me, I’ve not been murdered enough. I pray to fade away. Perhaps I could extinguish myself, like two fingers pressing out a candle flame, but I’m still burning to know what happened. I can only imagine, try to piece together what might have happened, and hope I am visited again in the morgue before I am moved, or embalmed.

I don’t know what happened before; I don’t know what will happen next. I’m just a head, floating in the black.

I’m a fool. I thought Lovecraft might prepare me for this. If fiction is a way of inducing an organism to remember experiences it never had, than reading Lovecraft is crucial for understanding the futility of life and the screaming horror of death—while you’re still around to enjoy it, that is.

Is there a reason for a literate person to read century-old pulp fiction? For the most part, no, which is why most of it has been forgotten by all except obsessives and weirdoes. Lovecraft stands out. People only know Tarzan and Conan because of films and comic books, but Lovecraft’s creations are famously difficult to visually apprehend, despite his sometimes exacting descriptions. The Great Race’s members were immense rugose cones ten feet high, and with heads and other organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from the apexes…

What Lovecraft did do, better than anyone, was radically decenter the human experience from the art of fiction. Critics, or people who just don’t “get it,” complain that Lovecraft’s characters are paper-thin cyphers who faint at the slightest hint of cosmic horror lurking in the ink-black sky. Correct, but that is a thematic strength, not an auctorial weakness. We are alone in an infinite universe, or so far from anyone else out there that it hardly matters. If we were to encounter alien life-forms, we would have no more ability to communicate with them than we do with a bread mold, or a warthog, or a solar flare.

They might destroy us, accidentally or from an ethic of pure malevolence.

Lovecraft didn’t stop there. Another major theme of his work is that of the outsider as the secret insider, and the insider—the literal self—becoming or degenerating into the other. Were his only issue that our brains are just large enough to realize how puny we are in the universe, he would be just another college freshman looking up at the sky and realizing, finally, that nobody will ever love him as much as his mother did, before he could express himself. Lovecraft found the otherness encoded in our own genes, creating an enemy on which it was impossible to wage war. There are Elder Gods and Great Races and Deep Ones living in deep time, and somehow we are both their pawns and their spawn. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.

Except, of course, that we won’t, as I posthumously discovered. As I am perhaps the ten billionth person to posthumously discover. We dwell in darkness, anxious and panicked and alone without the benefit of senses or a future, and for who knows how long after death. Has it been a moment? Will my brain finally stop when my body cools, or will I have to wait for my synapses to literally rot in order for this consciousness, the I addressing an empty universe, to fail?

My reconstruction of the events that led up to my murder is an academic exercise. I want neither justice nor vengeance. After all, I know what happens after we die. Those responsible, and you too, will be here soon enough.

2. The Call of Cthulhu

Colleen Danzig wasn’t exactly nervous, nor was she excited. It was a sort of Starbucks jitter that had her rehearsing what to say as she approached The Summer Tentacular’s registration table. She had half a dozen short stories published, all online, and a chapbook due out next year with a very small press. Small enough that the publisher still lived with her parents, and produced the books herself one at a time from homemade paper and crochet thread. Small enough to probably not be known to even the hardcore fans, really.

The men behind the registration desk seemed to know some of the attendees by face, and quickly dug out name badges and little plastic clips for them. Others had to wait, repeat their names, wave for attention, or simply just fume silently. It was a knot of black t-shirts and bad haircuts—ratty ponytails, the sort of bangs one usually sees on a child, and the like. Colleen had dyed her own short hair, just north of a buzzcut, green for the convention, and was feeling pretty good about it when the line shifted and she found herself at the edge of the table.

“Colleen Danzig, all-weekend member.”

The man before her just stared for a long moment, his mouth hanging open and flesh hanging from his jaw and throat like something amphibious. The Coke-bottle lenses completed the “Innsmouth Look.”

“Danzig,” he said. His voice wasn’t froggy, at least, but he said her name as though it were an intractable philosophical question. The other fellow behind the table looked up from his laptop and smiled toothily at Colleen.

“Danzig!”

“Yes?”

He smiled wider, even quaked a bit in his chair. He was a heavy dude with a bushy beard and twinkling blue eyes. Kind of like a young Santa Claus.

“Wolf’s blood!” he bellowed. Then he giggled at his own joke, tapped a few keys on his laptop, and when a label bearing her name was printed out, he affixed it to a square of thick paper and handed it to Colleen. His own badge read CHIEF SHOGGOTH, which Colleen decided was apropos. “Here you are. Oh, hey—I liked your story, ‘The Satanic Manuscript of the McCrumb Brothers’... well, except for the gay incest.”

“Incest,” the froggy man repeated, mostly to himself.

“Well, thanks. And thanks for the badge,” Colleen said as she slid it into a holder. Her story had only been maybe seven percent gay incest, tops. Mostly just awkward erections during uncomfortable conversations. “I’d like to know—”

“Program guide,” said the froggy man. “Panel descriptions.” He held up a pair of booklets featuring a line drawing of a gaunt, anvil-chinned H. P. Lovecraft and a sea of tentacles spilling out from behind him. “Opening ceremonies?” he continued. “Party schedule? Gaming schedule?”

“Oh God,” Colleen snapped. “Bar!”

Chief Shoggoth hiked a thumb over his shoulder. “Ah, writer’s workshop, right? Thattaway.”

It was easy to find the writers in the Warwick, the hotel bar. They clutched at their drinks with a special sort of desperation the fans and the locals who just wanted to watch the Red Sox couldn’t muster. Faces, mostly familiar from online thumbnails, bobbed up and down in the shadowy venue. More black shirts and jeans, more white heads, seemingly floating in space. It was like an awkward Mummenschanz show. The Warwick smelled like fried everything.

Colleen spotted Panossian at a three-couch booth with two other men with familiar faces, and one woman—her identity was obvious, since there was just a handful of female Lovecraftians and even fewer of them were Latina. R.G. Gonzalez, the publisher of Arkham Advertiser, a Canadian fiction magazine that supposedly actually looked like a newspaper. Supposedly actually because Colleen had never seen a copy.

Shopping for items otherwise completely unavailable was a good reason to attend The Summer Tentacular. Buying something is usually a good idea, but should Colleen buy a drink first before introducing herself? Order some French fries, even if they were cooked in animal fat? Sometimes even a vegan just has to say Fuck it. Or dare she approach Panossian dry and wait for the next round? What if some dude offered her a sip of his drink, and his gross beard was already wet?

Too many questions. Colleen walked up to the bar, snatched an unattended half-empty glass of red wine to use as a prop, and then went up to Panossian’s table. He wasn’t actually talking to anyone, so he was the first to smile and wave. The others turned and offered greetings. Butts shifted, space was made, Colleen took a seat next to R.G., and across from the two men. Panossian sat with his back to the wall, a couch to himself, and was wrapped up in a fairly thick wool coat despite the temperature.

“Hey,” Colleen said. She took a sip of the wine and was pleased with whatever the person who had actually ordered it had selected. And everyone was wearing nametags. Raul Smalley, a very tall and thin man, wore his around his neck, partially hiding the big red heart between the words I and PICKLES on his shirt. The man seated next to him had a tag reading BARRY HAGGIS, which was for some reason affixed to his forehead.

“Barry Hagman,” he said immediately, offering a heavy-seeming hand.

“Panossian called him Barry Haggis…and it stuck!” Raul offered. “It was the only way to keep everyone from calling him ‘Larry Hagman’ as a joke instead.”

“Hi, I’m R.G.,” R.G. said, instantly friendly in the way a woman is when another woman finally shows up to a sausage fest. She offered her hand as well, then grabbed Colleen’s and pumped it a few times, leaving Barry hanging. Panossian saved the day by leaning across the table to shake Barry’s hand instead. Raul laughed at that.

“So, is this your first Tentacular?” R.G. asked Colleen.

“First Tentacular, first time in Rhode Island. It’s, uh, pretty interesting so far,” Colleen said.

“Did they put you on any panels?” Raul asked.

“‘Women and The Mythos—Blasphemy or Abomination’,” Colleen and R.G. said together. They looked at one another and laughed.

“Ah, a true classic of tokenism and marginalization,” Barry said. “It’s a good thing, getting all the women into one room like that, so that the convention can, you know, go on without you interfering with it for an hour.”

“We’ll finally be free to strut around in the nude, the way God meant it,” Raul said. “Wait till you meet Norman.”

“Speaking of strutting around nude, you mean?” Barry asked.

“God, I hope not,” R.G. said. She puffed out her cheeks and made a gesture suggestive of rotundity. “Oh wait, you probably already met him at registration, right Colleen?”

Colleen shrugged and glanced at Panossian, who was smiling and nodding along, but who had yet to say anything. He peered not at Colleen, but at Raul. Colleen immediately figured out that Panossian was deaf, or close enough to it to have to read lips in a noisy hotel bar.

“I’ve got a panel on Robert Aickman versus Lovecraft,” Barry said.

“They were lovers, you know,” Panossian said, finally speaking up. Barry looked stunned for a moment, then laughed along with everyone else.

“This is why you don’t have any panels,” R.G. said to Panossian.

“Really?” Colleen said.

“Yeah,” Panossian said. His voice slow and loud. “‘Besmirching the honor of Lovecraft.’ You know, on Twitter, where all utterances of importance are made.”

“They almost revoked his membership,” Raul said.

“It was ugly,” Barry said. He finally took his nametag off his forehead and applied it to the lapel of his blazer.

“I said that H. P. Lovecraft was not only a racist, but utterly terrified of blacks, Jews, and even—” Panossian shifted his eyes back and forth dramatically—“Armenians. When Bhanushali brought up Lovecraft’s Jewish wife Sonia Greene as proof that he wasn’t that big an anti-Semite I said, ‘Of course he married a Jew. Pathetic little racist men of course marry women they think are inferior.’”

“Then what happened?” Colleen asked. “I mean, there has to be more to it than that.”

“Oh, then it became a total shit show. It was epic, really,” R.G. said. “Some fan said that he too had married a Jew and was Panossian calling him a pathetic little racist of a man—”

“And I said, ‘Well, it has nothing to do with your choice of spouse, but you’re two-thirds right,’” Panossian said.

“Turns out, the guy was in charge of programming and panels for Summer Tentacular,” Raul said.

“And then he explained that he was six-foot-five so he definitely wasn’t little, so obviously I was calling him an anti-Semite…”

“His brother owns the hotel,” Barry said. “It’s why we get it so cheap.”

“Speaking of,” Panossian said. “Your key, Colleen.” He dug a keycard out of his pocket and slid it across the table to Colleen. Everyone turned to him.

“It’s a deeply shitty room. Mold on the ceilings, the blinds. And I couldn’t get in the conference block, so I’m on the hook for full price.”

“Oh, so that’s why you filled out a Roommate Request form,” Colleen said, but Panossian wasn’t looking at her face and so didn’t respond.

Ms. Phantasia had walked into the Warwick. He was a larger man, in his sixties, in a full evening gown—tons of sequins this time around—and combat boots. On the back of his bald head was a tattoo of Lovecraft’s face done sufficiently well enough that occasionally drunkards in dark rooms tried to address Ms. Phantasia from behind. Sometimes, Ms. Phantasia didn’t turn around.

But Panossian wasn’t looking at Ms. Phantasia; he was looking at the woman behind him. She was dressed exactly like Phantasia, though she wore her hair in a peach fuzz crewcut and had no giant tattoo on her head. She was young enough to be Phantasia’s granddaughter. The Phantasias turned and walked up to the table.

“Hello!” Panossian said. “Got your own mini-me, do you?”

“I have,” Ms. Phantasia said, “an acolyte of my own.”

“Hi,” the young woman said. “I’m Chloe.”

“And you’re an acolyte?”

“I’m a writer.”

“Published?” Colleen asked.

“Stick with being an acolyte,” Panossian interjected before Chloe could answer. “There’s a future in that.”

“We have a collaboration in the souvenir booklet,” Phantasia said. “You must check it out, darlings.”

“And we will,” Raul said.

“We’ll fill a hot tub with marmalade, hop in, and take turns reading passages to one another,” Panossian said.

“That reminds me, I’m here for lunch,” Phantasia said, and with that he led Chloe to the bar.

Barry said, after Phantasia left, “He’s a strange writer.”

“We know,” R.G. said.

“I mean, his work. It’s Lovecraftian, but also decadent. He has a unique vision.”

“I read one of his stories; it was all about people licking one another’s palms,” Colleen said.

Panossian muttered something.

“Did you say ‘That’s hot’?” Colleen asked him.

“I said ‘It’s hot.’ I need some air. I’m going outside.”

Everyone had to shift over and bring in their knees to let Panossian out. He tread on Colleen’s toes, by mistake, and didn’t notice. Raul did notice and winced sympathetically. After he snaked out of the booth and turned to walk off, Colleen could see that he was a wreck. Old black jeans that he had likely been wearing for several days, sneakers with untied laces flopping about as he walked with the trace of a limp and hunched-over posture. He didn’t say good-bye or even nod or smile in farewell.

“You okay?” Raul asked.

“Steel-toed boots,” Colleen said. “Didn’t feel a thing.”

“So how do you know him, Colleen?” Barry asked.

“Online, like everyone else I guess.”

“And you’re roommates?”

“I’m sure he’s a perfect gentleman,” Colleen said, but for that moment she wasn’t sure at all.

“Did he say he was a perfect gentlemen?” R.G. asked.

“No, of course not.”

“Thank God. Then he might be one yet.” The two women laughed, but the two men looked a little confused.

Eventually R.G. said, “Opening ceremonies, or the book room?”

“Well, there’s only going to be one opening ceremony, and the book room is open all weekend, so I guess I’ll go to the ceremony,” Colleen said. “How about you guys?”

“Uh, book room,” Barry said.

“Definitely,” Raul agreed.

“I’m with them,” R.G. said. “Not that first-timers don’t find the opening ceremonies…uh, interesting sometimes.”

“Is it that bad?”

“You need to go once,” Barry said. “It’s something to tell the grandkids about.”

“You’ll never want to touch a man again,” R.G. said.

“I hope you’ve already reproduced,” Raul said.

“I’ll take a drink with me,” Colleen said. She got another red wine and sipped at it as she walked through the first floor of the Hotel Bierce to the Main Ballroom. The glass served as a decent shield against awkward conversations. Eye contact, smile, and then quickly take a sip to avoid saying even a word. Right outside the opening ceremony someone called out, “Hey, Asparagus Head!” Colleen cringed and looked about furtively, thinking that someone was mocking her, but then she spotted a smiling man whose head really did resemble an asparagus—his hair was feathered and seemed to come to a point thanks to some unfortunate cranial architecture. He brushed past her without apology or even slowing down. Then she heard someone calling out, “Oh man, if only Tomato was still around—we could make a salad!”

The Main Ballroom was only about half full, with most attendees gathering in clumps. To Colleen it looked like what she imagined a large AA meeting would be, except instead of alcoholism the attendees had all sorts of other, subtler, problems. At the front of the room was a dais and there sat Bhanushali, a wide smile on her face. She wore a sari, which was not the boldest choice, as a large hirsute man next to her was essentially dressed like Cthulhu himself—his beard was painted with green streaks, and he wore a muumuu, also green, that had masses of plastic ivy and seaweed stapled to it. Cardboard bat wings, also green with sequins for scales, and a Styrofoam bicycle helmet spray-painted green completed the ensemble. He stood to speak when someone tapped Colleen on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” said the froggy man from registration as he rustled through a knapsack he’d just swung over his shoulder. “Would you like to buy my book?”

The book was real enough, in that it hadn’t been hastily put together in a copy shop somewhere, with spiral binding and a cover image stolen from DeviantArt. Madness of the Death Sun was a decent-looking trade paperback, with a black and white cover that was only a little faded by age. The froggy man wrote under the name Hiram Chandler, a name Colleen recognized from online.

“It’s about a dying world in which the last sane man and the last sane woman are like unto gods—”

“Like unto…”

“Gods.”

“Shouldn’t you be in the dealers’ room?” Colleen said.

“I am in the dealers’ room,” Hiram said.

“Huh?”

“I have two tables. I sell books, old pulp magazines, Lovecraftian jewelry, collars, corsets, floggers, magickal implements, rope and tackle—”

“Hullo.” It was Panossian, who had just materialized somehow. “Excuse me, Hiram,” he said. Hiram didn’t just move over, he stuffed the book into his knapsack and scuttled away, his gait strange and limping thanks to the heavy bag.

“Don’t blame Hiram for the hard sell,” Panossian said to Colleen conspiratorially. He had a drink in his hand too and sipped it between sentences. “He has to make up for last year, when his distributor collapsed.”

“Oh, what happened?”

“He accidentally left his knapsack at the bus depot.”

Colleen laughed, then nodded toward Panossian’s drink. “What’s your poison?”

It was a tall glass full of a brownish mixed drink that looked more like muddy water than any proper liquor. “Try it.” He offered it to her; she held it to her nose and sniffed at it.

“That’s…unusual.”

“Are you still a vegan?”

“Yes.” She put her lips to the glass.

“No wonder. It’s a bullshot. Like a Bloody Mary, but with beef bullion instead of tomato juice.”

Colleen still had the glass. Her fingers tightened around it like it was a neck. “Are you fucking kidding me?” she said. “You were going to let me drink this?”

Panossian just peered at her, his dark eyes wide. She handed the glass back.

“You’ll need more than red wine to get through this,” Panossian said. He flicked his head over behind his shoulder. “Check out the goon squad in the back.”

Colleen was too angry to turn around or listen to anything Panossian had to say. Then, from the dais Bhanushali jumped to her feet and shouted, and barked, and ululated, and howled.

Then she said, “Do you hear the call!”

“The call!” she repeated.

“Of Cthulhu!” an enthusiastic fifty percent of the audience responded. The other half of the audience either looked embarrassed, or were just glancing down at their phones.

Colleen glanced over at Panossian, who had just finished his brothy drink in a gulp.

From the dais came an air-rending noise, half throat-singing half-gagging. The man dressed as Cthulhu stood up and threw his arms in the air. “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!” he shouted, and the audience participants chanted along, some shouting and others muttering like a bunch of occasional churchgoers who didn’t quite remember the Lord’s Prayer.

“The theme of this year’s Summer Tentacular,” Bhanushali said, “is the Mythos and God.” After the boos quieted down, she continued. “As we all know, H. P. Lovecraft was a strict materialist—”

“Was not!” came a voice from the audience, which Bhanushali ignored except for the slightest straightening of her posture.

“—and atheist. He had no truck with God, or any religious sentiment. And yet, there is much to learn about Lovecraft when examining his work and life through the lens of faith.”

“Bullshit!” came another voice from the audience, this one much louder and more determined. When Colleen looked back, she saw that everyone was craning for a look, except for Panossian, who was just fiddling with his glass of leftover ice.

The bellowing man was nearly as large as the frame for the open double doors in which he was standing.

Panossian leaned in and muttered into Colleen’s ear. “This should be pretty good.”

“The cult of Cthulhu is real!” the man said as he walked down the aisle toward the dais. Colleen recognized him as Chief Shoggoth from the registration table, though he had changed into a ridiculous-looking oversized black velour robe decorated with a rope-like golden thread along the sleeves and hems, and was shirtless. Thankfully, he was wearing boxer shorts and flip-flops.

“I meant terrible,” Panossian said.

Bhanushali stood stock still, one hand in the air, still gesturing toward the ceiling from when she had said the word “faith.” Her smile, frozen like the rest of her, had taken on a darker mien. The Cthulhu beside her stood up, chest forward and hands up, as if he was going to jump off the dais and charge the heckler.

“You can laugh—” said Chief Shoggoth, and indeed, a number of people were at least tittering, “but the concept of tulpa is a venerable one. Would any of you be laughing if the Dalai Lama were here before you?”

“Yes!” someone shouted, but Colleen didn’t know who it was. She noticed that her wine was not in her hand anymore, and saw that Panossian had managed to slip it from her grip and had just finished the last of it.

“Lovecraft first manifested the Elder Gods—the convention proves the power of his creations. All of you are feeding the creation of the tulpa, the Cthulhu thought-form, just by being here, by reading his work, by writing your own. I mean, look at this guy!” He waved a thick-fingered widely-splayed hand toward the stage and the man in the very unconvincing Cthulhu costume.

Colleen leaned over to Panossian and was about to say, Well, he is only the second worst-dressed person here, when she bumped heads with Panossian who was leaning in to whisper in her ear.

He winced and said “Well, he is only the—”

“—second worst-dressed person here,” Colleen said.

“I was going to say ‘third.’” He cut his eyes to a few rows behind them both, where a young man was wearing a black t-shirt.

“So?”

“Look closely.”

She did—the t-shirt featured the utterly ubiquitous green bulb of Cthulhu’s head, and the tentacles dripping from his lips…and a typo. Chtlulu read the legend over the monster’s head.

“I think he’s NSA,” Panossian said. “Here’s your wine.” He handed her the empty glass.

Chief Shoggoth had begun bellowing, and Bhanushali was shouting back, citing some fanzine or blog post that explained somehow about how stupid the Chief Shoggoth was being. “Why not summon up Nora from Et dukkehjem,” she finished. The crowd was mostly hooting and applauding until the man actually dressed as Cthulhu grabbed the mic.

“This is just gutter Satanism,” he said. “But have no doubt that even gutter Satanism is Satanism. Christ is real, He is watching and, truly, I worry about your soul, young man.” One of his wings wobbled and nearly came off his back. Nearly everyone shut up, except for one person who started cackling and then quickly stopped.

“Is this a put-on?” Colleen asked. “I mean, is this the opening ceremony?”

“The guy dressed like Cthulhu is an actual Bible scholar or something,” Panossian said. “Maybe it’s real.”

“It’s getting heated. What if the hotel calls the police?”

“If incoherent shouting were a crime, we’d all be sharing one big electric chair.”

“Is it like this every year?” Colleen asked.

Panossian shrugged. “I usually just hang out in the bar and sometimes go to the dealers’ room and look at books. I guess I have another reason to come this year, though,” he said.

“Why did you come this year?”

Panossian opened his mouth, clamped it shut, then opened it again. “I came here for you, Ms. Danzig. To see you.”

“Wha—”

“Ssshhh,” he hissed. “I’m trying to listen to the bullshit.” He pointedly turned away from Colleen.

Chief Shoggoth shouted back to the man dressed as Cthulhu. “Why are you even here then? Wasn’t Lovecraft an atheist? Didn’t he despise religion?”

“I can ask you the same question!” Bhanushali said. “Why would you think it at all rational to appropriate a Buddhist notion to bring to life an Elder God that is utterly fictional—and even if you could do it, why on Earth would you believe it to be a good idea?

“Have you ever managed to read one of Lovecraft’s fictions all the way to the end, Norman?”

Everyone laughed at that. Even Panossian chuckled.

But Chief Shoggoth, Norman apparently, wasn’t flummoxed. “I have! All of them. And the revisions, and the Derleth rip-offs, and even the crap you people all write.” He waved his arms about extravagantly and got caught up in his robe’s oversized sleeves for a moment. “We all want something to happen, don’t you see? We want cosmic horror because it’s better than the alternative—cosmic boredom!”

“I’m already cosmically bored,” Panossian said to Colleen.

Norman went on, bellowing. “We’re right! We’ll be right! We can create something out of eternal emptiness!”

“I think I’ll go to the dealers’ room,” Panossian muttered, and then he got up and skulked away. In his long black coat, he looked about as ridiculous as the people he’d been mocking. Colleen was at a loss for what to do for a moment, until she saw just how many people were sliding out of their chairs and heading out of the ballroom. If Norman’s display was supposed to be a part of the show, it wasn’t going over very well. Colleen hopped from empty chair to empty chair till she made it to the far wall, then followed it to the door and sprinted across the hall.

The dealers’ room was just as loud as the opening ceremony, but the noise here came from a collective susurration in the crowded room. Dozens of conversations seemed to be happening at once as Summer Tentacular attendees picked over boxes of used paperbacks or carefully held up hardcover books and haggled for deals. Dozens of conversations, or one being played out in dozens of different ways at once. Shoggoth Cthulhu black goat Yog-Sothoth Mi-Go Cthulhu nigger—

Did someone actually say the word “nigger” in public? Colleen scanned the room despite herself. Pretty much everyone was white, and not one person in the dealers’ room, as far as she could see, was African American. Perhaps someone was talking about Lovecraft’s cat, which he had called Nigger-Man. Colleen pushed on into the room, muttering pardons and leading with her shoulder. Nyarlathotep, Tsathoggua, Necronomicon.

Not every table featured books. T-shirts abounded, many emblazoned with jokes about role-playing games that Colleen was pleased to not actually understand. Displays of pewter dragons and wizards seemed only mildly out of place, like a Seventh Day Adventist in a roomful of Mormons. Toward the back of the room stood the folding changing screens and racks of fetish wear and corsets.

“Hey!” said a large man as he spotted Colleen. He wore a black pirate shirt with a plunging neckline, and leather pants tucked into knee-high black boots. On purpose, but Colleen put on a friendly face and smiled, then turned around as if looking for some friends.

The froggy man was behind her, holding a copy of Madness of the Death Sun up to his chest. He almost managed to make eye contact before Colleen turned on her heel again and decided to deal with the pirate instead.

“Colleen Danzig, right?” the pirate said. “Love your stuff.”

“Hey, thanks,” Colleen said. The pirate’s claim was a generic one, and Colleen was wearing a name tag, so she knew not to take the recognition or compliment too seriously. “I have a chapbook coming out soon.”

“Too bad you don’t have copies now. I’d buy one from you immediately. My name is Rob,” the pirate said, offering a hand. Colleen took it, and then he clamped his fingers tightly around hers and leaned in close.

“You are a geek goddess,” he whispered. “I would love for you to try on a corset.” He pronounced it cor-say. “You can keep it for the weekend, if you like. Are you on a panel? You can wear it to a panel; that would be free advertising for me, and of a certain benefit to you as well.” He gave her the once over, and Colleen felt like a hand had reached inside her and run up and down the bones of her spine.

In a flash, Colleen considered her options. The Summer Tentacular theoretically had a sexual harassment policy, or at least a code of conduct. Did this interaction qualify? To her, yes, but given the paucity of women at the convention, who knew how an official policy would be interpreted. But, he was being nice to you, offering free use of a corset… She could just make an excuse and extract herself, since this guy would be stuck in the dealers’ room during the day. But then there’d be the evening parties, where people got drunk and inhibitions evaporated. If she left now, he’d just follow her around, demanding the attention he clearly believed he deserved.

Or she could wreck him. The options there were two: hard or soft. She chose soft. Colleen lifted her thumb, placed it in the web of flesh between his thumb and forefinger and pressed hard. The pirate winced, then yelped when Colleen didn’t stop. Finally he let go.

“No thanks,” Colleen said. “I packed clothes for this event.”

“Jesus Christ,” the pirate said. He carried on too much for how little the pressure point trick hurt. “You’re like a crazy person! I was just trying to be friendly.”

Colleen thought to use his name, and glanced around for his name tag. Then she saw that he had tucked the lanyard into his pants, so that the badge dangled near his crotch.

“I’m a friendly person too,” Colleen said. “I just like having both my hands free at all times. It helps me to be friendly. Anyway, good-bye.” She turned to cross the room again, and, thankfully, the froggy man was bothering someone else already.

Norman, the Chief Shoggoth, entered the room, still in his robe, and extended his arms, nearly completely filling the wide double-door frame. He declared, “Five fifty-five! The dealers’ room closes in five minutes!”

Colleen was surprised to hear a chorus of groans, like a teacher had just announced that recess was over.

3. The Outsider

I never made it to the dealers’ room, which is sad for me, as I do love books. I did love books, I should say. Even with amazon.com and ebooks, and my old life down in Cambridge, Massachusetts—a town with a number of independent bookstores—there was still something special about the tables in a Lovecraftian convention dealers’ room. Books with print runs in the low triple digits, old stapled-together fanzines with the sort of cover art that could otherwise only be found in the doodles of a bored eighth-grade boy, and even some interesting titles.

Of course, nobody ever wanted to talk about writing. Publishing, sure. Who actually got a mass market paperback deal for one of their books, which editor was looking for short stories for yet another anthology about Cthulhu—he’s going to rise one day and destroy the world for no reason, you see—and whatever happened to that author who seemed so hot just last year.

Part of why I wanted to head to the dealers’ room and gossip a bit was to show that I wasn’t just last year’s fad.

There’s a saying, usually whispered in the committee meetings of convention runners, those Secret Masters of Fandom that run everything on a volunteer business, with no thanks to show for it except for the narcissistic pleasure of being in charge.

Fandom is the social network of last resort.

It’s true. Lovecraftians in particular are a bunch of misfits and social defectives. It started with the old man himself, who was crippled by neuroses so huge that he had no choice but to become a genius at what he did. Lovecraft’s short stories, so widely distributed in grade school libraries because they contained zero sex and only the merest suggestions of violence, were like cheese in a mousetrap. Boys, almost all boys, too fat or awkward or arrogant for sports, and not actually bright enough to achieve top marks, find their ways to the darkest corners and dustiest shelves, and there Lovecraft is waiting. And if those traps don’t get sprung, there are others. The Internet in-jokes, the role-playing games, the video game levels that end with great green tentacles reaching out from a swirling vortex, they all perform an initiatory function.

Lovecraft chooses his own.

One of his most famous stories, “The Outsider,” even explains how it all works. Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness, it begins. The climax of the story is a hoary old cliché, but the story is from 1926. There’s a poor ugly ol’ guy wandering around a suitably gothic castle as he narrates, all alone as he has been for his entire life. He encounters a party, but when the revelers see him, they scream and run. He stumbles around the room, half-Quasimodo, half-Frankenstein’s Monster, trying to find out what happened when he sees a hideous creature lurching at him. He raises a hand, but too late, and he actually makes contact with the monster. Of course, the creature was himself, and he had come across a mirror.

What makes “The Outsider” special isn’t the climax, it’s the denouement. There’s a misunderstood word. Ask one of the poor dears over at the Summer Tentacular and he’ll likely tell you that in a story’s denouement the writer’s job is to tie up loose ends. But the word means the exact opposite—it means to unknot. What’s being unknotted is the emotional tension created by the climax. “The Outsider” wouldn’t be worth reading for anyone over the age of nine if the story rested on the dumb twist that the narrator was the monster all along. Instead, after fleeing from his own horrible visage, the narrator makes his escape from a lonely life of fear and sadness. Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. He has friends! He somehow got his ugly ass to fucking Egypt! And life in Egypt is a big party too—he has found his home among the freaks, and the freaks don’t run from fellow freaks. I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid.

Then I remember that I’m dead. No feasts, no pyramid, just a body in a shoebox talking to nobody while I wait for my brain to decompose sufficiently that whatever is left of me finally just turns off. Is time passing, or are all these cogitations just one last burst of activity, every synapse blazing at once since I no longer need to breathe, since my heart no longer beats. I’m an echo of an echo, the ultimate outsider.

In Lovecraft’s fiction, the outsider becomes the insider. That’s the appeal. The bookish little nerd, often with aesthetic inclinations if not exactly artistic talent, figures out what is really going on. Ancient languages are deciphered, inexplicable phenomena examined, myths so obscure they can only be discussed in terms older than mankind are discovered to be the literal history of the universe. And the texts themselves provide all sorts of insider jargon and references for the initiated. And like all initiatory regimes, there are levels of enlightenment, ever more complex signs and tokens, layers of occult truth. It’s easy to see where L. Ron Hubbard got his inspiration for the Church of Scientology from.

The dust-up at the opening ceremonies was basically a conflict between literary critics and fans, to name two of the more ridiculous sets of people in the world. What’s a critic but a reader who can neither stop re-reading the same thing over and over, nor shut up about it? And what’s a fan but a reader who has stopped reading, and still can’t shut up about it? Fans resent critics, and critics disparage fans. What a great idea to get everyone together and provide inexpensive booze.

This year, though, someone found a better target than fan or critic—me.

They took my face, you know.

That’s why Colleen Danzig was brought in the first time, to identify my body from the clothes I’d worn when she last saw me. After my death, the flesh of my cheeks, all of my nose, my lips, my forehead, were all peeled off by...I presume by my murderer. I couldn’t feel it per se, but I knew. It felt the way it does when you suddenly realize that you’re not wearing your glasses.

It took some time for me to arrive at the state I am in now: posthumously conscious. When you first die, or at least when I first died, it’s like being in a lit room, and someone flips the switch. And like being in that now dark room, eventually your eyes adjust and you can make out objects and figures to a certain extent. And then, I guess, you fall asleep, forever. But my face is gone. I’m the outsider as outsider after all. If I had a mirror to look into, eyes to look out with, I’d see a hideous monster and I’d run screaming. And then, only later, would I realize that the crimson mask I’d seen wasn’t someone, it was me. The real me, the real me under the skin.

It has occurred to me that this is hell. I’m not religious; I grew up in the Armenian Apostolic Church, which basically just meant long liturgies in a language I didn’t really understand, and Christmas in January. My father will be growing a beard until I’ve been dead for forty days. Only then will he shave again. Will I still be here, in some other box and aware of it, counting off the days, imagining him at the mirror, solemnly cutting and shaving, and maybe even crying a tear or two? Or will he keep the beard, and shave it quickly, just for the sake of appearances? I couldn’t even explain my book to him when it came out, much less get him to read it. And now the book killed me, and he has nothing: no grandchildren, no legacy. One thousand years of Panossians ground to a halt in a laundry room in Providence, Rhode Island.

Lovecraft’s outsider says I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage, but he, and Lovecraft, were fucking fools. That’s the problem with literature, you have to be alive in order to write it.

4. Cool Air

There were three types of parties thrown during the Summer Tentacular. The first were book launch parties of various sizes and intensity. “The more terrible the book,” Barry explained to Colleen, “the better the party.”

“It’s true. There’s some sort of romance anthology called Lovely Craft: True Confessions of Women in Love with the Unspeakable. There should be pink cupcakes and lots of booze,” R.G. said. “The book looks awful.”

“Don’t you have a story in that one?” Barry said.

“Of course I do,” R.G. said. The elevator doors opened and the trio walked out onto the hotel’s dedicated party floor. A slight buzz of activity came from the far end of the hallway. “They had a Kickstarter and paid six cents a word.”

“Twenty percent raise over the pro rate,” Barry said. “Nice.”

“What are the other types of parties?”

“There’s the non-book launch party, usually by some fan group,” Barry said. “They’re just like the book launch parties, actually, except that there’s no little book table in the corner. So, more surface area for booze and snacks.”

“But they are fan parties,” R.G. said, suddenly a bit agitated.

“Aren’t we all fans?” Colleen asked.

“Not after you meet the hardcore fans, you won’t be. They’re the worst.”

“I disagree,” Panossian said. He’d just emerged from some room and fallen into line with the group. “The professional writers are much worse than the fans. The pros want to have fans, and to no longer be fans. Ambition is a hell. We are the worst.” Then he added, “Hello. Where we are going?”

“Cob’s party,” Barry said.

“Shit, man,” Panossian said.

“This is the third type of party,” R.G. said to Colleen. They had made it to the closed double door of the suite at the very end of the hall.

“It’s not a sex party, is it?” Colleen asked.

“If only,” Panossian said.

The room was dark. Well, it seemed dark for a moment, then a green light swept over the room. People were leaning against the walls, taking up the bed and spots on the ground. Colleen found herself standing alone as the others wandered off into the depths of the suite. Hagman and R.G. had paired off, so Colleen trailed after Panossian, who found a corner and planted himself in it.

“What’s going on? Where’s Cob?”

“The game is to figure out what story the environment represents. But it’s a total abstraction. It starts when the flashing green light goes off.”

“So we just sit around?”

Panossian pointed to one of the tables. “The Skittles are drugs. The M&Ms are drugs. There’s probably also drugs in the diet soda.”

“Well, what kind of drugs?”

“Acid, mostly. Other hallucinogens.”

“Is it safe?”

It was dark, and Panossian was still wearing his thick wool coat, but Colleen could see a shrug.

“Would you like anything?”

“Nah, I don’t do drugs anymore.”

The green light flashed across the room once more, then clicked off entirely.

Colleen shouldered her way through the crowd to the snack table, which was illuminated by a few glow sticks scattered between the bowls and cups. She hesitated for a moment, then turned to the man next to her.

“Are there drugs in these?”

In response, the man tipped his fedora, and then grabbed a handful of Oreo cookies and shoved them into his mouth. He chewed them noisily, contemplatively, and then gulped them down.

“Hmm,” he said. “Drugs, eh?” He took off his hat and shook free a mass of bright red hair—the roots were natural, but the bulk of it was dyed to match the shade found primarily on fire trucks. “I hope not. I mean, I don’t think so. Why would someone put drugs in the food?”

“Well, Panossian said…” Colleen said.

“Oh, that guy. You can’t believe a word he says about anything other than writing. He’s not bad, pretty good actually, but he’s some kind of pathological liar.”

“He is?”

“My name’s Ginger J,” the man said. He plucked a cookie from the bowl and held it up to Colleen’s mouth. “Try one, you’ll see.”

Colleen brushed away Ginger J’s hand. “I’ll get my own, thanks.”

“Say, wanna come to Lovecraft’s grave later?”

“Uhm…with you?” Colleen said. “I don’t even know you.”

“Not just with me. Lots of people are coming. Bhanushali arranges it every year. She invites one person, who is allowed to invite one person, who is allowed to invite one person. We usually end up with ten or so people. It’s a Summer Tentacular tradition.”

“Huh.”

“Panossian comes.”

Colleen raised an eyebrow. “Oh yeah, he didn’t mention anything.”

“You talk to him?” Ginger J’s tone changed. He was a bit more excited now. “Did he ever mention me?”

“I don’t talk to him much, and no, you’ve never come up.”

“But...” Ginger J said. “He said he’d look at my book, maybe give it a blurb.”

Colleen hiked a thumb over to the corner. “He’s right there, sulking or meditating or something. Go talk to him. Excuse me, okay?” She turned a shoulder to Ginger J and started loading a small paper plate with snacks from the table. When Colleen glanced over at where Ginger J was, she saw that he hadn’t approached Panossian. Instead he had pushed his way out of the party and was in the doorway, speaking with that mostly bald girl, Chloe, and making some broad gestures with his arms.

“Crowded, eh?” Panossian said when Colleen came back. R.G. was next to him now, squatting, while he had folded his legs under him to sit.

“Yeah, it is.” Colleen said. “I don’t really see how this is different than any other party, except that the lights are out, so there are more opportunities for people to elbow me in the gut, or cop a feel.”

“Are you warm?” R.G. said.

“No, it’s fucking freezing in here, actu—oh!” Colleen said. “‘Cool Air,’ is that the story this is supposed to be? Man, they must have pulled the knob off the AC or something.”

Colleen had something else to say but then three large men pushed their way into the party and roughly shouldered past her.

“Does every man here have no sense of personal boundaries?” Colleen asked R.G.

“Yes!” Panossian answered for her. Then he added, “Heheh, get it?”

“Lovecraft’s grave at midnight is the corniest thing around. I can’t believe you go every year, Panossian,” R.G. said.

“Oh, this’ll be my last year.”

“Why?” Colleen asked.

Panossian just shrugged.

“I’ll come along,” Colleen said. “I should get the full Summer Tentacular experience. Who normally goes?”

“A veritable ‘Who’s That?’ of horror fiction,” R.G. said.

Panossian stood up, walked to the corner of the room and leaned down to confer with someone. At first Colleen thought it was a young boy, but quickly enough she realized it was a little person. The man nodded enthusiastically, patted Panossian on the shoulder, and handed him something, which Panossian stuffed into one of the pockets of his woolen coat.

When he returned, R.G. asked, “Did you win? ‘Cool Air’?”

Panossian smiled. “Nope. ‘The Whisperer in Darkness.’ We’re supposed to be inside a Mi-Go brain canister.”

“How did you know?”

Panossian pointed to his ears. “I can’t hear well, but some things I hear better than others. There’s a little beeeeep-type thing, like from a theremin, going off in the corner. Most people guessed ‘Cool Air’ from the air-conditioning and the smell…”

R.G. wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, I guess the smell was incidental.”

“Who is that? Was that Cob? Are we going now? Is the party over?”

“Yes, no, yes,” Panossian said, “but those answers aren’t in order.” And then he walked out of the party, hand still in pocket, clutching his prize.

5. The Thing on the Doorstep

One thing I didn’t think when I realized I was about to die was Oh God, why me? Honestly, I’m surprised that it took as long as it did. It’s a little late to confess one’s sins posthumously, and honestly I’m not sorry. But let’s just say I was a jerk to a lot of people. A lot of very mentally unstable people. I don’t think anyone deserves to be murdered, except for terrible bestselling authors—that is, all of them—and I never did anything a reasonable person would kill me, or even just shove me, for. I insulted some people, made little jokes with a sufficiently deadpan affect that I was widely believed, went public with secrets everyone already knew about except the more obtuse, and thus easily enraged, fans.

I got my first death threat soon after publishing my first story. “De-Animated” was a story about Andy Warhol conducting a screen test of Dr. Allan Halsey and Buck Robinson, two of the men brought back to a semblance of life by Herbert West in Lovecraft’s story “Herbert West—Reanimator.” In my story, not a whole lot happens, just like in one of Warhol’s films, and then Warhol has the violent zombies dress up like beauty queens and engage in gay sex while he silently masturbates in the corner. It was published in an online ’zine called Bone, which despite its name was a horror magazine and not a gay magazine, and the very first comment, which the publisher let through due to her belief in free speech, read:

Why am I wasting my time reading these faggot perversions. This is not literature, this is buggery and the celebration of buggery. I feel like I just went to the movies and accidentally walked into a porn theater on Bestiality Night. Panossian isn’t an ordinary name, and nobody would pick it as a pseudonym, so the author should be easy enough to track down if it comes to that. And if I see any more faggotry from the Pen(is) of Panossian, it will.

Typical fan mail, really. Similar missives followed, from all over the English-speaking world. Every publication, every blog post, every little Q/A interview, every time my picture was tagged on Facebook, there was a threat or two. IP addresses told me that I had several such “fans,” though most were just one-off vents. I’d say I had three stalkers, though even now I hesitate to use the term. All I did was appear in public somehow via publishing or promoting my work, and all they did was materialize virtually in the comments section, or on a conversational thread on some social media network, take a shit on me, and vanish.

I wouldn’t say I gave as good as I got, but I gave. If I said that someone was “stupid” I’d be told that I was “a useless sack of shit.” If I came out against book piracy, or for it for that matter, because my opinions changed along with the evidence available to me, a chorus of people would declare that they’d never buy my work again. As if I didn’t have access to my own royalty statements; clearly everyone was already never buying my work to begin with.

I still don’t know exactly who my stalkers were, but I have suspicions. The man who dressed as Cthulhu during opening ceremonies I think is one of them. His name is Ronald Ranger, or as I called him, Wonuhld Wanger, with a hard g. Wang-er. Yeah, he definitely didn’t like me, and famously wrote an entire twelve-page ’zine, photocopied and stapled together all by himself, about my book. He didn’t like it either. Whenever I published anything, he updated his blog, and did line-by-line “fisks” of my story or article, pointing out what he saw as literary infelicities, “politically correct revisionism,” and symptoms of a disease of his own making: Congenital Terminal Hipsterism.

The second one was a girl named Tracy McKendrick, who had just this weekend reinvented herself as Chloe, “acolyte” to Ms. Phantasia. Tracy, Chloe, has some sort of medical problem—lots of allergies and a special sensitivity to alcohol. She likes testing people too. She tested me, at a horror convention in Brattleboro, Vermont. It was a small con, maybe two hundred people tops, and split between a downtown church and the local kids’ theater, and she buttonholed me and told me how much she liked my stuff, and then launched into a long monologue about how she wished her ex-boyfriend would be torn to pieces by extraterrestrial tentacles. That’s what she said, literally: “extraterrestrial tentacles.” Then she laughed, her breath thick with wine, and congratulated herself on managing the tongue twister despite how drunk she already was.

Tracy had a good voice. Ever hear of “autonomous sensory meridian response”? It’s a bullshit pseudoscientific name for a real phenomenon—some people, and I’m one of them, feel all “tingly” and turned on at certain voices and sounds, like whispering, or coins clinking, or the smoothing out of a piece of fabric. There are tons of videos of girls whispering about their day or role-playing an eye doctor or just repeating “Okay okay okay” while wiggling their fingers at the camera on YouTube, and some of these videos have a million or more views.

A novel these days can’t sell two thousand copies unless the ebook is priced at a dollar, but the Okay Okay Okay Girl has a million views. And until this weekend, I added at least one view a day. It’s like how I imagine heroin must feel.

When she wasn’t crying into her glass or guffawing, Tracy’s voice made my spinal fluid fizz like Coca-Cola. I can’t hear well, especially in crowded hotel rooms or restaurants, so when she suggested sitting in a corner to talk, I was happy to follow her and let her go on. And she did. Women like a listener, it’s true.

Tracy told me many things—about her eating disorder, and how fat she felt all the time. (Her weight was normal; her figure, attractive.) How she ended up living in central New Jersey in the form of a lengthy anecdote which involved a complex arrangement of roommate switches, a flood, and a dying aunt. Her hopes for getting a degree in accountancy. Her poems, and what a rejection letter that reads “Thank you very much” with the thank you underlined twice might mean. Her ex-boyfriend, who called her a freeloader and waste of space, which I agreed was terribly unfair. She showed me a part of one of her own stories—“It’s erotic horror,” she whispered, her voice buzzing with vocal fry—and it was about demons chaining a naked girl to a rock in hell and poking at her cunt with their barbed tails.

Tracy drank too much. She flirted outrageously, telling me about the awful first-date sex she had the previous month and how she loved conventions because the attendees were “sexually free.” Then she got up and announced she was going to bed, staggered and dropped to a knee, and then asked me to help her up and to her hotel room because she was too drunk to operate a keycard, lol.

Tracy actually said the word “lol” out loud. “Word” “lol” I mean.

So I did. I got her to the elevator, kept her from pressing every floor button, and then to her door. I walked her in and she threw her arms around me and demanded a hug. Then she amended: “a friend hug.” I gave her one. We didn’t kiss, my hands didn’t wander, but she nuzzled my chest and said, “Your heart is beating really fast.”

We sat on the bed a bit; she talked some more. I got my fill of an ASMR buzz. Then she slid under the covers, fully dressed and with her boots on, and said, “Hold me till I fall asleep. If you don’t, I’ll go back down and find someone who will.”

So I did, and she didn’t, and nothing happened. I let myself out. The next morning, she texted me and asked if we could have breakfast together. She had printed out her demon sex story and wanted to go over it. She didn’t remember anything that happened in her room last night. She sent back her breakfast twice because of ingredients to which she was allergic—onions, a plate that had previously held a piece of lox.

Anyway, after that I couldn’t get rid of her. She favorited nearly every tweet I tweeted, sometimes at the end of each day. Same with Facebook likes. Whenever she saw a news story I might like, she would email it to me and post it to Facebook with a demand that I respond to it. Isn’t it awful? Isn’t it great! Tracy liked sending me email at 3 a.m., detailing her dreams and her thoughts on writing. Only once did she ask me my thoughts on writing, and I just responded, “Generally, I’m against it.”

I didn’t hear from her much afterward, until one day I encountered her on the street outside my home. I don’t mean that I was walking down the street near my apartment and I ran into her, I mean she was waiting for me on the square of pavement right outside the door to my building.

“Panossian!” she cried.

She said my name “Pan-na-SAH-uhn,” which is wrong.

I wanted to just dart back inside, but couldn’t. It was my own rotten luck; I tend to look at my feet when walking, so I didn’t spy her through the window of my building’s front door. So I smiled and said hello and she held out her arms for a hug and I did not respond and then finally I put out my arms but hers were already down and then her head darted forward as if to kiss my cheek but I put my hand out and she shook it and then she didn’t let go.

“We have to talk,” she said. “I came here all the way from New York. I want to move to the Boston area. I think there are a lot of opportunities out here for me.”

Tracy was a small woman. Her fingers were like overcooked chicken bones in my hand, but her grip had a nervous strength to it.

“I decided this morning, so I just got on the Bolt Bus and came up,” she said.

Mostly I wondered how she got my address. There might have been pictures on Facebook, and then she just used Google Maps to trawl East Cambridge till she found the exact street.

“Let’s go get a cup of coff—” Tracy said. Then she interrupted herself. “I know you don’t drink coffee, or any hot liquids! Right? You can have an Orangina. My treat.”

Tracy knew a lot about me, but almost nothing about herself. What she wanted to do with her life, what skills or acumen she could bring to a career, what she wanted to say with her writing. She figured leaving her boyfriend, some generic creepy greetings-and-salutations-type dude with long hair tied into a braid, was a good start.

“...and just getting away from New York. It’s a zoo, an expensive fucking zoo.”

“Boston’s pretty expensive as well. And you have to pay for home heating oil, sometimes,” I told her. “It’s like paying a thirteenth month’s rent every winter.”

“I just want to write. I want to live in one room and write. I want to see the frost on my windows and drink tea and write.” Her voice was really something. It pulled on my spine.

“You can get away without a car out here, but it’s really cold. It snows once a week from Halloween until May Day,” I said.

“I pared down all my belongings, Panossian. I only own six things now. My iPad, a little black dress, this coat I’m wearing, these jeans, my boots, and a knife.”

Her coat was a big woolen peacoat, not dissimilar from my own. Actually, it was exactly like my own, including being the same size. Her little hands had vanished up the sleeves and she had to shrug to get them out. She unbuttoned her coat and proved her point about the number of things she now owned—no shirt, no bra. In one interior breast pocket, an iPad mini. In the other, the thick amber handle of what was probably a crazy-looking knife.

“You must be...uhm, cold,” I said. I almost didn’t notice Tracy’s tits for the knife.

“Let me stay with you,” she said. She closed her coat, and slid her hands into the opposite sleeves, holding them before her like she was wearing a muffler.

There are moments when thought is faster than time. This was one of them. How many times could I fuck Tracy before she went crazy on me? Crazier, that is. Would I have to buy her some shirts? How was I supposed to get any writing done? The old saying is “Don’t stick your dick in crazy,” but to be perfectly honest I hadn’t stuck my dick in anything for a long time and was desperate. Could I use her and lose her safely? I didn’t want her dead or hurt or anything, just happy and then gone, preferably under her own power after making her own wise decision that I was too awful a person to spend time with.

Tracy was a petite girl, almost unhealthy-looking with onion-paper skin and baggy eyes—I could probably get the knife away from her pretty easily, and toss it down a sewer grate. I mostly had plastic flatware back at the apartment, but she could probably kill me in my sleep pretty easily as well, with a pillowcase full of books or something. Was she mad enough—in both senses of the word—to actually commit murder? That was the question I should have asked myself then, or for that matter when I was re-introduced to her as Chloe just the other night.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Tracy,” I said. It probably sounded like an instant decision to her, but for me it felt like a day and a night before a balance scale. “This is all very sudden, and”—I leaned in to whisper. “You’re nearly naked under your jacket! How could you have come up on a five-hour bus trip that way?”

I thought her face would fall, but instead it twisted into a rictus. “So, you don’t like my body? Is that it?” Then louder, too loud for the café. “The famous Panossian is into girls with big tits, huh?”

The important thing was to let her yell at me, to just sit there until someone called the police or just dumped her ass outside, so I did. Tracy ranted at me, about how she was my biggest fan and online cheerleader, but I hardly ever spoke to her or even retweeted her. How she left her boyfriend, his name was Bryant, to make a new life in Boston with me. From the back of the café someone shouted back at her, “You’re in Cambridge!” but she didn’t blink.

While Tracy was yelling at me, I realized something. Specifically, I realized that I had a third stalker. Tracy knew a lot about me, just from paying close attention to social media, but she wasn’t the only one. There was someone else, whose name I didn’t know and whose face I’d never seen, who had paid attention as closely as anyone else. Tracy was telling me how she ordered a book with a story of mine in it for full price when it was on amazon.com for cheaper because she knew I preferred independent bookstores, how when she had a poem in Darkling Thirsts I didn’t write her a congratulatory email despite the fact that she knew, she knew, I had a copy because she’d seen the cover of the issue on my coffee table in a photo I’d taken of my broken toe.

But someone out there had to know more. Like most writers who aren’t widely discussed, it was easy for me to keep track of everything that was said about me on social media. Pseudonymous and anonymous comments were a little harder to keep track of. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a topless maniac who owns six things, or...someone else.

East Cambridge isn’t like the rest of the city in that it doesn’t tolerate loudmouth shit from girls who aren’t drinking at an Irish pub, so two male members of the café staff came out from behind the counter with a broomstick and a baseball bat and started yelling at Tracy to leave. She called them sacks of shit and said that she was a New Yorker, motherfuckers and then they picked her up and she screamed my name and then she was outside.

A girl came up to me. I guessed she worked there since she carried a towel, which is as good as a tin sheriff’s badge in a café. “You have to go too,” she said.

“I’m in here all the time,” I said, but I dug for my money anyway.

“Not anymore, you ain’t,” the barista said. “Step out the back way if you don’t want to see your girlfriend again.”

There was no point in mentioning that Tracy wasn’t my girlfriend, and I wasn’t worried about her coming back to my house. She could stick that knife in my heart for all I cared. The third stalker, that’s the person I was interested in.

The third stalker knew things that Tracy didn’t. Back home it took almost an hour of digging through old blog comments to find it, but there it was, typos and all:

Hey faggot you haven’t changed at all since you wuz shop-liftin on 86t street in Brooklyn. Nice mug shot cry alot in jail querrboy

I was fourteen. When I turned nineteen I paid to have the records expunged. Of course, expunged doesn’t mean eliminated, and who knows, I might have drunkenly told somebody the story of How I First Read Lovecraft at some convention or luncheon or something. The bit about the mugshot could have been an inspired guess.

“Alot” was a fossilized typographical error in the stalker’s texts. It’s also a pretty common error generally, so searching my records for “alot” gave me tons of false positives. I spent the afternoon not thinking about Tracy, or her knife, or her small half-scoop vanilla breasts, and instead revisited old flame wars, slapfights, and feuds.

There was the Ameriville Publishers fight, in which several writers were suckered into a vanity press scam and didn’t want to hear it even when no bookstore would stock their titles. The Summer Tentacular’s own flame war about sexism and whether or not wearing corsets should be banned for “overexciting” the elderly Lovecraftian fans. Whether or not Lee Roberts was a child molester. Who was going to edit David Cob’s posthumous tribute anthology during the three days everyone decided that he was dead because he tweeted “Goodbye for now, finally” and then was out of contact for three days. (He was at an airport and the plane was delayed for nearly sixteen hours.) Whether or not R.G. Gonzalez really knew anything about Lovecraft, or if it required a “Teutonic soul”—my own Armenian soul was somehow considered sufficiently northern despite it being not at all, really. There were other, less interesting, Internet slapfights as well, and a perennial current of low-level sniping and rivalries.

I found four other comments that I was sure were from the same person, all of which betrayed some secret knowledge of me.

Sitting in yer cold-water flat, eatin ravioli from the can and spendin money on camgirl.com alot of luck with your “career” fuck your Wikpedia page

Was he local? Hell, was he a she, and a camgirl to boot?

Merry Xmas faggot hope you get alot of presencts just kidding your parents hate you and who else would buy yu sumptin Ginger J hahaha

On the correct date, which was just common knowledge thanks to the Kardashians, but indeed I received no presents that year. I wouldn’t say that my parents hated me, but it was close enough for government work.

Polydactyl stray cats are all over your hood, P. You gotta alot of snow anna cats need extra toes to move all over the place. So that’s dinner for you. YOUR POOR!

Clearly, my third stalker was either dyslexic or just pretending to have bad spelling. How on Earth does one get polydactyl right, but then type “your” instead of “you’re”?

Then, finally:

Yer gonna be in alot of pain when I rip yer face off, fag

At the time, I wasn’t concerned. Not overly concerned, anyway. It was just online banter from a man, or maybe a woman, who was trying to get a rise out of me, but who didn’t care enough to even sign the threat with a consistent pseudonym. It might have even been a friend who had seen my web browser history, who had heard my shoplifting story, who’d been to Cambridge, just fucking with me. But even my friends wouldn’t joke about ripping my face off, wouldn’t gleefully predict how much pain I’d be in when he tortured me to death.

And that prediction came true.

6. The Haunter of the Dark

Swan Point Cemetery wasn’t very interesting in the dark, but the moon was high and gibbous, so the path to Lovecraft’s family monument and author’s own smaller tombstone with its famous epitaph of I AM PROVIDENCE wasn’t a treacherous one. The brace of fans marched silently, knowingly, to the location, and then formed a loose circle around the monuments.

“So,” Panossian said to Colleen, “did you bring anything?”

“Was I supposed to?” she asked.

“People do.”

“Well, did you?” Colleen said.

“No, of course not.”

Bhanushali turned and smiled at Colleen. She leaned in conspiratorially and said, “It’s a ridiculous affectation. The caretaker has to cart so much shit away from Lovecraft’s grave—on his birthday, on the anniversary of his death, on All Saints’ Day. Nobody knows how many strings I have to pull to be allowed to come out here at this time of night every year.” She winked at Colleen, then moved on to mingle with the rest of the ragtag crowd.

Panossian turned to Colleen to say something, but Colleen spoke first. “Everyone knows about the strings she pulls because she reminds them every year, yes?”

Panossian shrugged comically, the oversized shoulders of his wool coat rising past his ears.

“Why are you wearing that? Aren’t you hot?”

Panossian didn’t say anything. Actually, several of the party resolutely refused to dress for the summer weather. Leather dusters were popular, and both Ms. Phantasia and Chloe wore crushed velveteen cloaks. Most of the rest of the…mourners? celebrants?...wore only black t-shirts and jeans. Colleen was comfortable in her denim jacket, but seemed increasingly uncomfortable otherwise. She chewed her lip and stood watching as the others left little tokens at Lovecraft’s stone, or shuffled around the adjacent monuments. She looked over at Panossian again; he was looking at his smartphone.

Ginger J was standing before Lovecraft’s tombstone, a slim chapbook in his hands, muttering what seemed to be a poem. Colleen didn’t recognize it, so decided that it was probably Ginger J’s own work. She only caught a few words, but the piece seemed to be a riff on “Herbert West—Reanimator.” One line had been lifted directly from the piece: “…devils danced on the roofs of Arkham, and unnatural madness howled in the wind.”

“Weird, huh?” It was Chloe. She smiled at Colleen. “I wanted to say hello for real,” she said. Then she glanced around and added, sotto voce, “Fanny tells me this get-together used to be a networking opportunity away from the nuts. Now it’s, well, you know…”

Colleen grinned. “Networking in a graveyard. Apropos, I suppose.”

“At least it gets people out of the hotel. Have you ever seen Providence? Parts of it are really nice. There’s a big river thing too—bonfires floating on barges and everyone strolls around admiring the view. Nobody here wants to do anything but sit in the bar and prowl around the dealers’ room though. A few of us are going out, for real, after this, down to the Riverwalk. It’s touristy, but fun.

“We can have a few drinks,” she added, as an afterthought.

“The ol’ mill and swill, eh?” Colleen said. “I’m in.”

Chloe pointed her chin past Colleen’s shoulder, indicating Panossian. “Don’t bring that guy!”

“Uhm…I’m not really with him. I mean, I am, but we’re just roomies for the con.”

“I’m sure he won’t even mind. He gets off on sulking by himself in a corner.”

Colleen hesitated, then saw a way to change the subject. “Oh God, look…”

Another troupe from the Summer Tentacular were picking their way through the graveyard. Leading the pack with a self-assured waddle was Norman, the Cthulhu cultist. He had changed outfits, and was now wearing an utili-kilt. Behind him were a handful of stragglers, most of whom Colleen recognized from various convention tables—they were the people who manned the registration booth, sold the official t-shirts, posted the signage and handled the A/V, and handed out program guides.

Bhanushali trotted up to Norman, her hands balled into fists. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. David Cob was right behind her, silent but somehow menacing. His limbs swung just a little too loosely, like a boxer getting ready to fall into a stance and start throwing punches.

“Paying our respects,” Norman said. “It’s a public cemetery, isn’t it?”

“No.” Bhanushali was taken aback. “It’s not. Of course it isn’t. I mean, why would you think this was a public cemetery?”

“He means it’s open to the public,” said the man Colleen recognized as Asparagus Head. He’d taken Norman’s right flank, and glared at Cob.

“And you chose this moment to come to Lovecraft’s grave?” Bhanushali said.

“Oh no, we’re here to visit C. M. Eddy’s grave,” Asparagus Head said. “And perform a reading of his masterwork, ‘The Loved Dead.’”

Everyone gasped. Ms. Phantasia chortled. Even Panossian looked up from his phone.

Bhanushali drew herself up to her full height, which was not very high, and spoke. “‘The Loved Dead’ is not a masterwork, and to the extent that it is interesting at all, it is because Eddy wrote it in collaboration with Lovecraft. The portion of the tale you quoted was almost certainly written by Lovecraft!”

Cob said, “If you’re looking for Eddy’s grave, friends, given the direction from whence you came, you passed it on the way here.”

“We’re trying to get into the mood by touring the place a little first. Many famous people are buried here,” said Norman. “It’s not all about…” He shrugged toward Lovecraft’s family monument. “Him.”

“Several of the state’s most illustrious governors are buried here,” said Asparagus Head.

Then someone else said, “We love the dead,” and Norman’s crew all giggled.

“What is this all about?” Cob said plainly.

“We could ask you the same question,” Norman said. “What are you, a bunch of ‘cool kids’ going off to smoke behind the bleachers or something?”

“Does that make you jealous nerds,” Cob asked, “or truant officers?”

“Oh, let them stay,” Panossian said. “Who the fuck even cares?”

There was a change in the air. Bhanushali’s group turned and stared as one. Even Ginger J gaped at Panossian. But so too did Norman and his party, their pasty faces all scowling.

“What’s the big deal?” Colleen said. Panossian went back to his phone.

Bhanushali sighed. “If too many people attend this event, it’ll be discontinued. Not by me...by us, but by the caretaker and security. The police. Our friend Tomato can only do so much. This is a sub rosa get-together. We offer a Lovecraft walking tour of the city, and that tour includes a trip here.”

“You should have a sign-up sheet,” Norman said. “First-come first-serve.”

Ginger J spoke. “Norman, you live in Providence. You’re the first one at the hotel. You’d just sign your own name first every time. Same with all of you guys,” he said, gesturing to the men who’d arrived with Norman. “So, what’s the difference between what Bhanushali is doing and what you want to do?”

“The difference is that she’s actually doing it and we’re not!”

“Well, you’re here now.”

‘Thanks to him!” Norman said, pointing at Panossian. “He texted us.”

Panossian looked at his phone. “Oh, was that you? I was responding to a text—I didn’t recognize the number but I thought it was somebody in, uh, our group.”

“Really?” Bhanushali said. “Call the number back, see whose phone it rings right now.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because I don’t believe you, Panossian. I don’t think you answered a text; I think you summoned our friends here simply to ruin this event.”

“What if I call and the ringer is off,” Panossian said. “What if I call and it rings where you can’t hear it. What if I call and it’s really one of the people you invited?”

“Hell, what if he calls some other number instead,” Colleen said. “What are you going to do, rip the phone from his hands?” Panossian smiled at her, but Colleen was looking at Bhanushali.

Panossian’s phone rang. The ringtone was loud, an old-fashioned bell sound. Asparagus Head held up his own phone up, triumphant. Bhanushali rushed Panossian, scrambling for his phone, but Panossian threw up his arm and danced out of her way.

“Do you think Lovecraft cares who comes to his grave?” Panossian crowed. “Everyone wants to be a cool kid, eh?”

Norman shouted, “We don’t need your pity!”

Ginger J said, “I think I hear police.”

Everyone turned to where Ginger was looking and pointing. It wasn’t the police, only a single caretaker shouting “Whoop whoop!” and brandishing a powerful flashlight that illuminated the trees and cast a web of shadows across the ground. “What is going on here, Mandy!” he called out as he ran and skidded down the low hill. “You said a small, quiet group. Get the hell out of here now, and have a care not to kick over any sod. Stay on the paths. All of you!”

Bhanushali turned back to where Panossian had been standing, but he was already gone.

Back at the hotel, Colleen found Panossian sitting on his bed, muddy shoes and pants still on. He was texting someone again.

“So...what was that all about?” she asked, sitting on the corner of her own bed farthest from Panossian’s.

“I felt bad for those poor shitheads,” Panossian said.

“They thought you were making fun of them, like you had a bucket of pig’s blood ready to go.”

He shrugged. “That was part of it too, but really, those guys are their own buckets of pig’s blood. Perpetual Embarrassment Machines.”

“If you don’t like anyone here, why do you even come?” Colleen asked.

Panossian looked at her. “It’s a tax write-off. Also, they turned off the electricity and water in my apartment, so here I can get some stuff done at least, and take a shower. I pre-paid for the hotel and everything back when reservations opened on the convention website, and plus while I’m here I can sell something and make a few bucks. Check it out.”

He slid off the bed and went into the closet at the front of the room, bent over, and tapped out a combination on the room’s safe. He pulled out a box, and made a point of not extending his arms to show it to Colleen. Instead he sat back on his bed, held the box atop his lotus-folded legs, and opened it, but did not show it to Colleen.

“Holy shit,” Colleen said. “Is that what I think it is? How did you get it?”

“Turns out, he’s a fan.”

In the box was a book. It was a hardcover book, after a fashion, with no dust jacket. The title, simply Arkham, was scrawled in green, like a sloppy prison-grade tattoo on flesh. Which it was. Tentacles led to and from the word, almost like the roadways or rivers on a map of Lovecraft Country.

“Have you read it?”

Panossian shook his head. “I don’t want to touch it. Anyway, this is one of the five ol’ Skinner made out of himself. He mailed it to me. I was very surprised.”

Arkham had made a minor splash the previous year, when the anonymous author, who had covered his flesh in Lovecraftian tattoos, then skinned himself and integrated pieces of his skin into leatherbound volumes of his self-published novels. He had put four on eBay, but the dot.com’s proscription against selling human body parts and bodily fluids meant that the auctions were cancelled early.

“That’s why I’ve been on my phone all night. Trying to arrange a buy. I want nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars for it.”

“Christ, Panossian, go for an even ten,” Colleen said.

He waved a hand, “Eh, you have to fill out a federal form if you put ten thousand bucks in a bank account. I’d rather, you know, not have to.”

Colleen laughed. “Why not ask for nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents then!”

“I don’t want people to think I’m crazy,” Panossian deadpanned. Then he laughed. “Anyway, there’s all sorts of playground politicking in this community, and I can’t stomach it anymore.”

Colleen looked like she wanted to say something, to argue that most of the people she’d met so far during the Summer Tentacular were nice enough, but she couldn’t bring herself to lie. “Raul and Barry? R.G.?”

“Yeah, I guess they’re all right. They’re not long for the Lovecraftian world, though. They’re all working on thrillers, ghost stories—mainstream stuff. R.G. is even doing some magical realism, playing up the whole Chicana thing. Maybe she’ll end up with tenure in some university somewhere.”

“Beats trying to sell a human-leatherbound book to keep your lights on, Panossian,” Colleen said.

“Turn my lights back on,” Panossian said. “I’ve been sitting in the dark for a week, and charging my cell phone in the library. Hell, I’m not knocking leaving Lovecraftiana. You should get out too, before it’s too late. Write an urban fantasy novel, a murder mystery, anything but this Lovecraftian bullshit.”

Colleen plopped back onto her bed, hitting the pillows hard. “Why don’t you take your own advice?”

Panossian spoke plainly. “I don’t have any ideas.”

Colleen snorted. “Oh, come on. Everyone has ideas. Ideas are cheap.”

“I don’t have any. I had one idea. I’ve said all I have to say, I guess.”

Panossian picked up the box. “To be perfectly honest, I’ve spent hours daring myself to open this book, just to steal the plot of whatever Mr. Arkham happened to write about. I’ll be glad to be rid of it.” He got up, and then stopped at the door. “Did you want to flip through it first?” he asked, brightly. Then he laughed at his own little joke, and stepped out, letting the door to the room swing shut behind him.

Colleen reached for the TV remote control, almost by reflex. It was one of those adult joys, watching television alone, without parents to frown at her choices as when she was a child, or roommates to talk over the shows as when she was at home. But she was at the Summer Tentacular. This was supposed to be fun, intellectually and creatively stimulating, an adventure of sorts. There had to be something better to do than sit in bed and veg out in front of an episode of Friends, for Christ’s sake. There was always the fitness center, she supposed, but it probably didn’t have a heavy bag or kettlebells.

For Cthulhu’s sake, pretty much anyone else at the Tentacular would have thought. Not Panossian though, who would have rolled his eyes.

Colleen slid off the bed and strode over to the door. “Hey Panossian, wait up! I gotta see this,” she called out as she stepped into the hallway. Panossian was gone, and Colleen didn’t know whether he had taken a left or a right. Colleen picked left and turned the corner and didn’t see Panossian by the elevator bank, but she did see a swirl of black and a flash of flesh as an elevator closed. She could have sworn it was H. P. Lovecraft himself.

7. The Terrible Old Man

Colleen’s first visit to the morgue was a brief one. My face was gone, I hadn’t been to the dentist in twenty years so there were no easily accessible records, and I’d never been fingerprinted. It was up to someone who saw me that night to identify me based on my clothes, my size. The cops already knew it was me, since I’d been missing for a while and the Tentacular had the run of the house—so the cops took a roll of the guests and I was the odd man out. But for the sake of paperwork almighty, I presume, someone had to sign off, and Colleen came for me.

I barely knew her; I doubt I made a very good impression. I stopped trying to make good impressions years ago. Any impression would do. My background is straight out of central casting: funny-looking kid, scrawny, poor, awkward, unusual surname and smelly home-packed lunches, and then, one day…Ghostbusters.

If you’re not a Lovecraftian, you won’t get the reference. After the big hit movie came a cartoon on TV called The Real Ghostbusters, and one episode of that show was entitled “The Collect Call of Cathulhu.” I suppose that extra letter a made all the difference to some attorney somewhere. In the episode, the infamous plot device known as the Necronomicon goes missing and “Cathulhu” is summoned. Then a bunch of the usual cartoony stuff happens, and one of the ghostbusters explains that the Necronomicon is too dangerous to read, but that he has read “H. P. Lovecraft” to learn about it.

And something about the name seemed real. I went to the school library the next day, checked out the card catalog—there still were such things then—and there was a paperback called The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Other Stories of Horror, featuring what I thought to be a very cartoony-looking and green vampire. (It was actually a degenerate hybrid fish-person.) Honestly, the stories meant very little to me: the language was archaic, the paragraphs cyclopean, the New England settings only vaguely familiar. But I stuck with it. I renewed the book twice, and then just kept it after that till the school librarian actually called my mother. The impenetrability of the stories heightened their allure. I was the little class smartypants who had read through all the stories in the textbook in the first week of sixth grade, so I was unused to not instantly mastering material. My parents had no idea what the word squamous meant, nor did my teacher. Eldritch I’d encountered in a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook, and Sisters of Mercy—with lead singer Andrew Eldritch—had their fifteen minutes of fame at around that time, so I was pretty solid on that word. Tenebrous was in the school library’s dictionary, at least. So was febrile. I was getting somewhere with these stories, but success and happiness was not to be, as the story went.

The next troubling word was swarthy. I asked my teacher, Mrs. Vaz, but she just blushed and turned away. I went to the school library during lunch period—I was one of those kids with no place to sit in the cafeteria, surprise surprise—and asked the librarian, who never identified herself to students for some reason. She snorted and walked around her desk and put her hands on my shoulders. Then she spun me around and pushed me toward the door. Was this assault? Was it legal? Was swarthy a bad word—something like shitty?

The door to the library happened to have a window in it; the school was one of those old brick urban numbers with transoms over the classroom doors and a pair of large stone arch entrances with the words GIRLS over one and the word BOYS over the other. I thought I was being pushed out into the hallway, but the librarian stopped and peered over the top of my head. She was a thin woman with a shock of dyed black hair and long fingers like tree branches in a window. She looked at the window, not through it, at my reflection.

“That is swarthy,” she said. “You.” Swarthy, as in the throngs of people that seethed through the flume-like streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes about them… That’s from “He,” one of Lovecraft’s worst and most racist stories.

I wanted to pull off my eyebrows right then and there. I figured that’s what swarthy must mean—a thick brow—since it was one of the things the kids in school made fun of me for. The librarian had nothing else to say to me; she opened the door and with a rude shove sent me back to the hallway.

I became a bad boy.

Why not? Even the librarian didn’t seem to like me, and I actually read books and asked questions. I kept my grades up but other than that I lolled about in my chair, read comic books in class, tore sheets of looseleaf paper in thirds and slowly chewed on the strips, and made fun of the dumber, bigger kids, till they tried something physical. I had a swift foot thanks to weekend soccer games with my zillion crazy Armenian Sunday School friends and I planted it frequently in the crotches of the people I decided were bullies. As far as being bad went, I wasn’t all that good at it. I still used my model airplane glue on model airplanes, for Christ’s sake.

I kept reading Lovecraft, but at a distance. I was one of the bad people in his work, who terrified the good people just by existing. We all ended up dead at the end. As far as role models went, it was a pretty shitty thing for a kid to glom on to, but I eventually grew up and out of it. I wasn’t a hardcore Lovecraftian. I mean, I had other interests. I read other books—novels about middle-class people having affairs and such. Mysteries, science fiction, the Beats, you know. Whatever was around and people were reading. My first encounter with Lovecraftian fandom, with the whole messy world born from Lovecraft’s fiction, came at Tower Records in Cambridge, which once upon a time had a decent little magazine and ’zine section. Fuck Tentacles was a zine in the Xerox and staple mode, its cover image a collage: an Easter Island statue with Lovecraft’s face over the statue’s head, and a pair of tits from a porn mag over the stone pillar. Lots of doodles and five-pointed stars and a ransom note aesthetic to the cover copy. Five bucks for twelve pages, and that included the front and back covers, but I bought it.

I couldn’t get enough of Fuck Tentacles. I read and re-read it till the ink smeared and the pages fell apart in my hands. It was funny. There were jokes, and little cartoons. A short story comprised of photocopies of fortune cookies that somehow expressed both whimsy and foreboding. There were also a few capsule reviews of straight-to-VHS movies, and of small press horror publications. (This was all before the Internet got big and everything went digital. I was too shy and disorganized to sit down and write a letter to the P.O. Box on the back cover of the magazine. Plus it was a Providence, Rhode Island address, and I thought it might have been yet another coy reference that I didn’t quite understand.) The stories and cartoons and essays and reviews were all broad-church Lovecraftian, and the anonymous zinester took none of it too seriously.

Then came college, and Internet access, and the World Wide Web. Let me tell you that even in the 1990s, going to some search engine and typing the words “fuck tentacles” into the text bar was a terrible mistake. But there was plenty on Lovecraft—fan pages, USENET newsgroups, a giant floating multimedia conversation about the author’s racism and the importance of his wife’s secular Judaism. It was easy to get involved. To get sucked in.

I started reading some of the stories, small press novels, chapbooks, ’zines I’d heard about. And just through the act of sending away for this material, I became a part of the community. An email notification that I’d won an eBay auction would come with a chatty note, and the book would arrive with extra stuff—stickers, an extra chapbook, a handwritten poem. It was almost as though I had to begin corresponding with Lovecraftians. The Internet, where I mostly just lurked except for the occasional gnomic comment here and there, was one thing. Someone would fume, “Lovecraft was not a homosexual!” and I’d respond, “He should have given it a whirl—Panossian,” but would then ignore the flame war that followed. Pen and paper, though, really enthralled Lovecraft fandom. Lovecraft himself was a dedicated letter-writer, and so the zinesters and booksellers aped him. I never got around to making a ’zine of my own, but I wrote a bunch of one-page letters to people. That was my thing. Whether I had 250 words worth of content or 3000, I’d fit it on one page by shrinking the font, expanding the margins, or just printing my letter on an 11x14 piece of paper.

Lovecraftiana was something to engage in that for the most part did not involve women, which was another reason why I found it compelling. I liked women fine, I was straight, but I was poor and swarthy—a word that echoes, even here in this cold drawer in the morgue—and had a generally bad attitude, so no luck in the romance department. Sex was a rare and confusing way to end an evening only very occasionally.

Human beings have a lot of spare brainpower we don’t use. You might say we’re not allowed to use it. If we were, maybe we’d have fewer problems. Good-bye, cancer! Hello, moon colonies! Or maybe our minds would shatter. The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... like the old man said. Lovecraft has a way of filling a head, commandeering its surplus cognitive power. Colin Wilson even wrote a book about the phenomenon, The Mind Parasites. This was the thesis of many of my 3000-word broadsheets; I was obsessed with obsession.

I started writing just to show that I could. It’s not that hard, really. In any genre, there are virtuosos and there are hacks, and everyone who keeps submitting gets published eventually, by someone. In the world of Lovecraftian fiction, where reputation is the currency, there’s always some dipshit with a settlement check from tripping and falling in the supermarket burning a hole in his pocket, and what better way to spend it all than to start a small press?

So I wrote my book. I picked Salinger as a model because The Catcher in the Rye was short. I worked on it over a summer, and posted a chapter on my blog. Then I sent the link to various bulletin boards and websites run by some of Lovecraftiana’s stupidest and most reactionary nitwits. When the hate mail—Panossian is an effete faggot, Panossian is a pretentious poseur, Panossian is a fraud for appropriating Lovecraft without honoring his work, if Lovecraft were alive today he’d spit on Panossian—came rolling in, I saved it and posted that to my website as well.

After about three days, I got a note from the assistant editor at a small press who explained that he was leaving to become the top editor of his own even smaller press, and that he would like to see my complete manuscript. Two weeks later, I had a book deal, and a whopping two hundred and fifty dollar advance, plus the promise of five personal copies I could sell on eBay once the three hundred thirty-three hardcovers were all snapped up.

As it turns out, there is no such thing as bad publicity, as the book did sell out in a week, despite not even having been edited or published yet. Despite the fact that I was a nobody. People were literally pre-ordering the book in order to burn it, and put the video of the fire on YouTube. I didn’t even bother dreading the post-publication reviews, since it wasn’t as though there were any more copies to sell.

When the book came out, there was a little burst of excitement in our corner of social media, a couple reviews, an invitation to the Summer Tentacular, and that was it. Except for the occasional blog essay, an abortive haiku cycle that topped out at three, and two short stories of fewer than 2000 words each, I’ve produced nothing. I did turn my novel into a cheap ebook on Kindle and that does generate some money. I wonder where it will go now.

Colleen asked, “What’s going to happen to him?”

Not a lot, I thought.

The police officer—I presume it was a police officer anyway; it was a new voice, male, with the sort of accent I associate with Italian-Americans from New England—let the question hang for a long moment. “We’ll contact his family. They’ll make the decisions.”

“Can I go back to the hotel now? Do you have any more questions for me?” Colleen asked. Then to herself she said, “I just want to go home.”

“You’re going back to the hotel.” There was steel in the cop’s voice now. “Nobody involved in your, uh, little literary conference is going anywhere right away.”

“But—”

“Murder,” the voice I decided was the medical examiner said. “Murder, mutilation, and...”

“And a hotel full of, you know. Satanists or something,” the cop said.

“We’re not Satanists,” Colleen said.

“You’re all persons of interest,” the medical examiner said.

“Interesting persons,” the cop said.

“You can’t keep us in the hotel forever,” Colleen said. “The reservations all run out on Sunday. People have jobs, families...”

“We’ll do our best to get questioning out of the way, but if we don’t want you or anyone else leaving town, you won’t be leaving town,” the cop said.

“Plenty of room in holding, upstairs,” the medical examiner said.

“Are you suspecting me of...doing this?” Did Colleen gesture toward me, point to my ruined face? Why was I still out on display? This wasn’t neat like on television, where the drawer slams shut and we cut to another scene of two detectives walking briskly down a hallway. “I barely even knew this guy!”

“Yeah, you were sharing a room. Do you often share hotel rooms with guys you barely even know?” said the cop.

“No.”

“So this was a special occasion?”

“I don’t feel comfortable answering these questions,” Colleen said. “Am I a suspect? I want a lawyer.”

Maybe the cop shrugged. There was a shrug-sized gap in the conversation. “You’re free to go for now. We’ll see you back at the hotel.”

“Aren’t you going to give me a ride back? I’m not from Providence. I barely even know where I am.”

Then the rollers under my tray carriage started moving. As I was pushed back into the drawer, the medical examiner muttered, as if he knew I could somehow hear him, “That makes two of us.” Then, finally, the door closed and the black got blacker.

What was the last thing I saw? Literally saw, I mean, not just sensed. I see black, a black that feels cold, but even this blackness is just my decaying mind trying to give me something to look at, since I spent forty years looking at things. The last thing I saw was...

A man. He was old, older than me anyway. White. A great wrinkled hand. There was something in it. Not the knife, but something. It had to have been somebody from the con—we had the run of the house, and thanks to whatever the opposite of political correctness is, all the hotel staff were Hispanic, except for the pretty young girls and sharp young men at check-in and the concierge desk.

Nobody would bother to attend the Summer Tentacular from the outside world just to kill me and cut my face off. I remember every stupid little thing I’ve done or said so clearly, except for the last three minutes of my life. Trauma, or my brain trying to protect me even as it runs out of air and electrochemical juice and dies?

Who was that, looming over me in the hallway? Why couldn’t I run? Who had blocked the doors? Who had held me down?

8. The Unnamable

Back at the hotel, dawn was breaking and Colleen was at liberty to move about freely. Police—detectives obvious from their bearing and suit jackets, and plenty of uniformed officers—prowled outside the dealers’ room, in the lobby, and even by the restrooms, interviewing various con attendees about what they might have seen or heard. Panels were cancelled, hastily relaunched somewhere else, and then cancelled again when police officers stationed themselves by the doors, notepads in hand. One man was led away in cuffs, shouting about his wrists and his rights, but he had just been selling pirate DVDs under a table holding pewter dragons and faux basalt Cthulhus.

Colleen had nobody to talk to.

She opened her phone and checked Twitter for the hashtag #sumtent—it was the usual mix of in-jokes, announcements, and pictures of smiling people in black t-shirts until about two hours prior, when all the activity stopped. With some semi-frantic thumb action, Colleen followed a number of the fans and writers who had followed her back when her avi was of her face, and then sent out some Direct Messages reading MEET ME AT INNSMOUTH.

Colleen took the stairs down to the hotel basement, and its pool. She stopped at the door, frozen for a long moment. A killer on the loose, a girl headed down to a pool alone. What slasher flick isn’t like this? A glance around the large room revealed nothing that could be immediately made into a weapon, but Colleen experienced a brainwave and grabbed a towel and a five-pound dumbbell being used as a doorstop, then wrapped the latter into the former. A few practice whirls over her head were enough to satisfy her. She set up a deck chair, pulled out her phone again, and waited to see who would figure out where “Innsmouth” was supposed to be.

The first person to arrive was someone she didn’t quite recognize at first. He was an older man, with a Santalike beard, and unlike many con attendees he dressed nicely, if inappropriately for the pool area, in a suitjacket, suspenders, and tie. When he spoke, Colleen recognized him—he was the Christian fellow who had been dressed as Cthulhu during the opening ceremonies.

“It’s tragic, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Colleen said. Then she pursed her lips and asked, “Is tragedy the right word? That makes it sound like a natural disaster.”

The man retrieved a deck chair and had a little trouble unfolding it. “To be perfectly honest, I was speaking of the disruption to the convention. I thought you were summoning people down here in order to launch a guerilla panel on ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth.’ It is my favorite of Lovecraft’s stories. I’m Ronald Ranger—are you familiar with my fanzine, Dreamlands?”

“Is that still...going? I saw some issues for sale in the dealers’ room, but they all seemed pretty...”

“Oh, I stopped publishing it years ago,” Ranger said, leaning back onto the deck chair and crossing his ankles. “But it is that for which I am most famous.” He threw out his hands, embracing the empty room and smiling. “And look at me now!”

“Did the police talk to you yet, Mr. Ranger?” Colleen asked.

Ranger snapped his head toward her. “Is that what this is about? Are you wearing a wire?”

Colleen put up her hands, and immediately regretted it. Her loaded towel was on the floor, just out of immediate reach. “Whoa, whoa, take it easy. They interviewed me; I had to identify Panossian’s body and everything.”

“Knew him well, did you?” Ranger said, without even a hint of a question.

“No, but we were sharing a room,” Colleen said. “Platonically.”

Ranger hmmphed and made to push himself up off the deck chair when Asparagus Head poked his head into the room and asked, “What’s going on?”

“Charles!” Ranger called out to him. Then he turned back to Colleen, and said, “Have you met Charles yet? He’s an artist, an editor, a bookbinder and dealer in rare artifacts, and an incredible weird poet. Not incredibly weird poet mind you, but a poet of the weird.”

“Yeah, I get it,” Colleen said.

“This isn’t a bad location for the Innsmouth panel,” Charles said. “Especially given last year.”

Another pair of con-goers were loitering by the entrance to the pool area, and Ranger waved them in, his smile wide and gestures full of fellow-feeling. “Come in, come in! We will have the panel after all.”

“There’s an Innsmouth panel every year?” Colleen asked. “I’m afraid to ask how much there could possibly be to say about it, or what happened last year.”

“Oh, we had a heckler. Two, in fact,” Ranger said over his shoulder as he rolled his hands about, drawing people to pull up chairs around him.

“I was trying to show off my latest work—a set of chapbooks actually bound in dried, flattened squid—and I kept being interrupted by people making dumb jokes,” Charles said.

“And I was constantly interrupted by dumb intellectual commentary,” Ranger said.

“This will work out better without Bhanushali,” Charles said, smiling at Colleen. Somehow the skin on his face was so taut that when he smiled, the point of his asparagus-shaped head rose a centimeter or two. “She just needs to be on every panel, and when she’s on a panel, suddenly she’s in charge. She made a few of us uncomfortable as well. I love her to death, but she ain’t for everyone, ya know?” Charles was one of the few Tentacular members not from New England or at least the Northeast. Somewhere between Virginia and Tennessee, Colleen decided.

The room was filling up quickly, though Colleen didn’t recognize most of the people, not even from Twitter. Ranger was on his feet shaking hands and patting backs, like someone who had seen a large number of television shows about unctuous politicians. He made his way back to the entrance to the pool room and slid the doors shut. The crowd, about a dozen people, all white and mostly male, settled down instantly. Colleen stood up and Ranger nodded to her, and she nodded back.

“Well, let’s begin!” he started. “Race and Innsmouth. Just look at the news—wasn’t it obvious that Lovecraft, for all he is described as a ‘racist,’ was actually on to something? Both locally and internationally, so-called ‘people of color’ are more likely to be collectivist, more likely to be violent, and—”

“Bullshit,” Colleen said, loud. Her voice echoed along the titles.

Ranger continued over her, “and less likely to practice that which we call civilization. If we are to conduct a civilization, we have to understand that when we embrace multiculturalism, we embrace degen—”

Colleen grabbed her loaded towel, swung it high, and then slammed it against the ground. The floor tile broke like a tooth. She hoisted the towel again. This time, Ranger stopped talking.

“This is not the Innsmouth panel,” she said. All eyes were on her. She scanned the audience. Innsmouth breathers bubbled up in her head, but she managed to keep herself from saying it. “I wanted to talk to people about the fucking murder we had here this morning.”

“The police are handling that,” Ronald Ranger said.

“How do you know it was this morning?” Charles asked, his drawl slow and careful.

“I went to identify the body. I overheard some things,” Colleen said.

“Why were you the one to identify the body?” someone else asked.

“They were sharing a room,” Ranger snapped.

“So you were the last one to see him alive!” Charles said.

“This has to be obstruction of justice,” came another voice from behind her.

“You should leave,” Ranger said, pointing to Colleen. “You’re obviously the prime suspect.”

“I barely even knew Panossian,” Colleen said. “Why would I kill him, especially so horrifically? If I were a suspect, the police wouldn’t have brought me back to the hotel, would they?”

“Who do you think killed him, then?” Charles said. His tone was even now, thoughtful. He exchanged a glance with Ranger.

“I don’t know,” Colleen said. “I thought...we could compare notes.”

“I assure you that nobody here would kill Panossian,” Ranger said. He took a deep breath. “It’s essentially statistically impossible. Our demographic doesn’t commit violent crimes against members of our demographic. Middle-aged, middle-class white men have other tools at their disposal to create and maintain social hierarchies—we don’t resort to deadly violence against one another.”

Colleen just had to laugh. “Oh, is this the racist caucus! Now I get it. You’re a bunch of idiots.” She stood up, and swung her loaded towel over her shoulder. “I suppose it was my mistake for tweeting to strangers, but you know, there is a killer on the loose, and you people want to have some kind of Ku Klux Klan book club kaffeeklatsch. Or do you not care because Panossian wasn’t white?”

Someone murmured, just loud enough to hear, “Are Armenians white?” And then the conversation took off: “It’s part of Asia Minor,” “Close to the Caucus mountains, so Caucasian,” “They were called ‘Asiatic Turks’ in Lovecraft’s time...”

“Oh, of course he was white,” Colleen said. “I was just fucking with you.” Then she paused for a moment. “White-passing at any rate, as we used to say in graduate school. Did any of you think he wasn’t white before you heard his name?” She glanced around the room. “Only four hands up, see?”

Charles bowed his head. “I suppose you could say that Panossian lacked the ‘Innsmouth look,’” he said, wringing a few chuckles from the assembled.

“Unlike some people I can mention, Asparagus Head.”

“Your hair is green!” Ranger sputtered, pointing at Colleen as though he had just noticed her dye job. “What are you trying to prove? Are you edgy?” He started twitching his fingers to signal air quotes. “Are you some sort of ‘hipster’ type coming here because you were told on the Internet Lovecraft was ‘cool’? And you dare call my friend Charles Cudmore ‘Asparagus Head’?”

“Enjoy your Klan meeting, racist,” Colleen said. She headed toward the door, but two men blocked her path. They were tall and round, like bouncers, and one was already wheezing with excitement.

Colleen was calm. “You think you can keep me here?”

“You can’t just call someone a racist and then walk off, all lade-da,” one of the men said. “That’s a very serious accusation. You owe us a debate!”

“Oh, let her go,” Asparagus Head—Charles Cudmore—said. “She’s just a nitwit looking to sleep her way to the middle.”

“If she was Panossian’s girl,” the wheezing man said, “she actually slept her way down. Forget the bottom of the barrel, what happens when you lift the barrel up?”

“Tell you all what, why don’t I just bring one of the cops down here? Just to make sure you have your panel in peace, and don’t just spend an hour comparing notes and getting your stories straight,” Colleen said.

“Nobody here has anything to hide,” Ronald Ranger said. “You should be more concerned with people who are attempting to leave the hotel.”

“Nobody is allowed to leave,” Colleen said. “That’s what the police told me.”

“Ah,” Ranger said. “If only the police had attended the opening ceremonies to remind us all not to kill one another, then nothing would have happened to poor Panossian.” Laughter filled the room for a moment, until Colleen spoke.

“So, you think the murderer attended the opening ceremonies? Well, that narrows it down.” She licked her lips and smiled. The room was silent except for the bubbling of the pool. “Pretty much everyone here now was there then.”

“Including yourself,” Cudmore said. “And you called this meeting. So yes, please do find a police officer. If you think the Providence police will be shocked by the proceedings, you haven’t paid much attention to the news lately.”

“The police are on our side, Ms. Danzig,” Ranger said, his voice low. “They’re on the front lines every day. The average police officer can tell an innocent party from a guilty one just by taking in a person’s mien.”

“I guess I’m the innocent one, then,” Colleen said, and with that she left.

Exhaustion hit like a wave. Colleen headed back up to her room, the place where she had last seen Panossian alive. Where anyone had, she thought, but no, that wasn’t right. The killer was the last. Panossian must have made a left and moved to the elevator, unless he decided to take the steps down to meet the buyer. The room was only on the third floor, and Panossian might have wanted a little privacy. Elevators are packed with convention-goers at all hours during the Summer Tentacular.

No, Panossian may not have even gone down—he must have gone up. The body was discovered on the second floor, but it could have been moved there. The police had told Colleen nothing of the details, and the hotel moved to clean up the blood as soon as the police had given the okay. All this CSI-type stuff was giving Colleen a headache. She used her keycard, opened the door, and resolutely not looking at Panossian’s bed—was there an indentation of his shape on the blanket, does that sort of thing even happen?—went to her side of the room, threw herself onto the bed, which had not been made by the cleaning staff, and tried to sleep.

She closed her eyes and saw tentacles. They were everywhere, after all. On the name badges everyone wore, in the flower vases entwined with the usual fake hotel flowers, on most of the book covers and a good seventy-five percent of the t-shirts for sale in the dealers’ room. More than a few con-goers sported tattoo sleeves of tentacles twisting up their forearms and biceps.

Colleen had been curious to meet whomever it was Panossian was going to sell the book to, but not enough to invite herself along. That was the answer—it had to be.

Find the book, find the murderer.

No, she didn’t have to do anything. During the long interview with the police, she had explained all about the book and its cover reputedly made of leathered human skin, how Panossian had been sent a copy of it and now had arranged to sell it to...someone. It was like something out of a lurid film noir, and the cops treated it as such. They’d asked Colleen about her own relationship with Panossian (“mild online acquaintances”), prescriptions for psychiatric medication (“I don’t have to answer that...but none”), her day job, as she certainly wasn’t Stephen King or somebody, now was she (“I write SEO stuff”), what the hell SEO was (“texts designed to bring a certain web page to the front page of search engine results”), whom she thought might have done it...

I can’t imagine anyone doing something like that, is what Colleen had said.

And even the female cop laughed. Some horror writer you are, she had said.

She didn’t tell them about seeing H. P. Lovecraft by the elevators. They probably would have either arrested her for messing with them, or sent her to the psych ward for evaluation.

Colleen started cataloging the convention attendees, but quickly realized that a roll of the con membership was printed in the back of the Summer Tentacular program booklet. The police certainly had gotten one by now.

It would be pretty easy to draw lines through attendees too poor to buy the book, Colleen thought, but then she realized how foolish that was. The goal was to lure Panossian to his death, not to actually buy the book.

The book was free.

Who would want the book? Colleen certainly wouldn’t. Not everyone would. Hardcore collectors. The most extreme of the weirdoes, ones who might decide to make their own human-skin volume of some book, maybe even using Panossian’s flesh for their own private collector’s edition.

Find the face, find the murderer. Actually, that would be easier, wouldn’t it? Colleen thought. The face would need to be kept on ice, or maybe tanned immediately, in order to work. Check the security camera footage for suspiciously extensive ice machine usage, run the hallways and keep a nostril out for unusual smells. She shuddered at the latter idea. Actually, Colleen didn’t know anything about preserving human skin for tanning purposes, but it would be easy enough to find out.

The Tentacular was a strangely aggressive environment—writers jockeying for position, people bellowing at one another, men sneering at women out of some abject simultaneous attraction and repulsion. It was high school all over again, except that all the kids with a measure of social intelligence were at the homecoming dance and the kids left behind were the meatheads, glue-sniffers, nerds, and minor league bullies. Geeks who liked to show off their knowledge of esoteric subjects, the more repulsive, the better. Someone downstairs would know something about tanning human skin and the binding of books with it.

All Colleen had to do was go downstairs, carefully avoid anyone whom she had encountered down by the pool, and strike up a conversation about the horrid murder and what might happen to Panossian’s face if it were to fall into the wrong hands. Half her work was probably done already—surely every creep at the con was already discussing the murder to the extent that they could get out of police earshot.

All Colleen had to do was go back downstairs and find someone to talk to. All she had do to was go downstairs. All that required was turning around, letting her feet hit the floor and standing up, then walking over to the door and heading over to the elevator. All Colleen needed to do was get out of bed. Sleep was not coming. She might never nap again. It was better to be awake, awake and around others. She had some friends downstairs, they weren’t all horrible people—there was R.G., and the guys, and they were just downstairs. She could have lunch. If she was afraid, she could stick close to one of the uniformed officers downstairs. All she needed to do was turn around and get a good look at Panossian’s bed, and stand up, and leave.

No, she didn’t need to look over at the other bed, which Panossian had barely used and so it wasn’t really his and didn’t really count, and shouldn’t even remind her of him. She could close her eyes. Turn around, and close her eyes. No, better to close her eyes first, squeeze them tight, then turn around, then let her feet hit the floor, eyes still closed. Up, arms out as the layout of the hotel furniture was unfamiliar, and find the door. If it was the bathroom door by mistake, that was fine, it was easy to tell by touch. And the closet too, also simple to figure out. There was the door.

Colleen was out in the hallway, finally. Then as the door clicked shut behind her, she realized that she had forgotten her keycard inside. She realized that the murderer might have Panossian’s keycard.

Let him come.

When Colleen stepped off the elevator and into the lobby, she was immediately buttonholed by an anxious R.G. Gonzalez. “There you are!” she cried. “Panel!”

“They’re actually holding the women’s panel?” Colleen said.

“Yes, and it starts in three minutes. I tried tweeting to you, but you didn’t respond. Come on!” R.G. turned on her heel and reached out a hand. Colleen yanked her wrist away, but followed R.G. closely.

“Why on Earth do you give two shits about the stupid Women in the Mythos panel?” Colleen hissed in R.G.’s ear.

“I don’t,” she said. “But the con is only allowed to run the panels because there are three cops in every audience. We have to just act natural, so play along.”

The panel was not well-attended. It was R.G. and Colleen and Chloe, plus Norman, who sat himself in front of one of the two mics on the table and declared himself “the token white male oppressor,” and Hiram Chandler, who had built an impressive Stonehenge-like display of books on the table before him, obscuring his folded paper name tent and even his own face behind the haphazard, cyclopean architecture. The audience—three uniforms standing near the back, a hotel employee who was texting on his phone, and all of four legitimate attendees. Two couples, actually—a large man and a small woman, and a small man and a large woman. Mutt and Jeff heterosexuality. Colleen briefly entertained the notion that they were swingers; perhaps at the next panel they all attended, the polarity of coupledom would be reversed and the heavies would be together, with the skinnies sitting and holding hands across the aisle.

“Only four people!” Norman announced. “And five panelists. When panelists outnumber the audience, we all get to go to the bar and get a drink. So, what do you say?”

“Why are we excluding some of the people here from being members of the audience?” R.G. asked. The hotel employee shot her a thumbs-up sign.

“Actually,” Hiram Chandler said, slowly, “the tradition is that the panel moderator lead us all to the bar and buy drinks for everyone—panelists and audience members.”

“Well then, in that case, let’s get started with the panel,” Norman said. He laughed at his own joke and everyone chuckled.

“I’m the moderator,” Chloe said. “I’m the moderator of this panel.” She was quiet though, and Colleen wondered if Norman even heard her. Forget the quartet, the empty chairs that surrounded them, and the police. They surely hadn’t heard her.

“So, I just wanted to start off by saying,” Norman said, “that I am entirely in favor of more women Mythos writers, more women Mythos game-players, more women Mythos everything. The more women, the better. But, let’s face it—Lovecraft isn’t exactly woman friendly.”

“Exactly,” R.G. said. “He hardly ever wrote any female characters—”

“Lovecraft’s work deals with the sort of cosmic philosophy that women just can’t deal with,” Norman said, his voice a little louder than before.

“No, that’s not true,” Colleen said. “Bhanushali is the leading Lovecraft scholar in the world, and she’s—”

“Oh, Bhanushali,” Norman said, as if a fly or a radio transmission captured by his fillings had put the name into his brain, “clearly doesn’t understand Lovecraft. Anyone can collect letters and memorize lines of dialogue.”

“I’ve never heard Bhanushali recite much dialogue,” Hiram said.

“That’s true,” Norman said, turning to Hiram and pointing. “That’s a very good point. She doesn’t actually know the stories well enough. She’s not even on this panel.”

“I can’t imagine why not,” R.G. said.

“Not all Lovecraft is even cosmic horror,” Chloe said. “Look at his early stories like ‘The Hound.’”

“Please wait your turn,” Norman told Chloe.

“I’m the moderator,” Chloe cried.

“The topic is Women in the Mythos. ‘The Hound’ doesn’t even have any female characters. It’s just two dudes…what do they call that? An m/m story. I guess girls do like that kind of thing,” Norman said. He leaned in to the microphone before him, his wiry beard brushing loudly against it. He lowered his voice an octave and intoned. “Subtle. Homo. Eroticism.”

“‘The Hound’ is an important story,” Hiram said. “In it we find the first mention of the Necronomicon.”

“The Necronomicon!” It was the hotel employee, who was leaning against the back wall, near a table set up with pitchers full of ice water. The ice had already melted. “Like in The Evil Dead? The cover was a friggin’ face! That was some nasty shit.”

Colleen shuddered in her seat. “Now there’s a topic: human skin used to bind books,” she said.

“What does that have to do with women in the Mythos?” Chloe said. Now her voice was loud enough to be heard by everyone in the room, as was the edge of steel in her tone.

“Well…is that a woman-friendly image?” Colleen ventured. The panel was already a wreck, it couldn’t get much worse. She might as well try her best to take it over. “I’m not trying to say that women are squeamish or anything, but we’re the gender that generally embodies things. Women’s fiction is often about the body…uhm, and Lovecraft’s isn’t, really.”

“Anthropodermic bibliopegy,” Hiram said, and the other panelists turned to him.

He said it again. “Anthropodermic bibliopegy is the bookman’s term for the practice of man-skin book-binding.”

“Human skin,” R.G. said.

“There are three volumes here in town, at Brown Unversity,” Hiram continued. “An anatomy textbook from the sixteenth century—two copies of Danse Macabre, though German not French, so perhaps I should just say The Dance of Death—”

“Like in that Swedish movie?” the hotel employee called out.

“Yes!” Hiram said brightly. “Wer war der Tor, wer der Weise, Wer der Bettler oder Kaiser? Ob arm, ob reich, im Tode gleich.” He twisted his neck to look around Norman, at Colleen, nearly knocking over his book display in the process. “Are you familiar with your mother tongue, Ms. Danzig?”

“Let’s pretend that I’m not,” Colleen said.

“Who was the fool, who was the wise, who was the beggar and who was the Kaiser? Rich or poor, both equal in death,” Hiram said.

“And that brings us back to the topic of women in the Lovecraftian scene,” R.G. said. She grabbed the mic from its stand and stood up with it. “This panel is, or should be, about equality.”

“Hey, don’t hog the mic!” Norman shouted. “Equality should mean equal time for men and for women, right?”

“How about some time for me!” Chloe leaned over to speak into the other mic on the table, nudging Colleen out of the way. “I’m the moderator!”

“Well, you don’t seem very moderate,” Chandler said.

A police officer in the back stood up and raised her hand. When the panelists ignored her, she shouted in a gym-teacher tenor, “Question!”

Everyone stopped. Colleen nodded and pointed and said, “Go ahead, so long as it is a question and not one of those more-of-a-comment-than-a-question questions.” The other panelists giggled at that.

“Would you say this, uh…behavior,” the officer asked, “is typical of how these roundtable panels operate at this convention?” She was serious enough to remove a pad and pencil from her belt, flip it open dramatically, and hold the pencil aloft, ready to record the answer.

“It’s typical of how this panel operates,” R.G. said.

“It’s basically the only panel I’m on every year,” Chloe said.

“I’m new,” Colleen said.

Norman threw up his hands. “We let them talk! This is supposed to be a debate.”

“No it’s not!” said all three women on the panel, as one.

Hiram Chandler moved one of his books out of the way and snaked his hand over to the mic before Norman. “We should apologize. There was a horrific crime here last night—an acquaintance to many of us was murdered—” Norman jabbed Hiram with his apple-sized elbow. The larger man in the audience grabbed his slim partner by the wrist and nearly pulled her out of her chair. They hustled down the aisle and out the door of the conference room as the police officer spoke again:

“Acquaintance. Not friend?”

R.G. and Chloe just shrugged. “I’m new,” Colleen said.

“I’m not talking about Panossian without a lawyer present,” Norman said, and with that he stood up and walked off to the conference room’s side entrance, avoiding the police officer. Hiram gathered up his books as best he could and waddled after Norman, muttering to himself.

The police officer walked to the front row, sat down, folded her arms, and said, “Okay, ladies. Women in the…mythic times, was it?”

“Mythos,” R.G. said, as Chloe’s mouth opened just a moment too late.

After the panel R.G. and Colleen headed over to the hotel bar, which had changed somehow. All the lights had been turned on, as if 4 p.m. was last call, and the blinds had been opened, affording a view of the hotel parking lot. It was less crowded than usual for the Tentacular, and much of the floor was dominated by one large man, a baby-faced fellow in a suit, peering at his phone. He smelled like a cop to Colleen. R.G. and Colleen quickly found a table and sat themselves.

“More police rules,” R.G. said. “They don’t want people congregating in dark corners.”

“Is this how murders in hotels usually work?” Colleen asked.

“Feels more like a psychological experiment than anything else, don’t you think? Are they going to keep us here past Sunday night? The hotel people wouldn’t like that, and half the nerds here are doubling and tripling up in the rooms—they can’t afford to stay. I can’t afford to stay! It’ll be a huge slumber party at Phantasia’s house, or Cob’s, if they don’t find the perp.”

“The perp,” Colleen repeated.

“I really do watch too much television,” R.G. said.

“We should…”

The idea hung in the air for a moment, unarticulated.

“…find the perp?” R.G. said.

Colleen nodded once, and R.G. laughed.

“Geez, Nancy Drew! How are we supposed to do that?”

“Make a list of Panossian’s enemies, narrow down who might have wanted his book—”

R.G. waved a hand. “Panossian didn’t have any enemies.” Then she stopped, peered at Colleen, and asked, “What book?”

“He didn’t have enemies? Nobody liked him; he was a fucking jerk. Nobody even seems sad that he’s dead. Hell, nobody seems surprised that he’s dead. And it wasn’t just some kind of mugging gone wrong. Muggers don’t tear off someone’s face.”

“Face?”

Colleen froze. Of course the police hadn’t made a general announcement. Some things were likely kept secret in the hope of tripping up the murderer. But they hadn’t told her not to tell anyone what she had seen in the morgue. Maybe the police secretly wanted her to spill the beans, and somehow that would flush out the killer.

“Panossian’s face was sliced off. I identified him by his clothes and stuff,” Colleen said. “The…underneath looked pretty much like you’d expect. It was weird. The eyes, it would be wrong to say that his eyes were ‘open’ because there was no closing them. They were…on display, I guess.”

“Jesus,” R.G. said. She made the sign of the cross, like a Catholic might. “I haven’t done that in years, but Jesus.” There was another silence, then she said, “Maybe it’s not him.”

“Well then, he’s the killer, right, and wearing his victim’s clothes. So where is he? But c’mon, R.G., it was him. Really. You can volunteer to corroborate his identity if you want. They haven’t buried him yet.”

“I know,” R.G. said. “It’s just so incomprehensible. So…” She licked her lips. “You mentioned a book.”

“Arkham.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you see it?”

“I didn’t want to look…” Colleen said. Then she realized that she had ended up seeing much worse. She shuddered. Worse would be coming. She could feel it in her spine, where the marrow just froze. She looked across the table at R.G. A stranger, friendlier than most, but wouldn’t that be the kind of person who could lure Panossian down a hallway and into a stairwell? A friendly face?

Not that R.G. would be able to get Arkham over the border.

“Who would want Arkham? That would be the way to find the killer.”

R.G. gestured widely, pointing to everyone. “Who wouldn’t?”

“Me! It’s gross,” Colleen said.

“Not to everyone,” R.G. said. She was talking quickly now, growing agitated. “Clearly not to someone who could also slice someone’s face off their skull. Can you fucking imagine? Did it happen after Panossian was dead, or when he was still alive—”

Colleen raised a hand, and had to fight to keep herself from clamping it over R.G.’s mouth. “Take it easy. I want to be able to think this through.”

“Tell the cops.”

“I did.”

“So why aren’t they searching the rooms?”

“Would you keep a prize like Arkham in your room after killing someone to get it?” Colleen asked.

“They should be CSI-ing this place like crazy!” R.G. said.

Colleen shrugged. “It likely doesn’t work like it does on TV.”

“Wait,” R.G. said. “You said that someone killed Panossian to get the book—how do you know?”

“Well, I guess I was presuming,” Colleen said.

“Maybe the book was just a way to get Panossian alone, so he could be murdered. Panossian’s face was the prize, and the book not important at all. It could be in the bushes in the rear parking lot. Just because it’s valuable to most of the weirdoes here doesn’t mean it was valuable to the murderer.”

“But the killer could sell it, so wouldn’t he keep it for a while?”

“Who would he sell it to? A book collector who doesn’t mind framing himself for murder?”

“Or it could be a local,” Colleen said. “Just go home and hide the book there, or put it in a storage unit, or...”

“It’s a book. Even in a state as small and dumpy as Rhode Island, it’s easy to hide something the size of a book. Forget the book. If you want to figure out who did it, and God knows why you would, focus on the motive,” R.G. said.

Drinks came and they drank in silence. Then R.G. broke the silence. “Why?”

Colleen peered up at R.G., eyes focused, though the rest of her face gave way to confusion. “I...” She hesitated.

Then she began again. “Pulp fiction, baby,” Colleen said. She swallowed the rest of her gin and tonic in a gulp and slammed the glass down against the table. “If the Necronomicon were real, would you peek inside?”

“Oh come on, you didn’t even want to look at Arkham!”

“I know, and I regret it. I should have looked. I should have gone with Panossian. Maybe I could have saved him, or run away after seeing the killer’s face, or talked him out of it. Who knows what Panossian said to the guy. It’s just, you know, it’s strange,” Colleen said.

“I just want to know; that’s what it boils down to. I’ve been talking to these people for years, practically living with all of them in one big nerdy frat house for a day and a half, and someone here is a killer. I want to figure out who it is, because I want this to be meaningful somehow,” Colleen said. “It’s not some monster, it’s not some mad cultist under the influence of the Great Old Ones, it’s just a psychopath, right here, in this hotel. Hell, maybe right here in this bar. I can’t go on, pretending that this is a normal situation and attend panels and talk about how racist Lovecraft was, or how awful Clark Ashton Smith’s poetry was, or if the Internet means that photocopied fanzines are dead.”

Colleen folded her hands on her lap and then looked down at them. A moment later, she jerked up her chin and said, “Of course they’re dead!”

“Okay,” R.G. said. “And what will you do if you find yourself in some hallway, surrounded by murderers looking to take your face off?”

“I’m not like Panossian. I can take care of myself. The guy was a wreck; he couldn’t even pay his rent. He was easy pickins.”

“Now you sound like a predator,” R.G. said.

“Not a predator, but not prey either.”

R.G. asked, “So now what?”

Colleen wanted to confide in R.G., to tell her about the man in the shadows she had seen, but it wouldn’t be persuasive. She’d sound like a ninny, or a lunatic inserting herself in somebody else’s tragedy.

“Now,” Colleen said. “I’m going to lean on Chloe.” She stood up, turned on her heel, and started walking. Before R.G. could say anything, Colleen looked back over her shoulder and said, “I’ll pay you back for the drink!”

Cob and Phantasia were locals. R.G. had said so. It was a good enough place to start as any. Locals could hide the book at home, and then be back at the hotel in minutes. They were both also a head taller than Colleen, but Chloe, she was a bundle of twigs wrapped in a velour cape and just over five feet tall. She checked the program guide, and saw that Ms. Phantasia was on a panel called “Lovecraft: Queer or Just Weird?” Surely Chloe would be there as well.

Of course, so would some police officers, perhaps including the female officer that had intervened at the previous panel. Being a bully was harder than it looked. How did junior high school boys do it, how did they always manage to be in the right place to knock the book out of someone’s hands or to snap a bra strap? They’d just swoop in.

So Colleen waited. The carpeted hallways leading to the various conference rooms were largely empty except for a few loiterers looking at their cell phones, or sitting on the floor, backs to the wall, reading a book. If people had been keen to approach Colleen yesterday because she was new, and a woman, they gave her a wide berth now. Panossian’s murder was like a fog bank, obscuring her presence. These strangers didn’t dare make eye contact.

Of course, they never made much eye contact anyway.

If Chloe came out by herself, Colleen would sidle up and whisper in her ear, then lead her away. If Chloe came out trailing Ms. Phantasia, Colleen would have to act effusive and interested, and lure Chloe away for some “girl talk,” though Phantasia might still decide to tag along.

The panel hadn’t been that well-attended, and when it ended only a few people trickled out into the hallway. Chloe was among them, and she turned and trotted down the hall toward the restrooms. Colleen slid in behind her and matched Chloe footstep for footstep.

The women’s room was a great place for an ambush, as it was almost certainly going to be empty save for the two of them. Colleen smiled at the thought of surprising Chloe, of looming over the smaller woman in the mirror as she looked up from washing her face, but that didn’t happen. Chloe got to the door, opened it, turned around, and smiled as she held it open for Colleen. “Hey there,” she offered.

“Hey,” Colleen said. “Uhm, I’m just going to wash my hands.”

“Good…” Chloe was equally confused.

Colleen ran the water but didn’t wash her hands. She didn’t want slippery fingers. When Chloe opened the door to her stall, Colleen pivoted on the ball of her left foot and with the right slammed the door shut. She took a moment to admire her purple Doc Martens. “Hey!”

“What do you know about Panossian?” Colleen braced herself with both hands pressed against the sink shelf. Both arms behind her and one leg extended was not the best position in the world, but she didn’t think she’d have to hold it for very long.

“What? Let me out!” Chloe threw herself against the stall door but bounced right off.

“He was killed yesterday! What do you know? What have you heard?”

“I heard he was killed; we all did! They questioned everyone.”

“Tell me what you didn’t tell the police!”

“I didn’t tell the police anything!” Chloe said.

“Exactly!”

Chloe dropped to her knees, and slid under the stall to the next, and then the next. Colleen brought her leg down and rushed to meet Chloe. She managed to wiggle out from under the stall and onto the floor as Colleen met her. Chloe grabbed Colleen’s ankles, then wrapped her legs around Colleen’s legs. Colleen tried to kick, but lost her balance and fell backward. Chloe slithered atop Colleen, her tiny fists clenched.

“I’m gonna fuck you up,” Chloe said. Then she unclenched her right hand and showed off her long nails. Her own palm was bleeding. Colleen bucked hard, got a leg up, slammed her right calf into Chloe’s face, and sent her tumbling to the floor. Colleen went to grab Chloe’s wrists, but jerked back when Chloe swiped at her eyes.

“You crazy bitch,” Chloe shouted. “This place is crawling with cops! You killed Panossian!” She laughed, then sucked in a deep breath through her nostrils. Colleen jammed a thumb at her throat before she could scream for help, then sat on Chloe, using all her weight to pin the smaller woman.

“Where is the book?” Colleen whispered in Chloe’s ear. “Don’t try to fucking talk, just blink. Is the book in the hotel? Two blinks for yes, three blinks for no.”

Chloe’s face was bright red, and wet with sweat and tears. She blinked twice, then twice more, then sniffled and blinked again, squeezing her eyes shut hard and fluttering her eyelids.

“I’m just cryin’…” Chloe managed to choke out.

“Oh fuck,” Colleen said. She sat up, taking the pressure off Chloe’s neck and letting her inhale. “What the hell is wrong with me? I’m sorry. I just…”

Chloe eased her torso out from under Colleen and wiped her face with the back of her sleeve, leaving a black domino mask of runny mascara across her eyes. “Did you love him too?” she asked. “I mean, ever. I was over him. I’m over him.” She grabbed Colleen’s arms, squeezing her biceps, but it wasn’t an attack, it was an appeal.

Colleen thought to say Yes. Chloe would open up to her, confide her fears, spill the beans. Or was Yes the poison word that would turn Chloe’s blood black and send it boiling? She shifted her weight back onto Chloe’s shins.

“I…” Colleen started. The door opened. It was the police officer from the panel.

“Pick yourselves up, girls.”

They gingerly unwound their limbs from one another, like a pair of chastened lovers, and stood up. Chloe sniffled. Colleen looked at herself in the mirror. She was a fucking wreck. It was like looking at someone else entirely, something without a name.

“Let’s take a ride.”

9. He

Dying is like breaking a tooth and holding the white shards of it in your hand. It’s a done thing; the tooth will not grow back, you cannot glue it together yourself and squeeze it back into your gums. Everything that was going to happen with the tooth has already happened, and it carries all your errors—nighttime grinding, daytime Coca-Cola, cigarettes all day every day—right on its surface.

The difference is that sometimes you can die with a full set of teeth like my old Dede did. He always credited his fine dental and physical health to hard work and soft cheese, and swore by both pillars of his existence till the day he died of a stroke, instantly and painlessly (we were told) at the age of 102, in his own home, on his own couch, in front of The Price is Right, back when Bob Barker had dark hair. That’s as good as dying gets. Death, unlike bad teeth, cannot be avoided, but goddamn I didn’t want to die like this.

But then again, who does?

Now though, I wonder if Dede’s death wasn’t as instantaneous as we were told. Was it like mine is, a seemingly interminable period of near senseless consciousness—everything closed but my ears? Imagine having to turn off every light in a high-rise office building manually, one at a time, and the elevators are broken. That’s fucking dying. That’s being already dead.

If this is the afterlife, all religion is wrong, and most atheism isn’t looking very clever anymore either. There are seven billion of you out there, and what, ten billion of us who have been through it? Ticking away somewhere in our own brains until the last tissues rot, isolated from both the world of the living and even the rest of the dead. On television, people often address the dead, but only when we’re safely buried six feet under their feet. In real life, when in the same room with a corpse, people talk to themselves.

The coroner, or assistant, or intern—whoever it was—was a chatty sort. He gave me a name: Billy No-Face. His name was Thomas. I know because he goaded himself constantly. “Come on, Thomas, clean up already.” “Thomas needs a smoke break.” Thomas is also an artist getting a certificate in natural science illustration at RISD, and he was keen to put the ruins of me in his portfolio, but the light was all wrong, and his shift almost over, and oh, he didn’t bring the right sort of pencil. “How could you be so stupid, Thomas?” An excellent question.

When I was alive, I often felt a peculiar tingling sensation when hearing certain sounds in an otherwise quiet room—that ASMR thing I mentioned previously—but I didn’t always need YouTube videos. Whispering, shortwave radio sound effects, the rats in the walls of my apartment scuttling or scratching, and pencil sketching and erasures. There are plenty of videos of these sounds online, some looping for ten or twelve hours. They put me on the edge of orgasm and then to a blissful sleep, most nights. It didn’t matter how lonely I was, or how hungry, or even if my Internet or electricity was paid up, I had a guaranteed half-hour of ecstasy every night so long as it wasn’t so cold outside that the neighborhood vermin froze and died.

When Thomas sketched me, I heard it clearly. He was so close. But I didn’t feel a thing. No tingles, no bubbling spinal fluid, no sense of a human brain floating gently in a vat of NyQuil and sex. That’s when I really knew I was dead, when I finally looked down at my hand and saw my cracked tooth in my bloody palm. I nearly expired just then. I had this sense that I didn’t have to hang on till the last chemical reactions died out; I could flip the final light switch at any time, stop cogitating and then______. When the sound of pencil, the wrong pencil for Thomas but the right one for me, inspired no strange semi-erotic reaction, I nearly turned myself off.

He leaned over me. I could feel the tickle of his breath in my ear. “I know all about you, Billy No-Face. Panos Panossian,” he said. I couldn’t be sure, as so many of my nerves had already died, but I think he licked me.

Then the door opened and Thomas quickly dropped the sketchbook and kicked it somewhere. A rough but feminine voice said, “Hello there, Thomas. I’m bringing in a pair of bad girls for a little tough love show and tell. Hey, he’s already out.” Then I heard the sound of vomiting.

Thomas got up from his stool, muttering that this sort of thing happens all the time. I presumed he meant the puking, not the interruption of a late-night art session.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to prove,” I heard Colleen say.

“Pretty nasty handiwork,” the voice of the older woman said. Something rolled; there was a clank and a squishing sound. Thomas must have broken out a mop and bucket.

Then I heard Tracy’s voice, tentative and contrite. “Sorry. I don’t normally upchuck like this. It’s just…the smell.”

“Breathe through your mouth,” Colleen said.

They were together. Colleen and Tracy. Were they suspects? Did they have information? Were they going to confess right now, like on Law and Order or something, or turn against one another? Where my heart would have once started beating faster there was just an empty hole. I could feel my brain sizzling with anticipation, burning the “me” that I am away at the edges, like the corner of a piece of parchment held up to a candle’s little flame.

“Still think she did it?” said the older woman.

“This is really irregular, DiRonalde,” Thomas said.

“No, that is really irregular,” DiRonalde said. I’m sure she was pointing at me.

“I didn’t say that I think Chloe did it, officer,” Colleen said. “I said that I thought she knew something.”

“So you attacked her in the ladies’ room?”

“Lawyer.”

“I want to go back to the hotel,” Tracy said. “I just want to go home, really.” She’ll never be a Chloe to me. “I don’t want to press charges. I understand why Colleen is so upset.” She must have gestured toward me or something. “I mean look at him.” She started sobbing quietly. “He was so sweet.”

I’ve read that sometimes dead people moan, or burp, or make some other sort of noise thanks to air in the lungs. The cadaveric spasm, it’s called, and it sounds like the magic word a stage magician might use when pulling a zombie out of a black silk top hat. Make a wish! Cadaveric spasm! At that moment, I made a stupid wish—that my corpse would coincidentally burp or sputter.

“I’m really envious of you, Colleen,” Tracy said. “You’re published, people like you, you got to hang out with Panossian before any of this happened. I’m as upset as you are.”

“Chloe, look, it’s fine. I just, listen, you want to help? Tell Officer DiRonalde about Arkham.”

“Isn’t that a videogame?” DiRonalde asked.

“It’s an asylum for the criminally insane in the Batman universe,” Thomas offered, smugly.

“Well, it’s that now,” Tracy said. “Arkham is a town in the stories of H. P. Lovecraft. It’s sort of a cross between Salem, Massachusetts, and Providence. There’s a college in it, called Misktanoic, which is a stand-in for Brown University.”

“So?” DiRonalde said.

“That’s not what I mean, Chloe,” Colleen said. “It’s a book. A book bound with human skin. Panossian was sent a copy by its author, who handmade it, and was looking to sell it. That’s when I last saw him. I tried to tell the police about it, but they thought I was crazy.”

“Did you see the book?” DiRonalde asked.

“No, I was too grossed out to look at it.”

“I’ve heard about Arkham,” Tracy said, “but I thought it was just some sort of hoax or urban legend.” Nothing happened for a moment, then she added, “Because it just sounds ridiculous. It’s something some dirtbag kid who listened to too much Iron Maiden would think is cool.”

“If neither of you have seen the book, maybe it doesn’t exist and our friend here was trying to pull a scam on someone,” Thomas said. “And they got mad and killed him.”

“And cut off his face?” DiRonalde said. “Leave the police work to the police, son.”

“So what’s your theory?”

“I’m a humble uniformed officer, not a detective,” DiRonalde said, “but how about this—a love triangle? Two women scorned. They combine their efforts and kill their former lover. Then they have a falling out, and get into a fight in the ladies’ room of the same hotel where they killed their lover, because to put it plainly most murderers aren’t too smart, and people who lack self-control are the ones most likely to commit crimes of passion.”

I didn’t quite feel a hand on me, but there was something, a sense of downward pressure and movement somehow, as though I were wrapped in a dozen thick blankets. “This is not the kind of corpse left behind by a secondhand book deal gone bad, or even fraud.”

“What if someone wanted to turn his face into a book?” Tracy said. “The cover, I mean. They could just stretch the face over a copy of his novel, and make a unique edition of one, right? There are supposedly a few copies of Arkham out there, but that’s just skin, from anyone. Even another book made from someone’s face wouldn’t be exactly the same as Panossian’s, so it really would be a unique item.”

“It really would be also crazy,” Thomas said.

“Of course it would be crazy,” Colleen said. “But that’s what we’re dealing with, right? A crazy person who didn’t even try to dispose of the body. How else to prove that the face was Panossian’s? It had to be news, had to be something done in public, or almost in public.”

“You two girls seem to be on the same page,” DiRonalde said.

“Well, it makes sense,” Tracy said.

“It also makes sense if you two killed him for his face and were looking to put it on a book. He wouldn’t suspect either of you of wanting to kill him—men almost never think women are dangerous.”

There was another long silence. Then Tracy asked, “Are we under arrest?”

“Shut up, Chloe.”

“Do you have anything you want to say?” DiRonalde said.

“I just want to go back to the hotel,” Tracy said.

“‘I just want to go back to the hotel,’” DiRonalde mimicked her, speaking through her nose. “Not home, the hotel. Is there anything of interest at the hotel I should know about? In your hotel room maybe?”

“Oh, I get it,” Colleen said. “You’re searching our rooms.”

“We’re doing lots of things. Anyway, girls, you’re free to go for now. Don’t check out of the hotel, don’t leave Providence.”

“Aren’t you going to drive us back?” Tracy asked.

“Go fuck yourself,” DiRonalde said.

“What are we supposed to do!”

“Just call a cab,” Colleen said.

“Can’t we share one?”

“I need them out,” Thomas said. “Do I need to call Amato?”

There was muttering I couldn’t make out—were the girls chastened by the remark, hushed by a gesture, or was it my nervous system disintegrating?—and footsteps that echoed throughout the basement. Just me and Thomas again, and he took up his pad and started sketching.

My face. There’s something about us humans; we see faces where there aren’t any. In the façades of buildings among the windows and doors, on a plate of eggs with a strip of bacon. We want to anthropomorphize everything around us—this is why the dead shock us. We’re not quite human anymore.

A book, a book made of my face, well that would be something, wouldn’t it? If only there was such a thing as a spirit, as a soul, then perhaps I could live on, as a book, my face stretched and distended over the case, still cogitating on some level. When I finally blink out here, will my posthumous narrative take up there, wherever that flesh is now? I could see the face of my murderer when he looks upon mine, at least once.

Though I should say that lots of limited-edition collectors don’t read their fancy books. That’s what cheap reading copies and their Kindles are for. Like a serial killer with his refrigerator full of femurs and tits, book collectors only need to know that the very special books they own are their own, and nobody else’s.

Or maybe my face is already reciting its own story, in some mystic way that I’ll never be able to access. What is he up to?

Is he being dried out, doused with chemicals, stretched around a cylinder? Is he as angry as I am, or is he thrilled to finally be rid of the rest of the body, the rest of me? Is he happy to be the center of attention, which is all I wanted to be? There is no other reason to devote so much time and energy to Lovecraftiana—the subculture is a small one, and reasonably vibrant in that there are occasionally some breakthroughs into the mainstream publishing world, or some TV show or film that makes a whole other level of sense to those initiated into occult knowledge of yellowing paperbacks and in-jokes about who Cthulhu might eat first or last. We do it to find a place where we can be important.

I wonder what is happening at the Summer Tentacular. I suppose it’s no different than that daydream the living so often indulge in—what would people say at my funeral? Do I rate a memorial panel? Frankly, I’m surprised the police even care. But I did die in a hotel, and I am a bloody mess. Where the hell is my face? Where the hell is Panossian’s face?

Panossian’s face, warped and twisted so far out of recognition that he is only barely human anymore, and that is an improvement. Panossian’s face, molded and shaped into a gill-cheeked bug-eyed Innsmouthian. Pannosian’s face, that one big eyebrow finally and fatally plucked off. Panossian’s face, finally surrounded by other books and nothing else but. It’s a dream come true, an afterlife like that.

I wish I were he.

10. What the Moon Brings

Colleen and Chloe shared a cab back to the hotel. The sun was sinking and the moon was up. Chloe stared out the window, hugging the door on her side of the taxi, but she didn’t seem afraid.

“Why did you attack me?” she asked finally, keeping her gaze out the window.

“I think you know something about Panossian’s murder,” Colleen said.

“I already talked to the detective,” Chloe said.

“What detective?”

“What do you mean what detective?” Chloe asked. “The detective who has been interviewing everyone. Cob knows him or something, so he’s been pretty cool with it. Didn’t you get interviewed back at the hotel?”

“No…not yet anyway. Maybe they skipped me because they made me go to the morgue. Listen Chloe, I’m just trying to find out what happened. That’s why, you know…we had our altercation.”

“Is that why, or did you just think you could pick on me and get away with it? Fuck you, Danzig. I’m used to it. I’m used to people shitting on me constantly. There’s nothing you can do to me that hasn’t been done by a better class of fucks than you, you fuck.”

The cab driver glanced in the mirror. Colleen met his eyes and mouthed the word Sorry.

“I still think you know something about Panossian’s murder. I think he was killed for his copy of Arkham, and I think that Ms. Phantasia, who is local, might be hiding the book at his house.”

Chloe laughed a little Chihuahua bark of a laugh. “Fanny doesn’t have a house, moron. He lives with his father in a studio apartment.” She turned her head and wrinkled her nose at Colleen. “Good luck finding a book there. You ever see that old black and white TV show, The Honeymooners? You know how they have a table and two chairs and a stove and an icebox? That’s what Fanny’s apartment looks like. It’s why I like him.”

“How about Cob?”

Chloe shrugged. “I haven’t been to Cob’s house. If I had to guess, he rents a closet somewhere and hangs upside-down on the clothing rack during daylight hours.”

“Why is it that nobody seems hurt, or upset, or afraid, or even confused about this murder?” Colleen asked. The cabbie’s eyes widened. “Turn on the news station after you drop us off,” Colleen told him.

“I am upset. I almost cried back in that horrible morgue. I was going to cry in the restroom when you waylaid me too,” Chloe said. “Why are you going apeshit Nancy Drew on this—just let the police handle it. They know what they’re doing. They have fingerprints and evidence and stuff, I’m sure. You should worry about yourself, Colleen.”

Colleen gave Chloe a side-eye. “Oh yeah.”

“After what you did to me, you’re going to have to suck a whole lot of cock to get your career on track. A whole lot of cock.”

“Whatever,” Colleen said. The cabbie looked in the mirror again, his mouth open to say something, but he shut it again.

“Lovecraftians stick together. You’re new. I’ve been around the block a few times. You attacked me.”

“I should have left you back at the station house. Let Phantasia and his dad take the bus to pick you up.”

“What’s Lovecraft?” the cabbie said. “A new strip joint? Haw haw. You girls sound like you’re into partying.”

“We’re into taking your hack ID down and calling the taxi company,” Chloe said.

“She’s into slicing dudes’ faces off,” Colleen said, pointing at Chloe with her chin.

“And here is the Hotel Bierce, ladies,” the cabbie said as he turned the wheel and slid into the hotel parking lot. “No need to tip, just get the fuck out of my car, you lunatics. And tell whatever the hell convention is going on this weekend that there ain’t gonna be no more cabs picking up or dropping off.”

“Fuck you, pal. I’ll just take an Uber,” Chloe said, and she stepped out of the cab and slammed the door hard.

Colleen paid with a handful of wrinkled bills. “There’s a tip in there somewhere, really. Sorry—I’m not with these people.”

The lobby was crowded with uniforms and convention goers. Colleen glanced around for a friendly face, but, seeing none, headed to the elevator bank. Then she heard a voice boom out, “Ms. Danzig!”

Colleen turned and saw an older man, balding, well-groomed, tall and swaggering like a former bodybuilder who hasn’t quite gone to seed yet, striding purposefully toward her. His black Tentacular t-shirt fit on him like it was sprayed on. Behind him was that large baby-faced man in the suit, who looked up from his phone to see that the conversation he was conducting was over.

“Yes?”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Let’s say I don’t,” Colleen said.

“David Armbruster, I’m the co-chair of the Summer Tentacular this year. I’ll need your badge.” He held out a hand.

“Sure, why?” She had taken off her badge at the police station, so had to pat her jacket pockets to find it.

“So I can tear it up,” Armbruster said. “You’re barred from the Summer Tentacular, starting immediately, for life. Also, you are barred from purchasing a membership at Necronomiville, and also Yuggoth Days up in Vermont.”

“Yuggoth Day—wait, why am I banned?”

“You assaulted a fellow member of the convention, on the grounds of the hotel, during the convention. Detective Amato received a full report and just told me everything. You should have taken your grievances outside. Ma’am, you could have taken your grievances to me. I would have had the both of you in sixteen-ounce sparring gloves before a Ustream feed in twenty minutes.”

Colleen handed over her badge. “Fine. I can’t believe you’re even continuing to run the con—and I do mean run the con—given that there was a murder here last night.”

“Panos Panos Panossian will be missed,” Armbruster said. “By whom, I know not, but surely by someone. I’m teasing, Ms. Danzig. I believe that dark humor helps us get through trying times in our lives. I’ve had my disagreements with Panossian, but I wouldn’t wish his fate on my worst enemy, which he wasn’t, though he did seem to dedicate his life to climbing the hit parade charts of my antipathy.

“Speaking of Mr. Panossian, the room in which you are currently booked is in his name, and clearly he isn’t here to present his credit card and check out on Sunday morning, so you’ll have to remove your belongings immediately so that the room can be cleaned and prepared for another guest. I’ll have you know that the Tentacular has the run of the house this weekend, so the Hotel Bierce is at one hundred percent capacity.”

“So I’ll just check back in to the same room.”

Armbruster said, “I have already booked the room for myself. Mrs. Armbruster has complained that when I am not in my own bed at home I snore too loudly. Also, the police are concerned about the possibility of lookie-loos and souvenir seekers. Apparently, you shared a theory that Panossian was mutilated after death in order to create a book?”

“Something like that...but where am I going to sleep?”

“Ms. Danzig, there are many hotels in Providence. It’s the capital and largest city of the state of Rhode Island.” With that, he lifted her badge, grasped it with both hands, and tore it neatly in half, plastic sheath and all.

Upstairs, the room had definitely been tossed. The drawers were open, the towels spread out on the bathroom floor, the sheets undone from both beds, and Panossian’s stuff had been rifled through. There wasn’t much spilling out of the small travel bag—a cheap paperback of a book called Zod Wallop, two identical pairs of black jeans and some t-shirts, a toothbrush, and his badge. Colleen was startled for a moment before realizing that it was the badge for the prior year’s Summer Tentacular. That’s how frequently Panossian had occasion to use, or clean out, his overnight bag.

Her own belongings had been similarly manhandled. Clothes were everywhere, and her undergarments separated from the rest of her clothes and placed neatly on the small desk in the corner of the room. Just one more humiliation, she supposed. The books she had purchased—thankfully none of them all that pricey—were left splayed open and face down, as if some cop had flipped through them one at a time, and then chucked them over his shoulder when he grew bored with the text. And as I ran along the shore, crushing sleeping flowers with heedless feet and maddened ever by the fear of unknown things and the lure of the dead faces, I saw that the garden had no end under that moon; for where by day the walls were, there stretched now only new vistas of trees and paths, flowers and shrubs, stone idols and...ah, fuck it.

Colleen smiled despite herself as she packed up to go. She didn’t want to stay in the room anymore anyway, or the hotel...except that the cops didn’t want her to leave. She supposed she’d have to talk to one, and get permission, though if the police worked like any other bureaucracy, one person’s permission wouldn’t necessarily be communicated to the rest of the Providence PD.

Hell, a cop might say, “Sure, go ahead, check into the Ramada,” just to make it that much easier to arrest her. A thorny problem, one best solved at the bar, Colleen decided.

The Warwick was still packed, and Colleen instantly came up with a plan. Find R.G. and beg to sleep on her floor. And there she was, with Barry and Raul. For a moment, Colleen stood in the middle of the room, chewing her lower lip, contemplating where the trio might stand. They liked Panossian, or at least tolerated him, and didn’t seem to be very fond of Chloe, but R.G. at least was afraid of the police. Equivocations were useless, Colleen decided, and she strode forward and sat down in the empty chair of the four-top.

“R.G., hi. I need to stay with you. My room has been cordoned off by the police, and we’re not allowed to leave the hotel.” Barry spoke first. “That seat’s taken.”

R.G. said, “I already have someone staying in my room, and it’s a single as it is.”

“I’ll take the floor,” Colleen said.

“The floor is what’s occupied, Colleen.”

Raul said, “What did the cops do? I saw you get whisked away with Chloe.”

“We were questioned; they showed us Panossian’s body again,” Colleen said quickly. Then to R.G., “Who is rooming with you? Uh, just curious.”

R.G. made a face. “Chloe. Bhanushali asked me to watch her while you guys were, uhm, away. She’s a pretty sensitive type. She was rooming with Phantasia, of course, but they had some kind of argument.”

“He probably stretched out her fishnets or something,” Barry said. R.G. rolled her eyes.

“Do you think you’ll be safe, staying with Chloe?” Colleen asked.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” R.G. said.

Colleen hesitated for a moment. She had started the altercation, but was honestly taken aback at how quick Chloe was to fight back, to escalate. There was something about the look on Chloe’s face when she said fuck you up and held up that clawlike hand that frightened Colleen more now than when she had actually been under Chloe in the restroom.

“You know, uh, Ms. Phantasia banging on the door or something. He’s a pretty big guy,” she said.

“He wouldn’t hurt a fly,” R.G. said.

Raul spoke up. “You can stay with us, Colleen. Right, Barry?”

Barry shrugged expansively. He had very broad shoulders. “Yeah, I think we can squeeze her in.”

“Great. I’m fine with the floor,” Colleen said.

“There’s even a pretty nice chair with an ottoman in our room. It’s a double, and it can almost be a bed. You’ll be able to stretch out a bit more comfortably than on the floor.”

“Yeah, the floor is where Barry keeps his socks. He changes his socks three times a day.”

“I have sweaty feet!” Barry said. Everyone laughed.

For a moment, Colleen forgot about Panossian, forgot about the raw meat under his face, forgot about the altercations in the restroom and the elevator, forgot about everything. It was a dumb little joke, but it was enough. There’s a moment at every convention just like this one, for every member. Lovecraft, Star Trek, or Comic-Con, tradeshow or swap meet, it happens. For a candy-coated split second it happened to Colleen: why not just stay forever? Go from con to con, Thursday through Sunday, every week of the year, picking her way across the country and living out of a bag. Write on her laptop in the late evenings, and collect the paltry sums short stories and small press novels pay out via her PayPal account. She was a professional writer now, in some small way, and that meant that she could attend the conventions for free, and that she could eat most of her meals in the panelist green room. A billion people on Earth survive on much worse diets than baby carrots and Skittles and soda pop and oh-thank-God-they’re-vegan Oreos, and when a real meal was necessary, there was always a fan or two with no idea how to spend the money they made as sysadmins for third-tier public universities except on dinners with the real-life genuine writers they admired. Monday through Wednesday would be travel days—Amtrak, Greyhound, Craigslist carpools. Hotels had fitness centers, laundry facilities, Internet, maids, free coffee. She could get some airline credit cards, join a rewards club, rack up hundreds of thousands of points. That was sure to be more remunerative than the Roth IRA she couldn’t afford to open anyway. There would be gags and jokes and good times and a fair amount of being fawned over; there would be rivals to engage, controversies to weigh in on, selfies to snap. All Colleen needed to do to make it all happen was give up. No partner, just flings. No kids, just publications. No breakthrough into the real world of literature–bookstores and college speaking gigs and reviews in the Sunday papers. Just con after con, a long long con, until she either choked on a pretzel at some party or drowned in a hot tub or…until someone killed her and took her face.

She remembered that she couldn’t leave the hotel, not even for another hotel over the border in Massachusetts, where the fans were dressed like buff, sexy Klingons instead of grotesque Hefty bag Shoggoths.

“Oh God, I need some air,” she said.

“—what, and quit show business?” Raul finished his joke, and Barry and R.G. laughed. Colleen faked a titter and excused herself. On the way out of the bar, she grabbed an unguarded drink and gulped it down. The chances of it being a bullshot were pretty slim now that Panossian was dead. Instead of heading through the lobby to the front entrance, Colleen snaked past the elevator banks, down the hall, and took the rear entrance to the parking lot, where she thought she was more likely to be alone.

The summer night was sultry. Wasn’t that a line from a movie about a writer and his horrible mother? Something like it anyway. Colleen pulled out her phone to check up on social media and the #sumtent hashtag on Twitter. She was relieved to see that she wasn’t the news—nobody had @ed her, or even alluded to a “Danz” or CD. Of course, they could be talking about her off-tag, or on locked Facebook posts. She tried to find Chloe’s FB page, but realized that she didn’t know Chloe’s surname, or even if Chloe was her real first name. How did Bhanushali even know that she and Chloe would be released, and that Chloe would need a room? Someone at the police station must have called her, Colleen decided, though that answer just begged more questions.

Online, Panossian was the news. There were some RIPs, and a line from his book had been repurposed as an epitaph of sorts: If I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all...don’t be fooled. There’s no aeon strange enough for me. A few photos dug up from Tentaculars past where he stood awkwardly with Cob and Ginger J, hoisting a glass. One where he was frowning in front of a lectern, reading from a large sheet of paper. And a pic of Norman, who was a bit slimmer and linebacker buff back then, military-pressing a smiling, stick-thin Panossian overhead.

There was no discussion of the actual murder that Colleen could find, but given the users involved it was unlikely to be a matter of discretion or good taste. Were people worried about attracting the attention of the police, or the killer himself? Google News had a few wire reports about Panossian, all with the same ridiculous lede: Homicide investigators have now concluded that a man found dead in Providence’s Hotel Bierce during a horror convention on Monday was murdered.

“Good job, Holmes,” Colleen muttered to herself.

Whatever Colleen had drunk was snaking its way back up her esophagus. She hadn’t eaten all day, and had no appetite for it, but was feeling a little light-headed. She had some almonds in her purse and snagged a handful to munch on. She looked absently into the parking lot as she swallowed. The Tentacular really did have the run of the house, as Armbruster had put it. Almost every car in the lot had some kind of window decal or bumper sticker referencing Lovecraft, Cthulhu, or at lest the Goth scene. MY OTHER CAR is A MI-GO BRAIN CANISTER and CTHULHU ’08: WHY VOTE FOR THE LESSER EVIL? were especially popular. Odd, she thought, that there were no 2012 Presidential bumper stickers on the cars in the lot, though plenty of stickers stamped 2016 were in the dealers’ room. Then she remembered something she had read in a ’zine once—Panossian had claimed that the bumper sticker was racist as it somehow implicated President Obama as a worse choice than the world-consuming Cthulhu. It had led to a major debate about satire and racism and politics and Panossian’s personality, and the community had drawn a number of collective conclusions: satire good, racism bad, politics bad, Panossian’s personality obnoxious. For his part, Panossian had admitted to just “trolling” the community, though he did hasten to add that the bumper sticker, which he had first seen as a teen in 1988, really wasn’t getting any funnier. There was universal disagreement over that.

But none of the cars featured the 2012 bumper sticker. Panossian had had more influence than anyone would admit.

The Hotel Bierce had two wings and two rear exits that led to the parking lot. The door to the other exit opened and out came Bhanushali and Cob, Ginger J and Charles Cudmore, his big pointy head cutting through the sea of cars like a shark’s fin. Had they received permission to leave the hotel? The group stopped at the curb and Bhanushali looked at her watch. Then the hotel fire alarm started ringing, nearly sending Colleen jumping out of her skin. Bhanushali and her crew ran to a large SUV, one without any Lovecraftian accoutrements, and then Colleen was knocked aside by the exit door behind her swinging open. Evacuees spilled out in the parking lot, nudging Colleen along. She lost sight of the SUV until it had left the parking lot, but held up her phone and started snapping pictures randomly, trying to catch an image as the big car rolled past her.

She bulled her way out to a traffic island under a lamppost. Nobody wanted to talk to her anyway. One of the photos she had randomly snapped had captured the SUV in pretty decent detail. Zooming in didn’t reveal the exact plate numbers, but it was a boatlike Tahoe with a five-digit Rhode Island plate.

It was obvious that Bhanushali had arranged for a fire alarm to slip out of the hotel in the confusion. Cob was a local. Were they going for the book, or traveling with it now? Colleen needed to follow them, and didn’t have the time to run around to the front entrance and try to hail a cab, and that was assuming that the cabbie wasn’t true to his word and had called for an embargo against the hotel.

She saw Hiram Chandler, his knapsack heavy on his shoulders, walking toward a beat-up Honda with a Lovecraftian Jesus fish—the famous unicursal flank and tail, but with feet and a sort of large fin, and tentacles on one end and the word CTHULHU within the body of the fish—and took off after him.

“Hiram, hi!” Colleen said, reaching for her wallet. “I’d like to buy a copy of your book.”

“My book? You mean…”

“Death of the Mad Sun?”

He smiled. “Madness of the Death Sun. Close enough.” He swung his knapsack off his shoulder and got to digging.

“I’m also interested in another book. One bound with human skin. I have money,” Colleen said.

“You don’t have that much money, and I don’t have any such book,” Hiram said. He proffered a spiral-bound copy of his book, which Colleen snatched up. She shoved a handful of bills into his hand.

“I think I know where we can find one, but we have to get into your car and drive right now!” Colleen said. Hiram just stood there and blinked at her, his face ophidian.

“Bhanushali and Cob! They just left. We can still catch them,” she said. He didn’t move. “They left you out!” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a fob, and unlocked the doors with a tweet and flash of lights.

“Get in!”

Traffic was light and the Tahoe the largest thing on the road. The Honda was only four or five car lengths behind it.

“You think they have a copy of Arkham?” Hiram asked.

“Yes. Or they’re going to get one, right now.” Colleen wasn’t sure how much she should share. Hiram seemed harmless, but only in the way a heavily medicated inpatient at a lunatic asylum seemed harmless.

“But…why wouldn’t they invite me along? I’ve been friends with Bhanushali for years, and I’ve known David Cob for nearly as long. She’s a great scholar, he’s an excellent writer. They know how interested I am in unique books as well.” At the stoplight, he turned to Colleen, his lips pursed. “Is this a prank of some sort?” he asked.

Colleen smiled what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “No, no prank. Honestly, I think they even set off the fire alarm just to find a way to leave the hotel under the nose of the cops.”

“Oh, that’s right. We weren’t to leave the hotel grounds without permission. Perhaps we should turn back, or call the police and simply give them the license plate of Bhanushali’s car. That would serve her right.”

“Hey now, we don’t want anyone to get arrested,” Colleen said. “Plus we’d be implicated too, I bet. Don’t traffic lights around here have cameras?”

“I suppose they must,” Hiram said. “Why do you think they have a copy of Arkham?”

Colleen hadn’t though that far ahead. She only knew not to mention Panossian. “You know this is my first Summer Tentacular, right?”

“Sure.” Hiram said.

“And you know how sometimes people who are nervous or upset are more likely to make some admission to or confide in strangers? I’m basically a stranger to everyone. People have been acting very strangely toward me all weekend.”

“Ah, so someone spilled the beans!”

“Yes, exactly. I just had to find a way to take a look.”

Hiram smiled as he maneuvered his car through traffic, bringing it to only three car-lengths from the SUV. “You understand.”

“How else would I ever see a book bound in human skin, right?”

Hiram shook his head curtly. “No, that’s easy enough. As I mentioned today at our panel, there are several examples in university libraries and in other collections of fine books open to the public. You can just go in and ask to see them at any time. But…”

“But…?” Colleen said.

“But…” Hiram turned on his indicator and prepared to make a right turn off the highway and into a residential district, “people think that you’re some weirdo for wanting to see these books, to hold them in your hands. Even librarians, even bookmen.”

“Don’t get too close,” Colleen said. “They might see us. They probably know your car.”

“We’ll have to get close eventually, Colleen. We’ll need to introduce ourselves, think up some clever way to invite ourselves in.”

“That’s…true. Got any bright ideas?” Colleen said.

“If I’m honest, I’m nonplussed. It’s like crashing a party, isn’t it, except we’re known to the hosts who clearly have decided to go off on their own, even risking getting in trouble with the cops…are you sure this is about Arkham?”

“What else could it be about?” Colleen said automatically. Then she wanted to swallow her tongue. The question was a mistake.

“The murder of Panossian,” Hiram said, an edge in his voice.

“But…it can’t be. Leaving the hotel would basically give the cops an excuse to arrest and interrogate them. That’s the last thing Bhanushali wants.”

“True,” Hiram said. “Unless they feel the net closing in and have decided to make some sort of last-ditch attempt to…ditch!”

The SUV made a sharp left and drove into a narrow ditch, out of it, and onto a field. Hiram slowed his car and turned off the headlights. “My Lord, what are they thinking? They might be trying to bury some evidence.” He turned to Colleen and said, “You obviously misunderstood them completely. Now we’re both in danger. We should go back to the hotel immediately and tell the police what we saw.”

“Stop the car, we can just call from here, so we can tell the police exactly where we saw the SUV leave the road.” The Tahoe was about a quarter mile deep into the field, heading for the treeline.

Hiram pulled over and frowned. “Call, but do not call 911 as this isn’t an emergency. Then we’ll head back to the Bierce immediately. Better to deal with the police officers who have already seen our faces and know our circumstances.”

“I agree,” Colleen said. She looked up the non-emergency number for the Providence PD, called, waited, was routed to another number, spoke with someone who seemed very confused, and then finally got a police officer who took down the basics: an SUV went off the road. No, it didn’t crash. No, the driver didn’t seem inebriated. Yes, it appeared to be sufficiently suspicious that the call was warranted. The SUV was upright, but the lights were off. No, she was just passing by when she saw it and thought she’d call. No, she didn’t want to give a name.

“All right,” Hiram said. “Let’s—” Colleen snagged the keys to the car’s ignition with her left hand and snapped a flash photo with the phone in her right. The tiny car filled with light, dazzling Hiram. Colleen opened the passenger-side door and ran across the street to the ditch, and carefully slid down into it. She crouched down, and poked her head up.

“Colleen!” Hiram shouted. “Give me back my keys!” Colleen turned to shush him, but realized how ridiculous that would be, so she pocketed the keys, felt around for a pebble, and threw it at Hiram’s head. That set him running toward her, but he misjudged the lip of the ditch and fell right in, arms flailing.

The ditch was only two feet deep, so Hiram regained his balance in an instant. Colleen slapped her free hand over his mouth and hissed “Shut up!” in his ear. “We’re going to find out what they’re doing and get a picture or two, okay?”

Hiram grabbed her wrist and pulled her arm away. “Why? What is wrong with you?”

“Don’t you want to know? These people, they left you out of whatever they’re doing.”

“If what they’re doing has to do with Panossian’s murder, I am totally fine with that.”

“And I’m totally fine with finding out what they’re up to, and then watching the police drag them all away. Now, let’s go!” She didn’t wait for him; she was out of the ditch in a single stride, and staying low in the tall grass, snaked her way toward the SUV. If Hiram wanted his car keys back, he’d have to follow.

There were only a few trees in the field, but they were old and thick and made good hiding places. Colleen ducked behind one and waited for Hiram to catch up.

“You’re mad,” he said when he reached her.

“I was going to say the same about you,” she said.

Hiram frowned, then glanced ahead. “What are they doing?”

The other party were using their smartphones to illuminate patches of ground, except for Bhanushali, who had hers aimed at a piece of paper she was holding. Cob and Ginger J had shovels. Cudmore leaned against the SUV, either working as a look-out or sulking due to an argument he’d lost on the way to the location. Something was about to be buried, or dug up.

“Is that a map she’s holding, do you think?”

“Could be anything,” Colleen said.

“Should we move to the next tree?” Hiram asked. “They have their backs to us. We can get closer.”

“Okay.”

“Colleen!” Hiram whispered sharply, grabbing her shoulder.

“What?”

“Walk heel first, then toe. You’ll make less noise. Watch me.” Hiram stepped out from behind the tree in a low stance, and performed a funny little walk that Colleen had to admit was pretty close to silent. She aped him as best she could, and followed him to another, closer, tree.

He turned to her and smiled. “I feel like a cartoon character, tip-toeing from potted plant to potted plant,” he whispered. “This is so strange. I’m giddy rather than worried. Even if we’re about to stumble upon some terrible conspiracy, I have a very positive feeling about this.”

Colleen glanced around the curve of the tree trunk. “Asparagus Head is leaving. The rest of the men are digging. And—oh, the cops!” A red and white light flickered as it zipped along the black ribbon of road in the distance.

“Do we charge, or do we wait? If we’re too close, we might be implicated,” Hiram said.

Colleen pursed her lips. Hiram was right.

With a high-pitched yawp, the cop car turned off the road and took the ditch with a leap. High-beam lights cut through the low fog, flooding the area. Though it was summer, the grass was still brown, as if the life-force had been sucked completely from every blade.

“Go!” Colleen said, and she ran into the woods. She didn’t turn to see if Hiram followed behind her, but heard his footsteps close behind, and then farther away. She found herself almost immediately in a trackless wood, out of sight and out of earshot of the police. Lost, she spun around, looking for a landmark, and then saw Cudmore between the trees. He was strolling, hands in his pockets, like it was daylight and he was on the side of the road. Then he stopped short and waved and took off in a light jog, deeper into the trees. Colleen set off after him, her footfalls crunching leaves and twigs, but Cudmore either didn’t notice or didn’t care. He was plenty noisy himself.

“Hey, hey!” Cudmore said, waving an arm in greeting at someone Colleen couldn’t see. He turned a corner and was gone. Colleen stumbled over a root and took a knee.

A powerful flashlight swept through the woods and a man barked, “Get the hell back over here!” Colleen froze for a moment, unsure if she’d just be walking into a pair of handcuffs, waiting to see if Cudmore would turn around and walk past her. Something heavy fell, like a dropped rock, but there was no other movement. She stood up, tentative.

“I’m not kidding!” said the voice of the police officer. He had that commanding bark cops must practice in front of the mirror every morning. Her feet shifted under her ankles, unbidden.

“If I need to come in after you, we will have a significant problem with one another, sir!”

Sir! The word released something inside Colleen, a new kind of anxiety. She wasn’t relieved that she hadn’t been spotted, she dreaded being called upon next. Then something brushed past her and she yelped. From the shadows, Hiram’s froggy face sneered as he walked by, still walking in that odd and strangely silent bow-legged way. She followed him to where the wood met the field, so he wouldn’t turn her in and make everything even worse.

The police car was stopped about ten yards from the SUV and two cops had cornered the diggers. One made a beeline to the SUV and the other strode toward the tree Colleen and Hiram were loitering behind.

“Get out from there,” he told them. “Go stand with everyone else.” Hiram and Colleen marched over and stood next to Bhanushali, who was folding and refolding the papers in her hands.

She glared at Colleen and demanded, “You followed me!”

Colleen smiled. “Thanks for telling them that.” Then she turned to the cop. “We’re not with them.”

“Sounds well-rehearsed,” he said. “What’s going on here?”

Ginger J started laughing. “Go on, tell them. This’ll be good.”

The cop who had spotted Colleen and Hiram walked over to the group. “Something funny?”

“Maybe,” Ginger J said. Cob was silent, arms at his sides, almost as if willing himself to melt into the gray of the moonlit night.

Bhanushali said, “Very well. We were looking for something…”

“What?” Hiram demanded. The cop raised his palm, and Hiram shrank back.

“Nigger-Man,” Bhanushali blurted out, only to slap her hands over her mouth. Ginger J yelped. The newly arrived police offer, who was black, glared. His partner glanced over at him warily.

“It’s a cat,” Cob said. “A long-dead cat who once belonged to a local author yclept Howard Phillips Lovecraft.”

“And he named his cat Nigger-Man,” the glaring cop said. Cob shrugged elegantly.

“Why on Earth would you want to dig up…N-Word Man?” the white officer asked.

Bhanushali held up the papers in her hand. “We’re scholars and researchers. I myself am an expert on Lovecraft’s correspondence. He penned nearly one hundred thousand letters and postcards in his life. A few of them mention his cat, and these few—these are copies, mind you—hint at where Lovecraft buried the cat. But there are only hints and insinuations. We came here tonight to determine whether or not I read the letters correctly. I believe I have determined…the cat’s burial place.”

“And you came at night because?” the black police officer asked. “Ah yes, I remember now. You’re all at Hotel Bierce, aren’t you? And none of you are to leave the grounds.”

“Someone pulled a fire alarm at the hotel…when was it, Lucius?” the white officer asked. “About ninety minutes ago?”

Lucius walked over to the hole. “Just about ninety minutes ago. A thirty-minute drive, and this hole looks like about forty minutes of work.” He looked up, and glanced around the field. “And twenty minutes to determine that this particular patch of ground, equidistant between three trees that were probably saplings back when this fucking cat died, was poor Nigger-Man’s final resting place. Is that right?”

“That’s right,” Ginger J said with a giggle. “I throw myself on the mercy of the court.”

“Don’t say anything stupid, John!” Bhanushali snapped.

“Too late,” Colleen said.

“And you two?” the other cop asked Colleen.

“We decided to follow them because I thought they might have been trying to hide evidence related to the murder that occurred in the hotel,” Colleen said.

“That’s not what you told me!” Hiram said. “I was hoping to find that they had discovered a book bound in human skin,” he explained to the officers.

“Oh, that’s much more normal,” Ginger J said. “Oh man, we’re just so fucked. Ah, it’s okay. I have a horrible job, no girlfriend, nothing. What are Rhode Island prisons like? How bad could they be?” He giggled again and turned to the white officer, squinting to see his nameplate. “Officer Bonner, it’s a very nice state you have here. I’m so sorry I helped dig a hole in it.”

“Did you find the cat?” Bonner asked.

“What?”

“Did you find the bones of N-Word Man?”

“No. I mean, not yet.”

Bonner looked over at Lucius and shrugged. Lucius walked over to the police cruiser, leaned against the hood, folded his arms over his chest and said, “Get back to digging.”

“What?” Bhanushali said.

“Dig.”

“Yeah,” Bonner said. “Show us some cat bones. We’ll see if your story checks out.”

“What about us?” Hiram asked, gesturing with a thumb toward Colleen, and then back to himself.

“Shifts,” Lucius said.

“Shifts,” Bonner repeated.

“This is cruel and unusual,” Bhanushali said.

“You were already engaged in the task,” Lucius said. “We can just take all of you in for some real questioning. We still might. But find that fucking nigger-cat—”

“Nigger-Man,” Hiram said. Colleen slapped her forehead with her palm. “Oh, I apologize,” Hiram said to Lucius. “I’ll take first shift.”

About thirty minutes, and two new test holes, into the dig, Bhanushali’s phone rang. Lucius pointed to her and said, “Max the volume and pick it up. Don’t hold it too closely to your ear.” He walked right up to her.

Bhanushali rolled her eyes and answered the phone. “Hello Ronald,” she said. “I can’t talk right—”

“Yes you can,” the police officer told her. “You can talk to him, or you can talk to us down at the precinct house.”

“What is it, Ronald?”

Ronald Ranger was given to bellowing, so his voice was easy to hear in the field, even through the tinny speaker of Bhanushali’s phone. “So, were you correct? Are your hands all blistered? Did you find our little Nigger-Man?”

Cob, who was digging, stopped to groan, then leaned on the handle of his shovel.

“No, not yet…the police are here!” she spit out, too quick to be stopped.

“Where’s Charles?” Ronald asked.

“He left; he went back to the hotel.”

“But he’s not here!”

“Oh Lord,” Bhanushali said. Lucius literally laughed at her.

Bonner pointed to Cob. “Who is this Charles character and where did he go?”

Cob made to step out of the hole, paused when Bonner’s hand went to his holster, but then stepped out of the hole anyway. “Charles went to go take a piss, and never came back. Maybe he saw your lights on the road. It’s not a ninety-minute walk back to the hotel, is it?”

Colleen shrugged. “He could have taken an Uber? Right? Perhaps there was some disagreement, or he was sent to complete some other task.”

Bhanushali said, “What are you implying, Colleen Danzig,” smirking as she gave Colleen’s surname to the police officers.

“I’m not implying anything…except that it is strange that someone drives out to a field with his friends, and leaves right before the evening gets interesting.”

“I don’t understand the secrecy around this project at all,” Hiram said.

From the phone, Ronald called out, “What are those two doing there!”

Bonner raised an eyebrow. “Okay, you two,” he said, “back behind that tree. We’ll have our own little conversation.”

“The rest of you, you have ten minutes to show me some cat bones,” Lucius said. “And one minute to describe this Charles character.”

“Well, his head is shaped like the top of an asparagus,” Ginger J said, giggling again. Lucius snagged him by the wrist, twisted his arm behind his back, and practically lifted him off his feet on the way to slamming Ginger J against the hood of the cruiser.

“I’m tired of this shit!”

“Wait, it’s true,” Bhanushali said. “I have a picture, in my contacts.” She hiked the hem of her long skirt with one hand and rushed to the car, waving her phone with the other.

Lucius kept Ginger J pinned, but glanced at the phone. “Well, that is a pretty pointy head.”

Bonner clamped a hand around Hiram’s forearm. “To the tree.” To Colleen, he just said, “Follow.”

Behind the tree, Bonner let Hiram go and said, sotto voce, “This is your first and last chance to explain exactly what is going on. We already have trespassing and obstruction of justice. I don’t care if the judge drops the charges first thing Monday afternoon, you get to stay in a cell tonight if what you have to tell me right now doesn’t make any sense.”

Colleen said, “I’m trying to figure out who killed Panos Panossian—”

“Stop right there,” Bonner said. “You’re investigating a crime, on your own.”

Colleen blushed. It sounded stupid when a cop said it.

“Tracking down a murderer,” Bonner said. “You two.” He gestured to Hiram, then back at Colleen. “Do go on.”

“Are you going to arrest me?” Colleen asked.

“I could do that right now, Nancy Drew, even if you don’t say another word about Panos Panossian. But maybe if you tell me something of interest, I’ll have something better to do than take you in and fill out paperwork for an hour.”

“We’re all supposed to stay in the hotel. I think someone in that group pulled a fire alarm for the purpose of coming here, though I didn’t know at the time that they just wanted to dig up a cat. I wanted to find out what they were up to because I thought they might have something to do with Panossian.”

“And why did you think that?”

Colleen glanced over at the party. Bhanushali was a middle-aged woman, an intellectual. Not really murderer material. Cob was certainly intimidating and weird. Ginger J, a gormless nerd. But there was something about Bhanushali’s mien; she was a leader, a bit of a bully. She was surely the one who decided to defy the police order, and Colleen couldn’t imagine her wheedling the men to follow her plan. She just declared her intentions, and they complied. Cob…was it an act? The goth affectations, the baritone, the long black coat straight out of a Leonard Cohen song—it’s all just what geeks thought cool was. Ginger J was probably just a few years removed from Columbine shoot-‘em-up fantasies.

“I just…” Colleen started. “Panossian was well-known, but he wasn’t well-liked. Not by those people, I don’t think. Maybe not by any of the Lovecraftians here this weekend.”

“‘Lovecraftians,’” Bonner said. “There’s a party name you don’t hear every day. Sounds a little kinky.” He nodded over at Hiram. “What’s your story? Are you a Lovecrafter too?”

“I asked Hiram for a ride, and he obliged,” Colleen said before Hiram could open his mouth.

“She didn’t tell me anything about investigating a murder, officer,” Hiram spit out. “She persuaded me that the car we were following either contained or was ferrying its party into the presence of a very rare book, one bound with human skin, that I would very much like to see and possibly handle.”

“Human skin? Like someone’s face, maybe?” Bonner said. “I’ve heard enough.” He turned on the radio clipped to his chest and called for more cars, despite Hiram’s calm explanation of the commonality of anthropodermic bibliopegy.

Cob walked over, holding a towel in his hands, with Lucius right behind him, pushing him forward. Colleen glanced over their shoulders—Ginger J was cuffed and Bhanushali was standing in the field, under the light of the rising moon, bereft.

“Check it, they found the cat. Show ‘em,” Lucius said.

Cob raised his hands, flipped open the towel, and revealed a tiny brown skull in three pieces.

Bonner glanced at it. “That’s a fucking squirrel.”

11. The Tomb

They were escorted in one at a time. Ginger J first, since he was having some kind of low-key fit. Maybe they thought he’d crack when he saw me. Why weren’t my parents up to Providence to claim my body yet, to bury me? Why didn’t they come to see me instead of this motley crew of wannabes and weirdos?

“Oh my, oh my,” Ginger J said when they opened my drawer and pulled me out. “This is, this…really is happening, isn’t it, Officer Bonner?”

“Friend of yours?” Bonner asked him, and at that moment the door to the morgue opened again and Thomas said a tentative, “Hello?”

“Hi!” Ginger J said.

“Hey, what are you doing here?” Thomas asked.

“You know one another?” Bonner snapped. “Get out!” There were a few stammered excuses and the door slammed again.

“How do you know our overnight man?” Bonner asked.

“Art camp,” Ginger J said. “Up in New Hampshire. We both liked drawing Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian entities. It was years ago though; I don’t remember his name, only his fa—oh God, face!” He started giggling again.

I can’t say Bonner got much out of Ginger J. After visiting Lovecraft’s grave together—“You Lovecraftians really have a thing for graves, eh?” Bonner interjected—he and I separated and he didn’t see me for the rest of the evening. He spent some time in the bar, and Cob and Hiram could vouch for him, as could Ronald Ranger and even Charles Cudmore, and then he decided to go to bed. His room was on the seventh floor, in the north wing. The room I shared with Colleen was on the third floor, in the south wing, about as far apart as two rooms in the Bierce could be.

Did anyone want to kill me? Of course not; nobody at the Summer Tentacular was capable of murder. Evidently not. But who could do such a thing? That’s what I’m asking you. I can’t imagine anyone I know doing this. What about someone you don’t know? Huh?

It went on like that for a while. Then Bonner asked, “This guy, Panossian, what was he like?”

“He was a very good writer. Kind of an asshole, though.”

“Oh yeah? How was he an asshole?”

Ginger J thought for a moment, and said, “He didn’t really play the social game. Lovecraft fandom is full of people whose social skills are lacking, but Panossian had social skills. He just… weaponized them.” He laughed. “I guess you could say he was a cyberbully, but he’d do it in person too. In person, he wasn’t so bad, because he smiled and nodded a lot, and I don’t think people started arguments so much. But oh boy, on the Internet…he just wouldn’t shut up.”

“Did he ever talk to you about the Internet? Did he get any threatening letters?”

“Oh sure, constantly. But who doesn’t, you know?”

“Do you ever get threatening letters—I mean emails, tweets?” Bonner asked.

Ginger J snickered again. “No no, who would threaten me?”

“You said everyone gets threatened.”

“Yeah,” Ginger J said, “but just little things. ‘Say that to my face’—Panossian got a constant stream of the stuff. Really, it could have been anybody, I guess. Hell, he could have been doing it to himself to get some attention. He always used to make fun of his stalkers because they typed so poorly and made so little sense. I don’t think anyone took it seriously, least of all him.”

Thomas snorted. “Well, he should have.”

“What do you mean?” Ginger J asked.

I imagined that Thomas nodded or gestured toward me. Nobody said anything at all until Bonner spoke to Ginger J: “I’ll walk you upstairs.”

Cob didn’t say anything as he stood over me. No reaction I could hear to the state of my corpse. I couldn’t even hear his breathing, but somehow I felt his shadow on me. Were the smaller bits of my ears decomposing?

Bonner asked him, “So, what was your relationship to the deceased?”

“We were…contemporaries,” Cob said. “In the literary sense. Personally, I’d say we were casually acquainted.”

“Are you online?”

“Everyone’s online now, Officer.”

“Active on social media?” Bonner asked. “Or should I say anti-social media?”

Cob almost never varied his tone, but he sounded confused. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It just seems like you people enjoy wordplay, so I thought I’d try some. Do you have a Twitter account? Are you a blogger?”

Thomas laughed. “Nobody blogs anymore!”

“I have a blog,” Cob said, so not-pointedly that it felt pointed to me. “I post a new update once every eighteen months or so, when a new book or story comes out. I have better things to do than post photos of my lunch or weigh in on every controversy sparked by some reactionary denouncing women or people of color in fiction,” Cob said, his normal cadence back.

“Better things like what?”

“I write books. It’s time consuming. I write three novels a year. If I can publish one of them every three years I consider myself lucky. I spend a fair amount of time beating my head against walls both figurative and literal. I am also a student of Yin style bagua.”

“Sounds dangerous,” Bonner said.

“It isn’t.”

“You and Panossian ever talk about anything…controversial?”

Cob didn’t say anything for a long moment. “He told me something very interesting once. I used to struggle with alcohol, and Panossian said something to me that really…influenced my behavior,” he said finally, carefully.

“Yeah, what was that?”

“He said that if I were to decide to enter Alcoholics Anonymous or any twelve-step program, that I should keep in mind that the embrace of the ritual is more important than the fact of the ritual,” Cob said. “Officer, he told me that if I started to do the twelve steps, that I could, and should, do them all in five minutes. From admitting my powerlessness to spreading the word in the wake of my spiritual awakening.”

Bonner made a noise that was somewhere between an acknowledgment and a snort. “So, uh, how did you make amends in five minutes?”

“I dipped into my address book and mailed everyone I’d harmed a limited edition book from my library. I am not a very social creature; by extension I’ve never had the opportunity to harm very many people.”

“Opportunity,” Bonner said, rolling the word over in his mouth. “Interesting choice of phrase.”

“What I find interesting is that there seems to be no lead detective on this homicide case,” Cob said. “Every time I turn around, it’s a different uniformed officer asking questions, making comments, threatening people with arrest and even cuffing them but not actually arresting them.”

“Be sure to bring it up with the ACLU when you have the chance, Mister Cob. Write to the mayor too, if you like. You think I don’t know from Lovecraft? I’m born and raised here in Providence, son. I’ve read the stories, I’ve seen the fans down at Swan Point at all hours; the little girls in all black and the little boys in velvet playing Halloween in August. Truth is, we’ve been waiting for something like this to happen for years. We figured that one of you nuts would go crazy and commit a brutal fucking murder eventually. It’s a goddamned demographic inevitability, if you ask me, Mister Cob.”

“So, Officer, what you think when you look down at this dead man is, Finally,” Cob said. “And you are not alone. Is that right?”

I heard the squeak of a shoe. Cob isn’t a large man, really. And he trips over roots that burst free from the pavement and gets tipsy and laughs like a donkey at dumb jokes like anyone else, but when he turns on the Vincent Price/Boris Karloff routine, the dial goes up to eleven. I’m sure it was Bonner’s shoes that made a little noise as he took a step back, regardless of his baton and his sidearm.

“I agree with you,” Cob said. “This was expected. Inevitable, even. Inevitability is the essence of tragedy. It’s the difference between the horrifying end and a mere twist of the tale. When you see it coming, Officer Bonner, that’s when it’s really scary.”

“Some might call that an admission,” Bonner said.

“It’s an observation. It’s the core of my PhD thesis, which I completed two years ago. I’ll send you the file if you’re interested.”

“Let’s say I’m not.”

“Are we done here?”

“You are,” Bonner said. “For now.”

Bhanushali, when she was brought in, just cried and stammered, swallowing whole sentences that way. “It-it-it is j-j-just so un-un-reasonable,” was about as coherent as it got.

Bonner said, “Was he a friend of yours?”

“A colleague.” The stammer vanished. “I even published an excerpt of his novel in a collection of Lovecraftian pastiches.”

“You seem really torn up over it, but went to go dig up a racist cat? Pretty brief mourning period there, wouldn’t you say?”

“We’d been planning our…adventure for months. Most of us live nowhere near Rhode Island, or in proximity to one another. We’re a community of correspondence. Panossian was with all of us last night, to visit Lovecraft’s grave. He was a bit of a prankster. I am sure he would have wanted us to go forward with our attempt to determine whether I’d truly located the final resting place of Lovecraft’s cat.”

“I’m going to do something extremely irregular,” Bonner said. The morgue was a long rectangular room, with the refrigerated cold chambers along one long wall. Bonner walked over to the other near wall and then came back to stand over me. “We’ve been recording all these encounters. I’m going to play back what you just said so you can see yourself, and hear yourself. Take a look, ma’am.”

I am sure he would have wanted us to go forward with our attempt to determine whether I’d truly located the final resting place of Lovecraft’s cat sounded tinny and ridiculous when played back, but Bonner had overestimated Bhanushali.

“I stand by my claim, and every claim I make,” Bhanushali said. “Panossian embraced what Poe called the imp of the perverse. That was his charm, and frankly, it was probably his downfall on some level. Certainly this wasn’t the work of an itinerant serial killer, or a random attack. My understanding is that men aren’t often attacked arbitrarily like this. You might think my work is ridiculous, but museums the world over are filled with artifacts and ecofacts originally dug out of the ground by treasure-seekers, antiquarians, and yes, even grave robbers. Archaeology only became respectable in the twentieth century, and nobody cleared out the exhibit halls and put the purloined materials back into the ground for the sake of fair play once it did. If we were in Key West and I had excavated the tomb of one of Hemingway’s polydactyl cats, we would not be having this conversation now.”

“No ma’am, no we would not be,” Bonner said. “I am glad I remembered to press record again after playing back your prior statement.”

“Forgive me, Officer Bonner. It’s been a pair of long and traumatic days. If there is anything at all you think I know, or should know, about Panossian’s murder, please feel free to ask me. I want to cooperate and place myself above suspicion.”

“All right. Who did it?”

“What?”

“Who do you think killed Panossian?” Bonner said. “You’re right; this isn’t a serial killer’s work. We’ve never seen anything like it, nor heard of anything like it, and we’ve talked to the police in Massachusetts where Panossian is from, and we have the FBI blueskying ideas and whipping up profiles and emailing us every hour on the hour. We’re stumped, but we’ve narrowed it down—the killer has to be a member of your convention. So, who at your convention is capable of doing something like this?”

Bhanushali paused, which was extremely unusual for her. She was the type to launch into an answer even as she formulated one, happy to fill the discursive spaces with hemming and digressions till she came up with something that sounded clever, even if it wasn’t even close to true. Finally, she said, “Charles Cudmore.”

“Charles Cudmore. And who is that?”

“You saw his photo—he’s…”

“Asparagus Head?”

“Yes, him. Something about his manner and his fiction have always set me on edge. I’ve never published him. As far as I know, he has never been published, though not for lack of effort. Some writers become more famous in small circles for what they cannot publish than what they can. Most importantly, he revealed to me, just as we thought we had located the grave of…the cat, that he planned to use his skills in taxidermy and book-binding—which are well-known from his social media footprint—to turn the poor cat into a book somehow. That’s when I dismissed him. And to be honest, I suspect that he has some sort of brain damage based on his cranial shape.”

“Zippy the Pinhead was a peaceful man,” Bonner said. “Phrenology is an outmoded nineteenth century discipline, sort of like grave-robbing antiquarianism, you know. But Cudmore, if you say he’s a killer, I’ll make sure Amato questions him again. And we’ll take you in too, since you may have just named the name of the man who abandoned you at the poor lost cat’s gravesite as an act of petty revenge.”

Bhanushali yelped and fussed, and I heard the click of handcuffs. She bargained and complained all the way out the door, and probably upstairs as well. If Bonner did the Miranda rights thing from television, he waited until after he got Bhanushali out into the hallway.

When nothing is happening, I have next to no idea how much time passes.

Next to no idea, because there is a slight and dreadful inkling. Chemical reactions are taking place. The rigor mortis has finally set in, despite refrigeration, and my limbs are growing stiffer. This I can still sense, even as the power of my ears and nose wane. Why can’t I see? Because I can’t blink. What’s left of my brain can’t handle the constant input. All I see is the man looming over me.

And Thomas, just a broad colorful blob, like a floater in an eye. And he said to me, peering down at me, “You look better now than you did in your mug shot.”

I almost blinked out of existence right there. Was Thomas my third stalker? He was clearly a Lovecraftian of some sort. Did he somehow get my legal information from some underground cop network? If that’s all he knew, why taunt a fucking corpse? He started moving a few things around—equipment, or his own junk, maybe—and went back to muttering to himself. “Thomas, I cannot believe this is all happening...” he said. A door slammed shut, and I was alone.

For a long time, it felt like, nothing happened. Eventually, Colleen was brought down, yet again, to view my body. There was an edge of desperation in her voice this time. “Look, I don’t even care this much, really. Dragging me down here over and over again won’t change my story, won’t help your case, won’t reveal anything more about Panossian’s killer. Why do you keep doing this to me?”

“Because you keep showing up in the wrong places,” a cop said. Bonner must have been upstairs, booking Bhanushali. This one was the guy with the Italian-American accent that had previously accompanied Colleen. “You were the last person to see him alive.”

“Whoever killed him was the last person to see him alive,” Colleen said. I would have cringed if I could.

“Exactly.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“Who was it then, Nancy Drew? You’re water cooler material around here. We call you Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If I put you in custody for the rest of the weekend now, you’d be signing autographs for the boys and eating vegan meals in a holding cell.”

“How did you know I was a vegan?”

“Even dumb cops know how to Google. You’re all a bunch of famous weirdoes. What’s the old saying: In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people?” the cop said. Then he laughed.

“Warhol said minutes. It was Momus who made it people,” Colleen said.

“Who’s Momus?”

“I guess you’re his sixteenth person,” Colleen said.

“I bet your late friend here will be famous to more than fifteen people once the newspapers draft a story. You too. Do you want to be the Mystery Woman at the Center of the Intrigue, or the Girl Who Helped Solve the Case?”

“Funny,” Colleen said, “how can I help when I’m demoted to girl?”

“Women are dangerous,” the cop said.

“That’s sexist.”

Maybe the cop just shrugged or something. Maybe he didn’t respond non-verbally at all. “Think hard, Colleen. Is there anything at all—anything that isn’t ‘Find the book’ that can help us? Maybe even something that can help us find the book?”

Colleen exhaled deeply. Was she breathing through her mouth now? A lot of air moved over me. Then she said it.

“Holy shit, I know exactly who did it,” she said. “It’s been a crazy weekend, and sometimes I felt like I was going crazy, but I saw it. I saw a tall man, who looked like H. P. Lovecraft. But that wasn’t just a guy in Lovecraft cosplay. It was Ms. Phantasia. He’s bald; he has a tattoo of Lovecraft’s head on the back of his own head. I didn’t see Lovecraft coming at me; I saw Phantasia walking away from me. He’s local too—search his house, I bet you’ll find the book!”

“Do you know Ms. Phantasia’s real name?”

“Google it,” Colleen said.

“Yeah, yeah. We’ll get you back to your hotel now. No side trips, no night-jaunts. Heh, you like that? Wasn’t that what Lovecraft was afraid of—night-jaunts?”

“Night gaunts,” Colleen said. And she left without saying goodbye to me.

It couldn’t have been long after that, as I am still sufficiently cognizant to have experienced it, that another corpse was brought in. There was some confusion regarding the cause of death thanks to a birth defect.

“What the hell happened to his head? I don’t mean the injury, I mean...?” the morning shift examiner asked the police officer who had accompanied the body downstairs.

“We got some photographs from the horror people down at Hotel Bierce. Speaking of horror, this is it—nothing happened to this guy’s head. He was born this way.”

“His cranium is shaped like the top of a goddamned asparagus,” the medical examiner said.

“That four-dollar haircut ain’t helping matters either,” the cop said.

12. The Festival

The trip back to the Bierce was courtesy of the Providence PD this time, and unnecessarily circuitous, though Bonner did stop at a Dunkin’ Dounts and offer to get Colleen something. Cinnamon raisin bagel twists were vegan, but of course the store was sold out of them at 11 p.m.

Colleen just wanted to sleep in her own room, which she suddenly remembered she didn’t have anymore. She also had forgotten to get the room number from either Barry or Raul, so she got out her phone to leave them a Facebook message just in time to see it power down from lack of charge. With luck, they’d still be in the bar. She was headed right to the Warwick when she felt a hand on her back.

“Hey hey,” said the pirate from the dealers’ room. “How have you been? Enjoying the con?”

Colleen contemplated kicking his knee so hard he’d be half-flamingo, but instead just said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Why, what happened? I had to work this morning at ye ol’ dayjob, so I just got back.”

“There was a murder in this hotel. A lot of us have been taken in and questioned. I just got back from my third fucking trip to the morgue,” Colleen said.

The pirate’s eyes widened and he stepped away. “Are you a suspect? Who got whacked?”

“Got whacked? Panossian.”

His tone softened. “Oh, okay.”

“What makes it okay?”

“I don’t mean anything by it,” the pirate said. “It’s just that everyone here is pretty much harmless. You know, nerds. The omegas of society. This is a hotel full of potential murder victims, but I don’t think anyone here is capable of killing another human being.”

Colleen shrugged. “The cops disagree. So do I.”

“Well, who do you think did it?”

Phantasia was on her lips, but she swallowed the word. It was definitely him whom she had spotted so close to the room she had shared with Panossian, and as he was a Providence local there was no reason for him to be up on a non-party floor, but that was a flimsy thread with which to tie someone to a murder. “The cops have a suspect. I just got back myself; I’m sure you’ll hear a lot of gossip.”

“Wow, this sounds really terrible,” the pirate said. He still was wearing his puffy-sleeved shirt and all, despite the dealers’ room being long closed. Was his dayjob singing shanties down by the river for tourist nickels or something? “Want to split? If the killer saw you coming and going, and the cops dropping you off, you might be next. We can hole up at my house for the duration.”

“No,” Colleen said forcefully. “I can’t leave the hotel. We’re all sequestered here until they have a likely suspect.”

“Let’s retire to the Warwick then; I’ll buy you a nice stiff drink. I saw that you were already on the way there, so let’s join forces.” He then held out his arm, as if Colleen were supposed to sidle up to him and be led to the bar. Colleen was exhausted and had had enough altercations today, plus a big stupid gooch with a car might prove useful, so with a chagrined twist of her mouth, she took his arm.

Neither R.G. nor the guys were present, but the Warwick was both packed and quiet. The televisions had been turned off and the conversation was muted. As she walked to the bar, Colleen could feel the heat-vision glares all around. The pirate, a huge smile on his face, didn’t seem to notice. Colleen wondered if he’d ever get around to giving her his name, as he wasn’t wearing his badge. And yet, the pirate probably had the best game in the hotel.

“First round free,” bartender said. “In memoriam.”

“Tequila shots,” the pirate said, and the bartender poured a pair.

“To Panossian,” Colleen said.

“Who?” the bartender said. “Everyone else has been toasting a guy named Charles Cudmore.”

“He’s dead?” the pirate said, his voice cracking.

“How, what happened?”

The bartender poured himself a shot and downed it. “Another murder. Didn’t happen in here though; they found him out in the little vacant lot behind the hotel. This is my last fucking day. I’m not risking my life for dollar tips.” He stared at them expectantly. The pirate sat, rod straight, his big hands delicately holding his shot glass.

Colleen leaned over and stage-whispered, “Give him two dollars, for Christ’s sake.”

The pirate dug out a little leather satchel that was tied to his waist and pulled out a few crumpled singles.

“I have a strange question, if you don’t mind. Was Cudmore…mutilated at all?”

“Mutilated, decapitated, eviscerated. By tomorrow morning he’ll have been defenestrated and disintegrated. According to rumor and gossip from you convention people, of course. Cops say he was just hit in the back of the head with a rock and fell and hit another rock and that’s all it took,” the bartender said.

“Any suspects?”

The bartender shrugged. “I’m a part-time bartender. I’m actually getting my MA in Biology at Brown. The local constabulary don’t exactly loop me in on all their potential serial murder cases.”

“Why would it be serial murder?” the pirate asked.

“Why wouldn’t it be? Two murders of two people who are both attending this convention and staying in this hotel?”

“Serial killers don’t often attack men. They don’t strike a second time so quickly either. It doesn’t sound like any trophies were taken from the victims,” the pirate said.

The bartender glanced at Colleen, but said to the pirate, “You seem to be very knowledgeable on the subject of serial killers.”

“It’s a fascination of mine,” the pirate said. “One of many.” He gave Colleen the once over and smiled.

“Well, thanks for the drink. I have to find my roommates, to make sure that they’re okay,” Colleen said, and she slipped off the stool and trotted out of the bar.

Why would anyone kill Asparagus Head? Panossian had a copy of Arkham, and hadn’t spent his time in the Lovecraftian subculture making a lot of friends. But Charles Cudmore, despite the fact that Colleen didn’t like him or the company he kept, seemed like a gormless sort. From all appearances he was fairly well-integrated into the Bhanushali/Ronald Ranger crowd, and that coterie was composed of the big-wigs who controlled the major anthologies, who gave the big speeches at the conventions, whose aesthetic and political opinions were often argued against, but only rarely when they were actually present.

But he had spoken out against Bhanushali back in the pool area, and then abandoned her—or was expelled from the group—during the Nigger-Man fiasco. What was his deal, and who might have wanted him dead? Bhanushali likely wouldn’t talk to Colleen after that night’s adventure, but other people would.

Norman would.

The Hotel Bierce wasn’t a large hotel, and there weren’t very many common areas. It was almost perfectly suited for the Summer Tentacular, Colleen thought, but then realized that she had been holding the universe upside-down: the Tentacular was designed to suit the hotel’s size and capacity. Norman was on the convention staff, so all Colleen had to do was find the head of staff, and she happened to know which hotel room he slept in.

Armbruster was not pleased to see Colleen. She could only see one eye through the slightly ajar door, and it was like a gray marble, like a stone that would turn her to stone if it could. “Lights out, Danzig. The Tentacular has been destroyed forever. There’s no recovering from this.”

“Look, I don’t give a shit about the Tentacular. Where’s Norman?”

“Why on Earth are you curious about the location of that man? I would not think you were the sort to seek out a man of that kind.”

“I…have an important question for him,” Colleen said.

“Why don’t you go to his website and send him an email?” Armbruster moved to close the door, but Colleen blocked him with her foot.

“I will crush your toes, Ms. Danzig. I am not above such things.”

“Go ahead.”

Armbruster gave the door a half-hearted push, but Colleen didn’t budge. “My Docs are steel-toed. Expensive but worth it. I guess you can open the door and attack me if you want. Want to bet I can get a kick to your balls before you punch my lights out?”

“Ms. Danzig,” Armbruster said, his teeth clenched, “you are a royal pain in my keister. I hope you treat Norman as poorly.” He withdrew from the door and disappeared into the dark of his hotel room. An interior door shut. Colleen tried the door to the room, but it was latched so she could not force it open any farther. A few moments later, Armbruster’s face appeared again.

“Top floor, the other wing. Party suite. Good night, Ms. Danzig,” he said. Then he shut the door.

Colleen presumed that Armbruster had spoken to Norman on the phone, and perhaps had even warned him about her. He was a big guy, and once upon a time there had been muscles under that fat, she remembered. He had been friendly enough with Panossian for that horseplay photo that someone had tweeted, and Panossian had helped Norman and his pals crash the Lovecraft cemetery vigil, so perhaps he’d be an ally.

Colleen decided against the elevator. Somehow the staircases seemed safer as they were less well-trafficked and weren’t outfitted with security cameras. By the time she reached the party suite, she was breathing heavily, and her lip was sweating. A part of her hoped that there was an actual party going on in the party suite—she hadn’t eaten in hours.

A detourned Christmas wreath hung on the double doors. It had been decorated with a flattened, salted squid most likely purchased at an Asian supermarket. It was painted green and tied to the center of the wreath with fishing wire. A pair of oversized fake bat wings—Colleen couldn’t determine their provenance—extended outward. She knocked and Norman immediately opened the doors, as if he had been waiting for her with his hands on the knob.

“Come in, come in,” Norman said. “You’re the first to arrive.” The suite had been re-organized. The couches and chairs had been arranged in as much of a circle as the fact that all the furniture was rectangular would allow, and they surrounded three coffee tables that made something like a triangle. Some votive candles, as yet unlit, formed a pentagram shape across the table-tops. The blinds had all been drawn, the lights were low.

“Norman, the first to arrive for what? I can’t stay, I just have some questions,” Colleen said.

“Everyone who enters through these doors comes with questions,” Norman said. “Sit, sit.” He gestured toward one of the chairs, and helped himself to the loveseat the pentagram pointed to.

“This is some sort of occult event, isn’t it?”

“Not some sort, a particular sort. Tonight we create a thought-form, tonight we contact the dead, tonight we pierce the veil of the night,” Norman said. “Uhm, would you like a water? A Fanta? Snack? I have cheese.”

“I’m vegan. Listen, I’m not into the occult. My question is about Charles Cudmore.”

Norman’s beard twitched.

“You know, Asparagus Head?”

“Yes, of course. Kind of a jerk, but he had lots of friends. I don’t know…”

They sat together in silence for a long moment. “Is that it?”

“No, of course it isn’t it. You said you had questions. I’ve answered every question you’ve asked me so far.”

Colleen worked to keep from rolling her eyes. Maybe Norman was on the autism spectrum, maybe he was just playing up the occult master gimmick, but she needed information.

“Who thought he was a jerk? Among the people here at the Tentacular, I mean.”

Norman smirked. “Lots of people. Chandler. Armbruster. Robert Goddard. Panossian…”

“Wait, who is Goddard?”

“He’s a dealer. Dresses like some sort of gay pirate.”

“Oh! Why doesn’t…why didn’t he like Cudmore?”

“Cudmore was one of Bhanushali’s little pets. A very enthusiastic one; I think he even grated on Bhanushali occasionally, by which I mean his pointy head grated on her anus. So whatever Bhanushali said, Cudmore took it as gospel. She doesn’t like people selling corsets and games and fuzzy Cthulhu slippers in the dealers’ room. Were it up to her, it would be nothing but a book show…and the autograph session would be all of us lining up to get our copies of her edits of Lovecraft’s stories signed, by her.

“But Bhanushali is pretty politic. I can’t even get a rise out of her half the time,” Norman said. He winked. “I think you were in the audience for my little show at the opening ceremonies. I am a faithful member of the Cult of Cthulhu, but I know how that looks to people like Bhanushali, to people like you. I don’t expect people to treat me like a Presbyterian or anything. Bhanushali can sometimes take me in stride, but whatever occasionally annoys her, Cudmore makes into a personal crusade. And for Cudmore, a personal crusade means bitching and moaning on Facebook till someone tells him to shut up.”

“We’re not Facebook friends.”

“You are a wise woman.”

“Did anyone hate him enough to kill him?” Colleen asked.

“I heard his death was an accident,” Norman said.

“He was hit on the head with a rock.”

“Yeah, but he just landed on another rock and that’s what killed him.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Colleen said. “Nobody picks up a rock, sneaks up behind someone, and smashes the back of their head in, without knowing that their victim could well end up dead. He wasn’t just punched in the face. It was assault with a deadly weapon, and it was a literal deadly weapon.”

“Interesting legal theory,” Norman said, his voice clipped and unimpressed.

Colleen decided to try charm. “I’m sorry; I don’t mean to argue with you. I know you need to focus your mind on your ritual. Can you tell me about it?”

Norman’s smile opened widely. “Sure! I am hoping to get enough people in here who are open to a non-drug state of altered consciousness. We’ve all read Lovecraft, we’ve all written Lovecraftian fiction or played a Lovecraftian role-playing game, or watched movies or built models. We’ve rewired our own brains into Lovecraft appreciation machines.

“Do you know the difference between series and parallel circuits?”

Of course Colleen did. “No, please tell me,” she said, leaning in.

“Imagine a string of Christmas lights. In the old days, when one bulb blew, the whole string of lights blinked out. It was basically one long wire, and the electricity had to run through all the lights, in a series, for the circuit to complete. A parallel circuit allows each light to run independently. Even if all the bulbs burnt out except for one, that last one would still light.”

“So parallel is better?”

“Yes, but not in this case. I mean, we are parallel Lovecraftian circuits. You do your thing, I do mine. If someone leaves the fandom—heck, if someone dies or is killed, like Panossian or Charles Cudmore—we’ll all continue. I mean, I know you’re committed to Lovecraftian fiction now more than ever, right?” He shifted his weight toward the armrest of his loveseat, drawing close to Colleen.

“Absolutely,” she told him.

“My theory is this: if, for one night, we can run in a series circuit, all imagining the same exact thing, we can help bring that thought-form into reality. I mean, to us, it will be real,” Norman said.

“And how are you going to do that?”

“Simple.” He bent over and stretched, huffing. With some effort—shifting his weight, planting a hand on a coffee table and almost upsetting it, nearly slipping off the couch entirely—he retrieved a folder from under the tables. “I have written a short story. After some mood-setting with music, and some group breathing exercises, I’ll read it aloud and we’ll all visualize the same exact thing. Do you realize that Lovecraft never tells us how many tentacles hang from Cthulhu’s lip? What his wingspan is? It’s no wonder that everyone gets it wrong.” He patted the folder. “I have it all here. Exact specifications, exact behaviors.”

“I hope you describe Cthulhu as short enough to fit into this room, Norman.” Colleen knew Norman wouldn’t like the joke, but hoped that he would like a woman smiling at him.

“Oh, he won’t be materializing here,” he said. “Don’t you worry.”

“I wasn’t…worried,” Colleen said. “You know, I wonder if this ritual would work with some other thought-form. Like a summoning of someone we actually know. Maybe we can all talk about Cudmore, or Panossian. Sort of compare notes, get a multifaceted look at the guys.”

“I think that’s what Twitter is for, Wolf’s Blood,” Norman said. He winked. “But you know, a little ouija board action in the dark isn’t a bad idea. It might be a good preliminary ritual, in a way. Plus, people are grieving. Or they’re upset at last. I’ll update the Evite.”

Norman pulled out his phone and started tinkering with it. “Hey, by the way, thanks for tracking me down. I didn’t have you pegged as the type to be interested in any of this. I thought you were just here to flash some tits, make some deals with editors, and then split. You seem really committed to the Lovecraftian community. It’s nice to see. This should be an interesting evening.”

Colleen’s thank you leaked out between clenched teeth.

There was a knock on the door, and Norman bellowed, “Come in!” Colleen was extremely relieved to see Raul, Barry, and R.G.

Barry was a little tentative with his hello, R.G.’s smile was running at half-wattage, and Raul entered behind them silently.

“Hi guys,” Colleen said. She wanted to explain why she was here so badly, but there was no facial expression complex enough to explain everything. A few other people strolled in, just as awkward and nearly as silent and took up seats without the usual casual negotiations and gestures that spontaneously emerge in a social group.

“Welcome, all. When the hour strikes, we’ll be ready to begin,” Norman said. He opened the folder and handed the person on his left—not Colleen—a sheaf of papers. “Take one and pass the rest around.” More silence, except for the shuffling of the papers. Everyone in the room seemed pleased to take the story; any excuse to stare down at their laps rather than look at one another.

The story was not good. Colleen saw that right away. There was something in the shape of it that was wrong. Non-Euclidean indentations, dialogue between half a dozen characters bunched together in the same paragraph, and that paragraph filled up most of the first page.

The story, which had no title, was only three pages long, single-spaced. A quick skim showed that Norman was telling the truth. Cthulhu’s dimensions—everything from wingspan to the Rockwell scale hardness of the Elder God’s hide—were detailed. There was a trace of a theme in the tale, and even a sort of literary allusion. In the year 2112, an obvious reference to the fourth album by the band Rush, a half dozen marine scientists are taking measurements across the carcass of the dead Cthulhu, recording their findings using a variety of means. Unsurprisingly, their conclusions all disagree with one another à la the blind men bade to describe an elephant after touching its legs and trunk and ears, and they take to arguing in a very non-collegial way—montages of threats and scatological insults in speech, text, and video crackle over the speakers in their hyper-advanced diving helmets. One of them digs up an “ancient Internet meme” featuring a still photo of a professional wrestler emblazoned with the legend “Your Mama Rode Space Mountain, Fat Boy!” It was amateurish and stupid, but Colleen guessed Norman had some reason for it—perhaps it was supposed to be Freudian? Or worse, an in-joke designed to please either members of his cult or tweak a particular attendee of the Summer Tentacular. The sentences were seasoned with plenty of typographical errors—“alot of us disagree on what were experiencing”—as well, but after a few years in the Lovecraftian small press, Colleen was used to that.

All the squabbling among the scientists is vanity, as far above the ocean depths, an “autonamated astronomy satellite the size of a 12 aircraft carriers” notes that the stars are finally right, and Cthulhu rises, awakens, and consumes all the scientists, bursts from the Pacific and expands to ingest the entire planet without even perceiving that sapient life existed upon it until, towering over the ionosphere, Cthulhu opens his eyes to observe the infinite cosmos as the satellite in its orbit “crosses the great black eye like a razor slicing across the orblike eye in the 20th century surrrealist silent film Un Chien Andalou.” Colleen sucked on her teeth at that line.

She glanced up from the pages and tried to take the temperature of the room. There was a split—skimmers who had finished reading early looked as chagrined as Colleen felt. The people still reading it seemed intrigued by the story. Someone snickered, appreciatively rather than derisively.

“Norman…” R.G. said. “Did you hear about Charles Cudmore?” R.G. was in the skimmer group.

“Of course,” Norman said, his tone solemn.

“I mean, did you hear what the police found?”

“…his body?” Norman said.

“Patches of his skin were missing, all along his back and thighs.”

“Arkham,” Raul said.

“So, he was the creator of Arkham?” A general murmur arose across the room.

“He was a little guy; was there even enough, you know, flesh for that?” Colleen asked.

“Arkham is supposedly an octavo edition,” Norman said, holding up his hands, fingers and thumbs at angles, to form a little rectangle. “Wouldn’t take that much.” Norman sighed. “Anyway, we shouldn’t be attached to such concerns.”

“He was a friend of yours,” Colleen said.

“Spending mental energy on Charles Cudmore won’t bring him back to life, and even if I could bring him back to life, he’d die again, eventually.”

“You could bring him back to life again,” Raul said.

“Over and over,” someone else, who had just finished reading the story, said.

“And I might die and then he’d die and there would be nobody to bring him back to life,” Norman said, suddenly pissy. “Listen, we’ve gotten off track. Our collective focus has been disrupted.” He glared at R.G. “Everyone read the story again. Then we’ll begin.” He pulled out his smartphone, tapped at it to make it play some ambient buzzing drone, and placed it on the coffee table before him. “The lights,” he said, and the lights dimmed. Colleen hadn’t noticed anyone in the kitchenette area, but here was Hiram Chandler, who hadn’t said hello or otherwise made his presence known to anyone prior to this moment.

There was enough illumination for Colleen to read the story again, but she couldn’t bear the thought. She tilted the paper up and peered over it, trying to determine why R.G., Raul, and Barry would even come to an event like this.

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,” Norman muttered. In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming, according to Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu.”

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,” several of the seated people repeated.

“Do not attempt to visualize Cthulhu,” Norman intoned. “For he cannot be captured in your mind’s eye.”

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,” everyone save Colleen said. Even Raul’s squeaky voice was part of the chant.

“Bring to the front of your mind some element of Cthulhu. The roll of the dice in a game. A line from a tale, perhaps the one you have just so eagerly read. A swipe of green and black from a dream you had once.”

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

Norman’s voice was oddly soothing. There was something to the tone, to the measured cadence. It figured. If Norman were just a fat clown, he’d never have climbed the ranks as far as he had. But he had a bit of intelligence, enough money to afford a large suite at least for one night, and the organizational skills sufficient to keep the con running smoothly, despite the murders and the heavy police presence. Losers and stupid people never really achieve even minor positions of authority, are never given organizational responsibility. Even a minor competence is so rare…

Could Norman be the killer, Colleen thought. He had money—perhaps money enough for Arkham, and he seemed to know what it looked like. His blasé reaction to the news about Cudmore was telling. His religious beliefs were clearly nuts, and narcissistic besides.

The music swelled.

“In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. We are his dream. He is our dream.”

Colleen pictured dead Panossian, not dreaming at all, but extinguished, turned off. Not even granted the dignity of a burial, or a face. Maybe it was Cudmore—he was clearly the binder of Arkham. Did he send Panossian the book just to lure him into an ambush? But who killed Cudmore? Could it have been Phan-tasia? Or did Phantasia kill Panossian and Cudmore both? Maybe Colleen was wrong, and Phantasia had just been up here, in the penthouse suite, setting up the candles last night or looking for a working soda machine, when he wandered downstairs to the floor on which Colleen and Panossian shared a room.

Norman continued, describing Cthulhu. Cthulhu is beyond space and time. When the stars are right, and the stars are right, Cthulhu will materialize and fill all spaces in the world. The spaces where shadows form, the spaces between molecules, the spaces inside atoms. The image of Cthulhu in your mind is not the true Cthulhu. There is a vista of reality far beyond your island of ignorance, which is but like a speck upon a flea...

...there’s a hole in the bottom of the sea. Colleen’s mind wandered. At the very least, that meant that the ritual would fail and Cthulhu would not materialize and consume the universe simply by being active in the universe, the negation of the Uncreated that created Creation. Norman definitely had his spiel down, but he should have edited out some of the alliteration.

Finally he stood and said, “It is done.” Everyone looked up at him. “Okay, let’s drink!” A cheer went up, the lights flashed on, and from the kitchenette Hiram reached down out of sight and then lifted a giant plastic keg up onto the counter.

Raul caught up to Colleen with one long stride and whispered in her ear, “This is the part when we summon Cthulhu. The drink is basically absinthe. And lean.”

“You mean cough syrup...?”

“And melted Jolly Ranchers.” Raul reached out and snagged one of the cups, already filled with a greenish purple liquid. He gulped it down in a single swallow. “It’s horrible!”

R.G. appeared on Colleen’s other side, with a cup in each hand. “For you. You can tell that Norman actually believes in his religion because he makes you sit through the prayers first, and then you get the drink. It’s sort of like a Salvation Army soup kitchen, except fewer head lice.”

“Actually, just as many head lice,” Barry said from immediately behind Colleen. Colleen found herself surrounded. Before her, the crowd parted and she moved to the keg, where Norman had a red Solo cup full of the stuff waiting for her.

“Purple Death,” he said, handing it over.

Colleen glanced down at the cup. It definitely smelled like a combination of licorice and synthetic chemical fruit. She still had hardly eaten anything, and this seemed like a very powerful drink. Colleen raised her cup, said thanks, and took the teensiest sip to a chorus of boos. “Sorry, still a girl,” she said.

The crowd drank with an intensity that only comes with the combination of free alcohol, unsuccessful writers, and high stress. Colleen took sips, and the booze flooded her veins. Raul, as it turned out, was a sullen drunk, and took to murmuring about his agent and the big book deal that got away. Barry got loud, bellowing about how rough his father was, how the old man once piled all his copies of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in the bathtub and turned on the tap, destroying them all and clogging the plumbing, for which the whole family blamed Barry.

Norman climbed the coffee tables, feet awkwardly placed to keep his pant cuffs from the flames of the still-burning votive candles, and raised his cup.

“To Charles Cudmore!” he announced. “That man was a friend of mine!”

“To Cudmore!” Colleen joined in the response, but it felt unnerving and queer, treating Cudmore as though he had lived to a ripe old age and died in a hospital bed.

“Cudmore was a great artist, editor, critic, collector, and person,” Norman said. “How many other so-called ‘fans’ or ‘colleagues’ go out of their way to contact their favorite people, to compliment their projects, to send little gifts and messages of encouragement? Heck, I know I don’t do that sort of thing…and I probably should.”

Norman lowered the cup and held it in both hands, then held it out in front of him. “Got to pour one out for that homie. Uhm, you guys just drink, I don’t want to have to pay for a carpet cleaner.” He overturned the cup, and a few drops landed on the candles, sending them sputtering. “Anyone else have anything to say?”

Colleen stepped forward, raised her cup, and said, “To Panossian!” The room was silent. R.G. then repeated, “To Panossian,” quietly, her cup aloft by a couple of inches. A few others muttered, “Panossian, yeah.” “To Panossian.”

“Fuck that guy,” Norman said. “He made a fool out of me not forty-eight hours ago. You think I’m going to forget that?”

“Easy man,” Barry said. “That’s the Purple Death talking.”

“Oh, I don’t fucking care. You didn’t even take the ritual seriously, did you Cathleen?”

“Colleen,” Colleen said.

“Wolf’s blood! Fucking Danzig, yes I know your goddamn name.” Norman tottered forward, his toes at the edge of the coffee table.

“Don’t say anything you’ll regret, Norm,” Barry said.

“Let me tell you something about Panossian, Colleen. He was a fucking asshole. He wasn’t a part of this community, and that’s why you don’t see anyone crying into their drinks over his death. You get it? Nobody cares about him. You know why we tolerated him? Because we don’t have any fucking way to get rid of people. Anyone can show up and make a nuisance of themselves and chant ‘Lovecraft, Cthulhu, tentacles, Necronomicon’ and we’ll accept them. We, as a community, are way too accepting.” Norman gestured broadly. “That is the problem. That is why these rituals never work the way I want them to. This—” he said, turning around, his arms wide, “is why we—” and then he lost his footing and fell off the coffee table, slamming hard into two of the chairs that had been set up for the ritual.

A few people rushed to his aid, and brought him back to his feet. Norman shook them all off, and stomped back toward the keg of Purple Death. The whole front of his shirt was stained with the stuff.

Hiram said, “Norman, it’s all right. Maybe the ritual did work. In fact, I am sure it did. Nobody goes to a Catholic church, takes Communion, and then ‘wonders’ if transubstantiation occurs.” He put up his hands and flicked his fingers when saying the word “wonders.” As Hiram spoke, several people started filing out of the suite, cups clutched in their hands.

“Well, I’m sure it didn’t, it never does,” Norman said. He leaned his elbows against the counter and sighed deeply.

Colleen made eye contact with Hiram, who shrugged. “Does this happen every year?”

“This is new,” R.G. told her.

“Usually, it’s the Purple Death that’s the sacrament,” Hiram said, refreshing his own cup via the keg. “According to Cthulhuism, only black oblivion is ‘real’ and human consciousness and understanding isn’t just limited, it is actually alien, divorced from the cosmos. We’re the outsiders, utterly alienated from the true reality of the Elder Gods. We worship Lesser Gods—Christ, Allah, television, capitalism, you name it. So, we try to get blotto.” And with that, he drank. “It’s all about self-empowerment, right Norman?”

Norman just groaned. “Oh, Charlie, what have we done?”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Colleen asked.

Hiram raised his palm and gestured toward Colleen, but she didn’t stop. She walked up to Norman and tapped him on the shoulder. “What have you done?”

“Nothing.” Norman cut his eyes at her and sneered. “Mind your own fucking business. I don’t even know why you came here.”

“I want to find out who would have a motive to kill Charles Cudmore.”

R.G. said, “Colleen, leave it alone. Leave it for the cops.”

“Yeah, I’m getting sleepy,” Barry said. “Are you coming up to the room, Colleen, or not?”

“Let’s all just go back to the bar,” Raul said.

“It’s closed,” R.G. snapped at him. “Colleen.”

“What did you and Cudmore do?” Colleen asked. “And who killed Cudmore?”

Norman whirled around and nearly lost his footing again. Colleen stepped back from the flailing, her hands up, a toe pointed. “I have no idea who killed Cudmore! It was probably you!”

“From the police station?” Colleen said. “Who did it, and why?”

“Someone did it,” Norman said. “Cudmore knew something, something bad. He was such a cool guy, a real friend. Gave his flesh and blood for Lovecraft, literally.”

“Arkham—he was the author?”

“No! That was me! Charlie was the bookbinder.”

“This is crazy, let’s go,” Raul said. “You didn’t write Arkham, Norman. We can tell from the story you make us read every year. You wouldn’t get a penny a word, much less a pound of flesh.” He was as unnaturally tall as Norman was wide. When he stepped up, the pair of them looked like the lowercase letter b.

“Norman’s always trollin’ trollin’ trollin’,” R.G. sang.

“Two people have been killed,” Colleen said. “And most of the people here, most of their supposed friends, are only mourning one of them.”

“You’ve done enough, Colleen,” Bhanushali said. She was standing in the doorway, about to enter. “Ms. Phantasia has been arrested and is being held because you claim that you saw him headed to the location where Panossian passed away.”

“You missed the ritual,” Hiram told her. She stared a hole through him, then turned back to Colleen as she entered the suite. “Danzig; you shouldn’t even be here. This is a Tentacular function, and you are no longer a member of the Summer Tentacular. Was no one checking badges? Norman?”

“A religious exemption,” Hiram said, but Bhanushali ignored him. “I’ll have you thrown out of the hotel,” she said to Colleen. Hiram ducked away and busied himself at the sink.

“But I’m not allowed to leave the hotel,” Colleen said.

“Then I guess you too will have to stay overnight in the holding cell down at the city jail.” She called out, over her shoulder, “Armbruster.”

Armbruster walked in with two police officers. “Here she is, like I said she’d be.”

“You sent me up here!” Colleen cried out. The police surrounded her and pulled her wrists behind her back.

“I think you’ll also find a felonious amount of codeine cough syrup in that keg,” Bhanushali said, pointing to it. “This drunken fat man smuggled it into the hotel.”

Norman just moaned but Hiram lifted the keg and dropped it back onto the countertop, producing a hollow-sounding thump. “This keg is empty.”

“We’re not your personal honor guard, ma’am,” one of the police officers said. “We’re only interested in securing this hotel right now. If you think these guys were doing wrong, take it up with the front desk.” He scanned the rooms. “Everyone, line up single file and pour the contents of those cups down the drain of the sink. We’ll wait here while you comply.”

“Bhanushali, I do this every year. You’ve been here, you know—” Norman started. Armbruster marched up to him and yanked the badge from around his neck with a sharp snap. “You’re banned. Get out.”

“This is my room,” Norman said, “whether I’m banned from the convention or not. You get out.”

Armbruster shot a look at the cops. The one not monitoring the sullen line of people pouring their drinks away just shrugged.

“Fine,” Armbruster said. “Enjoy your ‘party room,’ son.” He walked out of the room, followed by Bhanushali, with the cops and Colleen immediately behind.

In the hallway, everyone was silent, but thanks perhaps to some pre-planning Bhanushali and Armbruster walked over to the elevator bank and the cops hustled Colleen down the side steps and out to the rear parking lot.

“Miranda rights? Charges?” she asked.

“Trespassing?” the cop said, like it was a question.

The other cop opened the door to the cruiser and gestured extravagantly. “You have the right to remain silent. Honestly, it’s a good idea. We want to find a killer, not break up room parties. Don’t say anything, keep your head down, and we’ll process you quickly.”

Colleen almost smiled at that. After the formal arrest, the body cavity search, the seemingly endless wait, and the offer of “a baloney sandwich, or fucking nothing if you don’t like meat, Little Miss Vegan” in response to her inquiries about food, she found herself handcuffed to a bench in a hallway. Opposite her, handcuffed to another bench, was Ms. Phantasia. His heavy eye make-up was smeared, and lipstick was a gash across the bottom half of his face, but somehow he still managed to look more like the late drag queen Divine than he did The Joker. It might have been all the purple and green velveteen, and the Iggy Pop t-shirt under the vest with buttons near-bursting over his belly, or it might have been despite all that, but there was something about Phantasia that was compelling, even as he just sat there, slouched over, half-defeated. He was like a pile of top hats and silks and scimitars after the magician had left the stage, or the circus big top three hours before show time. Something magical had happened. Something astounding was promised. For a moment, Colleen could see why a lost soul like Chloe would hitch her wagon to this star.

“They didn’t know which cell best suited me—boys or girls—so they left me out here. I was too rough for the girls, and they thought the boys might grow too excited once they gazed upon my countenance, so here I am,” he said. His voice was melodious and deep, like a singer’s or a late-night TV horror movie host from back when TV stations had such things. “Perhaps they had the same difficulty with you?”

Colleen smirked. “Don’t be a fool, Phantasia. They put us together in the hope that we’d talk and one of us would say something. They don’t know whether you killed Panossian or I just said I saw you to throw suspicion off me and on to you.”

“Fantastic! How did you come to such a conclusion?” Phantasia asked.

“I am a writer, you know. I do more than just Lovecraft pastiches. When something strange happens, I think about motivation. Why would someone do such a thing? Why would the police put me, the person who gave them your name, and you together?”

“Perhaps they’re waiting for you to say something incriminating,” Phantasia says. “To gloat? Apparently, in this town walking down a flight of steps can be incriminating. That’s what they have me in for. And you?”

Colleen frowned. “I attended Norman’s dumb ritual slash party slash drunken mental breakdown without my Summer Tentacular badge.”

“They should put you to…death!” Phantasia declared. He planted himself on the bench and shook rapidly, making a buzzing noise with his tongue and teeth. “Haha, don’t worry, darling. The fathers of our great state have never executed anyone.”

“Life in prison then. You’re the one facing a murder charge, aren’t you? Pretty jolly for all that,” Colleen said.

“Oh no, that’s all been resolved. Charles Cudmore killed Panossian,” Phantasia said. “I’m afraid one of the police officers decided to get a little fresh with me when taking me in, and so there was a misunderstanding and somehow the police officer decided that I was resisting arrest and had somehow slapped him, though I did no such thing. My dear old pater cannot afford the bail money right now, but Bhanushali is hard at work raising funds.”

“She was hard at work getting me back down here when I saw her last,” Colleen said. “She is the one who had me arrested.”

“Don’t think too harshly of Bhanushali, young miss. She was briefly under arrest as well. Imagine it—that old priss being strip searched? When Cudmore was wheeled in, they let her go and decided that Cudmore had killed Panossian.”

“Why the hell would they do that?”

Phantasia’s gaze drifted overhead, as though he were gathering his thoughts, or fabricating some. “Do you know why I enjoy Lovecraftian fiction?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “It is because Lovecraftian fiction posits a world that is indescribable, incomprehensible, and delicious. There’s something out there in the dark, and it may be divine, or grotesque, or both. Pain and wonder, an unparalleled combination.

“Life as we live it is mostly just pain, interspersed with enough wonder to keep us from going mad. Except for those of us who go mad. Panossian was a mad one, I think. He didn’t know how to live in this world. Honestly, neither do I. Fuck, girlfriend, take a look at me. I often sit on a bench down by the river and people-watch, or ride the buses all day. I’ve learned something from my observations. I have learned, Ms. Danzig, how people live in the world. How they adapt to a universe so black and infinite that their minds cannot correlate the contents of it. Do you know what they do?”

Colleen said, “Why don’t you just tell me.”

“They lie,” Phantasia said. “To themselves. Or maybe ‘lie’ isn’t quite the right word. They simplify. Lie quite right simplify! Oh my, I am rhyming. Oh, for a Boswell of my own to capture every utterance. Anyway, where was I?”

“Lie,” Colleen said. “Simplify.”

“Yes, of course. They see a world too immense to understand, and shrink it so that they can understand it. Police do this all the time. Why did Charles Cudmore kill Panos Panos Panossian? Ms. Danzig, he did it because someone suggested that he might have, and then he was wheeled into the morgue himself. Think of how easy this makes the case—no need to continue the investigation, no need for a trial. There is a connection between the two: Panossian had a copy of Arkham, which was bound in human skin, sent to him by Cudmore…as it was his skin that bound the book. He was expert at removing skin from a body, and he removed Panossian’s face expertly from the poor bugger’s cranium.”

“What was Cudmore’s motive?” Colleen asked. “Why would Panossian try to sell Arkham back to Cudmore if Cudmore sent it to him in the first place?”

“They had an argument,” Phantasia said. “The police interviewed nearly every member of the Summer Tentacular about Panossian. How do you think he came off once those interviews were compiled? He constantly argued with and needled his Lovecraftian colleagues, his brothers and sisters of the tentacle. He was widely hated, and desperate for money.

“For his own part, Cudmore foolishly gave away something he could have sold for a great deal of money. He was a little man—it’s not as though he had so much excess flesh that he could manufacture so many extra copies.” Phantasia rubbed his belly with his uncuffed hand. “Unlike some of us. He sent Arkham to Panossian, for free, when he could have sold it for tens of thousands of dollars to virtually any of the upper-tier collectors. How much did Panossian want for his book? Probably not more than a few hundred dollars, maybe one thousand. It’s hard to sell a flesh-bound book on the open market, unless you are the one with the flesh.”

“And why murder Panossian so violently, why take his face?”

Phantasia shrugged. “I wouldn’t say Cudmore was stable. He had that odd misshapen head. And he could have perhaps decided to make another special limited edition of the flesh of a murder victim’s rictus, trapped forever in a frozen howl. He had the contacts to sell such a book privately, and if you know anything about book collectors, you know they don’t let petty issues like a corpse and a murder stand in the way of gaining a truly unique item.

“That was Cudmore’s goal in joining the corps sent to seek out the grave of poor dead N-Word Man. Ah, cats! ‘Objects to adore, idealise, and celebrate in the most rhapsodic of dactyls and anapaests, iambics and trochaics,’ as Lovecraft said. But Cudmore hoped to make a book of the cat if there was any flesh not ‘et by worms, and if there was, he’d use the bones as decorative details. Bhanushali probably wanted the dead cat for herself, and they argued over the issue and he left and then he fell to his death in the dark and cursed wood of Providence. The murderer struck down by fate. They search his hotel room and find the face and the copy of Arkham. Case closed, convention over, and now we can all go home.”

Colleen took a moment to process all of that, and said, “I see. That is a simple story. Makes sense. Plays upon the stereotypes of Lovecraftians the cops probably spent all weekend confirming while performing surveillance at the con. And I bet there’s Panossian’s DNA on Cudmore and vice-versa.

“But you do know, don’t you, that Cudmore didn’t just fall and die. He was struck on the head, then fell on another rock, right? He was killed too. So, in your simple story, who killed him?”

And with that, Ms. Phantasia burst into great screaming tears.

13. From Beyond

Charles Cudmore lay dead four feet away from me, in the adjacent cold chamber. Were I alive I’d climb out of my cell, walk over to his, open the door, yank him out, open his mouth, and piss down his dead throat.

He actually seemed to like me, back when he was alive.

Folks like Cudmore come along every so often. You think you know the lay of the land, you think you have a good mental map of the social pecking order, and then, a new player emerges and he is already everyone’s best friend. You wouldn’t peg him for the type—he had a slow, southern drawl and blundered into every political and pop culture discussion one could possibly have. War in Iraq? Hulk Hogan sex tape? He’d always weigh in on Facebook or some forum, to denounce everyone as missing the real truth, which he, conveniently, had access to. Have I mentioned that his head was shaped like the top of an asparagus, and he wore shaggy bangs to complete the picture? But it was no use mocking his appearance; we’re all ugly here in Lovecraftiana. Cudmore was a good enough sport to embrace the look, and the nickname.

Three years ago, I’d never heard of him. Cudmore first appeared on my radar when he debuted his column in Dreamlands, which was shocking for two reasons: Ronald Ranger was notorious for not publishing the work of other people in his ’zine, and the column was dreadful. I mean, it was routinely without thesis or point, like asking a smart eighth-grader who hadn’t done the reading to get up in front of the class and discuss the major themes of Hamlet.

His first column was about my book. The first sentence of his first column was about how he was so busy setting up his column that he hadn’t had time to read my book, so he’d be just reviewing the first twenty pages or so. Literally—Panossian’s The Catcher in R’lyeh is one of those especially challenging Mythos novels new writers often think is a good idea, but I’ve been so busy setting up my office and brainstorming ideas for this new Dreamlands column, “Get to the Point,” that I’ve only had time to read two dozen pages.

He went on to explain that within those two dozen pages was everything wrong, and right, with Lovecraftian fiction. I was a hipster who didn’t understand the classics, but it was good that I was confronting the Old Guard with new ways of thinking and writing, but Salinger was boring, but adding Lovecraft to anything made it less boring. Panossian was obviously a pretentious git, but if you had to pretend to be something you’re not, at least Panossian made the choice to pretend to be a good writer.

It wasn’t the review that bothered me—really, it wasn’t—it was the follow-up email chastising me for not sending him a thank you note for reviewing my book. Thank you notes were key to Cudmore’s own bottle rocket ascension. Six months later, he was starring in YouTube videos with Bhanushali, and launching a crowdfunding campaign for a new feature-length documentary about C. M. Eddy, which everyone was extremely enthusiastic about. Twenty thousand bucks later, Cudmore had produced a four-minute trailer that sounded like the audio had been mixed in a bus depot men’s room. Last Summer Tentacular, he got a table in the dealers’ room and had one product for sale: H. R. Giger’s Necronomicon and Necronomicon II, with tipped-in lithographs and leather binding and black cloth slipcases. It was a set of course, both signed and both numbered—and yes, they were numbered 666, that infamous Biblical number that has nothing to do with Lovecraft or the Necronomicon or anything, but which immediately doubled the price. And Cudmore wanted $2500 for the books, no negotiations, no chatting.

He just raised his eyebrows, asked, “Do you have twenty-five hundred dollars in cash?” and then glanced down at the book. “No? Move along then. You’re blocking traffic.” That weekend, in every panel he was on, or attended as a member of the audience, he managed to mention that the books were for sale, and that they had been a personal gift from Giger.

His other big anecdote was this: when he was down in Hollywood “doing some work,” Richard Matheson had taken him aside and given him two pieces of advice—always be true to yourself, and don’t be a name-dropper.

“Like Richard Matheson told me, ‘Nobody likes a name-dropper,’” Cudmore told me during our panel about Fred Chappell, the poet and Lovecraftian from North Carolina. The name I had dropped was “Fred Chappell,” whom I had interviewed the year before for a small science fiction magazine.

Cob and Phantasia pooled their money to buy the books, and then flipped a coin to see who would get Necronomicon and who would get Necronomicon II. They live on opposite ends of Providence, so even in the event of a major hurricane coming ashore, it was likely that at least one of the volumes would survive. That’s all it took for Cudmore to become a quasi-legendary figure. He had the goods, he had connections to writers that people have actually heard of, and he knew the secrets of kissing up and kicking down. He had one other skill too, a crucial one.

Charles Cudmore could make a deadline.

Now, the stuff he produced wasn’t very good, but if you’re a fan and just want to consume nothing but Cthulhu all day while waiting for Cthulhu to come consume you, then it was fine. Do you remember when getting weddings videotaped was a big deal, and if you come from an “ethnic” family like mine, the cheesier the editing the better? Heart wipes, slide shows of the bride and groom as babies on their potties, split screens, Mission: Impossible music played on a Casio keyboard, a green screen sunset. That was Cudmore—tons of green everywhere, line drawings of nude women on their backs, their bellies sliced open and intestines rising from their stomachs to form a cloud of tentacles under a pair of glowing eyes. His Giger tribute. And he pointed out that in his depiction, the big tits of all the dead girls slide into their armpits. “That’s what big tits do, Panossian, when they’re real,” he told me once. He designed his own ridiculous-looking tattoos as well. He had one of a pair of tits with toothy mouths for nipples and tentacles on the underside, like a pair of jellyfish. But he always wore a blazer over his T-shirts to keep his tattoos hidden. Asparagus Head was that kind of guy.

He never met a font he didn’t like; the more the merrier. His layouts looked like the menu at a Mediterranean restaurant. He used Photoshop the way a kid uses a knife to spread peanut butter. I thought he was just incompetent, until I realized how malevolent he was.

There was an online dust-up a couple of years ago about a bust of Lovecraft being crowdfunded. A science fiction writer in Israel saw a link and wrote a long blog post about Lovecraft’s anti-Semitism. Let’s be clear—Lovecraft was an anti-Semite. He wasn’t an anti-Semite for his time, he wasn’t an anti-Semite only before his marriage to Sonia Greene, he wasn’t an anti-Semite until he learned about the horrors of Nazism, he was an anti-Semite from beginning to end. The man hated the fucking Jews. When he lived in Brooklyn, he described the population as “a mongrel herd with repulsive Mongoloid Jews in the visible majority, and the coarse faces and bad manners eventually come to wear on one so unbearably that one feels like punching every god damn bastard in sight.”

Anyway, he didn’t punch anyone, but a number of people in the broader genre of the fantastic, of which Lovecraftiana is the rundown district with the amusement park full of rusty rides and meth-addled carnies, objected to the fund-raising and suggested instead that the money be used for something else: scholarships for writers of color, a bust of Octavia Butler, a statue of a dragon…there were all sorts of ideas, really, for what to do with other people’s money.

Bhanushali, a woman of color herself, took exception to the “anti-Lovecraftian interlopers” and launched a month’s worth of daily tirades against all the counter-ideas, which is fine, and then also attempted to contextualize and redefine Lovecraft’s racism and anti-Semitism out of existence. This was especially disappointing, as Bhanushali herself wrote quite eloquently about Lovecraft’s personal shortcomings in the past. She suggested that the bust be made in her own image, called the Israeli science fiction writer “a parasite” (big rhetorical blunder, that one), and signed one petition on behalf of the entire Summer Tentacular, which annoyed me and a few other people.

Armbruster and Cudmore were Bhanushali’s chief lieutenants, with Cudmore the head of the Facebook division. Nobody could talk about the issue without Cudmore materializing and declaring everyone “Knee-Jerk Liberals,” to which he would then add, “And I am speaking as a Liberal myself.” (Yes, he capitalized “liberal,” like most people who aren’t actually liberals do.) He’d go on about his own Jewish heritage (one grandfather) and explain how inferior everyone complaining was to Lovecraft, writing-wise. He further poured a few letters into some grade-level reading comprehension test website, along with the Facebook comments of his rhetorical enemies, to prove that Lovecraft was twice as intelligent as anyone who didn’t want the bust made. He declared that I, personally, was “just a maggot who hopes to eat enough shit to one day pupate and then finally emerge as a board-certified gadfly.”

And a few minutes later, also on Facebook, he sent me a private message: “Hey P, I don’t even care about the bust issue. It’s a stupid idea to make a statue anyway. Do you want to be a part of my next project—a collection of stories about Arkham, Massachusetts?”

Of course I said, “Sure,” but things got in the way and I never managed to get my story done. By “things” of course I mean my couch and Internet porn and hunger pangs.

You would think I would have instantly cottoned to the idea that Arkham was the Cudmore anthology, except that to really understand Lovecraftiana, one has to understand just how much material is produced each year. Dozens of anthologies, hundreds of short stories, a handful of novels, a bunch of games and art, roomfuls of useless verse, and hard drives packed with unlistenable “dark” music. In any given month, there’s something with the word Arkham on it being produced. Arkham may well be the most written-about fictional city in the world. What helped is that outside of some 17th century homes, and the college, and the river, and the sanitarium, it was a blank slate. So, why not drop Sherlock Holmes down in Arkham, or have Einstein visit Miskatonic University to give an anachronistic lecture on dark matter, or gift its main street with a number of goth night clubs, or host a gang war between the Crips and the Bloods there?

I didn’t realize that Arkham was Cudmore’s work until the morning shift in the morgue, when they turned him over to look at the blow to the back of his head that had knocked him out. Someone had done some pretty perfect slicing on his back. The medical examiner referred to it as “scarification, possibly ritualistic,” but when he described the rectangular patches that had been sliced from Cudmore’s back, I knew almost everything.

Yes, for all the good it does me.

A great big piece of foolscap paper is called a folio. In the olden times, folios were books made from these great big pieces of paper. Fold them into fours, that’s a quarto. Fold them into eights, that’s an octavo. I’m oversimplifying, and I don’t even think modern printers work the way I just described, but the terms stuck. Anyway, an octavo edition is generally a pretty small book. A pocket dictionary, for example. I never picked up and read Arkham as the horror small press rule of thumb is this—the fancier the physical object, the worse the actual text between the covers—but the case was small and the book thus even smaller. Arkham was Cudmore’s project, and made from the skin off his back.

So who removed the skin for him?

He’s right next to me, dead as I am. Deader, perhaps, as his frontal lobe took a beating, as did his little lizard hindbrain. Is he trapped like me, waiting for the last chemical reactions to finally fizzle out? Is he still in there, but at severely reduced circumstances, crying like a child, without either reason or ruthless instinct? I suppose that will be me soon enough. There’s no reason to suspect my brain will turn off like a light switch. More like a sponge drying in the sun.

A Lovecraftian story, a strange tale, a plain old ghost story, we read them for any number of reasons, but there’s one obvious one—we get to indulge the fantasy that there is something beyond death. If only there were. Even if the soul were nothing but a low-power radio transmitter and receiver, I could be chatting right now with my old frenemy Cudmore, he of the asparagus-shaped head. Fiction tells us about survival after death, but also of community after death. We believe it too—we make sure mama is buried next to papa when she passes, we spread the ashes of our dear dog over the city park, even though it’ll all just be washed away in a week by the rains.

We visit Swan Point and try to find a trace of the real Lovecraft there, though he is ninety years gone.

There’s nothing like that. I can tell. I am dead enough to know. It’s like being the only person in a room adjacent to an entirely empty room. I don’t have to peek in to know what’s on the other side. I have other senses, the senses only the dead have, and I know whose are better as the dead know. I know that there is something going on in what’s left of Cudmore’s head, but what it is I don’t know. There is no way I can reach out to that little flickering light in his tenderized brain, but if I were a merciful person I’d reach over and snuff it out between my fingers.

That wouldn’t even make me a murderer. It would be doing Cudmore a favor.

Death, it changes you.

I have become gossip. I’m considered the more important nerd by the police; Cudmore is just a man-shaped clue as to the facts and perpetrator of my demise, and this despite the fact that Cudmore has money, has friends, has a poor old mother who flew up the Eastern Seaboard to identify him and sign for his belongings—she is gossip too, as she has a similarly malformed head, which the medical examiners snickered over after she left, in tears. Ah, it’s not as though she could have cried any more if they called her names and stuck their tongues out at her.

I hate myself and I hate that the life beyond death is nothing but a small and shrinking echo chamber in my own brain, but I wouldn’t wish being a police medical examiner on anyone, not knowing what I know now. Imagine a thirty-year career of guffawing and sneering at corpses, only to find out afterward that while you cut them open or fondled their genitals or mocked their loved ones that some of them could hear you. Seventy-two hours in hell, knowing you deserved it.

Tracy killed Cudmore. She confessed to it. Or, should I say this: Chloe confessed to killing Cudmore in order to keep her master, Ms. Phantasia, from being accused of it. Which isn’t to say that Ms. Phantasia killed Cudmore, is it? Perhaps he was just worried about being found guilty for the crime of looking like a vampiric drag queen in a town where New England liberalism only goes so far.

The police have also decided that Cudmore killed me, because he’s into skin, and the slicing of it off bodies. Circumstantial evidence, especially given that Cudmore sure as fuck didn’t reach around his own back to slice off the covers for the five-unit run of Arkham.

Cudmore died with his eyes closed. The last thing he recalls is probably a few blades of grass, maybe a leaf, coming right at him. I died with eyes wide open, the lids torn from them along with the rest of my visage. Seeing too much is almost as bad as seeing nothing, but only almost. Was it Cudmore, was it Cudmore?

I had taken the steps down to the basement, near the fitness room, the pool, and the laundry. When I was alive, I was sure that nothing was worse than having to ride an elevator with a bunch of nerds. They’re all so self-conscious that they strike up conversations, make jokes (“Let’s press all the buttons!”), they sing songs about the elevator. Of course, someone would ask what was in my box.

Then what happened? Where was I? In the basement, by the laundry. The buyer was initially anonymous. I have a reputation as someone to tell a secret to…if you want everyone to know about it. Arkham was hot property as its provenance was obscure, and folks worried that the tattoos on the cover would one day be traced back to some murdered stripper or other. I wasn’t to expect anyone in particular until I got here.

I thought the deal was that nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars would be enough to keep my mouth shut. The killer had other plans with which to keep me quiet, obviously.

Either I was early, or the killer was late. God, I hope the killer was late. What could be more humiliating than having to wait around to be murdered? Who was it, who was it? It’s just a shadow to me, though everything else in the room in my mind’s eye is fairly clear. White washer/dryers in vertical stacks against both walls. A flickering fluorescent light. A vending machine for soaps and a couple of carts. Everything smelled like chemicals and superheated human sweat. The door behind me opened.

It was David Cob who gave me the details of the sale at his party. Was he there, in the laundry room? Some large shadowy figure was, but virtually everyone at the Tentacular everyone is large, except Cudmore. Ranger is a pretty large and tall guy. Phantasia wears those giant boots. Fucking Norman, a giant in every direction. Even Bhanushali is a husky sort, though she is so short. She could never loom over me, despite my own height being just average.

Hey, Asparagus Head! Who killed me? Did you set me up with that copy of Arkham? If only there were a community of the dead. There would be no reason to keep secrets anymore. Nothing can harm us now. Like I used to joke—if I could choose my own epitaph, it would be “Kill Me If You Can.”

A community of the dead would be composed of excellent communicators. How many times have you kept from saying something to keep from harm, or have blurted out something stupid just to strike at someone first, before they could get to you? No need to do that, here in the land of the dead. If only I could talk to my old pal Cudmore, compare notes. We could figure out who killed him for real too. It surely wasn’t Tracy—she just had one of her little obsessive weirdo spasms and decided to tie herself to Phantasia, and the Tentacular, and even my death forever by inserting herself into it somehow. Now she’ll be in the papers, like a Manson girl or something, and there will be fan websites about her, and some post-riot grrl hardcore bands will name themselves after her, and she’ll be a mugshot forever, never growing older, never owning more than six things.

Oh, Cudmore, were you my final stalker? Did you know him? Got any clues? What did you think when they rolled you in here and then immediately started talking about me? How does it feel, being a footnote in my far more interesting murder, what with my missing face and dozens of potential suspects, while you’ve been all wrapped up with a sweet little confession?

Damn, son, if your head had been shaped like mine, you might just be alive today.

One thing we had in common, Asparagus Head, was our love of classic B-cinema. “X”—The Man With the X-Ray Eyes, with Ray Milland, directed by Roger Corman? An essential film for anyone interested in science fiction, existentialism, and cheesy gimmicks. Specterama! At the end, Milland can see everything, the whole universe, which is mostly great swirling darknesses and in the center a cosmic eye staring down at all, and so he plucks out his own eyes. And remember how at one late-night screening in some hotel or other, we all shouted that apocryphal final line, “I can still see!”

That’s what death is like. Except that I have a little blind spot right at the time of my death. But like Milland in that movie, my vision is getting better and better. I’m afraid though, that the moment I remember exactly what happened, I’ll cease to exist. This is one last cogitation, one last thought, before the brain surrenders. I won’t need to gouge out my eyes—I can’t do so anyway—my brain will gouge itself out.

So, what are you thinking, Cudmore, if you are thinking? Any regrets? Who played you? Did you ever like me? I presume you knew that there’s no way you’d get Arkham back in your hands, even if you lived. Maybe it was a real present after all. Then they go to you, or maybe you just let it slip that I had a copy, and then the killer decided to kill you too so you wouldn’t ID him. Or her.

I suppose this extended moment of consciousness has me hopeful, despite it all. Is this three days in Hades, like Jesus Christ on the cross? Will I continue to exist? Is Hell me here with nobody to talk to but Cudmore, or me here with nobody to talk to, not even Cudmore?

I can’t wait to finally, actually die.

14. The Other Gods

“Why shouldn’t I bury you deep?” Detective Amato asked, without looking up from his keyboard. He was a two-finger typist, and his tongue poked out of his mouth as he worked.

“Lawyer,” Colleen said. She was allowed the privilege of sitting at Amato’s desk rather than an interrogation room, and wasn’t even cuffed. He was the big baby in the suit she had seen around the hotel a couple of times.

“Wrong answer,” Amato said. Now he looked up. “That’s why I should bury you deep. You can have a lawyer by, I dunno, Tuesday, maybe? And forget that comfy bench outside—we’ll put you in the holding cell with the other ladies if you want to play lawyer. We got you for a violation. You could go now, if you cooperate. I want to know about the corpses downstairs, I want to know what the hell is going on in that hotel.”

“Why haven’t I met you before?” Colleen asked. “It’s all been uniformed cops and revolving door arrests.”

“You weren’t at the scene, standing over…” He took off his glasses and squinted at the monitor, “Panossian, with a scalpel, or…Cudmore, with a rock. I can’t be everywhere at once, and frankly until the second body turned up we didn’t think the murder had anything to do with…” Another squint. “The Lovecrafters.”

“Lovecraftians.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Amato snapped. He glared at Colleen for a moment, and then quickly typed something, jabbing the backspace bar a few times, and then filling in the word while muttering to himself, “Love. Craft. Ee. Uhns.”

What kind of cop was Amato? Colleen was surprised, and appalled. He looked like a living TV prank, as if Panossian would show up any second, carrying his face in his hands. Then Amato, wearing his father’s comically oversized dress shirt and tie, would drop the act and smile his big baby-face smile and say “Gotcha!” He was maybe thirty, or a very well-preserved forty, thin with close-cropped black hair cut into a toddler’s bangs. No wedding ring, and no personal effects on his desk save a Boston Red Sox schedule pinned to a wall, and a plastic wrapper from a vending machine Danish crumpled into a ball by his mouse.

“Listen, don’t be a fucking smartass,” he said. Colleen just looked at him. She had things to say—It’s okay, I won’t tell the teacher you said bad words immediately popped into her head—but she kept them to herself. “I spent a lot of time with the FBI, trying to determine if this was a serial murder. Ritualistic, a marginalized victim, unusual circumstances, but nothing came up. Then this second murder, entirely different, perhaps even just an assault gone wrong. Hit someone with a rock and kill him, a good lawyer can plead it down to manslaughter.”

“Are you supposed to tell me all this stuff?” Colleen said. Amato twisted his face to shout again, but then just raised a finger to his lips and shushed her.

“I know you’ve been sneaking around, ‘Buffy,’” he said. “And I know that like most people who sneak around, trying to solve a crime, you’ve probably come across something interesting, and like most people who sneak around trying to solve a crime you have no idea what you’re doing. You’re going to get hurt, or hurt someone. You might end up taking up a third space in our morgue. But you know something. So, tell me what you know.”

“I know...” Colleen started. “That Panossian was not well-liked. He liked to wind people up. He was an okay writer, so people put up with him to a certain extent. And, if I’m honest, I know that virtually everyone else I met this weekend has some kind of strange personality problem or other. My guess is that whoever has the book, or wanted the book, is the murderer.”

“You mean the book with a cover made from the skin of Victim Number Two, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Well...” Colleen stopped. Amato nodded, like one might to a child struggling to remember the letters after L-M-N-O-P. “The book is the connection. Panossian had the book with him; then it was gone when his body was found.”

“Could someone have found the book and the body, and decided to take the book and not mention the body to anyone?” Amato said. “Let’s just say we found a lot of DNA right outside the laundry room...” He looked back at his computer monitor. “Of course, he was found right outside a laundry room.”

“I suppose that is possible,” Colleen said.

“Great, we agree. So ignore the book for now. Who wants to kill Panossian?”

“I don’t know if anyone at the Summer Tentacular is capable of murder, really,” Colleen said. “Not unless it’s about the book. I can imagine someone killing for a priceless, rare object, and even trying to make another one with Panossian’s own skin, but—”

“Who?” Amato said.

“Who...would kill for the book?”

“That’s right,” Amato said. “I’m talking motive only. Forget how they might have hidden the book, or if they were around to kill Charles Cudmore, just think: based on what you know of the men and women in your little subculture, from your online interactions with them, their creepy horror novels, what they said at your conference this weekend, who is highly interested in a book made from human flesh?”

“I don’t know, I mean...” Colleen said.

Amato looked through his Danish wrapper for any spare crumbs, and, finding one, plucked it into his mouth. “Funny. One of our officers was at a panel, one on the topic of women, and she reported that there was a lengthy digression about skin-bound books by...” Another squint, another click of a mouse. “A guy named Harry Chandler. Sounds like crime fiction!”

“Hiram,” Colleen said.

“Gotcha,” Amato said. “Hiram Chandler, who you were later found with, not far from where Cudmore was found dead, stalking some other attendees of your conference, who were themselves engaging in shenanigans to...dig up a cat named...Jesus?”

Amato glanced over at Colleen, but she wouldn’t correct him on the cat’s name. He winked at her.

“So, you see my problem, don’t you? At best you’re flailing around, trying to determine who killed your friend, but you don’t even keep notes and so crucial facts slip your mind. So, you associate with an obvious person of interest, making it more difficult for us to do our work.

“At worst, you and he worked together to kill Panossian and steal both his book and his face.” He tapped the fingertips of his left hand against the desk, sort of a tiny rimshot.

“But I’ve been in and out of this police station all weekend,” Colleen said. “You cops searched my room, and now someone else is in the room so even if you found anything, it could be Armbruster! If I wanted to get away with murder, I wouldn’t have—”

“Started a fight with Tracy McKendrick?”

Colleen shut her mouth.

“I would have retreated from Tracy’s attack.”

Amato snorted. “That would have been a good idea either way,” he said, “so why didn’t you?”

Colleen said, “She was like a wild animal, or the sort of bullied kid who one day goes crazy and shoots up the school, killing both her bullies and everyone else. I thought she might have something going on. Her and Phantasia. And don’t they?”

“Never mind about Mr. Greenfeld for now,” Amato said. “I want you to tell me how I can know you had nothing to do with the murder of Panos Panossian or Charles Cudmore.”

It was a shocking question, like being thrown into a wall. But the wall crumbled and Colleen’s central nervous system took over and she spoke, “Had I wanted to kill Panossian, I could have done so at any time. Why would I lure him away from my room to kill him? Why isn’t there blood or anything leading back up to my room? Cudmore? My alibi is your police force bringing me here at about the time Cudmore was killed. I was in a cop car, or down in the morgue, depending on exactly when it happened. It’s obvious, really, Detective Amato. Am I free to go?”

Amato shook his head. “Not quite yet. Here’s a mind-blower for you, broccoli-top”—Colleen’s hand reflexively touched her hair—“what if there is no book?”

“But there is! Cudmore—”

“Did you see Panossian’s copy of the book?”

“No...” Colleen said.

“How do you know he had one then? Doesn’t it seem strange that he would have a copy?”

“He said the author, we called him ‘Skinner’ because he was anonymous, sent it to him as a token of his appreciation,” Colleen said.

“Does Panossian seem to you like the kind of guy who would get expensive presents from secret admirers?”

“No, not normally,” Colleen said, “but he did have his fans. And frankly, if anyone was going to be a fan of Panossian, a crazy person with a skin-book is probably it.”

Amato shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “Okay, but think of it this way—someone really wants that skin-book. Panossian doesn’t have it; he made it up, or heard that it was real and faked up some leather Moleskine or something to make a few bucks. It’s not the sort of crime the victim would call 911 about, is it? No skin off Panossian’s nose, right?” He snorted at his own joke.

“But, Colleen, imagine the sort of person who’d buy Panossian’s book. How angry might he be if he paid up a bunch of money—”

“Where’s the money then?” Colleen asked.

“Doesn’t matter. Everyone has smartphones; the book-buyer could have done a transfer with an app. Anyway, he pays the money, gets the box, and finds out that it’s empty.”

“Don’t you think the buyer would want to examine the book first?”

“Okay; he opens the box, looks at it, realizes that Panossian tried to pass off some normal leatherbound book as a human skin-book, and then...what happens?”

“An argument.”

“A fight.”

“A fight...” Colleen said. “A fight that ends with him killing Panossian and taking his face?”

“Killing him via taking his face,” Amato said.

“How is that possible?” Colleen said.

Amato said nothing. Colleen looked at him. He twitched an eyebrow and lifted his chin.

“Big tough guy knocks little rat-faced guy out?” Amato held up a hand and lifted his index finger.

“Multiple people cooperate to hold him down and cut him.” His second finger went up.

“Panossian was already weakened, perhaps by his roommate?” Third finger, but he winked.

“He was a little tipsy, a little out-of-sorts. He didn’t seem very healthy. I imagine him living in a coldwater flat, eating ramen from a hotplate and wearing gloves while he typed out angry emails on his laptop because he couldn’t afford heat or a Starbucks coffee.”

“Easy to knock off, that’s your estimation?”

“Let’s say I agree with your estimation,” Colleen said.

“Easy enough for a small woman like Tracy McKendrick to knock off?” Amato asked.

“I suppose anything is possible,” Colleen said.

“Exactly,” Amato said. “Anything is possible. That’s what we want you to keep in mind. You know, in the future, when one of your friends gets killed and you decide to start interrogating suspects in washrooms.”

Amato looked over the top of Colleen’s head and nodded. “Do you understand? Capische?” Colleen could feel, she thought, someone looking at her, but she knew better than to turn around.

“What you are saying is that you’re going to let me go, and that I can head back to the hotel, but that I definitely should stop poking my nose into police business, stop following people, and that I absolutely should not try to find the book because it probably isn’t real. Because, as you say, anything is possible.”

“Exactly,” Amato said. “I don’t want to see you here again, not in handcuffs. And that isn’t up to me, it’s up to you.”

“I will definitely behave in the manner you describe,” Colleen said plainly.

Colleen was sure that Amato was secretly giving her the go-ahead to continue to root around. He had spelled out some alternatives she hadn’t considered not to dissuade her, but to arm her, to keep her from leaping to conclusions without thinking through all the possibilities. And anything is possible.

If anything is possible, then yes, an untrained writer could find a murderer.

Amato snapped his fingers in her face. “Hey, Ms. Danzig. Earth to Danzig, did you get sucked away by the Mi-Go? I said your ride is here.” And he pointed.

Colleen turned around and saw R.G. R.G. lifted her hand and waved, jingling a set of keys. “C’mon!” she said.

“Oh!” Colleen said to Amato. “Thanks. Thanks for calling her.”

“No sweat,” Amato said. “I’ll walk the two of you out. C’mon.”

Outside, R.G. strolled over to a motorcycle, complete with sidecar. “Cool, eh?”

“Wow,” Colleen said. “Is it yours?” R.G. pushed a helmet at her chest, and she oofed a bit.

“Yup. Once upon a time I had a real job, and made some real money, and this is my baby. I don’t park it near the hotel because I didn’t want some angry white dude to vom in the sidecar,” R.G. said. She waved a hand toward it. “Hey, get in! Watch out for the mic when you put on the helmet.”

Colleen gingerly stepped into the sidecar, put on the helmet, and lifted the visor. “I’ve always wanted to ride in one of these.”

R.G. smiled as she straddled her bike. “So has everyone who has never ridden in one before. It’s kind of like rolling down the highway in a La-Z-Boy recliner, so…” She unfolded the lever with her right foot, stepped onto it, and kickstarted her bike. R.G. whoooed over the roar of the engine, shut her visor, and signaled for Colleen to do the same.

“Can you hear me?” R.G.’s voice echoed tinnily in Colleen’s helmet.

“Wow, yeah,” Colleen muttered.

“What!” R.G. said.

“Yes, I can hear you!” Colleen shouted, way too loudly for her helmet.

“Just talk only a little louder than normal, like you’re trying to make yourself heard over the droning of some white dudes going on about the thematic importance of titties in video games.”

“Got it!” Colleen said. Then the sidecar jerked and they were off.

“You know what they say,” R.G. said. “You ride a motorcycle, but you drive a sidecar. It’s pretty cool!” R.G. didn’t handle the sidecar all that well, and Colleen thought she heard something rattling.

The helmet limited her view of the mounting bracket holding car to bike and suddenly Colleen felt very vulnerable. “Does it always rattle like this?” she asked over the helmet radio.

“I don’t know!” R.G. said. Everything was a shout. “Never rode in it. Never let my kids ride in it either. I use it for packages, groceries, that sort of thing.”

“Why did you come get me? How did you know?” Colleen asked. “Nobody ever came to get me before.”

“I don’t know that either!” R.G. said. “They just made an announcement that everyone was free to go, and that if someone wanted to pick you up, someone could!”

Everything felt suspicious now. Were the cops going to just put the squeeze on Chloe till she confessed to both killings or named accomplices? She and Phantasia were weird enough that any trial would be a formality. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, look at these freaks! One thing Colleen had never considered—R.G., Raul, and Barry. They seemed as though they were friends with Panossian, but who knows? Panossian had bullied Barry into wearing that dumb nametag. R.G. used to have money, but didn’t anymore, and a copy of Arkham delivered to the right hands could go a long way toward solving that problem. And Raul...it hardly mattered, but he was probably nuts in some way. Anything was possible. That’s what Amato wanted her to know. Colleen had ignored some potential suspects and now was riding along with one of them in a mobile death trap. Was R.G. going to drop the heel of her boot on the bracket and send the sidecar spiraling off into a ditch, or just swing over across the traffic line and let a semi take Colleen out?

“Pull over!” Colleen said. “I feel like I’m gonna puke!”

“But we’re almost there,” R.G. said.

“I’m going to puke in your fancy helmet!” She made some gagging noises into the mic. “I’ve been up all night, no food, in a dirty prison cell. I need air!”

“Calm your tits, Danzig, I’ll pull over at that doughnut shop.”

R.G. pulled into the parking lot, just like an ordinary person not planning on murdering Colleen. She even took off her helmet and waited for Colleen to step out of the sidecar and do the same. Of course, once Colleen took off her helmet, R.G. would have a clear shot at Colleen’s head with her own helmet. The store was oddly empty of traffic for a Sunday afternoon. Didn’t people buy cardboard jugs of coffee and doughnuts by the dozen for brunch anymore? The doughnut shop had definitely seen better days. It was once a Dunkin’ Donuts but the Brand Police had been by and stripped the signage and posters, probably due to poor economic performance or one too many health violations.

“Gosh, thanks,” Colleen said into the mic. She could hear her own voice coming from the helmet in R.G.’s hands. “Look, I spit up in the helmet a bit. Let me just go to the restroom, okay?” She ran off before R.G. could answer, but heard a worried-sounding “okay” through the mic as she entered the shop.

The cashier barked at her. “Hey!” She reached down under the counter and came up with an aluminum baseball bat. “If you think you’re gonna rob this place, I’ll ring your damn bell,” she said. She was a small round woman, and despite the edge in her voice she still sounded like a girl. Her uniform had once been a Dunkin’ Donuts ensemble, but the logo was covered by an oversized, and blank, plastic name tag.

Colleen lifted her visor. “Wait, I’m just... I need your bathroom.”

“You have to buy something.” She placed the bat on the countertop, within easy reach.

“Okay, a coffee.” Colleen dug out a few crumpled dollar bills from her pocket and pushed them at the cashier.

“Your hair is green,” the cashier said. She pressed a button on the cash register.

“Uhm...yes,” she said.

“I heard some cops talking about someone who was killed the other night. He had green hair too. Is that why you’re wearing a helmet?” the cashier said. She wasn’t getting the coffee was what was happening.

“Wait, what?”

“The other person with green hair,” the cashier said, her voice still cutting and light at once, like a little girl snapping at a doll. “He was brained. Head smashed open. You figure wearing that helmet indoors will keep someone from sneaking up on you?”

“Oh,” Colleen said. “Well, no. Where did you hear about this? Did it make the news?” There were newspapers for sale on the counter, but only USA Today, not the Providence Journal.

“Nah. People just come in here, police especially, and talk like they’re all alone, you know?” the cashier said.

“What else did the police say?”

“Don’t you want to use the bathroom?”

“Well...yes!”

The cashier shrugged. “We don’t have a public restroom, sorry. Let me get you that coffee.”

Finally the cashier turned her back on Colleen, leaving the baseball bat unguarded. She wanted to grab it, just for safety’s sake, or to augment her demand for the bathroom.

“Do you have an employee-only bathroom?” she said, sliding her fingers toward the bat.

“It’s for employees only,” said the cashier.

“Thus the name,” Colleen said. She rolled the bat onto the floor. “Whoops! Oh, sorry, please let me use it, just once. I think I’m going to be sick!”

The cashier spun on her heel, coffee held high. “What are you doing? Give me that bat back! No, wait, don’t touch it. Freeze, or I’ll throw this coffee in your face!”

Colleen slapped the visor of her helmet down. “Ha!” But she put her hands up.

“What’s going on in there?” It was R.G., through the helmet mic.

“Want me to call the cops?” the cashier said. “They all love me, you know.”

“Want me to pee on the floor?” It wasn’t even about R.G. anymore. The cashier was just another enemy now, another person saying “No” and being belligerent for no reason other than petty authority. No, lack of authority. She was just a minimum-wage worker who didn’t even qualify to work for a real Dunkin’ Donuts.

“You can go pee out by the dumpster, you fucking freak,” the cashier said.

“Can I at least have my coffee?”

The cashier shoved the cup at her. “Here you go. God knows why you want to pee and drink at the same time. That’s like buying a coffee just to dump it out.”

By the dumpsters, Colleen did actually dump out her coffee. She had to think—was R.G. the killer after all? There were so many possible suspects. Nobody seemed to like Panossian, and virtually anyone at the Tentacular would do something drastic to get their hands on Arkham. If not kill someone, then come across a dead body clutching the book and just pry it from Panossian’s cold, dead hands.

“Of course, who the hell would be in the laundry room?” Colleen said, aloud. “Half the guys haven’t even changed their shirts all weekend.”

“What?” It was R.G., communicating over the helmet connection. “Aren’t you done yet? Are you really peeing outside?”

Colleen bit her lip. R.G. didn’t ask about the laundry room—was that because she already knew about the laundry room? Did the uniformed cops tell people where Panossian had been killed as part of the interviews they did with everyone?

“I have to…do some laundry when we get back to the hotel. I was just thinking aloud,” Colleen said into the helmet.

“Let’s go. I want to make the closing ceremonies. Everyone is going to be there because…you know.”

“I know,” Colleen said. One more chance to get everyone together. With two bodies in the morgue, R.G. wouldn’t dare try to kill Colleen now. It would be irrational.

Like…tearing off someone’s face.

For the moment, Colleen decided to trust R.G., or at least act as though she did. Back in the sidecar, she asked. “Who do you think did it?”

“Panossian?” R.G. said. “Asparagus Head. You know, Cudmore. And then Chloe killed Cudmore.”

“But why?”

“Who the fuck knows, Colleen. People are just crazy,” R.G. said. “Cudmore was always a looney. Chloe was probably just doing a Fatal Attraction thing with Panossian. She attacked you, didn’t she? She was probably just jealous that you were staying with him.”

“How did Chloe know to kill Cudmore then? How did she get to the field?”

“Christ, I don’t know,” R.G. snapped. Her usual good humor was gone. “Let me drive.”

It was worth considering. Cudmore kills Panossian and takes his face, maybe with the help of other people, as Amato suggested. Either Chloe was one of Cudmore’s confederates, or found out about Cudmore’s role in the murder and took some sort of sick revenge.

So, who did Chloe know who also knew Cudmore? Phantasia, obviously, since Phantasia had been around for decades and knew everyone. So did Ronald Ranger, who called Cudmore a good friend. And Cudmore was with the whole Bhanushali crowd digging up that cat, but had had some sort of disagreement with them. She was back in the incestuous tangle of Lovecraft fandom—everyone had multiple connections to everyone else, rivalries and friendships, resentments and admiration, cults of personality and long-simmering vendettas.

Before she knew it, Colleen and R.G. were a block from the hotel. R.G. parked on the street, took her helmet off, and smiled widely. “Ready?” she said, her voice raised.

Colleen didn’t want to take off her helmet. Things were quieter inside, and darker, and subtly warped, like she was peering at the events from a distance, or via a screen. She felt safe. Nobody could take her face while she wore the helmet, or sneak up behind her and cave in the back of her head. Why didn’t everyone wear motorcycle helmets all the time? Why didn’t they shower in them, and clean off the visors with Windex? Why not fuck in them, smacking the hard shells together instead of kissing?

R.G. leaned in and rapped on Colleen’s helmet with one knuckle. “Hullo? You fall asleep in there? C’mon!”

Colleen took off her helmet and ran a hand through her short hair. “Okay, let’s get this done. I guess I’ll just wait in the lobby.”

“Why?”

“Armbruster,” Colleen said.

R.G. shrugged. “What’s he going to do? Throw you out again? Call the cops who just let you go, again?”

“He might just do that,” Colleen said, but she followed R.G. into the lobby and directly into the large conference room where the opening ceremonies had been held just two nights before. This time, the room was packed, and even the hotel bar was likely empty. Bhanushali was on stage, in a black business suit, as was Ronald Ranger. A large blow-up of Charles Cudmore’s author photo, with his pointy head and feathered hair and oversized eyeglasses, was set on an easel between them. Panossian was represented by a print-out of his publicity still on 8.5 x 11” paper, propped up against the corner of the Cudmore poster.

Cob and Ginger J sat next to one another in the front row, and after an empty seat there was Hiram, his backpack now on his lap. Raul and Barry were two rows back; they had an empty seat between them, presumably for R.G. Norman sat across the aisle, surrounded by various black-clad minions. Colleen almost didn’t recognize Robert Goddard, who had finally changed out of his pirate outfit and wore a gray suit, with a bolo tie. R.G. marched to her seat, and squeezed between Barry’s knees and the back of Hiram’s chair to fit in. Colleen was worried for a moment; she could feel Armbruster’s gaze upon her. But Hiram caught her eye, smiled, and moved over, patting the seat next to him. She had no choice but to take it.

“Listen,” Hiram said, “I’m glad you came to this. I have something for you.” He unzipped the backpack on his lap and fished out one of the spiral-bound copies of his novel. “I want you to have this. It’s a complimentary copy. You don’t need to tweet about it or anything, but please, give it a read.” He pressed it against her chest with a force just short of a shove. Colleen took it, wary that resisting would just bring Armbruster down off the stage and start another conflict.

Ranger stood up and approached the mic stand near the easel. “I would like to begin with a moment of silence,” he said. Next to Colleen, Hiram muttered something to himself about the impossibility of beginning with a moment of silence if one begins with asking for a moment of silence.

After a pregnant pause, Ranger began. “Friends, our community has been grievously harmed this year. When we speak of horrors, we generally speak of the cosmic, of ancient beings stretching their tentacles across the inky blackness of space, of dead civilizations and cyclopean ruins, of witch-haunted New England. But we now are called upon to understand that sometimes evil is human, all too human.”

Hiram leaned over to whisper in Colleen’s ear, but Colleen turned to him and spoke before he could: “Nietzsche, yes I know.” He virtually flinched back into his own space.

“As the philosopher once said,” Ranger continued, “‘At the sight of a water fall we may opine that in the countless curves, spirations and dashes of the waves we behold freedom of the will and of the impulses. But everything is compulsory, everything can be mathematically calculated. Thus it is, too, with human acts. We would be able to calculate in advance every single action if we were all knowing, as well as every advance in knowledge, every delusion, every bad deed.’”

Ranger spoke seemingly extemporaneously. No notes, no smartphone, no gesticulations.

“‘The acting individual himself is held fast in the illusion of volition,’” he said, as though he was coining the sentence rather than reciting it. “‘If, on a sudden, the entire movement of the world stopped short, and an all-knowing and reasoning intelligence were there to take advantage of this pause, he could foretell the future of every being to the remotest ages and indicate the path that would be taken in the world’s further course.’”

Ranger let that sink in for only a moment, and then added, “But as we know from Lovecraft, we cannot correlate the contents of the universe. And this is a mercy, as our minds could not handle a complete understanding of the universe, and our place in it. So we are left with two poor options, you see. We can find ourselves terrified by the inexplicable attacks on our fellows, or we can face the utter mental annihilation that comes with complete understanding.”

Ranger peered down at Colleen as he intoned the final clause of that last sentence. She remembered his lengthy takedown of Panossian’s book, and stared back at him.

“Charles Cudmore was a friend of mine,” Ranger said. “He was struck down in the darkest part of the forest as he sought to understand more about H. P. Lovecraft and his world.” He finally tore his eyes from Colleen and instead looked over his shoulder at Bhanushali, who kept her hands on her lap and stared straight out into the audience.

“We may know who did it, but we may never know why. I don’t understand why Phantasia and Tracy—pardon me, Chloe—behaved the way that they did, but allow me to suggest that some people take our hobby and our community a little too far.”

Colleen murmured to Hiram, “You mean, like trying to dig up Lovecraft’s cat?” but it was Hiram’s turn to rebuff her. Instead, he just tapped the cover of the book on her lap.

Ranger’s speech took a strange turn into mainstream Christian sentiment. He brought up ISIS and immigration into the United States from Muslim-majority nations. Colleen could feel the crowd’s attention evaporate. Phones were slipped out, yawns ostentatiously proffered, a susurrus of conversation bubbled up throughout the large room.

Colleen opened Madness of the Death Sun. She’d read worse. Hell, considering Norman’s story at his ritual the night before, she’d read worse this weekend. There was an adjective for every noun, and the Last Goddess wished to “sup on sweet meats and pears stewed in honeywine under the velvet dome of the crepuscular sky,” but it was still skimmable, which Colleen did. Madness was a murder mystery of sorts—the Last God and the Last Goddess had concerned themselves with the murder of a satyr by a group of “rawboned freemen” on a tiny island named Mahkra—Arkham backward.

She began flipping through the book as quickly as she could without attracting undue attention. The story was only nine pages long; it was just repeated several times to bring the book up to a reasonable length. But that made no sense—Madness of the Death Sun had been published, for real, back in the 1980s, and Hiram was just hawking these homebrew copies because he couldn’t find a new publisher.

It was a message, for her. She skimmed it again, looking for typographical oddities, secret notes, hints in the margins. She glanced up at Hiram, but he was sitting, ramrod straight amidst a sea of slouchers, and seeming to play close attention to Ranger’s speech. “The nihilism of the Arab Muslim is distinct from Lovecraft’s cosmic pessimism,” Ranger said. “Lovecraft clung tightly to traditional values, to conservatism in politics, culture, and even architecture, because he had caught a glimpse of the writhing darkness that awaits us when we abandon...”

Colleen craned her neck back to murmur to R.G., “I just zoned out. Is this, like, some sort of racist speech?” R.G. glanced at her, and without even a twitch of the lips, returned her gaze to the stage.

Ranger launched into a eulogy of Cudmore, explaining his hardscrabble beginnings in South Carolina, his love of the films of John Carpenter, especially The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China, how warm and friendly he was and how the Lovecraftian community should be pleased with its own ability to open wide its tentacular arms to strangers and newcomers.

Hiram whispered in Colleen’s ear, “Let’s leave!”

“What?”

“Let’s go to my room and make love!” he said.

Colleen gasped, almost ready to roll up the book and smack him across the face with it.

“You don’t like it,” Hiram said, suddenly angry, “then why don’t you leave right now?”

He reached out and pushed her on the shoulder. “Go! Now!” He looked desperate, Colleen realized, not angry. And a little afraid.

“I believe that ultimate justice is in the hand of the Lord. But what of a Lovecraftian universe, a world with many gods, and many worshippers, but whose prayers always go unanswered?”

“What’s going on, Hiram? What’s with this book?” She gasped. “It’s a clue!”

“What if there was such a thing as Lovecraftian justice?” Ranger said, raising his hands high. “Oh, if only we could cast a deadly spell!”

“Okay, get her,” Raul said, and then hands were all over Colleen, pulling her limbs straight. Hiram fell to the floor next to her, crying.

15. The Evil Clergyman

It’s gone beyond a cliché—a couple centuries from now “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” will be some sort of turn of phrase utterly divorced from its origins. By then, the Internet will be so well-integrated into our homes and clothes and furniture that there will be no distinction between it and what we now call real life. You know, the thing I had until two days ago. And in a few hundred years, there probably won’t be dogs anymore. No birds flying under the ash-gray skies, no fish in the scalding seas, nothing but men and maggots and machines, and precious few of those first two categories left.

That’s one of the attractions of Lovecraftiana. The future is written, the present disregarded, and the past…oh, the past. We all wanted to live there, back when a story in a pulp magazine paid five cents a word, and Manhattan landlords were charging twenty-five bucks a month to rent an apartment. Today, a studio apartment in Manhattan costs a thousand times that much—and good luck finding a vacancy at any price—and pulp magazines still pay five cents a word. We don’t even rate garrets anymore. Everyone in Lovecraftiana was either born rich or has a day job they never ever discuss.

The past is omnipresent, pun intended. The same old ’zines from the heyday of the 1970s are sold and resold, century-old stories are pored over anew with every generation of essayists and bloggers, the men dress in overcoats and the women corsets. Pronounced cor-say, naturally. When I put the word “fuck” in my book, just as Salinger did, I literally got nasty letters from people complaining about “foul language” just as Salinger did. Even my third stalker, who constantly used curse words in his anonymous missives, complained: Hey Panossian you think you’re a tough guy for putting the f-word in your POS (pece of shit!) novel? Mama showd wash your mouth of with soap. I’ll do it soon if she doesnt.

If I flatter myself, I never really fit in with the Lovecraftians because I was interested in the present more than either a sepia-toned past or an apocalyptic future. A handful of us could do things like watch sitcoms on TV, or name who won the previous World Series, or read a Jonathan Franzen novel without throwing it aside after ten pages because none of the architecture the characters (actual characters!) inhabited was described as cyclopean.

If I don’t flatter myself, I never really fit in with the Lovecraftians because I could fill my plate at a buffet without anxiously narrating aloud to whomever was in earshot about all my selections. “Ooh, pork loin! But those sausages and peppers will make me gassy. Is that kale? Ugh, what am I, a bunny?” Quite an achievement, being able to keep one’s mouth shut.

When I spoke up, it was by design and toward a particular end, and honestly, my end was most often to rile the clueless. In one subject or another, everyone is clueless. The difference is that in the nerd milieu, being quiet or, God forbid, saying “I don’t know,” is virtually impossible for most people to manage.

Ronald Ranger was always well known for holding court on all sorts of topics: Lovecraft, Christianity, Bollywood musicals, physical fitness (he was a bodybuilder in his younger days), and why Panossian is a terrible writer. Even now, getting colder in this box, with my muscles unwinding and my organs wilting, I have a reflex to say, “Nice guy, but…” But really, I have no idea one way or another. Every interaction I ever had with him ended with me escaping into a fantasy of pulling out a gun, swallowing the barrel, and pulling the trigger. Other people seemed to like him though.

Or maybe they just wanted good reviews.

At Yuggoth Days in Vermont two years ago, he gave a long speech about the role of Christianity in Lovecraft’s fiction, which was impressive in that Lovecraft barely bothered with Christianity in fiction. Imagine a three-hour talk on the role of the soup spoon in the film The Matrix. There’s a couple in there, and one is even memorable, but…

Anyway, his thesis was that as an Anglophile who was also influenced by the Gothic, which in turn had an abject relationship with Roman Catholicism, Lovecraft found Christianity to be useless as a weapon against the Elder Gods and thus left it out of his stories for the most part because he, Lovecraft, could not decide which Christian sect was actually correct. Ranger then went through a variety of Protestantisms—the Anglican and Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Northern Baptist, Methodist—and Catholicism as well, describing what he imagined Lovecraft would think about every sect, in what he imagined Lovecraft’s voice was. (A reedy mid-Atlantic accent, which was probably close to right.)

Finally, Ranger declared that thankfully, despite Lovecraft’s interest in the Arab world, he never took Islam seriously. “Could you imagine a narrative universe in which your local al-Qaeda cell worshipped, or worse, contested against the Great Old Ones? It would be the pulp equivalent of Nazi propaganda!”

“Hitler,” I said, using the same reedy voice. I stood up. “There is a great and pressing need behind every one of the major planks of Hitlerism!” Ranger glared at me as I recited Lovecraft’s view on Hitler, from his 1936 letter to Donald Wandrei.

And then came the applause. It was just a scattering, but we were both unnerved. Ranger thought I’d turned the crowd against him. I thought that the Nazis in the audience had just revealed themselves. The applause was too sudden, its rhythm too quick. I decided to finish anyway. “The major planks of Hitlerism–racial-cultural continuity, conservative cultural ideals, and an escape from the absurdities of Versailles. The crazy thing is not what Adolf wants, but the way he sees it and starts out to get it. I know he’s a clown, but by God, I like the boy!”

There were, I was sure of it, two sets of applause. The excited burst from the fascists, and a second, larger but less passionate counter-clapping from a few others who got what I was trying to do.

“Also, you left out all of Eastern Christianity, which has a very different view of sin than everyone in the West.” Then I sat down to silence.

I was seated in the second row, and it is introvert tradition that nobody ever sits in the first row, so I couldn’t see who had clapped for me, and who had clapped for Adolf Hitler finally getting his due. Of course, most people kept their hands on their laps. Ranger was pretty important in Lovecraftian fandom, after all, since he had access to a photocopy machine and made his little ‘zine, Dreamlands, with it sometimes.

Ranger sneered at me for a long moment, then made the usual excuses. On his deathbed, Lovecraft recanted his affection for conservatism, and at any rate al-Qaeda is a very different kettle of fish than the Nazis. I opened my mouth and he literally held out his palm to stop me from speaking. “You have had your turn,” he said. He then decided to add an asterisk to his discussion of Catholicism to include all “theatrical, liturgical Christianity.”

“Do you mean,” Barry said, “that the Gothic in literature was a way for Protestants to deal with Greek and Russian Orthodoxy in the West, because that…makes no sense.”

I clapped, three times, in my lap, then stopped when nobody joined me.

Ranger bellowed, “No, I did not mean that!” and then asked the audience if anyone had any sensible questions.

Then fucking Cudmore raised his hand. “Say Roger, I just wanted to tell you that I saw a work print of Charles Band’s adaptation of The Evil Clergyman and it’s a real hoot,” he said before he even finished standing up. “He made it in the 1980s, but the distributor went bankrupt, but my friend Dennis, an editor who worked on several important movies, had a little party and I got to meet Charles and his brother Richard. He’s a great composer. The bit where Jeffrey Combs hangs himself is on YouTube. It’s pretty intense.”

“That is not even a question!” I said. That got a few laughs.

“Yeah, your little Hitler speech wasn’t a question either, was it?” Cudmore told me.

“I was making a point.”

“So was I,” Cudmore.

“Yeah, what was it?” I said.

“The point is that people don’t want to hear obnoxious political garbage, P,” Cudmore said. A smattering of applause followed. “We’re here to talk about we enjoy. En-joy. And want to make professional contacts, not just try to win Best Knee-Jerk Liberal of the year, Two Thousand n’ Twelve.”

And then there was a lot of clapping, and even a single “Hear, hear!” Even Barry applauded.

I was thinking of a comeback, I almost had one formulated, then Ranger said, “All right, it’s 2 p.m. We’re already over time. Next up is an interpretation of the music of Erich Zann on the theremin by Tracy McKendrick. So, do stick around for that unless you have a better offer.” He walked immediately to the door and left the conference room, instead of hanging around to chat in the interstitial period between events. Ranger was fucking pissed.

That evening, the first of several reviews of my book appeared online. He started with Amazon.com, then did an extended review in his own ’zine, and also mentioned the book in a Buzzkill.lit listicle on bad Lovecraftian fiction, twice: #4, Worst Attempt at Multi-Author Pastiche in Lovecraftian History and #16, Worst Value on a Per-Page Basis, Limited Edition.

Funny thing is, he didn’t seem to have read it.

They say that Lovecraft’s racism was simply because Lovecraft was “a product of his times.” It’s a weak apology for Lovecraft, and self-damnation for Lovecraftians. The problem with Lovecraft’s admiration for Hitler is that bad people like me keep bringing it up.

Kept.

The problem with Lovecraft’s admiration for Hitler is that bad people like me kept bringing it up. That was the locus of the controversy over Lovecraft’s racial views. You could agree with Lovecraft, be an actual racist and admirer of Hitler, and float along on the fringes of the subculture for decades. Make a repeated stink about it, and you end up on a slab.

I mean, that seems to be one reason why someone might have wanted to kill me.

It might be a case of attempted ratiocination in the absence of sensory input, or it might just be that my brain is finally starved out and is disintegrating, but I just cannot figure out what happened. I don’t recall my death, and I don’t understand why I was targeted. Did Cudmore, the author or at least the manufacturer of Arkham, actually like me, or did he literally go through the trouble of skinning himself and sending me a book just to lure me into a fatal trap?

The cops think it was Phantasia who did me and Chloe who did Cudmore. They could have been working in tandem, but without anyone else. Phantasia has a bad hip; the whole cloak thing is to cover up his limp. He is also the most conspicuous person in any room he is in thanks to the make-up and the cape—I’m reminded of that book that was so famous twenty years ago, in which some baddies within the Vatican send a seven-foot-tall albino spy off to commit some fairly public murders.

Who was that big shadow? Norman is pretty big, but I suspect I would have smelled him coming. Sweaty feet wrapped in an old sweater. If you’ve ever been to a “gaming store,” you know the scent I mean.

Could Norman be a murderer? Absolutely, but I always imagined that if he ever killed someone, it would be a woman. Norman had had a girlfriend once, in college. To hear him tell it, it was a chocolate-and-roses relationship. He held open doors. He honored her by sleeping on the floor while she tossed and turned in bed. Norman was a real Galahad, kissing hands and attempting to write poems about his love’s “apple-tinted cheeks.” I don’t know what that means either, but the first draft included had the typo “apple tinned-cheeks.”

Norman also paid for what he called “multiple dinners” and I wasn’t above saying, “Yeah, but what did she eat that night?”

Ultimately, though, Sarah was a “bitch” who left him to marry “some rich fag—literally” who was in the closet in order to maintain access to his trust fund. It was all very old-fashioned, like something out of an undistinguished novel from the 1930s, except for the Internet. Norman still loved Sarah, and they were friends on social media. He basically treated Sarah the way Tracy treated me. Always “liking” or “faving” something, entering every conversation she had in Uncle Dad mode: “You know, Sarah, Pennsylvania’s gun laws are even more free than Florida’s; Pennsylvania even allows for open carry outside of the nanny city-state of Philadelphia. You need to get out more!” And “If you haven’t read the original Thanos Quest, and don’t know who the Elders of the Universe are, you really can’t expect to be taken seriously when you discuss the Collector scenes in Iron Man 3 and Guardians of the Galaxy.” Thanks to the peculiarities of Facebook, I got to see virtually every TED Talk-length lecture he offered Sarah, without even being friends with her.

He’s had other girls since then, but he never met any of them. They were all online-only relationships, all based around having met on some bulletin board or IRC channel. His girlfriend of the moment, and there had been five or six of them, were all involved in the occult and throwing horror conventions—movies and junk, not Lovecraft. In the same way some women are attracted to serial killers who are safely behind bars, these girls were all into Norman so long as there was a continent between them and plenty of opportunity for online drama.

One of them, her name was Drusilla VanShreck (I suspect a pseudonym!), tried to read Catcher and didn’t like it. She wrote a long blog post about how it was unfair to expect that horror fans might be familiar with Salinger’s work, as it’s “literary” and thus not “in the mainstream” of fiction. I didn’t even bother responding to the review; it’s a bad idea in general, and nobody that stupid can be reasoned with. R.G. swooped it, and even Bhanushali did, to explain that Salinger is a very popular author, or at least very widely read thanks to classroom adoptions. She wasn’t having any of it, and suddenly she was the victim of Lovecraft fandom’s own “Mean Girls,” as she put it, so of course Norman had to waddle in to defend her and explain once again that Bhanushali was just an “Affirmative Action scholar” who was only taken seriously because people were so upset by Lovecraft’s racism that they needed an “Indian lady” as “the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.” Yes, Mary Poppins.

He then wrote his own blog post, friends-only, forgetting that I was among them, in which he wrote a long, ridiculous fantasy about cornering Bhanushali in an elevator at a convention, and pissing on her sari.

It all sounds so stupid and petty when I summarize it, but this little tempest in a teaspoon consumed a summer of my life.

The storm of blogging, tweets, Facebook status updates, and even quickly dashed-off and mailed paper ’zines ended with Norman going out to see VanShreck in Arizona to claim his woman, only to be left stranded at the bus station after a four-day journey when she refused to leave her house to come get him, and refused to give him an address so he could call a cab. Drusilla just wasn’t ready to consummate her liaison of ultimate darkness.

After that, Norman really went bonkers. He’s never been married, never came close to having a kid, but he started supporting men’s rights, even going so far as to picket a courthouse in his hometown to protest alimony and bias in custody. He got himself on the news and stammered through ten seconds of talking points. He put up a YouTube video in which he burned an all-woman anthology of Lovecraftian fiction, The Thousand Young, and followed it up with an article in which he claimed that Lovecraft’s own work belonged to the “meninist canon” because he did the right thing by all but eliminating women from it. As a reward, Armbruster put him on the annual women’s panel at the Summer Tentacular for three years running. He was thrown out of a horror convention once for standing by the elevators with his arms crossed, glaring at every women who entered or left a lift, and muttering either “fertile” or “dead end.”

So yes, Norman could definitely kill someone. But I don’t think it would be me.

Barry Hagman is pretty large, but we’re friendly.

There’s Cob. Like Phantasia, he’s into the goth thing—or maybe he’s just a New Yorker. He dresses all in black, wears big boots, and he walks with the sort of easy confidence that athletes do. Good posture, rolling shoulders. Rumor has it that he played football in college, and the fact that college sports is grist for the rumor mill should tell you a lot about Lovecraftiana’s relationship to sports and physical culture. Lovecraft’s own gauntness and habit of splurging on ice cream after weeks of eating moldy bread and beans from rusty tin cans is virtually aspirational for this crowd.

Cob and I, I thought, always had a relationship based on mutual respect. We never had very much to say one another, but I loved his books and he liked my own little novel, I think. He didn’t tell me that he disliked it, anyway. Cob was the sort that if he were a little more together, socially, he could have been a tenured professor and public intellectual. Instead, he wrote strange fiction at right angles to traditional Lovecraftiana and practiced any number of affectations—a kooky mid-Atlantic accent, aikido-style forward rolls down hallways “to keep in practice,” drinking nothing but the Taylor cream sherry he always carried with him, wearing a big woolen coat and pince-nez glasses everywhere, and his theme parties.

The longest talk we ever had was three years ago, after I pegged the story his party was based on—“Pickman’s Model.” It’s an odd story with a pretty neat premise; Pickman, an artist, is painting all sorts of monstrosities in his little studio. As it turns out, he’s painting the creatures depicted from life. As a climax goes, it’s a bit of an eye-roll; the achievement of the story to my mind was this almost conversational horror from the middle pages:

Listen- can you fancy a squatting circle of nameless dog-like things in a churchyard teaching a small child how to feed like themselves? The price of a changeling, I suppose- you know the old myth about how the weird people leave their spawn in cradles in exchange for the human babes they steal. Pickman was showing what happens to those stolen babes- how they grow up...

That’s pretty freakish! Lovecraft rarely got so sentimental as to involve children in his stories in any way, and this minute reference is powerful because of it.

Cob’s party that year was a big deal because he offered real food, instead of just snacks. Specifically, raw beef and chicken, to be prepared yakiniku-style on a series of grills he had set up around the suite. Where Cob got the money for this sort of thing, I still don’t know, but scuttlebutt was family money.

I first noticed that the smokeless grills weren’t set up on the suite’s coffee tables, but had been placed atop planks of wood directly on the carpeting. He didn’t bother laying down a tarp, so the party quickly became a bit of a mess, with slimy strips of chicken everywhere. The few con-goers who were adept at using chopsticks helped the clueless use the grills, but for the most part even cooking was a struggle. Hot beef melted against the grills, a few geniuses tried to use their fingers to retrieve their dinner and yelped in pain and embarrassment, and not a lot of meat was making it to anyone’s mouths.

At first I thought Shoggoths, those “shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light” that, in Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” took to “crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.”

Fucking penguins, man. Anyway, while a bunch of mostly dudes mostly in black clumsily hunching over hot plates and struggling to eat was somewhat reminiscent of shoggoths, ultimately the shoggoths were clean. What was before them, they crushed and absorbed into themselves. The party-goers mostly just spilled things on their shirts. The ones who managed to get some meat into their gullets ate like wolves. From there, it was easy. Any wolves in a Lovecraft story? Probably but…maybe dogs?

Then that chilling line about dog-faced monsters raising feral children and training them how to eat in a churchyard came to my mind. The presumption is that the doglike creatures are ghouls, teaching the kidnapped children how to eat corpses. The implied connection between the charnel house ghoul and the otherworldly fae is the most compelling thing about “Pickman’s Model,” and that’s what I told Cob when I finally got to him. I was fifth in line, and the other guesses were pretty far off.

“Not bad, toots,” he said. “You win.”

“All the raw beef I can consume?”

“That as well,” he said. He didn’t smile. He almost never smiled, except at his own jokes, or his own private thoughts, but responding to a joke with a joke was as good as it got with Cob. “You win this.”

He leaned down—another big guy, another possible identity for the great shadow in the laundry room—and whispered my prize. Cob knew someone in Hollywood, which was strange to hear given that his own fiction was relentlessly nineteenth-century. It read like Kafka, but translated via Google. The Hollywood man was looking to put together an anthology TV show along the lines of The Twilight Zone and Tales from the Dark Side, and was actively soliciting published short stories to adapt.

I had three or four stories, maybe, that I could polish up and get published in some little fanzine or glorified Blogspot or other, and then forward on to the producer, who might take it, and who might actually be a real producer and not just someone with a business card and a Burbank-area post office box. A thin reed, but all I did to get the break was correlate the contents of Cob’s mind.

I guessed something else too—he had different prizes for different people. “So,” I asked him as the party wrapped up, “what would the reward have been if a poet had won, or if just some normal fan had won?” I was raised to be a good boy, so I had snatched up a Hefty bag and was shoveling paper plates and half-filled Solo cups of soda and Two-Buck Chuck into it while Cob leaned against the kitchen counter. A couple of other people had also decided to stick around and help pick up.

Cob…didn’t smile. “What’s a normal fan?” he asked. Then he waved a hand, swatting at his own inferior rejoinder like it was a bothersome fly. “You’re right. I thought one of your broadsheets, stripped of all the interpersonal discussions, might make for a decent episode of a television program. There may well be no program, but perhaps my friend will option it for several hundred dollars, which is money you don’t have now, isn’t it?”

It was a dig, but Cob wasn’t perfect. He spoke too loudly, and the other afterparty helpers dropped what they were doing and demanded to know what Cob was talking about. What TV program, what was his friend’s name, why couldn’t they submit their work?

“I don’t even know your names,” Cob told them, and out came the name badges. One woman, her name was Alyssa something-or-other, even started pitching her idea to Cob. It was about aliens with a cosmic message of the oneness of all religions coming down to Earth on silvery cloud-shaped starships. They had been watching us all along from these “false clouds,” waiting to see if we could prove ourselves as a species, which we did after 9/11.

“And then the twist is that 9/11 proved us to be an incorrigibly violent species, right, and the cosmic assistance program of the aliens looks just like the Book of Revelation. Did I guess that right too?” I said. Alyssa sneered at me, and Cob mouthed the words “Thank you” at me, over her head.

When we were alone, Cob made me drink some of his cream sherry and told me that I had a strange knack for guessing what other people were thinking. “That’s why I won’t insult you by telling you which of your missives I thought would be perfect for my friend. You know exactly the one I loved most of all.”

I looked up into his eyes, which is something I rarely do as eye contact is unnerving to me, and I realized that I had no idea which of my broadsheets he meant. I was desperate to ask him, desperate to trick him into telling me, but he gave me nothing, except for this:

“Panossian, it’s important that someone like you is involved in this ‘community.’” He didn’t twitch his fingers to put quotes around community, but instead just made a single stroke mark with his right pinkie finger. “You’ll shake things up. You’ll be a good chum to some, and simply chum to others. Many writers find a tiny success with the most minute of audiences and then spend most of their creative energies justifying their failure to reach a general readership. Except for Raul, that tall skinny fellow you know, nobody at the Tentacular even has a literary agent. When I find a Lovecraftian novel on the shelves in a bookstore, I want to take a photo and send it to The Society for the Preservation of the Passenger Pigeon, just to give them something to do.

“Don’t think of this as career advice; I have nothing of that sort to offer. It’s simply an observation: anything involving literature, especially Lovecraftian literature, is darker than you think. Lovecraft’s own fiction was essentially an extended suicide note. Be careful what you decide to write, Panossian.”

“Well, Cob,” I said. “You’re extremely creepy.”

“Stay out of my head,” he said. “I’d recommend spending as much time staying out of your own as you can manage without causing your autonomic nervous system to shut down.”

“Is that advice won from experience?” I asked.

“From...observation,” Cob said.

I can’t say I took his advice, or even understood it. The TV thing evaporated as well. I sent the story I thought Cob meant to the email, got an excited response and a promise that it would be read in two weeks, and then after two months of one-sided follow-up emails from me, I shoved the hope out of my mind, willing myself to stop daydreaming about a four-digit check or my name on the credits roll of a TV show just as the local news shoves it to the side. As it turns out, the show never came to fruition, so at least I got to live as a citizen of the republic of disappointment along with the producer and everyone else who had been a part of the abortive project. Better that than being lord of the kingdom of jealousy had the show actually made it on air without me.

Cob’s advice to spend as much time as possible outside of my head was lost on me, clearly. Even now, trapped in my head and ruminating, I get a little charge out of being defiant. No, I’ll stay in my head!

It is not so much that I think Cob had a reason to kill and mutilate me as it is that I wouldn’t put any behavior past him. Not murder, not suicide, not traveling off to Tanzania to found a Mennonite orphanage, not joining al-Qaeda. Though I had some superficial insight into his mind when he laid it all out in front of me at his parties, he was still frustratingly enigmatic. After our first encounter, he basically stayed away from me. We exchanged increasingly subtle nods as we passed in the hallway. If we found ourselves at a table together, we sat at opposite ends and independently held simultaneous, parallel courts.

There’s a video online of an isopod among sharks. It begins with a shark swimming across the bottom of the screen. Then, thrashing into view is a hideous agglomeration of flesh—an isopod attached to the face of another shark, the shark’s tail whipping about and struggling for freedom. The first shark simply floats off in the corner. That was me and Cob. Two sharks, ignoring one another. I guess I’m the second shark now.

One time, at yet another Lovecraftian event, I saw him drinking a beer. Not his sherry, not some weird concoction, a beer. He was hiding too, in a little picnic area behind the motel we were all staying in. He saw me and smirked and either dropped his fake FM Radio Announcer Voice or adopted for the first time an old-fashioned Brooklynese accent. “Whut?” he said. “I needit.” He held out a hand and shook it, mimicking the DTs.

“Go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.”

“That shit doesn’t work,” he said, sounding nothing like himself. Not the Cob I knew at all. It was unnerving, like finding your father lounging around the house in a little pink negligee when you make the mistake of coming home from school twenty minutes early.

“It doesn’t have to work. You just have to go, if you really need booze to get through one of these weekends. Your mind will start working, it’ll solve the problem for you, if you admit to having a problem in a way that you can’t deny. That’s the power of ritual. Take part in a ritual and your brain will start working to make it reflective of reality,” I told him. It was just some bullshit designed to flatter and placate the old Cob. The one who never drank beer, and who didn’t sound like Ralph Kramden.

“You sound like fat Norman,” Cob said. He finished the beer in a swig and crushed the can and threw it over his shoulder. When he walked past me, I half-expected him to affect a belch, but instead he just sauntered on, putting on his usual posture and usual stride like you or I would shrug on a familiar rain slicker when heading outside on a stormy day.

Ultimately, all I know of Cob is that he enjoys manipulations: of words, of entire genres, of people. Every utterance is a test or some attempt at intimidation. Every social interaction is an experiment. Did he have Cudmore send me Arkham? He had arranged the sale of it, so he knew. He knew everything—that I had the book, that I was eager to be rid of it, where I was going to be, and who might be waiting for me. It could have been him all along. Is Cob the monster at the end of this book?

16. The Colour Out of Space

Colleen struggled and got one arm free, then started jabbing everyone she could. Barry Hagman inhaled sharply and simply tackled her, pinning her to the floor, face down. He slipped his right hand under her armpit and locked her in a half-nelson. He was very heavy and planted his weight on Colleen’s torso, driving her into the carpeting. Only when Bhanushali gestured at her and said, “She’s turning purple,” did Barry shift some of his mass onto his knees and elbows.

“Thank you,” Bhanushali said. She stood up, head high, posture excellent, and walked to the microphone stand. Ranger moved out of her way with a practiced backward step. “I suppose you are wondering why I called you all together today,” she said, her face as solid as Lincoln’s on the penny. Then she broke into a sly and subtle smile. “I always wanted to say that,” she murmured.

“We have in this room a killer. A murderer. I intend to get to the bottom of the horrific crimes against our community this weekend. Colleen Danzig, I believe that you murdered Charles Cudmore and also Panos Panossian, and further set up Ms. Phantasia and his friend Chloe to take the fall for your crimes.”

Colleen nearly exploded out from under Barry. “No! Are you crazy? I’ve been looking for the murderer all weekend!”

“Have you?” Bhanushali said. “We’ve all been cooperating with the police. We all had extensive interviews with Detective Amato, who was on site since Panossian’s body was discovered, and yet you always conveniently seemed to be out when he sought to interview you. The uniformed police have also noted that your absences from the hotel have been very well-timed.”

Bhanushali blew out her cheeks and continued. “This is what we have, Ms. Danzig. You were the last person to see Panossian alive. You were the last person to see Cudmore alive. You have no alibis, nobody was with you when these young men were killed. You attacked Chloe in the washroom of the hotel. There has never been so much as a sexual harassment complaint at the Summer Tentacular until you showed up.

“All I am interested in doing now is finding the proverbial smoking gun. We want the face, Colleen. Panossian’s face.”

Colleen opened her mouth to say something, but only croaking came out. Barry shifted his weight again, and she inhaled sharply, blew out the air, and gasped twice more before she was able to speak. Blinking away tears, Colleen said, “This is madness. What’s going on? Hiram!”

Hiram stared straight ahead, motionless. He was barely breathing. At least he had stopped weeping.

“I didn’t kill anyone,” Colleen said. “What’s my motive? Why would I kill Panossian? You’re the ones who hated him.”

The murmur arose in the room. Bhanushali held a palm up to her chest. “No, no, we liked Panossian. He was a member of our community. We all got along with him.” The muttering shifted tonally, toward a generalized assent.

“You know what,” Norman said, standing up. He wrung his hands as he spoke. “I loved Panossian. I loved his book, I loved his attitude. Sure, sometimes talking to him was like pouring an ice bucket over your own head, but I appreciated it. I read his blog all the time, I followed him on Twitter. I’m so jealous of the people who were on his mailing list and got those long print letters from him.” He licked his lips and blinked back a tear. His fingers combed through, then tugged at, his wiry beard.

“There was a little game we liked to play,” he said. “I’d write him these anonymous trolling notes and he’d respond in really humorous ways. It was a thing we had.” Norman waved over at Ginger J. “Remember when you sent him that Christmas present and I called him a fag?”

“Oh, that was you! ‘Stalkerlicious’? Panossian was totally terrified of you,” Ginger J said.

“Really?” Norman said. “I thought he was into it. He even sent me a copy of his JD arrest record to—”

“He didn’t even know it was you,” David Cob said, his baritone filling the room.

“Panossian had the potential to be an excellent writer, I always thought.” Ranger spoke into the mic, leaning over Bhanushali’s shoulder. “I tried to encourage him to develop a skill to match his ambition in my own critical writing.”

“I admired his work as well. He shook up the Mythos,” Bhanushali said.

Barry looked up at the stage, giving Colleen a moment of respite from his breath in her ear. “Everyone knows how I felt about him.”

“Absolutely,” Raul said.

“What I liked about Panossian was his guts.” Armbruster paced as he spoke, his boots very close to Colleen’s head. Everything smelled like dirt and sweat and leather to Colleen now. When she could get a breath, she virtually spit it out her nose from the stench. “Not too many men these days share their opinions so openly, not without first determining which way the wind is blowing. I often thought that if I had a son, and he grew up in Lovecraftian fandom, that I would want him to turn out much like Panossian.”

Colleen laughed despite herself, despite the weight on her ribs, the thick baseball mitt of a hand wrapped around the back of her neck. It came out like a clicking, tek-tek.

“Let...me up,” she finally said.

“I think it’ll be all right,” Hiram said. “What can she do now that we’re all here? That we all know.” A few people near the back of the room moved to the doors and stood before them.

“Colleen, I don’t think you really understood how much people in fandom liked Panossian,” R.G. said. She tapped Barry on the shoulder, and the man lumbered to his feet. Colleen rolled over onto her back and gulped in air. Barry sat back down and pinned her legs under him, but she had space to breathe now, and she was able to shift onto her elbows and lift her head.

“Oh God, oh God...”

It was quiet for a long moment. She was surrounded, a dozen eyes on her, in the middle of a huddle.

“You...liars,” she said. “He was always...making fun of you.” A few people smiled.

“He did,” Armbruster said. “He kept us from getting too complacent.”

“You didn’t even...eulogize him. Just Cudmore,” Colleen said.

“This is his eulogy,” Armbruster said. “We’re not speaking extemporaneously. We want you to know what you have done, Ms. Danzig.”

“I was a huge Panossian fan,” Ginger J offered. “I mean, you knew that, Colleen. We talked at the party. I thought we had made a connection. I wanted a sequel to Catcher. You took that chance away from all of us.”

“It wasn’t me!” Colleen said. “It’s obviously one of you!”

“Shut up!” Bhanushali snapped. “We all have alibis. Unlike you, we spend time with one another, we chat and have a few drinks, and don’t attack others. You, on the other hand, flitted in out of nowhere, quickly insinuated yourself into our ranks, and…” She stopped speaking.

Armbruster said, “We’re after the book, Ms. Danzig.”

“I’ve never even seen the book. Maybe there isn’t one?”

Bhanushali snorted. “That sounds like you’ve already found a buyer.”

“Detective Amato suggested to me that maybe there never was a book. Maybe Panossian made it up.”

“Arkham is real,” Ranger said.

“Oh, you have a copy?” Colleen said. Ranger stayed silent. “C’mon, this is ridiculous! This is kidnapping, battery…what if a cop walks in?”

“The police are gone. Your frame-up of Phantasia and Chloe made sure of that,” Bhanushali said.

“Maybe Arkham is real, but Panossian never had a copy. Maybe the cops, who investigated the crime, know something you don’t know, ever think of that?”

“Of course we have,” Bhanushali said. “We spent hours comparing notes. Amato mostly asked about you, as you were Panossian’s closest associate. He was very curious about Arkham, and even let slip something very interesting—Cudmore was the bookbinder and the skin was his own.”

“That just goes to show how esteemed Panossian was,” Ranger said. “Forget giving him the shirt off his back, Cudmore gave him the skin off his back.”

“Hiram…” Colleen said. She spoke quietly, as though there wasn’t a man straddling her and grinding her cheek into the ground, as if the room wasn’t full of belligerent writers and readers who had trapped her in a hotel mere moments after the police left, satisfied with their weekend of detective work. “Tell them.”

“I told them everything,” Hiram said. “I told them that there was a moment when we ran off in separate directions and I couldn’t guarantee that you didn’t kill Charles Cudmore with a rock.”

“We spent our time comparing notes,” Bhanushali said. “I suppose there were too many people of interest to keep us all from speaking with one another. Amato questioned me primarily about other people; he was highly interested in you as Panossian’s roommate.”

“Not so interested that he spoke to me about it. A uniformed officer did, in the morgue, while we were standing right before Panossian’s body. If that was good enough for them, it should be good enough for you,” Colleen said.

“It’s not,” Armbruster said.

“Why did you follow Cudmore into the woods?” Ranger had nudged Bhanushali out of the way and spoke quietly into the mic. Colleen almost felt a twinge of sympathy for him. “That’s what happened, yes?”

“No, I just saw him in the woods—we left because of the cops.” Colleen tried to put some pressure on her own knees, to force an inch of space between herself and the floor, but Barry wasn’t budging. Was he getting a charge from this? “He saw someone and waved at them—”

“Someone? Them? Which is it?” Bhanushali said. Colleen made a confused-sounding noise. So did Barry.

“Ever the prescriptivist,” Cob said. He was still in his seat, looking at the wall by the stage. Only he had stayed seated after Colleen had been tackled. “Bhanushali is objecting to the use of the singular ‘they,’ though examples of such usage can be found in Chaucer. And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame, They wol come up . . .”

“Who was it?” Bhanushali said. “It was a single individual, yes?”

Colleen couldn’t shrug. “Probably Chloe!”

“How would she get out there?”

“Uber.” There were confused looks. “It’s a ride-sharing app. C’mon, you have to know what it is. It’s like calling a cab, except it’s a privately owned car. Plus, think about it—usually, when a grown man throws a rock at the back of someone’s head, especially someone with a soft skull, they die before they hit the ground. It makes sense that they would, anyway. But Aspara—Cudmore, he was alive until he hit that second rock. That’s a weak throw. That’s someone with spindly little arms who probably throws like a girl. Chloe.”

“We know what Uber is,” Armbruster said. “I do anyway. And let me assure you that many of the young men assembled here throw like girls, as you put it. I’m more interested in Panossian. Why did you do it, Ms. Danzig? Fame? Did he try to interfere with you?”

“I think I’m cramping up,” Barry said. “Can I let her go?”

Armbruster looked over at Bhanushali, who flicked her wrist. Armbruster turned back and nodded to Barry, who slowly clambered up and off Colleen. She sat up but stayed on the floor, inhaling and exhaling deeply, testing her ribs for hairline fractures with her palms.

“I didn’t…kill him,” she said. “Had to be someone else.”

“Who?”

What did Colleen know? Ms. Phantasia was in the vicinity. Cob was the connection to the seller. Cudmore was the person who created Arkham. Norman was obviously some sort of Panossian stalker—and he’d do anything for attention. Even Barry and Raul and R.G. were suspect; they seemed to like Panossian fine, but it would take a group to hold a man down and remove the face, wouldn’t it? Ginger J could probably be convinced to do anything. Armbruster was some kind of musclebound freak, and hadn’t Panossian insulted his wife or something? Wasn’t Bhanushali weary of Panossian’s constant sniping, his attempt to show her up at the cemetery? Then there were the people she didn’t really meet that weekend, the ones she didn’t really know.

And Hiram.

“Hiram. He wasn’t with me any more than I was with him when it came to the night Cudmore was killed. He also has a fascination with flesh-bound books,” she said. She wanted to add I’m not saying he did it. I’m saying it’s a possibility; reasonable doubt. I didn’t do it. But Hiram spoke before she could finish.

Hiram paled. “No, no, you don’t understand…how could you say that, Colleen? I was trying to—” He was cut off by Armbruster laughing.

“Nice try, Ms. Danzig, but there’s something you don’t know.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a penknife, and walked over to Hiram.

“Please don’t…” Hiram said.

Armbruster held open his palm and with a grunt, sliced his hand open. Hiram spun his head and pursed his lips shut. Armbruster slid the knife back into his pocket as he kneeled, and with his free hand grabbed Hiram by the jaw, thumb and fingers deep in the flesh of Hiram’s froggy jowls, and turned him back around to look at the blood freely flowing from his hand. Hiram turned white and gasped, then forced a swallow, before falling into a swoon.

“Can’t stand the sight of blood,” Armbruster said. He let Hiram down gently. Without another word he headed to the back of the conference room, where the hotel staff had laid out some pitchers of water, to rinse his wound and make an impromptu bandage from the table runner.

“Fuck yeah,” said Norman.

“It strikes me that Colleen needs a defender,” Ginger J said. “If she says she didn’t do it, what evidence do we have that she did? All we can show is that none of the people in this room committed the crimes. Neither Phantasia nor Chloe are in the room, and there were plenty of people on day passes who could have killed Panossian, or even just a random person who came to the hotel to eat in the restaurant.”

“Maybe it was suicide,” Norman said. He guffawed at his own joke, three sharp barks.

“Except,” Bhanushali said, “that Phantasia was on his way to speak with me about a project when Colleen saw him. He often took…a selfie with me. It’s on his, what do you call it?”

“Instagram,” Ginger J said. He whipped out his phone and thumbed the screen for a few seconds. “Yup. So Phantasia didn’t kill Panossian. He was with you. The timestamp checks out, and I remember the make-up Phantasia wore that night. It was a Whatever Happened to Baby Jane tribute, he told me.” Ginger J shrugged. “I don’t even know what, or who, that is.”

“So, Chloe killed Panossian, and Phantasia killed Cudmore,” Colleen said from her spot on the floor. “Wait…why is Phantasia in jail if you have the picture?”

“An excellent question, Colleen,” Bhanushali said. “Not everyone is as adept as being ‘taken downtown’ as it were, and then being let out a few hours later. Amato believes that timestamps can be faked, or that perhaps when they complete their reconstruction of the crime, that there would be enough time for a man to kill Panossian, mutilate him, and then appear upstairs without a speck of blood on him to meet with me and pose for a picture.

“Maybe for an Olympian, it’s possible, but Phantasia isn’t what anyone would call fleet of foot.”

“Is that what Amato told you?” Colleen asked. “Because there’s another possibility, isn’t there? Phantasia killed Panossian, left the scene, and then someone else came by to take the face.”

“And obviously, that would be Chloe, right? She’d do whatever Phantasia told her to.”

“Except that I was hanging out with Chloe that night,” R.G. said. “She was very nervous about moderating the women’s panel, and we talked about it over drinks.”

“Any selfies?” Ginger J asked.

“I was there too,” Raul said. “We all,” he said, gesturing to R.G. and Barry, “were shocked to think Colleen did it, but nothing else fits. We’ve been over it and over it.”

“Unless someone here is lying. Two people, or even more, claiming to have been with one another, via social media footprint or otherwise, and instead they killed Panossian and later Cudmore,” Colleen said.

Hiram groaned and brought himself up to his knees, his face a blank except for heavy open-mouthed breathing. “Oh dear,” he said to himself.

“Or it still could have been some rando!” Ginger J said.

“‘Randos’ don’t behave this way,” Ranger said.

“He’s right,” said Goddard. “Trophy-taking makes sense for a serial killer, but this sort of bizarre semi-public attack on a male stranger, and then a more primitive, almost cowardly attack so soon after. It doesn’t fit the profile of a traditional serial killer.”

“Not every serial killer is a traditional serial killer though,” Ginger J said. “You can’t argue that just because something is sociologically unlikely that it cannot have happened.”

“I suppose it could be a serial killer who killed Panossian as part of a trophy-hunting fetish,” Hiram said. He took another deep breath. “But then this same person also killed Cudmore not out of some fetishistic impulse, but for practical reasons.” Another deep inhalation, and then he concluded, “Perhaps Cudmore knew something that would harm the killer…such as his identity.”

Colleen, still flat on her back, looked up at Bhanushali. There’s something about looking at a person from a fresh angle, even a literal one, that inspires. A frown was forming on her face as the conversation took on a life of its own—members of the Summer Tentacular had some passionate opinions about the behavior of serial killers, but it was all just an abstraction, and a diversion from what Bhanushali wanted. Everyone was distracted. Colleen reached into her pocket and put her hand on her phone. She hoped she was hitting the right buttons.

Of course Bhanushali didn’t have any real evidence that Colleen was the murderer, but now Colleen knew that Bhanushali wasn’t just mistaken, she was putting on a performance, aiming to convince someone else that Colleen was guilty, Bhanushali knew who did it.

Who was she protecting with this charade? Who was she performing it for? Ginger J was defending Colleen, but she couldn’t imagine Bhanushali taking his opinion at all seriously. The cops, perhaps, since he was so guileless. Hiram had tried to evacuate Colleen, and he had a decent reputation in the field. It was him Bhanushali wanted to convince, or at least confuse.

What was Hiram trying to say with his story? What did he know, or suspect?

“Who did it, Hiram?” Colleen asked aloud, killing the conversation flying over her head.

“I don’t know, I don’t know who killed Panossian,” Hiram said.

Then Colleen smiled. “You do. Everyone else was talking about Cudmore. That’s the issue, right? More than one person. It’s why everyone’s alibis are so tight.”

Barry stood up, ready to do something, but Colleen pulled her phone from her pocket. “Don’t you people know how to disarm a twenty-first century girl? I’m streaming this shit.”

Armbruster ran up the aisle, and in six long strides was atop Colleen, scrambling for the phone. She tossed it from her right hand to her left, then slapped Armbruster’s wounded left palm. He jerked back, more in surprise than pain, but that was moment enough for Colleen to shove her hand into his pocket. He pushed her away, but she came up with his knife. Colleen dropped to her knees, planted the blade in Armbruster’s instep. He screamed, then gulped as Colleen sent her forearm into his crotch. He fell over and clutched at his genitals, whimpering and bleeding.

“That’s how you do,” Colleen said. “Blood on the carpet!” Then she muttered, “Christ, I finally won one of these...” mostly to herself.

“Anyway, here is my theory,” Colleen said. “Cudmore, ever the climber, sent Panossian a rare copy of Arkham, the book with a case made from his own flesh, without realizing that Panossian was a social and political dead end in the Lovecraftian scene. He wanted it back; there were plenty of other friendlier and more helpful people he could impress with such a gift. But how to do it? Buy it, but with what money? So, pretend to buy it and strongarm him. Who’d believe Panossian over…

“Over whom? David Cob and Ms. Phantasia. Two extravagant members of the community, well-liked because of their eccentricities, and both locals, which is important when handling something like a book made out of human skin. You can’t exactly hand it to the concierge.

“My guess is that Cob was the buyer, and Phantasia was going to be the book handler. But there was an argument of some sort. There’s always an argument of some sort when Panossian is in a room with other writers. Good thing Armbruster was there then, with his retired drill sergeant act. There was a fight. Maybe it started out with some yelling over the sound of the washing machines. Perhaps Panossian tried to shoulder his way past Armbruster and ended up tripping and smacking his head on the corner of one of the washing machines.

“Maybe the plan was to murder Panossian all along, just to be rid of him.

“Did Cob have the money to buy the book? He has money for parties. It hardly mattered, anyway, since the idea was to get the book back from Panossian, and he’s cheap. But there was some kind of altercation down there. I’ll be kind and suggest that he hit his head. Blood was everywhere. What else to do but call in the help?

“How many people does it take to clean a laundry room?” Colleen looked meaningfully at R.G., then Raul and Barry. “A bunch to really scrub clean all the evidence. You three would be glad to help. Maybe Ranger helped clean up too, in his papier-mâché Cthulhu suit. If that got a little blood splatter on it, would a mundane staffer even notice? Ranger could walk right outside with the suit, and it would be easy enough to burn in a fireplace at Cob’s house. Maybe Panossian was even alive then, and someone promised to take him to the hospital.

“Norman, you’re a big fan of Panossian. Wouldn’t he really like you back, as a true-blue friend, if he woke up with stitches and a bandage and his new best friend standing over him, watching? I see you smiling at the idea. But…maybe you were mad at him, or maybe you just fucked it up somehow and freaked. Or maybe Panossian was already dead, and you decided on a truly irreplaceable souvenir—a genuine Evil Dead-style Necronomicon with a face on the cover, a face of the man you were obsessed with. Here at the Summer Tentacular, you could make that dream a reality. After all, you know an expert on…what’s the phrase again, Hiram?”

“Anthropodermic bibliopegy,” Hiram said.

“The ultimate collectable,” Colleen said. “You just didn’t realize, Norman, that Hiram still had a shred of decency in him and refused. He was maybe even repulsed. Maybe he confronted Cudmore. Cudmore, because Cudmore was a skinny little dude with a paunch. Even a milquetoast like Hiram wouldn’t be too worried about a physical altercation with Cudmore. Perhaps Cudmore was mostly innocent—he wasn’t on the scene when Panossian was killed. But he was terrified that someone knew about the book, and even more horrified when he was told about Panossian’s missing face.

“He was going to spill the beans. He had already arranged to be a part of special trip to the grave of…Lovecraft’s cat. Tensions were running high with Cob, and they shared a car. He couldn’t take it and stupidly just walked off instead of hailing an Uber like a normal person,” Colleen said.

“Did I say normal person? That brings us to Panossian’s little mini-me, Chloe. Chloe, a very-much not normal person, did manage to hail an Uber, spotted Cudmore walking along the side of the road. She gets out of the car, follows him to the little wooded area right behind the hotel, where she threw a rock at Cudmore’s head, killing him. Maybe that’s manslaughter, maybe it’s murder. Did Phantasia put her up to it? With Cudmore dead, the cops wouldn’t go to his dumpy little apartment to look for the book, or for Panossian’s missing face. Was she going into business for herself, like a Manson Girl? Maybe she was just trying to get his attention in a dark wood and didn’t know her own strength, was surprised by her own aim. Who the hell cares, except for Ronald Ranger?

“How did Phantasia and Chloe end up under suspicion? They stood out. They made mistakes. But they didn’t kill two men for no reason, by themselves. Maybe I’m wrong about Cob. Maybe we can just swap him out for you, Bhanushali. Anyway, that’s my theory. We have a room full of killers and accessories. If I didn’t name you, how do you feel about your precious writer heroes and the Summer Tentacular now?” Colleen inhaled sharply and glanced over at the door. Armbruster was getting up. His shoes were off, and he had taken off his socks and tried to tie them around his bleeding foot to staunch the flow.

“Ms. Danzig,” Bhanushali said. “I misjudged you. You do have a gift for fiction, after all, though your ratiocination doesn’t hold a candle to Poe and your invention pales in comparison to Lovecraft. Ludicrous spectacle. Do you honestly expect anyone to believe such a long and involved story, such a web of conspiracy? Though I suppose if you’re streaming it onto the Internet, where people see traces of the Illuminati in music videos and believe that the CIA destroyed the World Trade Center, you’ll find a small if ardent audience. That’s about your level.”

There was some shouting out in the hallway, muffled by doors and distance. Only Colleen heard it, because only she was listening for it. “Oh, I wasn’t streaming it. I just speed-dialed the front desk and had my speaker phone on. I needed a long, confusing theory, to give them time.” The large doors at the back of the conference room flew open. The concierge and several staff members barged in shouting and pointing.

“Blood on the carpet! What is this? What are you doing to this girl? We called the police. Nobody is going anywhere or doing anything till they arrive, and then you are all out!”

Over the shoulder of the concierge, past a few feet of carpeting and on the other side of the large windows that opened up into the hotel’s parking circle, a line of Providence PD black and whites roared into place, sirens howling.

Colleen was driven to the station by Officer DiRonalde. When Colleen tried the door, she realized that she was being detained.

DiRonalde glanced into the rear-view mirror, and then cut her eyes over to the clock tower. “You might miss your Amtrak train,” she said. “They have some vending machines inside, I think. No nice restaurant or bar though.”

“If you wanted to question me, why drive me here first? We could have talked on the way. Plus, I want the MBTA, not Amtrak.”

“You know what style of architecture that is?” Officer DiRonalde asked. She didn’t wait for an answer. “Brutalist style. Isn’t that funny—the architects insulted themselves in the very name of their style.”

“It’s from the French, béton brut. Raw concrete. It just means that the building has concrete exterior walls and is supposed to look important.”

DiRonalde narrowed her eyes. “You pick up a fair amount of architectural terms when you get involved with Lovecraft. He liked scenes and buildings, not people. There were all these ancient races, building or living in cyclopean structures,” Colleen told her.

“Like the clock tower? The clockface looks like one big eye.”

“No, cyclopean means huge and rough-hewn stone. Imagine primitive giants hefting huge boulders and stacking them up to build a wall.”

“We had some sophisticated giants working here, I guess,” DiRonalde said. “French giants, pouring brutal concrete.” DiRonalde licked her lips and smiled a twitchy smile. “Where did you get your moves?”

“Gongfu. I had a crush on Donnie Yen as a little girl.”

“How much of that story you told is true? About the conspiracy?”

Colleen snorted. “You tell me!”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I don’t know either. I didn’t find a shred of evidence for anything. As a story goes, it was a plausible one, I guess. Maybe it really was Phantasia killing Panossian to get the book, and Chloe killing Cudmore to keep him quiet, and both of them just randomly, stupidly hoping that they wouldn’t get caught.”

“Or not caring if they got caught,” DiRonalde said. “Some people will do anything to get famous. I bet their books will hit number one on the best-seller chart once the papers start publishing their mug shots.”

“I thought you couldn’t profit from writing books about crimes.”

“If you’re guilty, and your book is about the crime,” DiRonalde explained. “We tore Mister Fantasy’s apartment apart. Nothing. No book, no face, no emailed plans, no texts on their phones, nothing.”

DiRonalde peered into the rear-view mirror. “Ditto Capobianco’s.”

“Oh, is that Cob’s real surname?” Colleen asked.

“Yeah, it is. I hate it when Italians try to assimilate by changing their family names. It wasn’t Ellis Island that shortened it for his grandfather or anything; he did it himself. Capobianco is still his legal name,” DiRonalde said. “I hear that your man Lovecraft didn’t like the idea of Providence becoming an Italian town very much.”

“Yeah, he was a fucking racist piece of shit if you ask me,” Colleen said. “Good writer though, I guess. I won’t be reading him anymore after this weekend though. Can I leave this shithole town now?”

“You think that’s why Mister Cob changed his name?” DiRonalde asked. “To make good with the ghost of Lovecraft? To blend in with the past of Providence, instead of its future?”

Colleen shrugged. “Maybe a publisher told him to do it. It’s easier to go into a Barnes & Noble and ask for the latest novel by Cob than it is to ask for Capobianco. And even if you can say it—it’s not that hard—there’s no guarantee that the seventeen-year-old kid at the information desk will be able to spell it. Or anything, for that matter.”

“You know how to spell Capobianco?” DiRonalde asked. Then she spelled it out, nice and slow. “Maybe you should Google him later. Sounds better than ‘Cob’ to me. Like something a hillbilly would stick up his ass. Anyway, you’re going to get on the next train, right?”

“The next train to Boston, sure.”

“That where you live?”

“No. I have a connection there to go home.”

“Where’s home?” DiRonalde said.

Colleen didn’t say anything.

“You gave the front desk the information,” DiRonalde said. “I can look it up back at the station.”

Colleen tilted her head, then righted it, staring right back at the cop through the rear-view mirror. “Do that then.”

“We’re just having a conversation here.”

“We were,” Colleen said.

“My orders are to put you on the train and make sure it leaves the station, and then pace it across the border. It’s a royal pain in the ass, I don’t mind telling you.”

“My friend was killed this weekend, and then I found out that I don’t have any other friends because they tried to kidnap me, and I had to stab somebody in the foot,” Colleen said.

“Don’t forget that girl you attacked.”

“The one in jail right now waiting arraignment on murder charges?”

“I think she might be pleading down to involuntary manslaughter. I think she had some line about how she was just trying to throw the rock to scare off a ‘scary stranger.’” DiRonalde mimed quotation marks around the words. “It was dark, she couldn’t see anything. You know, you told us that you couldn’t see very much that night either. Of course, on Monday, she could look at the judge and demand to go to trial.”

“She’s…unpredictable,” Colleen said.

“I downloaded one of your stories, onto my phone,” DiRonalde said. “Couldn’t make heads nor tails of it, sorry.”

“Panossian used to say that the best thing to tell a writer is, ‘I bought your book but I haven’t had time to read it yet.’ That way they can feel accomplished and mentally add two bucks to their bank accounts, and not worry about getting a negative critique right to their face,” Colleen said.

“Heh,” DiRonalde said. “Why do you think they killed him?”

“They? Is that a plural or a singular?”

“The drag queen said he didn’t do it. Then he had some sort of altercation in his holding cell.”

“What happened?”

“He slipped and fell, banging his head against the toilet in the holding cell. It’s pretty gross, the men’s toilet. You can imagine.”

Colleen could imagine. “So, how many times did he trip and fall against the toilet?”

DiRonalde shrugged.

“More than one time, I bet,” Colleen said. “So, it was someone from the Summer Tentacular, wasn’t it? Who?”

“Naw, we found him on the floor when we brought in your former friends from that little town hall meeting for prints. It was a WaterFire weekend, you know, so we had a lot of guys who needed an overnight cooling their heels with us.”

Colleen just looked confused, so DiRonalde explained. “You didn’t go? You should have. Sounds like it would have saved you a world of trouble. A hundred fires floating on the rivers—the Woonasquatucket, the Moshassuck, and the Providence—around downtown and by Waterplace. Didn’t you hear about it? You’d think your conference was held this weekend so you could go see it. They have all sorts of music and little events along the waterfronts, and the fires are pretty wicked when the sun goes down. It’s a real spectacle. Anyway, there are always a couple of drunks…” DiRonalde peered up into the rear-view again. “You know, Massholes. Between WaterFire and you people, we had our hands full.”

“Maybe I’ll come back next year and check it out,” Colleen said. She remembered now that Chloe had mentioned something about it. Maybe next year Chloe would get to see WaterFire too, from the inside of a prison bus rumbling past.

“Don’t,” DiRonalde said. Then neither of them had anything to say for a while. “Your train’s coming in five minutes. Unless you’ve got anything else for me, let’s go inside.”

“Why didn’t we just wait inside the entire time?” Colleen said.

“I would have had to cuff you, that’s why.”

The doors unlocked with a thunk and DiRonalde stepped out and opened the back door for Colleen. “I still might have to. Just walk to the ticket machine, buy your ticket, and I’ll put you on, and then just stay there. Sit by a window. Don’t go to the restroom. Don’t try to buy a Starbucks. If it wasn’t me pulling this assignment, someone would have driven you to the Mass border and let you out of the car on the shoulder of the road.”

“That sounds highly irregular for twenty-first century police work,” Colleen said.

“It’s been an irregular weekend,” DiRonalde said, sneering. Then she lightened up. “Hey, sorry. You know, cops have to stay ‘on.’ Nobody respects us otherwise.”

“Women cops especially, I bet,” Colleen said.

“Women writers too, eh?” DiRonalde said.

“Fuck yeah,” Colleen said.

After a long moment of silence, Colleen said, “So…why do you want me to Google Capobianco?”

“Google him and find out,” DiRonalde said.

The train idled on the platform for several minutes, and as she had been instructed Colleen took a window seat. DiRonalde stood on the platform, standing guard over Colleen’s position, her arms folded across her chest except for when she was asked a question by a confused-looking tourist with luggage and an old-fashioned paper map. Then she pointed a finger in the direction the traveler had just come. She stayed on the platform through the all aboard signal, only turning and taking off in a trot when the train lurched into motion.

Colleen looked out the window, but didn’t see a police car in those moments when the service road was visible. Did DiRonalde really expect her to jump out of a moving train? The commuter rail had stops in South Attleboro, Attleboro, and so on. It would have been easy to leave the train, hop into a waiting cab, and go right back to Providence. A bit more challenging with Amtrak, which was a straight shot into Boston. Once the train had crossed into Massachusetts, Colleen pulled out her phone for some mindlessness. She couldn’t stomach Twitter or Facebook. Even though the inevitable mass defriending was the least of her concerns, it struck her deep. Whatever daydreams of a career as a writer in the Lovecraftian mode Colleen had once entertained, they were dead. When her mind drifted toward the stories in her hard drive that needed revision, she had to remind herself that she would not be published again. Not in this genre, not under this name.

Once Threes stopped being diverting—games full of opportunities to make simple decisions are the best for annihilating conscious thought—Colleen on a whim decided to Google “David Capobianco” just as had been suggested. Wasn’t that uncommon a name, it turned out. There was a venture capitalist, a hot prospect high school baseball player, and a fairly prominent physician. No sign of Cob in the first several thumbthroughs of results.

Colleen added “Lovecraft” to a search. All of four hits, to old and defunct angelfire.com pages. The couple of lines preserved by Google were tantalizing, but Google’s cache for the pages was of little help. Doing deep searches was frustrating on a smartphone, especially with the 4G signal occasionally dropping to 3G as the train trundled on toward Boston. Oh, for a world blanketed in wireless, so she could just pull out her laptop, open a dozen browser tabs, and see what she could see.

It was easier to plan than to do. Go deep—check USENET for ancient material. Lovecraftians never give up any media. The Tentacular even had a panel on the maintenance and sale of ditto, mimeograph, and hectograph machines. It was packed every year. Colleen wished she had known about Cob’s surname earlier; the dealers’ room featured a number of tables that specialized in fanzines of the appropriate vintage. What had Cob been up to when he first entered the fandom?

It wasn’t even about the murders, not at first. Colleen was just a bundle of unresolved tension and loose energy. Fiddling with her phone wasn’t soothing, but it was something new to focus on. She’d been working on “Capobianco” for almost twenty minutes before she realized that she had been fed the information.

The cop hadn’t just been shooting the shit; she was trying to tell Colleen something. That had to be it. The only question was which side DiRonalde was on. Smart money was that she was on the side of the police, but even that could mean one of two things. Like Amato, was DiRonalde hoping to use Colleen somehow? But if so, why escort her out of state?

Too many questions, not enough bars on her phone. It was like opening a book in a dream and seeing the letters in a language she couldn’t read fall off the page and scatter all over the floor.

Putting the phone away was no better. Panossian’s faceless grimace, all teeth and bulging eyes. Barry’s weight, crushing her tits and ribs against the very curve of the Earth. Phantasia bragging, then bursting into tears, his handcuff rattling against the bench as he cried. Crazy Hiram waddling like a duck. It was an endless montage of horrors and absurdities.

The cops didn’t need to chase her out of town. One possibility Colleen was dreading was Panossian’s parents, who would have to show up eventually to collect the body. She’d be the only one to greet them had she stayed in Providence, the only one to pretend to have been a close friend, so that his parents could in turn pretend that Panossian ever had close friends. A tearful hug from a fat mother who probably smelled of kitchen spices and chicken bullion, and an awkward exchange with a lanky father wearing a suit for the first time since his son’s baptism. Colleen shuddered at the thought.

But still, she wanted to know. The cops couldn’t chase her out of town. Providence was still with her, a ghost on her heels hungry for one more victim. There was nothing to do but wait to get to civilization, so she put an elbow up against the window, tucked her head in her arms, and tried to sleep.

They weren’t dreams per se, but something like them. Like watching TV and reading a newspaper at the same time. The train, the trees rushing past, the squeak of the wheels, they were always there. And so too was the darkened movie theater where Colleen sat, in the middle of the fifth row, virtually alone. The curtain parted and the air over her head lit up.

There was nothing to the film. Despite the red velveteen seats and the smell of burnt chemical “butter,” nothing on the screen was even close to what one would expect from a commercially driven cinematic experience. There was a speaker under Colleen’s seat—the rumble of the train—and on the screen dark shapes floated and pulsed against a darker background, like floaters in a great eye squeezed shut.

The train was warm, but the theater of the dream was cold. Not air-conditioned, cold like a meat locker, and growing colder as the film progressed. Something bloomed from the center of the screen, not quite so dark as its surroundings, like veins of slate erupting from obsidian. It felt organic, like a growing thing, or the fossilized remains of something that had once grown, and was being revealed again.

Wolf’s Blood, she heard, the final word comically extended. Panossian was sitting next to her in the theater. His face was flickering in the light despite the screen mostly showing black on black. He snickered at his own impression of Norman.

Was it Norman after all? Colleen asked in her dream. Panossian tilted his head and smiled a toothy, crooked smile, and leaned forward to whisper in her ear.

The voice wasn’t his. It was something else, something ancient, a stone tongue grinding against teeth.

It doesn’t matter who did it. It is done.

Colleen jerked awake, like an electric charge had hit her spine. The film still played in her eyes for a moment, till she blinked it away. It was her stop. Outside, summer was blasting Massachusetts, and she walked outside and just let the sun boil away the moisture in her limbs.

South Station had free Wi-Fi thanks to some sort of sponsorship deal with Google. It wasn’t fast, but it would do. Colleen set up her laptop, ordered a jalapeño pretzel—without butter, they’re vegan—from the Auntie Anne’s kiosk, and got to work.

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine had some leads, but not very many. Cob was thinner in his youth, with long hair dripping over his face. He wrote “dark poetry” which was not very good, but there were occasional flashes of interest, and he had published a short story in Ranger’s ’zine, and an essay on Lovecraft and Italian-Americans in the Providence Phoenix. The archived webpage was old enough that the article wasn’t even provided via link—Cob had taken a digital photo of the page and presented it as a full-size long-to-load gif. Colleen couldn’t imagine waiting for the image to show up in the dial-up days of the late 1990s.

There was also an abandoned LiveJournal, which still hosted entries about gossip and calls for submissions and many references to even older USENET groups, and the “flame wars” that had gone on there. How funny—nobody calls Internet conflict flame wars anymore, Colleen thought. Every disagreement is presumed to be caused by disingenuous trolls, not by passionate people arguing their points beyond all rationality.

Like killing one another.

Google’s omnipresence came in handy again. USENET, archived in Google Groups, and fairly easily searchable. The trick was to not get sucked into the conversational threads, the twenty-five-year-old controversies that erupted once, and still informed all Lovecraftian attitudes today. Earthquakes and fault-lines. Luckily for Colleen, everything but the personalities and the controversies was dead. She dove into the deep archives of alt.cthulhu.fan and alt.lovecraft.professional and rec.arts.lovecraftian, glad to be unable to express her views because the conversations she was reading were essentially in a dead language, recorded on a dead medium.

Then she found a binaries group. Most of the subject headers promised pictures, but the posts were just streams of seemingly random characters. There also seemed to be a ton of automated posts about spam and removal of posts. A glance at Wikipedia explained it all—the code was a way of sending graphics and sound files over the Internet in the bad old days before the World Wide Web. It used to be expensive to do things. USENET was the cyber equivalent of the mimeograph machine, but even the Lovecraftians abandoned it in the end. Presumably, had Lovecraft lived to be one hundred and managed to type a few messages onto his own newsgroups, his fans never would have forsaken the medium.

It took over an hour, but she managed to find some binaries posts that were actually complete, and that hinted at photos of Summer Tentaculars from days gone by. Colleen wasn’t sure what she’d find, but it was almost a pure joy of plumbing an archive at this point. She shivered, opened another browser window, and skimmed Lovecraft’s classic of ancient libraries, “The Shadow Out of Time.” The old Internet was like the archives of the Great Race: In its vast libraries were volumes of texts and pictures holding the whole of earth’s annals-histories and descriptions of every species that had ever been or that ever would be, with full records of their arts, their achievements, their languages, and their psychologies.

Especially psychologies. The candid photo was an extinct genre; everything was posed, and all the men and women under the gaze of the camera turned wacky. A toy plush Cthulhu was common headgear; people posed with their eyes bulging and mouths opened wide in rictuses of surprise and glee. Glasses hoisted, t-shirt slogans pointed at, people lifted high into the air by a younger Armbruster who also once had a head full of hair. Everyone was eager to perform some sort of transgression or low weirdness. Colleen tried to imagine Lovecraft without a suit jacket, or performing a handstand, or chugging four beers in two hands. She supposed he was the dour father the children were trying to impress with their juvenile antics, or the aloof schoolmaster an entire school of class clowns wanted to see smile. They were all low-res, most black and white; the collection really felt like cast-offs from a high school yearbook.

There were a few pictures of Cob, here and there. He was chubbier then, and if Colleen squinted, maybe more ethnic somehow. A John Travolta haircut, furious eyebrows, a baby face with pinchable cheeks.

And then Colleen actually found a photo of Cob. The chubby, swarthy kid wasn’t him. Except for having a bit less gray in his hair, Cob was Cob, ageless and seemingly immortal. Fashions had changed since the 1990s; mustaches sprouted and wilted, a brief fascination with kilts was superseded by the wearing of simultaneous multiple fanny packs and flip phone holsters, but Cob stayed the same.

But the false Cob, the chubby Italianate-looking fellow, seemed familiar. The photos were pure files, with no captioning and often with no other details than Tentac1997party or Yuggoth02 on the USENET posts from which Colleen had pulled them.

The station was getting crowded, noisier. Rush hour. Colleen bought another pretzel to keep the moral rent on her seat paid up. It tasted like cardboard in her mouth; eating was useless and stupid. That guy looked familiar but he wasn’t at the Tentacular, she was sure of it. Had she seen the photos before; had he been at some other convention? Maybe he was local, and she’d seen him on the train, or the doughnut shops, or…

Antony Amato. The detective that had studiously ignored her during the investigation at the hotel, and who gave her that bizarre lecture at the station. Anything is possible.

But he didn’t know anything about Lovecraft. What had Amato call the fandom—Lovecrafters? Funny. Almost too funny, especially as he had said something else too. Hey, Ms. Danzig. Earth to Danzig, did you get sucked away by the Mi-Go? I said your ride is here.

And somehow, Norman had gotten his hands on Panossian’s arrest record?

And didn’t a couple of people mention someone—something?—named “Tomato.” Tony Amato? Another dumb nickname in a community full of them?

And then R.G. had shown up, drove her back to the hotel, and told Barry to tackle her when Bhanushali decided that she wanted to play Miss Marple. Amato knew all about the Tentacular. He had set Colleen up, picked her for no other reason than she was Panossian’s roommate for the con, and tried to use her to…what, exactly?

Another set of theories, simultaneously complex and half-baked. Cob did it alone, Amato covered-up for him. DiRonalde knew about Amato, and fed the info to Colleen for…what reason? Personal conflict with the detective, gender solidarity with Colleen, or did DiRonalde actually do the murder? There’s no reason to exclude anyone, or anything. Anything is possible.

But some things are more likely than others. Amato arranged events to get Phantasia and Chloe arrested. The real killer was still out there, still among the members of the Summer Tentacular. Was Amato protecting the entire convention—as Hiram seemed to be trying to hint—or just Cob, or someone else? Ronald Ranger had no love for Panossian. Maybe he was the murderer. Perhaps he had confided in Cudmore, who threatened to go the police and so Cudmore had to die too. Perhaps Cudmore killed Panossian, and some other secret fan—Raul?—killed Cudmore and then R.G. convinced Amato to hint that Colleen did it when it became clear to her that the cases against Phantasia and Chloe would not hold up in the long term.

The speculation was useless. Maybe Cudmore threw a rock straight up in the air and dropped to the dirt to do a push-up and killed himself. Maybe Panossian tied a razor to an elastic band, tied the other end to the agitator of one of the washing machines, put in a dollar’s worth of quarters, and used it to slice his own face off just to make sure that the Lovecraftian community would never forget him.

“Fuck, if anything is possible maybe I had a pair of black-outs and killed both those nerds,” she said, aloud. She slapped her hand over her mouth, but none of the several people who had turned to look at her went back to their phones or newspapers or upmarket trade paperback novels about unhappy young men from Manhattan who meet happy young women from Cape Cod until somebody gets cancer or something.

Colleen shut her laptop with a smack, stood up, and walked right to the Silver Line, the computer in the crook of her arm like an important book she wished to be seen with. It would be easy to go home, to decide that Phantasia and Chloe were the killers. If the court found them guilty, great. If the court found them innocent, then courts make mistakes. Forget the universe, Colleen couldn’t correlate the contents of one simple roomful of murder suspects without toeing the edge of reason and deciding to go over.

There was a plane waiting for her. She was going to take it home, by way of Chicago, then a layover where she’d eat tres leches cake—the vegan kind with soy, almond, and coconut milk—at that little place in Midway Airport, and then another flight and she’d be home in Oregon where she belonged. It would be late at night, but Portland is safe and her car would be fine, so maybe she’d scrape the WW^(;,;)^D? bumper sticker off right in the airport parking lot, or maybe she’d wait till the next day, when it was bright and sunny, to do it.

WW^(;,;)^D? That is the ultimate allure of Lovecraftian fiction. All the ratiocination the human mind could muster; all the piecing together of disparate documentation from ship captains, from academics, from harried witnesses; the collections of artifacts and ancient codices; even the revelation of ancient cities and alien species; none of it mattered, ultimately. No matter what was discovered through application of logic and reason, it wouldn’t be enough to forestall doom. Cthulhu wasn’t the antagonist of “The Call of Cthulhu,” and the doomed sailor Gustaf Johansen wasn’t the hero. Cthulhu’s eventual rise and the utter destruction of humanity—as an epiphenomenon of some machinations we couldn’t possibly comprehend—wasn’t a threat, it was a promise. Like Judgment Day without the Christians, the apocalypse without salvation. No hint of an afterlife either. Lovecraft was a materialist. His right-wing bullshit was based on deep psychological problems, not traditional social conservatism. Cthulhu’s momentary defeat in the famous novella didn’t come from a prayer or a spell, but from ramming a steamship through his fat fucking green head.

Colleen was fuming, fists tensed. The T was packed with typical Boston trash. Pig-faced Irish and Italians with Red Sox caps, black kids braying like donkeys over some idiot joke. Old ladies who took such poor care of themselves when they were young and fuckable that now they were shaped like the letter C. For a second, she felt it. That endless swirling black hatred of all existence. She was a fucking Elder God…or an obnoxious loser racist like H. P. Lovecraft.

Or was she just fucking crazy now? How did Lovecraft describe Johansen’s descent after he took that desperate chance and turned his stolen ship, Alert, around and rammed it into Cthulhu’s bulbous head? There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.

Mocking imps. The train was full of them. She stood there, computer in one hand, pole in the other, baggage between her feet, as the train circled Logan airport, disgorging passengers at the terminals, at the rental car center. It rolled back through the World Trade Center stop, the Courthouse stop, to South Station. Colleen got off the T and walked back to the main concourse, to Amtrak and the commuter rail. A desperate chance… There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly.

Colleen bought a ticket back to Providence. One way. She was already mad; she wouldn’t have to wait till after her encounter to go insane and die. She would leave that town a blasted heath if she could.

17. Re-Animator

Thomas, the squirrely intern, talked to my parents. My mother was escorted from the room. My father decided to stay and take a peek. I never heard a sound like the one he made, not from him, not from anyone human. One time, in Armenia, my grandmother slaughtered a goat for me. She wanted to show that she loved me, the spoiled American grandson, by offering me meat for dinner. But she was old and her fingers stiff from arthritis, so the cut wasn’t as clean as it could have been, and the goat ran screaming and howling and stumbling up a hill, where it stumbled into a bush. In the bush lay a sleeping porcupine.

The goat at that moment was what my father sounded like. Yes, we finally killed the goat, my grandmother and I working together, by chasing it until the arterial spray was a trickle. Then I threw a rock and it bounced right off its head. My grandmother snatched it up and hammered the goat’s skull in. Her only complaint was that the head makes for some decent soup, and she’d have to go without.

Of course we ate it, the next day. Goat takes forever to tenderize.

I was surprised that nobody had come for Cudmore. He always talked about his famous friends, so I figured he had a loving family as well. Most people who are inexplicably confident despite being talentless and more than a little stupid have warm, affectionate parents.

Maybe they’ll still come. Maybe they’ll scream their lungs inside-out, as my father did. I’ll feel better if I hear that howl from somewhere else. He was mutilated too, though not as obviously, as painfully, as me.

Thomas is muttering to himself again. He’s singing, actually. That song about the girl who shot up her school because she didn’t like Mondays. I’m pretty sure the lyrics are wrong, but I couldn’t tell you for sure as my brain is collapsing. I even used to know the name of the girl. I can still picture her. She was a redhead with an almost featureless face and those large glasses that were popular in the 1970s and that have just come back into style now thanks to hipsters. But maybe I’m just remembering Amy Carter, or Chelsea Clinton.

“Thom-as Dumas/it’s time/to take/pho-tos,” Thomas sings and I come out of my drawer. I can’t believe that someone named Dumas would call their kid Thomas. Another drawer opens too. I presume it’s Cudmore’s. The camera sounds artificial, like what TV taught us cameras sound like when someone takes a snapshot. I realize that he’s taking photos with a smartphone of some sort. Thomas is in business for himself. Whether I’m going to be a 4chan Internet meme or part of some art school project I don’t know, but I don’t like it.

I am losing track of time.

Time and senses are tied together. Without them, any of them, you’re divorced from the universe. If I count “One, two, three…” I barely experience the moments between numbers, except that sometimes, when it’s loud, I can still hear. I have to work to keep my thoughts separate from my experiences. What’s left of my brain is eager to fill in the latter with the former. When I daydream, it feels as real as anything else I experience.

I hope this is all over soon. I never quite embraced the idea of death. That’s part of why I’m so interested in fantasy and horror. What’s a worse horror than extinction? I had a friend in college, who died in a car accident after the release of the first Lord of the Rings movie, but before the second one came out. I spent the entire three hours sniffling, because Rich would never see the movie. I didn’t even like The Two Towers that much. The undead, ghosts, at least they live on, even if tortured, even if in Hell. They won’t be forgotten. I won’t be forgotten…if only I were a ghost and not just the final thoughts of a man who is already dead, a mind that’s nothing but cinders.

Thomas is still there when the next thing happens. It’s a new voice in the room, a New Englander. Or maybe I had heard it before. He says, “Hey, Jace. I brought in some company.” More footsteps, a shallow gasp from Thomas.

“Good evening,” Ms. Phantasia says. He sounds desultory, defeated.

“Hi,” Thomas says. Then he says, “You, I’ve met.”

Chloe says, “Hiya.”

“This unlikely duo has a problem, Thomas,” the man said. “They’ve been accused of murdering and mutilating these two men.”

“Wait,” Phantasia said. “Is that exactly true?” There was no answer, and he said, “Then I want my lawyer immediately. This man is not mutilated, or at least he was not posthumously mutilated. The patches missing from his back and stomach are his own work…as you know, Detective Amato.”

“Well, here’s the interesting thing,” Thomas said. “I think we can get one more cover out of him. It’ll be tricky though, and his skin isn’t holding up so well. We’ll have to tan it soon. But there is an Innsmouth down by the small of his back. His tramp stamp, if you will.”

“Why did you bring us here?” Chloe said. “This is insane. I should scratch your face off.”

“That’s why you’re cuffed, but my old friend Duane isn’t,” Amato said.

“I…” Phantasia started. “This is utter madness. Antony, do you think you can keep this quiet forever? Even prisoners are allowed to send mail. I have many correspondents—”

“And a big bump on your head,” Thomas said. “I hear that’s allowed in prison too, especially if you insist on spending your license-plate-making money on mascara and rouge.”

“That was a coincidence,” Amato said. “Duane, I would never do that to you. Trust me, you’re not going to go to trial. There’s no physical evidence, there’s nothing. Same for you, Ms. McKendrick. No evidence. Don’t plead out, you’ll be cleared. You’ll be cleared. We just needed to give the brass something. A name. Two names.”

“My lawyer told me to plead out. Involuntary manslaughter,” Chloe said.

“Don’t plead out unless you want nine months in prison, and you don’t want nine months in prison. Duane, tell her.”

“Chloe, prison is no place for beings such as us,” Phantasia said. Then he hesitated. “Oh, I understand.”

“Duane,” Amato said.

“Detective Amato,” Phantasia said. “We have moved far beyond the initial plan here. An initial plan would be simplicity itself for me to describe to an attorney, or a judge, or the National Enquirer—”

Thomas snorted. “I thought you wanted to be taken seriously.”

Chloe said, “The Enquirer did break the John Edwards story, of his out-of-wedlock baby.” Everyone was quiet for a moment after she dropped that.

“Hiram told me that you were interested in all the Cudmore ‘skinner’ books. I thought you’d drive a hard bargain. I suspected you might even rough Panossian up. You’ve always been pleased to throw your weight around, and he was always eager to provoke reactions. I did not expect to be standing before two bodies. My Lord, Amato, what is wrong with you?”

The big man, no wonder I didn’t recognize him. It was Amato. I’d never met him before, but I knew the name from some old ’zines, from some old anecdotes. Another local to Providence, a fan since childhood, a writer who never made it. He had written some story about Lovecraft’s death, about how the expired tin cans of beans that Lovecraft ate were tainted with the ichor of shoggoths, which led to the cancer that killed him. By all accounts, the story was actually pretty widely read. The joke is that it was widely read only because he would not stop submitting it to every ’zine and online journal in existence. When the name on a masthead changed, he’d submit the same story again. Between the assistant editors and fiction editors, the writing workshop participants, and the fiction contests, more people read his dumb story than would have had he actually managed to publish it. After ten years and countless revisions, he gave up and dropped out.

“Listen, we all just need to be on the same page here,” Amato said. “You walked in at just the right moment, Duane. You know what happened?”

What did happen? The large man. Amato. He was the client, he wanted Arkham. But he was a cop, obviously. There’s something about the police, you know. Ever been to a demonstration? I went to one, once. I’m not very political, but I marched in 2015, to commemorate the Armenian genocide. There were a lot of men in suits there, Armenian men, their jackets practically splitting from bulging shoulders. But the cops among the crowd were easy to distinguish. Something about their shoes, their facial hair. Even the young cats who joined the left-wing activists had their tells—baseball caps and Red Sox shirts, as if any pinko would be caught dead with that stuff as their casual clothing.

I remember now, the surge of panic. I was being set up. Amato had been wearing yet another Cthulhu t-shirt; he smiled and told me that he was thrilled to meet me and thrilled to see the book, but I didn’t trust him. And then Cudmore casually strolled in.

“These two were already going at it when I walked in,” Amato said. A lie. No, that’s not it at all. Not really. “I just wanted the book. Cudmore was shouting about how he felt so betrayed, and Panossian was just confused.” Yes, that much is true.

“You were intimidated by little Charles Cudmore?” Chloe asked. She snorted.

“No.” The cop voice was back.

“By the time I got downstairs, Panossian was dead,” Phantasia said. “Next thing I know, I’m being dragged away in chains. Chains, Antony!”

“Cudmore…killed Panossian, and took his face while you just stood there?” Chloe asked.

Amato was not a good storyteller, so he couldn’t lie effectively. He had to try the truth.

“I killed Panossian. It was an accident. I killed Cudmore. That was purposeful. He was going to talk, even after I let him have the face. Here’s my offer—plead innocent, I’ll be sure you both get off. It’ll be an unsolved murder, forever. A Jack the Ripper-style mystique. Think what it’ll mean to the legacy of H. P. Lovecraft to have an unsolved murder of a writer attached to it. Think of the Necronomicon, that face…”

“I don’t like this,” Chloe said softly.

“You can not like it as a free woman,” Thomas said, “or you can not like it in prison.”

Amato still wasn’t telling the whole truth. I didn’t recognize him. I didn’t know him. He had tested me, taunted me. His voice dropped an octave when he got mad. Hell, he dropped a class position from middle-class detective to blue-collar blowhard. “Whaddya mean you never heard uhv me?” he’d said. Then I remembered the story about his one story, and sure, I smirked. I even told him that he could probably pass the text of Arkham off as his own.

“You’re a wiseass, you know that?” he told me. “I wrote plenty, published plenty,” he said. “I was a wiseass once, just like you. Instead of a blog, I had a ’zine.”

Fuck Tentacles.

Antony Amato ruined my fucking life.

“You brought us here to show us the stakes of not playing along, is that it, Antony?” Phantasia asked.

“I’d hoped to have another suspect ready to arrest, but that didn’t quite work out the way I had planned,” Amato said. “So just take it easy; you’ll both be out by Friday. No bail, no trial.”

I could have been a real writer.

“My poor father…” Phantasia said.

“I’ll get Cob to go visit him. Even a social worker. I’ve always been open to helping you, Duane.”

“I don’t need any help,” Chloe said. “I just want this to be over. Can you guarantee that?”

“Absolutely,” Amato said. “It’s my ass in the frying pan too.”

There was something so smug and awful about Amato. He was protected by his bulk, his badge, his status. He had played at transgression, fucked around with art. Then he shrugged and left it all behind.

“We also have an upside,” Thomas said. “We’ve cornered the market on skinner titles. Hiram Chandler is willing to help us pass them on to the right collectors. And the face.”

“I couldn’t leave Cudmore running around with the face. I had to give it to him to keep him quiet in the short term. He told me he was going to dig up Nigger-Man with Bhanushali too. I told him I’d meet him out there, keep the rest of the police away.”

“Why me?” Chloe said.

Years later, richer than I’d ever be, as a bully with a gun, Amato wanted to buy his way back into Lovecraft fandom with a genuine copy of Arkham. I needed the money, and I needed it bad, but not so bad I could keep myself from getting in his face.

“Listen, you were just connected to Phantasia. It fit.”

“Our edition of one of the Necronomicon will bring in a pretty penny. We’re proposing a four-way split,” Thomas said. “The face I’m already tanning back at school.”

Amato never had to leave. He could have continued with Fuck Tentacles for years, triumphantly revealed himself after thirteen issues. He could have been the king of fandom. He traded it for a bullshit existence, and stuck me with his bullshit existence without even knowing it.

I shoved him. His cop reflexes took over and he clocked me hard. I saw the lights from my back, and then Cudmore’s stupid pointy head hovering over mine too.

“I’ve been trying to write for years,” Amato said. “It won’t be some useless occult bullshit like Simon’s mass-market Necronomicon. It’ll be good. It’ll be scary. I even wrote a little legend for the face on the cover.”

I was concussed, confused. But I had reflexes too, and they took over. But I’m all mouth. Amato shut me up but good. Now I have yet another bullshit existence, this hour that stretches between life and death, and it’s fading fast.

I can only hope that in the hell of his own mind, Cudmore feels as betrayed, as used.

I’m not even a mouth now, but I am something else. I’m heading into the outer reaches of time. My body in the ground, food for worms. But I’m not a healthy corpse. I’m sick, and I’ve always been sick. I’m full of poisons, chemicals. Processed food little better than Lovecraft ate, thirty-five years of sucking in car exhaust and playing in asbestos-soaked school hallways.

“So—Hiram? What are you doing here?” Amato’s voice cracked as he spoke. “How did you even get down here?”

“I came to visit Ms. Phantasia, and then I met…”

“The desk didn’t send you down here,” Amato said. Something shifted in the room.

I am a bag of chemical reactions. Put me in the ground. Put me in the ground of this cursed city, because for sure as fuck my parents can’t afford to transport my body and bury me anywhere else. I don’t even have a savings account.

“I met someone Panossian’s parents had named…” Hiram said, his voice froggier than usual.

I’ll curse this land. I’m a man of lead and radioactivity. I sat way too close to the television. Let me rot into the water table, I’ll give that fat baby-face fuck prostate cancer. I’ll drive his children to early graves. I’ll make his grandchildren drooling retards. I swear, molecule by molecule, I’ll push myself into the soil, into the air. Just give me one free radical; I just want to push one gene out of place. That’s all it takes to start the spiral of degeneration.

“You fuckers are going to pay for this.” It was Colleen Danzig.

“No, I don’t think we are,” Amato said.

Did he have his sidearm in his hand?

The room quieted as though he did. The temperature plummeted. Or is it me?

“You can’t shoo—” Phantasia said.

“Easy, easy easy.” That was Thomas. A chant. Art school kids aren’t made for such things. But I am, now. That’s the secret to death. We’re not just food for worms, we’re the death of worms too. The universe is running down, gears grinding against black gears.

“How many people are you going to kill? Who are you going to frame next?” Colleen said. “Eventually, you’ll run out of Lovecraftians. You won’t be King Shit of fandom if there are no fans left.”

“It’s not too late. We can all just keep this to ourselves. Forget the books. Let’s all go our separate ways. Phantasia and Chloe, you’ll be all right. You can make sure of that, can’t you Antony?” Hiram said. He was practically in tears.

“Easy, easy take it easy, easy…”

Finally, it was Chloe. She screamed “No!”, and there was a rush of air that felt like her limbs, and the gun went off. I couldn’t even smell it anymore. The report was distant, like thunder a dozen miles away.

There was more yelling, but I didn’t know from whom. I’m a fading photograph now. It’s all swirling, black seas of infinity. I am on the shore. I don’t have to take a step, it is disintegrating under me. With me. It’s all the sea, washing me away like salt. Then I hear a horrible roar, but it’s not the waves of the dark and endless ocean, it’s an animal noise, something alive raging against death.

There’s another shot fired, one even more distant, and a gurgling sound. My ears are done, my skin is ice turning to slush, running from my cracked bones. I’m under an ocean of black, the surface too far to see. It’s a good place here, a good place for a long long sleep. One day though, one part of me, one tiny sliver will find its way into an eye, into a throat. I’ll have my fucking killers down here with me, I promise I promise, I swear I swear. Put me in the ground, bury me deep, where I belong.

I hear something. She’s just so close, so I can hear it, her voice She must be kneeling right by me. She must have been driven to her knees. Colleen’s hot breath is on my ear. I know she’s not talking to me; only a fool or a saint would address me now, but she says it. Colleen says what I’ve always wanted to hear.

“Are you okay? Where are you hurt?”

Is that so hard to ask someone?

Does she have Hiram’s head in her lap now? Is she stroking Chloe’s cheek? Is Colleen kneeling in a pool of blood not her own? Her own? Is she calling out to someone across the room, or talking to herself, half-deranged from a bullet in her belly, from her life leaking out between her clutching hands?

Then she says something else. Something I still wish were true. Something I know won’t ever be true for anyone, not ever.

“It’ll be okay. Don’t worry, everything will be okay, okay? Okay...”

The more novels one writes, the shorter the acknowledgements get. First I must thank Jeremy Lassen, whose desire for one more Mythos novel from me inspired this book. He will never ask again, clearly. Early readers Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Carrie Laben kept me excited about the project, and Erica Satifka’s amazing design for the ’zine pages really made this something special.

Gosh, that’s pretty much it. As it turns out, writing a novel is a lonely business.

About the Author

Nick Mamatas is the author of six and a half novels and several collections. His work has been translated into German, Italian, and Greek. Nick is also an anthologist and editor of short fiction, including the Locus Award-nominated The Future Is Japanese (co-edited with Masumi Washington), and the Bram Stoker Award-winning Haunted Legends (co-edited with Ellen Datlow). Nick’s own short fiction has appeared in genre publications such as Asimov’s Science Fiction and Tor. com, lit journals including New Haven Review and subTERRAIN, and anthologies such as Hint Fiction and Best American Mystery Stories 2013. His fiction and editorial work has been nominated for the Bram Stoker award five times, the Hugo Award twice, the World Fantasy Award twice, and the Shirley Jackson, International Horror Guild, and Locus Awards.