The Mall of Cthulhu Read online

  "Lovecraft?"

  "What the hell is that—is that one of your porn sites?"

  "No, no no! H. P. Lovecraft? Writer?"

  Laura looked blank. "Hey, can we talk and eat? I'm starving, and that saag paneer isn't getting any hotter."

  Ted's face, already lit up, got one shade brighter. "Oh, thank you! Indian food! I have to tell you, the whole bachelor fridge and bran cereal thing you have going on here is just really not working."

  "Yeah, well, they feed you really well in jail."

  "Point taken. But why all the bran? I mean, is there some kind of a problem with your plumbing that needs to . . . "

  "My plumbing is not up for discussion. Come out to the kitchen and help me dish this stuff up."

  They went to the kitchen, where all the food had survived its drop very nicely. Ted picked up the bottle of Riesling that had rolled under the table and gave Laura a big hug, which was such a rare experience that she didn't really know how to react. Tentatively, she hugged him back and then felt instantly awkward, not to mention disgusted, since he still smelled of the dumpster.

  "Okay, I want to hear everything, but you have to change your clothes. You're not very appetizing smelling like that."

  "Okay, okay! Kendra leave anything else here?"

  "Well, let's just say it's nothing I want to see you wearing right now," Laura said, smiling. Ted retreated to her bedroom and emerged a minute later wearing her ratty old New York Liberty t-shirt and a pair of workout shorts that were enormous on her but made Ted look like he was playing basketball in the 1970's. She couldn't help smiling.

  They ate and drank in silence for a moment, and Laura felt slightly guilty as she saw how ravenous Ted was. Eventually, Ted was able to get out, through the adrenaline fogging his brain and the saag paneer clogging his mouth, that he'd taken the CD to Queequeg's and logged on to some video game from a file on the CD, and that he—or rather the computer person he'd been pretending to be—had been attacked by a busty blonde who'd called him by name, thus confirming that Hal-caf hadn't been working alone and that his associates had probably taken the Queequeg's hard drive. The fact that Laura hadn't been called by the police today had led her to believe that someone other than the police had the hard drive, and this pretty well sealed it. She didn't think assault by virtual centerfold was in the Boston Police playbook.

  Everything in the area of the game where Ted had been "attacked" related to Lovecraft, who was apparently some kind of horror writer from the twenties who wrote a lot about gigantic octopus-headed creatures from other dimensions that he called "The Old Ones" and their nameless horrible horror, and bad geometry. Or something like that.

  "So, your shooter couldn't get a date in high school. What's your point?"

  "Hey, I represent that remark! There are a lot of hours to fill up pondering why the popular girls don't like you, and for some of us, a rich fantasy life augmented by fantastic fiction and yes—role playing games—there, I said it, helped us through this difficult period. You know, it's really just like why you played field hockey."

  "First of all, I played soccer, and second of all, popular girls liked me."

  "Yeah, but did they like you like you? How many did you nail?"

  "Lesbians don't nail, okay? That verb implies the use of an implement that . . . "

  "Ducking the question. So you were 0-for-high-school, is what you're saying."

  "Yes, fine. Anyway, why is the fact that these people are your fellow dorks important?"

  "Because it's real. That's the only reason they'd shoot up the Queequeg's. They can play this game and pretend they're dorks, and coordinate this thing nationwide or maybe even worldwide on the internet. Anybody who stumbled onto anything would just think these guys were Lovecraft fans, but they are really Cthulhu cultists! For real!"

  "What the hell's a Cthulhu cultist?"

  "Well, in one of these stories, it's a bunch of degenerate sailors and the like—you can tell they're evil because they're not white—I know, I know, somehow the racist part sailed right over my head when I was fourteen—anyway, they are trying to open portholes to other dimensions to bring about the return of these creatures so horrible to contemplate . . . "

  "That contemplation of their horror would drive you instantly mad, I get it."

  "Right!"

  "And this is real."

  "Yes!"

  "That's nuts."

  "True! Also, there's no such thing as vampires. You could look it up."

  "Ted, there are so many holes in your theory. First of all, what is anybody's motivation for bringing nameless horror to the Earth? Second, if they do all their planning in what is essentially a public space, why would they need to shoot up a Queequeg's to get it back?"

  "I don't know. Maybe you can't get in to Randolph Carter's room without a key. Or maybe they found information from the Necronomicon and encoded it in the spreadsheets."

  "What the hell's the Necronomicon?"

  "Ugh, it's the book that unlocks the secrets of the dead. It was written by the mad Arab, somebody."

  "The mad Arab?"

  "I can't remember. Al somebody. Listen, these stories are from the twenties. They're not exactly PC. But Randolph Carter had a book written in Arabic tucked into a desk drawer!"

  "I'm not buying."

  "Well, I am. Which is why I'm going to Providence tomorrow."

  This stopped Laura short. Ted was leaving town? Ted was doing something active? He'd followed her to Washington, to New York, and then to Boston, clinging to her like a remora. And now he was the shark all the sudden? It didn't feel right.

  "I'm all for you getting out of town, but what's in Providence?"

  "Well, Randolph Carter had a map of Providence in his dorm room. I actually downloaded it to your computer, so we can look at it if you want . . . " Ted opened the laptop and Laura reached out and snapped it shut.

  "You downloaded a file from a hostile web site?"

  "Well, it's not a hostile site, I mean, it's just that some hostile people use it, and—"

  "And you downloaded a file from this site where hostile people hang out and you were about to open it on my computer."

  "Well, yeah. I thought we could look at it and compare it to a real map of Providence, you know, see if there are any clues . . . "

  "Did it ever occur to you that there might be a virus or something on this file?"

  "Uh. No. I mean . . . "

  "Do not open it. In fact, give me this." Laura reached out and grabbed her computer away from Ted. "Okay, so besides the killer Trojan horse virus map, what else makes you think you should go to Providence?"

  Well, some people believe that the Necronomicon was real and that Lovecraft had it and hid it somewhere in Providence before his death. Other people think he donated it to Brown, but of course their libraries insist there is no such thing as the Necronomicon."

  "Which only proves to these nutballs that Brown University is part of the conspiracy, right?"

  "Exactly! Because if they did really have it, they'd deny it! So, I figure they're in Providence looking for the Necronomicon somewhere. I'll get a bus down there or something and see what's up."

  Laura felt something strange when Ted said this. It took her a minute to realize she was kind of hurt. All this time dreaming of Ted being out of her hair, and now he was just taking off. He'd only be fifty miles away, but still. Who was going to look out for him? And didn't he feel like he needed her anymore? And if he wasn't weighing her down, what would she use for an excuse for not having a real social life?

  After dinner, Ted settled in to watch some reality show that Laura found too stupid to even use to kill time. So she sat down to plan the Providence Operation. Because Ted was nuts, of course, and this was way more likely to be an organized crime thing than some kind of cult killing, but what if he wasn't? Certainly if somebody had told her at the beginning of freshman year of college—or when she was a first-year student, she reminded herself, remembering how she h
ad ripped into anyone who dared to call her anything containing the word "man" when she was eighteen—that there was a colony of vampires, and that the incredibly hot sorority girl she had a crush on was several hundred years old, she would have said they were nuts.

  And besides, even a fruitless chase after the cult of C-somethingorother was more exciting than looking for Whitey at the ATM, which looked like a project that was going to drag on pretty much indefinitely, as they had a fresh tip to check out a strip mall ATM in Naples now, and the videos were being uploaded and would probably be ready for analysis tomorrow. Ugh.

  So she decided to play a little thought game. Let's assume these people are really in Providence, and that they are incredibly powerful badasses. It wouldn't hurt anything to assume this as she did her planning. (And, some part of her brain whispered, It would keep Ted safe, because she had to keep her Ted safe.) First of all, Ted getting on a bus and going to Providence alone wasn't going to work. He hadn't been seen in his completely clean-shaven persona yet, except by some rats in the Queequeg's dumpster, but she didn't like the idea of him in an enclosed space like that for an hour. And maybe the authorities and whoever else was after Ted would be watching South Station and its adjacent bus depot.

  "Hey!" Ted called from the couch. "Wanna watch Massachusetts Marriage? Twenty people in a gigantic house on Martha's Vineyard, and nobody knows who's straight or gay, but there will be at least five weddings at the end!"

  "Can't talk. Working." Laura turned back to the computer, then turned back to Ted. "You made that up, right? That's not a real show, is it?"

  "I swear to God!"

  "I had a summer like that, except it was Nantucket, and nobody got married."

  "No shit?"

  "Well, there were only five of us, but one girl told me we could fool around, but we couldn't go out, because that would make her a lesbian."

  "Whoa. Okay, drunk girls are making out on TV—I need to pay attention to this."

  Laura turned back to the screen and her operational planning. She felt an excellent brain buzz coming on—the kind she thought she'd get running investigations at the FBI. Her mind felt electric instead of foggy as she thought out all the angles. If she were an evil conspirator searching for Ted, what would she do?

  Okay. He'd need an apartment, but he couldn't rent the apartment, because then he'd have to put his social security number into circulation, and they had to assume that the Cazulu people had that from the hard drive at Queequeg's. So she'd get her bar ring (a big cubic zirconia engagement ring she'd bought for twenty bucks that helped her ward off male suitors when she was in a non-lesbian bar) and say she needed a place for her and her fiancé.

  This was a good plan, but now she reached the problematic part. She was sure that she couldn't keep Ted from going to Providence, and going there would make him marginally safer from the Boston Police and FBI and whoever else was looking for him. But if the Cawhatever cult was real, and they really were in Providence, then they'd be looking for Ted while he was looking for them. And it just seemed very unlikely that Ted would be able to poke around so discreetly that no one would know he was poking around. So she would have to supervise any serious surveillance on the weekends. In the meantime, she needed to give him something to do that seemed like real work but would actually keep him out of harm's way.

  She needed to do some research. She went to the kitchen, grabbed a container of Clorox wipes from under the sink, and wiped down the outside of her computer. Then she opened it and gingerly wiped down the keyboard. She replaced the Clorox wipes under the sink and found her screen-cleaning wipes in the top drawer of the desk. She wiped the screen clean and stuck her face up close to the computer to make sure the stench was completely gone.

  "Did you just sniff your computer?" Ted called out. Laura gritted her teeth and fought back the tirade about how somebody had to make sure all the toxic filth was off of it.

  Ted had said something about a temple, so Laura searched for Jewish houses of worship in Providence and found ten different temples scattered all over the city. If she put him on surveillance of each temple for a day, that would buy her two work weeks of Ted doing probably pointless stakeouts. During that time, she might be able to figure out whether it was worth going down there and doing any real investigating.

  "Oh my God, you have to watch this! This girl Nadine has already made out with two women and a man, and it's only day 2! She's such a ho!"

  Laura didn't even respond, because she didn't have the energy to lecture Ted about his outmoded patriarchal judgments of female sexuality. She printed the map of Providence with the locations of the temples circled and typed up detailed instructions for Ted about inconspicuous surveillance. She knew she was risking offending him, but she felt like she had to be really basic, so she included instructions such as "Do not ask anybody anything while you're doing surveillance."

  She flipped her laptop closed and found that, though she'd been up for over thirty-six hours, she was too hyper to sleep. Ted was asleep on the couch in front of the Ten O'clock News. Laura sat down to watch, and reflected that Bridget Tran y Garcia was pretty hot, and the next thing she knew it was five a.m.

  Laura explained the plan to Ted and called in sick. She then dug out a needle and an old hoop earring and explained to Ted that he needed his ear pierced.

  "No way! It's gonna hurt!"

  "Don't be a baby. You got shot at, and now you're whining about getting your ear pierced."

  "Yeah, well, he didn't shoot at me with needles, okay?"

  "I don't care. You need stuff to distract people from your face. You wear a big earring, people will see that and not pay attention to your identifying features that can't be removed."

  "Gah, okay, be quick! I hate this!"

  Five minutes later, Ted was successfully pierced. Bald and clean-shaven with a gold hoop earring, he looked like a gangly Mr. Clean. Laura changed into exercise clothes, walked down the stairs and started up her Nissan Altima. She drove the five blocks to the Glen Road entrance of Franklin Park and parked her car in what she judged to be the most inconspicuous spot.

  She got out of the car, popped her headphones on, and ran the tree-lined path up the hill, around by the high school football stadium, past the basketball and tennis courts and the back entrance to the zoo, and through the dirt path through the woods, and then back up the Hundred Steps, always her favorite place to end a run, even though she almost always had to stop running and start staggering by about step sixty. When she got back to her car she was covered in sweat but felt more awake and alert than anyone carrying as big of a sleep debt as hers should feel.

  She got behind the wheel and said, "Ted? Are you in here?"

  "Yes, and I'm already cramped up, and my testicles aren't used to this kind of compression. I think I'm gonna be sterile by the time we get to Providence. Isn't this kind of excessive?" he said. "I mean, we couldn't have just left the house normally?"

  "Listen. You think there is a far-reaching conspiracy, and that these people want to kill you. We know for a fact that the latter part is true. So if the first part is true, we have to be extra careful. We can't be seen together at all, at least not within a mile of the Queequeg's where they knew you were yesterday."

  "So you really think I'm on to something?"

  "I think you're nuts, but I'm going to run this operation as if you're not nuts. Whether these people are supernatural cultists or just gangsters, we proceed extra carefully so we can keep you safe."

  Ted was silent for a moment. "That's sweet!" he said, and Laura suddenly felt embarrassed. Fortunately, any maternal tenderness she felt toward Ted quickly evaporated when he said, "But wouldn't I be safer with a seat belt on? I'm just saying. In addition to my testicular discomfort, I'm gonna have such a knot in my back by the time we get to Providence that I won't be a very effective investigator, especially given . . . " Laura turned up NPR and tried to drown him out.

  Once they arrived in Providence, Laura drove up the h
ill to Brown University and pulled the car over. "I'm going to go walk down the street to the admissions office to ask for some information for my niece who's coming to visit. Wait five minutes and get out of the car. Spend a couple of hours ogling Brown girls or something—"

  "Are we near RISD?" Ted called out from the floor. "Because while I certainly have nothing against the Ivy League cuties, I think I'm more in an art school mood today."

  "Knock yourself out. Walk down to the river and ogle the secretaries having lunch if you want."

  "Hmmm . . . professional façade, wild, untamed interior? I like the way you think!"

  "Christ, Ted, that's the way you think. All I meant was that I don't really give a shit what you do for the next four hours as long as you stay inconspicuous. So listen. Right now we are at the corner of Prospect and College streets. Okay?"

  "Got it."

  "What's the corner?"

  Ted paused. "Prospector something?"

  Laura gritted her teeth. "Prospect and College. Say it back to me."

  "Prospect and College."

  "Good. Now if you walk down the hill on College, you'll come to a coffee shop on the left before you come to the river. Got that? If you get to the river, you've gone too far."

  "Got it."

  "Just be in the coffee shop at 4. Hopefully I'll be able to give you the key to the apartment I'm renting for me and my fiancé."

  "Okay, honey! Have a good day apartment hunting, sweetie!"

  "Fuck you, sweetums!" Laura trilled in return. When she returned from the admissions office, Ted was gone.

  She went and met the real estate agent, a woman named Aline who was wearing a rhinestone pin in the shape of a house with the word "Sold!" written in fake rubies across it. Aline took her first to a building with peeling paint and split banisters that looked like it might be condemned, then to a building where the blue vinyl siding was separating from the exterior walls and the interior doors appeared to be made of cardboard, and finally to a utilitarian gray box of a building containing six tiny, spartan studio apartments. It was not a nice place by any means, but it was the Taj Mahal compared to the other places she had seen.