The Mall of Cthulhu Page 8

  And yet, if he was right about the whole Cthulhu Cult Conspiracy, he couldn't just sit by and hope somebody else dealt with it. He'd have to take action. As much as he hated it, he decided to actually do his job, or whatever this stupid, crazy, pointless thing was, and possibly blow his chance with this completely adorable body-jewelry retailer. He blurted out some damage control. "I don't even know your name—"

  "Cayenne."

  "Like the pepper?"

  "I was originally one of five Jennifers in my class."

  "Uh, Cayenne, that is such a fantastic offer, and I really want to take you up on it, but I am—I actually have to run away right now, but I'm not running away from you, and I'll be back tomorrow, and I hope you can extend your offer because it really sounds fantastic and also I'm probably going to be completely famished by this time tomorrow."

  Cayenne looked unconvinced. "Well, I don't know your name . . . "

  Neither do I, Ted thought, then said, "Jonathan," before he could even think. Mr. Average was about to disappear around a corner, and Ted grabbed his bags and started to run to catch up to a comfortable following distance. He realized he should probably ditch the bags, but then what would he wear?

  He ran until he reached what he hoped was an inconspicuous distance. When Ted reached the mall's exit, probably half a mile from the end of the mall from where he had entered, Mr. Average looked back. Ted quickly ducked into a lingerie store, and by the time he'd fought off the three saleswomen who had descended on him when he entered, Mr. Average was gone.

  He walked out of the door and tried not to look like he was looking around. This end of the mall was on a dirty, deserted street with the highway running overhead, and it seemed a million miles from the gleaming, high-traffic entrance Ted had used. He stood alone on the narrow street for twenty seconds before a dilapidated pickup truck came rumbling by. Looking around, he could see boarded-up buildings and empty lots, and, directly opposite him, rising almost to the level of the highway above, a giant, filthy stone building that had once been white. It was narrow and four stories tall, with gigantic columns that had probably once made it impressive. The windows and doors were boarded up and/or padlocked, and signs saying "No Trespassing—Police Take Notice" competed with graffiti that was either illegible or said things like "Fuck 5th Street Crew Wannabes."

  And then, scrawled next to something that looked like "Case96," Ted saw something spray painted on the bottom of a gigantic column that might have been "Yog-Sothoth." Or possibly "Yo Sheila" or "Yes O'Toole." Graffiti was really hard to read.

  Ted decided to walk around to the front of the building to see if there was an obvious place where Mr. Average might have gone in. He was keenly aware of how ridiculous he looked, and of every crinkle of his large paper shopping bags with the plastic handles that dug into his hands, but he couldn't just leave all his purchases on the street. As much as it's possible to creep when laden down with rustling shopping bags, Ted crept around through a weedy, trash-strewn lot to the front of the building.

  When he got there, Ted got input from two senses that told him that he wasn't crazy, he wasn't lost in a fantasy—this was all too real, and all his suspicions were correct. A strange scent was drifting out of the building: a bayberry spice candle from Ye Olde New England Candlery. And above the door, two words and a symbol were visible through the layers of grime.

  He decided it would be prudent to walk away quickly and call Laura from a safe place, and as he headed home, Ted wondered if any place was safe.

  Eight

  Laura was buzzing on the horrible employee lounge coffee. It felt like the coffee might be eating a hole in her stomach, but she headed down to the lounge for another cup anyway. She had no idea if she was going to be able to continue doing this stultifying work she'd been doing for a week now. She understood that she was paying dues, but she was impatient and bored and so eager to be doing something real that she found her mind wandering to the Providence Operation all the time, even though that might or might not be something real.

  Before she got more than two cubicles away from her own, her phone vibrated in her pocket. She checked—it was Ted, and she surprised herself by feeling neither annoyance or resignation, but excitement. Maybe he found something!

  "Hey Ted, what's up?"

  "It's all real, Laura, it's all real, and I'm scared shitless but also kind of excited, but I don't know what to do next!"

  "Back up, back up. What happened?"

  He told her how he'd followed Mr. Average out of Ye Olde New England Candlery, and how he'd seen "Yog-Sothoth", or else "Yo Sheila" spray-painted on the building next door.

  "And then I smelled a scented candle coming from inside the building!"

  "So the guy's looking for a filthy thrill, and he took a date there to do it among the pigeon poop."

  "You know, if you'd seen this place, I think you'd understand that that's actually more far-fetched than my theory. But anyway, guess what the abandoned building was!"

  "I don't know."

  "Guess!"

  "I don't know. A comic book store?"

  "A four-story comic book store? No, It was a temple, Laura. An abandoned Masonic temple. The mall is the place of power! It's adjacent to the temple! Remember what it said in the notebook? They are trying to bring the Old Ones back to life right in the middle of the Providence Towne Centre Mall!"

  "What the hell is a place of power, anyway? Is that from your pal's racist horror fiction?"

  "Okay, he was dead long before my birth, so he's not my pal, and it's not in his fiction, at least not that I remember. Do you remember when I went out with Moonstone?"

  "Moonstone? Was she the one with the crystals and the incense and stuff?"

  "Yeah. I used to think about how hot her sister was whenever she started talking about New Age stuff, so this might be a little—"

  "You used to think about her hot sister? Jesus, you are a disgusting human being."

  "Yeah, yeah, I'm male, we knew this already. Moving on, what I think I remember about places of power are that they're places where the, like, boundaries between dimensions are thin, or something like that."

  "The boundaries between dimensions."

  "Well, yeah! If you're trying to call nameless horror forth from another dimension, maybe you need to go where the walls are thin!"

  "That's nuts."

  "I know. I mean, I even think that's weird and crazy, but these guys appear to believe it. I mean, in these stories, there are always a bunch of evil conspirators trying to bring the Old Ones back. I can't imagine anything else you'd possibly be trying to do with a Necronomicon in a place of power."

  "Okay. I'll google places of power and see what I get. Where are you?"

  "I'm home, or whatever, in this apartment."

  "Were you followed?"

  "No. I took a really roundabout way home, and I was checking the whole time. You'd be proud of me—I'm totally paranoid!"

  "Let me think about our next move and call you in tonight." Laura suddenly didn't need any more caffeine. She decided she'd take a few minutes to look for places of power and then do some illicit digging through the Bureau's electronic files for stuff about Cthulhu. Maybe if any of it was real, there would be some kind of clue somewhere in the Bureau's database. Of course, she'd leave her footprints all over the system, and if McManus ever decided to check up on her, he'd see exactly what files she'd been calling up, but she'd worry about that when it happened.

  First she clicked on her internet browser. She typed "Places of Power" into a search engine and spent the next fifteen minutes clicking around looking for information. What she found, on a variety of new-age blogs and huckster websites, was a remarkably consistent picture of what places of power were, and Ted, with just his horror-fiction background and some half-remembered at his disposal, had pretty well nailed it. All the sites claimed that there were places where the barriers to other dimensions were especially thin, and that people always responded to such places, wh
ether they realized it or not, by building things like Eiffel Towers and Washington Monuments and Stonehenges near them. A badly translated lecture by some Czech guru or something said: "Humanity feels the pull of places of power, and, therefore, will build structures of important in such places. So clock towers, town squares, monuments, all these things are cited where they are situated because of the energy powerful of the location felt by planners and builders of the monumental structures, especially popular works."

  Ted had said the place of power was adjacent to the Temple. Laura supposed it made sense that planners and builders were sensing the energy of the place of power and sited the mall where it was situated due to the energy powerful. She smiled. It wasn't Stonehenge, but nobody could deny that the Providence Towne Centre was an important symbol of what its builders revered.

  Laura thought for a moment. It might be time to start taking this whole thing more seriously. She'd been relying on Ted's second-hand Lovecraft knowledge for background information, but if she was taking him seriously at last, she had to find out some more information on her own. She typed Cthulhu into the search box and got millions of results. Someone had posted "The Call of Cthulhu" online, so Laura read it. It was pretty much as Ted had described it—bad geometry and horror so indescribable that it defied description.

  Having finished with the primary source, she spent a few minutes looking through Lovecraft fan sites, ads for "What Would Cthulhu Do?" t-shirts, Lovecraft related porn, (of course) and the rantings of a few cranks who claimed that some combination of the Rand Corporation, the Trilateral Commission, the Illuminati and the international Jewish Banking conspiracy were hiding the Necronomicon and/or using it to control world events. It was pretty telling, though, that none of the millions of Cthulhu-related pages Laura could call up said anything about a conspiracy to bring the Old Ones back. Even the loonies who believed that a cabal of Jews was controlling the world with a Necronomicon pilfered from the Knights Templar had nothing to say about an active conspiracy to bring the Old Ones back.

  Glancing around her cubicle to make sure no one was approaching, she accessed the FBI's internal network and searched for Cthulhu. No records found. She tried Randolph Carter and found a guy from Louisiana who was wanted for mail fraud. Lovecraft—no records. Yog-Sothoth. Nothing. Necronomicon: Level Z clearance required to access these records. Password?

  Shit. Level Z? What the hell was that? She'd never even heard of Level Z clearance. Her own clearance was A-14. Well, whatever a Level Z file was, she wasn't going to be seen putting bad passwords into it. But why would this file even exist? Maybe it was the code name of an operation. Or maybe Ted was actually on to something.

  Laura cleared her browser's history, gathered up her stuff, and swiped out. She'd made precious little progress on Whitey's withdrawals today. She hoped McManus wouldn't notice that either. Would anyone notice? The word around the office was that everybody knew this project was bullshit, that D.C. had just shoveled this bunch of shit their way to punish the Boston office for embarrassing the bureau nationally by having at least two agents in bed with Whitey.

  Laura thought about the best way to help Ted keep an eye on the mall. If he was lurking around all the time, he'd eventually attract the attention of mall security, which was a bad thing for a fugitive from justice to do. She left the building and called the management office of the Providence Towne Centre.

  The mall had two pushcart retail kiosks available. One thousand dollars would reserve one for the Harker corporation for a month. Laura read her Amex number out to the guy and hung up. A thousand bucks was a lot to invest in a surveillance operation, but she supposed it was cheap as far as saving the world went.

  After work, Laura called Ted and told him that she'd put a deposit down on a month's rental of a pushcart at the Providence Towne Centre so that Ted would have an excuse to be in the mall looking bored all the time. She promised to find something unappealing for him to pretend to sell and have it overnighted to the apartment.

  "So I looked up places of power," she said.

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah. So it turns out you were right. They're places where cosmic energy currents run, or barriers between dimensions are semi-permeable, or so the people peddling crystal healing claim."

  "I knew it! So they're going to summon forth the Old Ones right there in the mall!"

  "Well, it certainly looks like they might at least try. So, uh, what happens if they succeed? Is there any more detail than what I read in 'The Call of Cthulhu?'"

  "You read Lovecraft? That's really sweet!"

  "It was for the investigation. Anyway, does your white supremacist pal have any more stories about what happens if they come back?"

  "He wasn't a . . . well, I guess maybe . . . well, he wasn't active in any organizations. That I know of. But anyway, if they come back? Bad, bad shit. They are namelessly incomprehensibly evil, and I guess they cause untold horror, death, and misery."

  "Got it. It's kinda convenient that so much of this stuff is unknowably indescribable, isn't it? I mean, it really saves him from having to imagine something and then describe it. So basically we have no idea what to look for."

  "Well, I think we'll know if it happens. And it'll be really really bad."

  "Okay. I can't . . . I mean, I really can't believe I'm saying this, but I think you have to call this in to the Bureau. If it's real, it's more than the two of us can handle, and it might be good to get some of the Bureau's resources behind it. You have to find a payphone, look carefully to make sure there aren't security cameras or an ATM with a camera or anything nearby, and call them up. Tell them about the temple, and tell them you know that the mall is the target. But don't mention anything about Cthulhu. Just tell them you think there's a terrorist cell meeting in the temple and that they are going to hit the mall. That'll at least get them to check out the temple."

  "Okay. I'll do it."

  "Great."

  "Can I ask you something, though?"

  "Okay."

  "Are you just humoring me? Or are you just really bored at work? Or do you actually believe me? I mean, I don't know what pushcart rental costs, but it couldn't be cheap . . . "

  "A thousand bucks a month. They'd better make a move within the next thirty days, because I won't be able to afford to save the world for two months in a row. Anyway . . . there's something else."

  "Yeah? What?"

  "Well, I poked around in the computer system today. There was nothing for most of the bizarre words you've been throwing my way, but there was a file for Necronomicon."

  "What did it say?"

  "I couldn't get into it. It's a Level Z clearance. I don't know if anybody in my office could even get into it. I've never even heard of a Level Z clearance. I thought it stopped at E-1, and everybody with an E-1 clearance is in DC."

  "But . . . what's that mean?"

  "I really have no idea, but I suspect it means there's something big going on, or somebody really important knows about it. Maybe I'm wrong, and it's just a code word for a sting operation on mail-order brides for comic store owners or something. In which case I'm probably telling you to waste the FBI's time, but if this is something real, I just feel like it's actually more cautious to do something at this point than it is to do nothing."

  Ted was silent for a moment. "It means a lot to me, you know. You believing me. Even in a kind of half-assed way."

  "Well, you were right before, and it was pretty important. So maybe you're like the proverbial stopped clock." She smiled, and she hoped Ted could hear it through the phone.

  Ted laughed. "Okay, so since I'm on a roll, let me tell you about the girl I met today. Ted prattled on about some overly-pierced pushcart vendor he had a crush on, and Laura signed off. She had a hard time sleeping. She wondered if Ted should get a gun.

  The following morning, after the usual card swiping routine, Laura sat down at her desk, clicked on her email, and groaned when she saw McManus' name in her inbox.

  "
Harker: my office as soon as you read this," the email said, and Laura felt that sour-stomached, trip to the principal's office dread (she had, despite the type-A nature of her last ten years, actually been sent to the principal's office twice in her life: once in second grade for kicking Steve Raymond in the groin in a heated kickball dispute, and once in seventh grade because Christian Zur had copied off of her math test.). Shit. He had checked up on her, the one day she was doing something she wasn't supposed to. How was she going to answer the questions about searching for Cthulhu? And how many extra hours of ATM tape would she have to go through to atone for not doing enough yesterday? Her mind raced, trying to think of a credible lie. She came up with something about how a friend gave her this story about a cult to read, and she was just curious, wanted to see if it had any basis in reality. Thin, but it was all she had.

  She looked at the email again, and the dread quickly gave way to hatred for McManus, which was more fun and more manageable.

  "Would it kill you to put a verb in that sentence? Christ," she muttered, deciding to play this in the "I'm really busy right now why are you annoying me" way versus the "Oops, you caught me," way, and hoping that it would make a difference.

  She did not hover in McManus' doorway but walked purposefully toward his desk. He sat there, doughy red face even redder than usual, gut straining at the buttons of his shirt. "You need to see me?" Laura said.

  McManus looked up. He appeared to be clenching his teeth.

  "Harker." McManus paused, and Laura could see, even through layers of jowl, his jaw muscles on the side of his head pulse in and out several times before he spoke again. " . . . I don't have any idea how you managed to work this, especially without going through me, but I got word from DC today that your transfer has been approved."

  Laura searched her mind. She hadn't put in for a transfer, and if she had, it would have had to go through McManus. What the hell was going on?