The Lovecraft Code Page 2

  But his people had given their lives to save their own Holy Books, hadn't they? They had been persecuted and murdered in large numbers because of their religion. Because of their texts.

  “One ...”

  Jamila kept her eyes shut. She did not want to see the pathetic figure of her father's friend in the state he was in. She was horrified and humiliated, but even more she knew that her secret had to be kept at all costs. Her family had been keeping secrets for generations. A secret was worth more than gold. But she could not control her body and the rush of urine from between her legs made her feel disgusting and unworthy of so sacred a task as this.

  “Two ...”

  Fahim struggled with his decision. His people would never forgive him for betraying them to the Iraqi police. He knew the value of the book, but also knew that it must be kept out of the hands of those who would use it for the destruction of humanity. If he gave it up now, all would be lost and his name would be cursed for generations ... if indeed there were generations left to curse him.

  But then he felt a strange warmth take hold of his heart. Something like fingers—gentle fingers—had touched him inside with a sensation so profound he thought it was a physical touch. But nothing had moved in the airless cell. Maybe it was a heart attack. Maybe he was already dying.

  He looked at the young girl, whose eyes were now open and staring directly at him, and into his own.

  Jamila had made the decision for him: for Fahim and for the evil man with the gun between her legs, too.

  “Three ...”

  The explosion rocked the tiny cell, dislodging the iron pipe so that Fahim fell free, his hands still tied but no longer attached to the cell. There was a fog of dust and plaster everywhere. Piles of debris. He felt a small hand take his own in a darkness made absolute with the termination of all electric power in the city. He dragged himself upright, as best he could, his legs shaking and threatening to fail him at every step. He stumbled when his feet struck the body of the security officer, who did not move. Incredibly, Fahim thought, I have outlived the man who was going to kill me. If even for a moment, I have survived. His brain tried to make sense of what had happened. He knew it was an artillery shell, or a rocket fired from one of the Crusader's gunships, demolishing this house or the house next door. But how to explain that sudden determination in Jamila's eyes, or the warm hand that held his heart in its palm only moments before the blast?

  Dazed, he let Jamila lead him out of the cell, out of the basement, and eventually all the way out of Mosul.

  Red Hook

  April 15, 2014

  At the same moment, but exactly nine years later and thousands of miles away, Gregory Angell—scion of a long line of Rhode Island Angells and great-grand-nephew of the celebrated but long-deceased George Angell, professor of Semitic languages at Brown University—woke from a restless sleep in his basement apartment in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, drenched in perspiration. He turned on the lamp next to his bed and stared up at the water-stained ceiling for a long, anxious moment. Was it the scurrying of rats in the walls that woke him? Or was it the scuttering of old nightmares through festering holes in his porous, paper-thin dreams? A young girl. A starving man. A darkness that seemed to breathe poison. Iraq.

  His left hand rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. His right hand held the gun he kept under his pillow.

  Through the flimsy plasterboard walls he could hear the radio in the apartment next door. It was the morning azan, the Muslim call to prayer. His neighbors were Syrians, from Damascus. They were also the supers of the building he lived in. It was the azan that woke him up. The warbling, floating cry of the muezzin roused feelings and memories in him that he preferred to have left buried, back in the frontier between Iraq and Turkey. Kurdish territory. No man's land.

  It was the land that gave the world the three great religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

  And it was the land where he lost his faith in God entirely.

  Instinctively, he checked the automatic's ten round magazine. With one in the chamber he had eleven shots ready for whatever would come through the door or lurked in the shadowy corners of his book-congested apartment. Nothing ever did, of course. Not in the more than seven years since the massacre at Mosul where God died, buried there with the women and children who were dragged off the bus in front of his eyes and machine-gunned in the street. Yezidis. Kafirs.

  Victims.

  It was about four a.m. The worst time of the day for him, that sliver of dubious existence between night and day, between darkness and light. It was the hour when shadows took on substance and where function, impossibly, followed form. For a man who no longer believed in God, he was more than afraid of ghosts.

  He felt his pulse, and slowed his breathing, counting off the seconds. Ten seconds in, hold for ten, exhale for ten, hold for ten. Ten seconds, ten rounds. A ten count. It was how he lowered his blood pressure. That, and his Glock 9mm, was how he got through the night.

  Sweating. Trembling like a man suffering from the DTs. Glock tracing an arc through his small apartment, looking for a target of opportunity. A flesh-and-blood target to stand in for the invisible, creeping thing he could not name.

  He cradled his head in his hands. There was a longing in the music now coming from the room upstairs, a longing that he felt as acutely as if he had lost the same love at the same time as whoever had written that song, or as whoever was listening to it now in order to ease the pain of distance or loss. Their distance was his distance, their loss was his loss. The music—the plaintive sounds of Syrian-accented Arabic lyrics against the yearning strain of the oud—could have been wrung from his own heart.

  It was a love song, and it was being sung by a man to a woman who had left him for another country forever. A lost love. To Angell, it was still a love song: not to any human woman but to a presence once as strong as the most cherished sweetheart, the most adored spouse.

  It was a love song to a dead God.

  Angell knew he was losing his mind. He heard things that weren't there. He saw things out of the corner of his eye that could not possibly exist. Shadows. With guns. And when he closed his eyes against the pressure of too much sight, the image—that image—of an afternoon in Mosul was conjured up before him like a monster from the pages of some suppressed grimoire. Instinctively, Angell knew that conjuring a demon from Hell had been forbidden by the Church not least because, once raised, that demon could attack God, kill him, and change the world forever. After all, that is what happened to him.

  Terms like unspeakable horror and loathsome putrescence were used by pulp fiction writers as shorthand for things they had never really seen. But Angell had seen them. Angell knew what unspeakable horror was: he saw it committed on a side street in the Hell that was Mosul. He knew what loathsome putrescence was, because Iraq was a museum of rotting corpses, clouds of flies, and the stench of death that never left you. Not even on the flight home to the land of deodorant and mouthwash, washing machines and frozen margaritas, cable TV and hot showers.

  Most of all, he knew with a deadly certainty that God was dead. He knew that humanity was alone in the vastness of space, on the brink of extinction on a tiny planet in the middle of a nowhere galaxy, where science and technology were exactly as Carl Sagan had characterized them: as candles in the dark. Cold comfort when the apocalypse was upon them. More like “whistling in the dark.”

  Better to let your eyes get accustomed to the eternal night.

  Angell kept his madness from seeping into his daily life, into his classes at the university, by staying alone as much as he could so that others would not notice his sudden loss of attention, his gaze drifting to a point somewhere in the distance, his inappropriate comments, his “lack of affect.” To many he was just the stereotypical absent-minded professor, an eccentric who had nonetheless served his country as an advisor in Afghanistan and Iraq, a man fluent in strange tongues and living in a world of ancient faiths. He was allowed those moments w
hen he seemed to disappear into another world. He was indulged in his little insanities.

  They didn't know about the Glock.

  It was the nine millimeter that kept him sane, for it was his way out. His ticket home. He relaxed into the peace that the presence of that weapon gave him, for it was right there, like a promise he knew would be kept. Any time it got to be too much, the solution—the escape route, the exit strategy—was there. Not like God, who was not there.

  It was fully-loaded, but that was just for show. He knew he would need only one bullet.

  Pretty strange lifestyle for a professor of religious studies at Columbia University.

  Book One

  Chatter

  The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

  —H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”

  Chapter One

  Remote Viewing

  Damascus

  738 C.E./120 A.H.

  Before the Grand Mosque. Steps away from a shrine containing the head of John the Baptist. In the blinding sunlight of noon, reflecting off the stones of the mosque and the stones of the plaza before it. A man. A madman. In rags, holding a scroll of paper. He is chanting something incomprehensible. It may be poetry. It may be a prayer. It may be divine. It may be blasphemy. A crowd gathers.

  It is Ramadan, the month of fasting and of forgiveness. No one has sipped a drop of water since before the sunrise azan. Men and beasts are crazed with piety and thirst.

  There is dry, nervous laughter. The Umayyid Caliphate is in its last days. Within twenty years, it will be gone. Like the desert sands in a windstorm. The Law of the Prophet—Peace be upon him—has rooted out the demonolatry of the pagan tribes and replaced it with the scented pages of the Holy Book, the Qur'an. But some members of the Quraish—the Prophet's tribe—still hold to the old ways, in secret, worshipping the dead gods and pouring libations onto the broken stones of a dead faith. They have rescued the idols from the Ka'aba—and from the Prophet's wrath—and built hideous altars in the mountain caves north of the city. Altars bathed in the blood of sacrifice.

  The madman is not of the Quraish. He is a Sabaean, of Yemen, and they say he is a cousin of the false prophet ‘Abd Allah bin Saba, the Shi'a heretic who proclaimed the divinity of Ali, and who will soon be executed after revolting against the Caliphate from his sanctuary in the sacred city of Kufa. Others, that he is an adherent of the Mazdaks, an ancient cult that existed before Islam, obsessed with the manipulation of numbers and the making of magic squares and jadwal to which they put obscene and blasphemous use. Or a worshipper of the Old Gods, A'ra and Hubal, Azizos and the daughter of Allah, Manat. Or perhaps a devotee of Qos, he of the shrine of black basalt whose cult was known—and suppressed—at Wadi Hesa. Indeed, the madman's descendant—in another thirteen hundred years—will unleash a tidal wave of apostasy and violence on the earth.

  Today, however, the madman is alone and wailing before the Grand Mosque.

  His words are gibberish, a kind of poetry, rhythmic syllables of an ancient tongue which was old when Moses—Peace be upon him—was a priest of Aton in Egypt, learning Egyptian magic. In the shrine of the Grand Mosque, in the shadows of the crypt, the head of the Baptist moves.

  The crowd grows larger. The Caliph's men are moving slowly towards the madman, uneasy about arresting someone who may have been touched by God. Their scimitars flash in the noonday sun.

  A single, strangled word escapes the lips of the muttering madman and sails like a winged curse above the heads of the faithful. Three syllables that strike fear into the souls of the ulama. They retreat a step before him, and the Caliph's men do likewise.

  In that moment, in the sight of God and man and the Grand Mosque, the madman's left arm is ripped from his shoulder in a shower of blood and gore and terrible, terrible pain.

  The hand that ripped it cannot be seen. Not in sunlight, nor in shadow. The blood drips on the stones as the crowd stares, uncomprehending, before it retreats in horror.

  The screams can be heard in the deepest recesses of the mosque. The head of the Baptist can be seen to shiver in its reliquary, its jaws struggling against age and death and memory to open, to give voice to the eternal, to the black well of terror at the heart of the human condition, to the Dreadful that has already Happened.

  The madman's severed arm is nowhere to be seen. It has vanished, as if into the air itself. Something can be sensed, something ... Another violent twist of invisible force and his right leg disappears and his body falls to the dust and gore beneath him. His screams have become so loud and penetrating that they are no longer heard with human ears. He is being devoured, slowly, before the eyes of the faithful in the square, before the Grand Mosque. The scroll of papers in his left hand has fallen and its leaves are being blown by an invisible wind to the four corners of the Caliphate. His mouth is stretched wide in a rictus of pain and terror and the faithful begin to scatter, to flee from the jinn who have possessed this madman and caused him to be torn asunder before their unbelieving eyes. His left leg disappears into the craw of some unseen Beast and his torso flops helplessly on the ground as, finally, his remaining arm is chewed to the shoulder and all that is left of the seer, the prophet, the madman is his head and what remains of his shredded abdomen. As his head is swallowed up into the maw of the voracious monster his last word finds its expression in the lips and jaw of the Baptist—Peace be upon him—as the head rattles in its reliquary of gold and silver, screeching in a voice rusted shut with disuse over seven hundred years of death and hollow prayer:

  Qhadhulu ...

  The “Manson Family”

  Fort Meade

  April, 2014 C.E./1434 A.H.

  The viewer collapses into his chair. He rips the electrodes from his head and chest and screams for water. He is shaking, perspiration dripping from every pore and soaking into the chair and the floor of the air-conditioned room in the basement of the secure location at Fort Meade.

  His handler rushes into the room and shouts for the medic who is always on call.

  It is the year 2014 and the location is the headquarters of the Remote Viewing team that had been tasked with locating the author of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: Osama bin Laden. They are what is left of the CIA's Bin Laden Issue Station which was officially disbanded in 2006, but whose most fanatic members—those calling themselves the “Manson Family” because of their obsessive and alarmist mentality—have regrouped under other operational names, other black budgets, in order to continue a new search for a new threat: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq and now head of the notorious Islamic Caliphate, or ISIL. This search has made use of every possible means, every conceivable tool, in order to accomplish its mission. No matter how strange. No matter how unorthodox. And that includes the seeming witchcraft of remote viewing.

  The rooms where the viewing was taking place were thirty meters below ground. The walls were a meter thick, reinforced concrete. The lighting consisted of racks of long fluorescent bulbs behind wire mesh screens in the ceiling. Doors were made of titanium steel. Soundproofing was everywhere. Desks were bolted to floors. Its inhabitants referred to it as ‘Spahn Ranch’—the infamous headquarters of the real Manson Family—and it tried very hard to live up to its reputation. Guards were posted at every doorway. They were armed. Heavily armed.

  Back in the 1970s, this operation was captioned variously as GRILLFLAME, or the fantastically-suggestive STARGATE, or any one of half-a-dozen other cryptonyms. Military personnel with high level security clearances were trained in the art of spying on the enemy using only their minds.

  It was not a new art, and hardly a science. It had been used by the Nazis during W
orld War Two to locate enemy submarines, and the Soviets were rumored to be using the same methods during the Cold War. In the 1980s, the operation had been terminated even though the remote viewers had claimed some impressive wins. No matter; to a newly-Christianized American government the whole thing smacked too much of demonolatry, and with the demise of the Soviet Union and the removal of the Berlin Wall, STARGATE went the way of all other forms of HUMINT—Human Intelligence—until the events of September 11, 2001.

  With the pressing need to find Osama bin Laden and others members of Al Qaeda the remote viewing program came back on-line. Due to all the cutbacks at CIA and the firing of literally hundreds of field agents that began in the immediate post-Watergate era, agents on the ground in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Iran were few and far between. Domestically, the FBI had virtually no agents who could speak and read Arabic fluently, far less anyone with knowledge of Farsi, Urdu, or any of the other languages of the Middle East. Until Homeland Security could come up with the expertise it needed—and could cultivate the kind of in-country espionage networks that had existed throughout the region during the Cold War—other means had to be found for spying on the enemy.

  Basically, remote viewing is the simplest form of intelligence-gathering one can imagine. One needs a human brain capable of thought, and at most a sheet of paper and a pencil. That's all. If the Pentagon needs to know what kind of resistance to expect at a given location anywhere in the world, the remote viewer is tasked with nothing more than coordinates: longitude and latitude. The viewer then relaxes and enters a kind of mild trance state during which time he or she “sees” the location mentally. The paper and pencil are there to facilitate imaging: the viewer may start to draw general outlines of what is seen, or specific characteristics that seem important or especially clear. At the end of the session the drawings are analyzed for their intelligence value. If there are no drawings, the viewer may be speaking aloud into a recorder, describing what is seen and heard in the trance state.