“May I touch it?”
“Go ahead,” said Hubbard. “We carried out trace tests when the thing was first handed in and found nothing you wouldn’t expect from a chunk of stone pulled up from the bed of the Atlantic.”
Carter picked it up. It felt heavy, and nothing more. He’d almost expected to be momentarily tormented with one of his strange visions, but there was nothing except the experience of holding a cube of stone. It felt very smooth, even the striations having no sharp edges.
“Nothing at all to date it by?” he asked. “No way of telling where it came from?”
Hubbard shook his head. “No. As I said, carbon-fourteen dating is useless in its case. We tried thermoluminescence and briefly investigated the possibility of oxygen isotope chronostratigraphy being of any utility, more in hope than expectation. Both just weren’t suitable. The thing lying in water for heaven only knows how long removed a lot of options. We did use electron microscopy to study the striations. We were looking for tool marks.
“Nothing, which is suspicious in itself. It implies the striations were thermally cut. We consulted some friendly geologists to see if there was any possibility the thing was entirely natural and not a wrought artifact at all. They assured us that there was no record of porphyry forming anything like this. So, either the striations were smoothed by, well, I can’t imagine … acid, perhaps? Or they were incised with something like a plasma cutter. Neither possibility speaks of great antiquity.”
“Atlantis?” said Carter. He was sure to smile when he said it.
Hubbard didn’t smile back. “If I had a dime for every person who’d … What’s the matter, Mr. Carter?”
Carter’s smile had vanished abruptly as he idly turned the cube in his hands, and happened to look down at it. The face upon which it had been resting when he first saw it was now uppermost. It, too, displayed the dense pattern of apparently semirandom striations cut into the otherwise smooth stone. Running across the striations was a ridge, as high as the striations were deep. Where it crossed them, the striations bent to join it, or perhaps branched from it to head off for themselves. He turned the cube until the beginning of the ridge was in the upper right corner. From there it ran in a straight line of slightly varying thickness down to about a third of the way along from the bottom-right corner on the lower edge as he looked at it.
In the eye of Carter’s mind, the striations looked a lot like threads.
His voice was a whisper. He spoke slowly. “When exactly was this thing handed in?” he asked. He put the cube down on its cloth.
Hubbard looked curiously at him. “It would be four … no, just five months ago now. Why do you ask?”
That was long after Suydam died. It was impossible. Carter wanted to think it was a coincidence, but that was impossible, too. The ridge, the striations, the bunching of the lines. He would never forget that pattern.
“I’ve seen something like this before,” he said. It was a partial lie. He had seen something
exactly
like it before.
“Really?” Hubbard looked at the cube again, his curiosity reignited. “In a museum? A book? Where?”
“At a crime scene,” said Carter. “I’d put it back in that bottom drawer again if I were you, Professor, and forget about it. Better still, drop it back in the Atlantic. Atlantis can choke on it.”
* * *
The position of Owen Worley’s house meant that he and his family saw much of the comings and goings of Waite Road. Generally it was uninspirational viewing; the residents of the street all tended to drive cheap pickups, and once you’d seen one, there was little to differentiate them from one another. What passed as excitement was what happened every few weeks; somebody would turn down there on the assumption that it would be a shortcut to one of the roads to the west. Then they would find that the road led onto an isolated spit of land, and they’d have to turn and come out, feeling shameful for trying to rat run through and being caught out. Owen never failed to smile and wave at the impatient assholes if he was outside when they drove by.
Yeah, there’d been that guy the other day who’d stopped and actually talked to Worley. He’d been okay, hadn’t taken offense. Most just drove by with their tails between their legs. Once or twice they’d stopped and gotten in his grill, which kind of proved his point. Only an asshole wouldn’t be able to take such a mild piece of hazing as that.
Recently, he’d noticed an outsider visiting pretty frequently. He drove a red Mazda, and looked a mite like that guy who used to be on MTV a lot, singing a song about running along a road that didn’t go anywhere. He wasn’t a resident, and—apart from service vehicles like the mail—about the only regular visitor. Maybe he was the boyfriend of one of the Waite girls. That kind of made Worley envious.
The Waite men he’d seen were a real bunch of sad sacks. They looked stupid, with heavy stupid faces and dim stupid eyes. The women, however, were something else again. He’d started telling the guy who stopped the other day, but he’d given Worley a look that made Worley shut up. Well, more fool you, buddy.
The Waite women weren’t beautiful in that brilliant-toothed, immaculate-hair, movie-and-TV way. They weren’t plain, either, but Worley found it hard to apply words like “pretty” to them. They were something else. “Striking,” maybe. “Attractive,” definitely.
They didn’t dress up, they didn’t wear much makeup, if any, but Worley would have nailed any one of them if he thought he could get away with it. The oldest looked like she was in her forties, but he’d thought that when he and his wife had moved in opposite Waite’s Bill fifteen years before, so he guessed he just wasn’t very good at gauging how old people were. The youngest he’d seen was maybe sixteen. Maybe. Normally he wasn’t much into jailbait, but holy fuck.
A couple of weeks before he’d been out front mowing the lawn on a Sunday morning. One of the interchangeable pickups had swung out of the bill’s approach and headed up the slight rise leading west into town. It had stopped more or less in front of him while the driver, a typical Waite man with dead eyes, got out to make sure the load of boxes and junk in the back was properly secured. While he fussed with ropes, his passenger—one of the girls—slouched with her arm out of the window.
Worley would swear he wasn’t staring. He’d just stopped to wipe his brow. That was all. Just stopped for a minute, and happened to be facing that way. He wasn’t staring.
The Waite girl looked at him suddenly and it was just as he happened to be looking at her, at her naked arm, at her hair, her profile. It just happened that way. He wasn’t staring.
She looked him dead in the eye, and she smiled. No. She
grinned
. It wasn’t a happy, joy-of-life grin, but the grin of somebody who’s just won. A grin of victory. It looked good on her.
He’d blushed. Big guy like him, and he’d blushed. It was just because of the mowing, though. It had made him hot. He’d turned away as he became aware of a forming semiboner, and walked into the house to get himself a drink.
He had heard her laughing as the door closed behind him.
He’d hated it, feeling horny because of her. Jesus, was she even legal? It made him feel like a pervert. Even more so when he beat off thinking of her. Even more so when he imagined her under him as he fucked his wife. Waite’s Bill, just down the little isthmus road. Waite Road, just there at the end. Its proximity itched. He scratched hard.
But the guy in the red Mazda, no, he couldn’t be the boyfriend of any of them. Worley had seen him drive in alone and, after a few hours, or even overnight, he’d drive out again, still alone. He entertained the idea that maybe one or another of the women was a whore, but that didn’t make sense. Why would they have only one client? Still, the thought of going over there with a fistful of bills and buying a few hours with a Waite woman occupied him for a while.
Worley was alone today. His wife and daughter were away for the week seeing family in Maryland, so he had the run of the house to himself. He’d taken a few days off to get some work done on the place without falling over his family, and had rapidly sunk into a routine of treating every day like a Sunday. So, there he was on the porch to pick up the mail in underwear and a robe when the red Mazda drove out of Waite’s Bill. He saw it slow at the corner and drive past his house still in first.
For the first time ever, the driver wasn’t alone. There was another guy in there. He looked disheveled and kind of shocked to Worley’s eye, so out of the norm that it took Worley a second to realize he was looking at Kenneth Rothwell.
His jaw dropped. That was just weird. What had a guy as rich as God been doing on Waite Road?
Rothwell didn’t look up—he just carried on looking shell-shocked. The driver, though, Worley had a momentary glimpse of the driver looking across and seeing him there on his porch. Then the Mazda was gone, off up the rise and out of sight. Worley went back inside, shaking his head.
It nagged at him for the rest of the morning, distracting him from his chores and his work. He drove his car onto the drive to wash it, and then decided he’d rather have lunch first even though it was early.
He came out to find one of the Waite women half sitting on his car’s hood. No, not one of the women. It was the girl. The one who’d laughed at him. She wore jeans and scuffed blue shoes and a T-shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra, Worley saw that straightaway. She was dark haired and pale, and her pupils were as black as obsidian. She smiled, and it was a close cousin to that grin that had confused him so much. She slid off the car and walked to him, and he could only stand there foolishly as she did so, his heart speeding, his blood beginning to burn him.
He felt now, though he didn’t truly apprehend it, what it was that was so attractive about the Waite women, so irresistible to him, at least. They were feral creatures, with the lamina of civilization so thin upon them that they tore it with ease. There was something of an ancient incomprehensible wisdom about them, or knowledge at least, that reeked of the land before the Europeans came, or even before the first Americans came across the land bridge from Asia. A power of ages combined with a vulpine vivacity. The Waite family were animals, just like us all, but unlike the rest of us, the Waite women knew it.
She stood close by him, and touched him on the forearm, her light fingers stroking his skin, now dense with gooseflesh, as she spoke quietly to him, and he heard no words. Then she led him indoors and he followed dumbly.
They didn’t spend the afternoon together, no more than a vivisectionist spends an afternoon with a subject upon the operating table. The Waite girl operated upon Worley methodically and without mercy, taking him places darker than the perverse commonalities of a century that thinks it has seen it all. It was pleasure of a virulent kind, with each orgasm a precipice to which she dragged him more reluctantly, again and again until he was broken, and then went quietly afterward.
She left him at dusk without even telling him her name. She left him dead-eyed and alone with the new vistas she had placed in his mind. He had little coherent memory of seeing a red Mazda leave Waite Road. The day would be nothing but a blur by tomorrow. Soon he wouldn’t even be sure if he’d just gotten very drunk and daydreamed the whole thing. The one thing that would stay with him would be that he had no interest in Waite’s Bill. Why would he care who came and went? It didn’t matter. So little that he’d once been concerned with actually mattered. He would just carry on being Owen Worley, reliable worker, loving husband and father. It had all been revealed as an act to him, and he was good at it, so he would just carry on.
Reliable.
Loving.
He could still hear her laughter.
“I need some money,” Carter told Lovecraft. “I still don’t have any control over the accounts yet, and I need some ready cash for the investigation.”
Lovecraft knew Carter was aware of what she thought of the investigation and didn’t bother reiterating it. Instead she said, “How much?”
Carter slid a printout across the counter.
She read it, then she frowned and read it again. Then she picked it up, so she could look at it more closely and express her incredulity in its fullest form.
“You have got to be kidding. What is this thing?”
“Colt had one made. It’s a copy of an artifact that has the college archaeological faculty stumped, and Colt has an exact copy. Whatever he’s doing, that cube’s got something to do with it. I need one to study.”
“You don’t think you’re getting a little … paranoid about all this stuff, Dan?” she asked with evident reluctance.
Carter didn’t have the time or the patience for that right then. “He tried to kill me. I still don’t know how he failed.”
“What now? He did what?”
Carter was going to lie about how he’d gotten into Colt’s house and then decided,
Fuck it
.
“I broke into his house to search. Found some odd shit, including the twin of this invoice, but nothing out-and-out incriminating. On my way out, I saw Colt from the window. Emily, he
knew
I was there. I think he’d been planning it. He mimed drowning at me, and then drove off.”
“That’s not trying to kill…”
“I couldn’t get out. The place was tight as a drum. No, tighter. Way tighter. The doors were sealed, the windows wouldn’t open. Then the place started to flood.”
“He flooded his own house?”
“Yeah. No. He flooded it, but I’m not sure it was water. Or, at least, not water from around here.” Lovecraft was already looking at him like he was a lunatic.
What the hell
, he thought.
In for a penny
. “And by ‘around here,’ I don’t mean this state. I mean this universe. I know, I
know
how this sounds, but I am not a fanciful man. I work on the basis of human behavior and solid forensic evidence. I count being able to swim through somebody’s house without the use of water as pretty compelling evidence that somebody is fucking around with the laws of physics.”