Lovecraft sucked in air as if she’d just been brought back from the dead. In a sense, she had; the hopelessness fell away as she found purpose. She was crying, and she was more furiously angry than she had ever been in her life before. Nothing had ever mattered this much before.
“Not done yet! We’re not done yet!” she shouted at the sea. She ran toward the tunnel mouth, clutching the Mossberg fiercely. Its weight felt good.
“Fucker!” she shouted over her shoulder at the uncaring waves, and ran into the tunnels.
* * *
Logic against instinct, nuance versus principle, Carter and Colt fought an indefinable battle in a non-Euclidean battlefield. Neither knew how long they had been fighting, time becoming just another thing without limits or metric. There shouldn’t have been time enough to draw breath, yet still worlds could have turned to dust, as they presented move, countermove, feint, and block. Colt had discovered a new mathematical argument and bore down upon Carter with it, a juggernaut of brutalist rationalism in a melt of discarded rationales. Carter fended it off and evaded, holding The Twist with difficulty, swaying and sweating and swearing while probability grew heavier and heavier upon him. Then he remembered himself, sidestepped, and the weight became light and blinded Colt long enough for Carter to throw his shoulder back against the door and push. But it wasn’t a door, and it wasn’t a Twist, perceptual or otherwise, though it was closer to a door than the other thing and Carter wondered how they could ever have thought—
Then Lovecraft was there, she had a shotgun, and she was telling Colt that if he didn’t stop doing what he was doing
right this fucking second
she would
blow his fucking head off
.
He ignored her. She fired.
They all saw the densely packed cloud of pellets and fragments of cartridge padding travel as slowly as pebbles in honey toward Colt, saw them glow red, white, cherry pink, and turn to vapor that hung in heavy tendrils, falling slowly in fanciful metallic curlicues as they cooled.
Lovecraft mouthed something angrily, and swung the gun toward Carter. She communicated that she liked him a lot and she wasn’t enjoying pointing a gun at him, but if he didn’t stop doing what he was doing
right this fucking second
she would
blow his fucking head off
.
He didn’t ignore her. He relaxed his mind and stepped away from The Twist.
Colt was taken entirely off guard and off balance. He was still pushing, and pushing hard; he’d been expecting Carter to carry on their battle just as he had when threatened by Lovecraft. The Twist unfurled. Too much. Far too much. The potentials held back within it slipped out like dust, first in a wisp and then in a drift and then in a blizzard. He saw Emily Lovecraft grab Daniel Carter’s arm, shout something at him, start pulling him away.
Carter looked Colt in the eye, and Colt saw pity there. Then they were gone, and Colt was all alone with the Perceptual Twist.
He looked back to it and started to bring it back under control. He’d done it before; this was more of a leak of potentiality than he’d dealt with before, but the principles remained the same. He anticipated no problem …
Except there was a problem. His perception was twisted and the Perceptual Twist no longer seemed to be a twist in perception. He scrabbled backward mentally from it. He had to stay in control. He had to see it as he had always seen it if he meant to control it, but it was too late. Like a nagging thought or an earworm, the realization that The Twist was not and had never been simply that had taken hold of him. He had failed to understand it all.
He thought momentarily of the old story of a group of blind men trying to identify an elephant by touch alone. One embraces a leg and declares it to be a tree, another finds the tail and says it’s a snake, and so on.
Just like one of those blind men, Colt had profoundly and utterly misunderstood what he was perceiving.
It wasn’t a twist untwisting. It was a fold unfolding. There was no perceptual liberty to be had at all; there was only one truth, only one way to see, and as he saw what was obscured, what had long lain hidden and partitioned away from the world of men and women, of ephemeral lives and TV dinners, of love and money and lazy days and religious genocides, there lay a reality that brooked no glib reinterpretations or alternate points of view.
William Colt looked on the pure stuff of the universe, the pervading omega, the incandescent alpha, the binary of that which is and that which is not, and his synapses turned to mercury, the axons of his brain to glass, his eyes froze in his skull, and his heart liquefied in his chest. The everything and the nothing poured through him and his scream lasted forever.
* * *
It was confusion and certainty all boiled together. As in a dream where you have something
so
important to do, but the situation and the people keep changing and sometimes the important thing to do becomes a different important thing to do, they ran through the tunnels. Sometimes it was to escape whatever was coming, sometimes to reach a place for reasons other than safety.
Lovecraft spluttered words, but Carter already knew what she was trying to tell him. The Waites had used Colt. They had tried to use Carter. They were always intended to war there, to fight over The Twist that was a Fold. They were always intended to damage it in the fight, to release what lay beyond. That which Carter’s and Lovecraft’s ancestors had placed under a fold in reality, as one hides a smudge on a bedsheet, or a note upon a piece of paper.
Both sides had lost. Both sides had won. Coup could only be counted in individual cases, by individual standards. Right now not being in the immediate area, as the Fold unleashed an angry reality that had suppurated like a boil for the past several decades, would and could be all they hoped for.
They found themselves on the riverside. Lovecraft’s car was nearby. An old blue and white sneaker lay on the grass. They did not remember leaving the tunnels. Above them the stars whirled as in a planetarium and roared as they sped across the night sky. The river shuddered, and the close Atlantic raged, and even the earth rippled and swept beneath their feet. It might not do any good to run. The whole world might die that night, but they could not stand and not even try to outrun the epicenter of the world’s end, for that is human nature and human nature was not one of the things that had lain pinned beneath the Fold.
They ran. They ran to the car, and Lovecraft slung the Mossberg into the footwell, started the engine with the key the Waites had not bothered to take from her, and pulled away in a shower of earth even as Carter was dragging his door shut.
They got as far as the isthmus, where they almost crashed into Detective Harrelson coming the other way. He opened his door and half got out, yelling, “Where the fuck have you been? What happened?” Lovecraft was waving at him to reverse out of the way and he was starting to obey when—above them and unseen—the stars became right, the omega erupted, and the world was destroyed.
Death felt a lot like being in bed.
Carter finally decided that nothing could feel quite so much like being in bed without actually being the experience of being in bed. He would have to do something to ascertain the truth of that and he settled on opening his eyes, which seemed to work.
He was in bed and, as far as he could see, was not dead at all. He was in the bed in the apartment over Hill’s Books and the world had therefore not ended, unless he was wrong about eternal souls and this was some sort of version of Heaven, or Hell, or maybe Purgatory. Then he remembered that there is no such thing as an eternal soul, and he remembered why he knew that, and he sat up in bed breathing hard and with a cold sweat squeezing from his pores.
The room sat around him, continuing to look willfully mundane. Carter closed his eyes, centered himself, and looked again, but this time he
looked
. It was just the apartment. His apartment, the one he’d inherited. He could detect nothing
twisted
or
folded
about it at all. Clean, comfortable, and completely unthreatening.
He decided to take it at its unspoken word. He rose, showered, and made himself an omelet for breakfast, washing it down with orange juice and coffee. It was as he was finishing his breakfast that he noticed his shoulder holster lazily slung over the back of the chair opposite. His Glock 17 was in it.
Hadn’t the Waites taken it from him?
He wasn’t usually so cavalier with firearms as to leave them littering up the place like that, but it wasn’t unknown when he was tired and securing the weapon properly looked like taking a minute further away from sleeping that he wasn’t prepared to give. He secured it now, checking its load and discovering it was unfired. His Ruger holdout was lying in its ankle holster on the chair’s seat. This, too, had not been fired.
He locked them in the safebox he’d fixed to the floor of the closet as a temporary measure until he could make something more secure and checked his watch. It was almost half past ten on a weekday, but there was no sound from downstairs. Lovecraft was punctual, always punctual, and the store always opened at nine.
Carter was somewhere in the uncomfortable hinterlands between acceptance and denial. The world had ended, and now he’d had an omelet. It wasn’t something he’d thought he’d ever enjoy after the destruction of the world.
He went downstairs, shrugging on his jacket as he went. The bookstore looked much as it ever did, right down to the political biographies near the door. He went behind the counter and found the Mossberg there. He checked that the chamber was empty and cautiously sniffed the muzzle; no scent of gun smoke. Not that that proved anything; a good cleaning would lose the smell. He also noticed the ammo tube was unextended. Frowning, he replaced the shotgun in its hiding place.
Nothing was different. Was Colt still out there? Was The Twist or the Fold or whatever the fuck it was called still active? Did all that ever happen? Carter would have loved to shrug and say in a faraway voice, “It was all a dream,” but he knew damn well it wasn’t. He’d experienced something, although he was prepared to accept it might be some sort of breakdown. That was preferable to it being true.
He noticed a vinyl figure on the shelf behind the counter and his frown returned. He didn’t recognize it at all. He didn’t remember it at all. Didn’t there use to be a little vinyl Cthulhu there? He picked up the figure and studied it. It was of a serious-looking, heavily built fantasy knight in fanciful black armor. Carter looked at the base. Along with the manufacturer, copyright, and trademark information, he read, “
Randu the Swordmaster as created by H. P. Lovecraft. Masters of Fantasy Series No.31
.”
Carter had never heard of Randu the anything. Based on Randolph Carter, maybe?
Across from the counter he found an encyclopedia of fantasy and looked up “Randu the Swordmaster.”
Lovecraft’s major creation, Randu the Swordmaster was the protagonist of twenty-nine short stories and two novellas published from 1925 until Lovecraft’s death, the final story, “The Funeral Bride,” being published the following year. Randu predates Robert E. Howard’s “Conan the Barbarian” stories (c.f.) by some seven years, although—despite the friendship between Howard and Lovecraft—the stories seem to have influenced Howard only slightly, the character of Randu having more in common with Michael Moorcock’s “Elric of Melniboné” stories (c.f.), a tragic hero apparently inspired equally by Lord Dunsany (q.v.) and the Nordic tales of Ragnarok.
Carter felt cold again. He flicked through the book to the entry for
Lovecraft, H. P.,
and skimmed it. He didn’t find what he was looking for and forced himself to read it more slowly, taking in every word.
There was no mention of the Cthulhu stories. He checked the index. There was no mention of Cthulhu at all.
A scrabbling of metal against metal, tumblers thrown, and Lovecraft swung the store’s door open. She sagged against the frame and looked despairingly at Carter.
“We did the right thing, yeah?” she said. Her tone was pleading. “We did the right thing? We didn’t fuck up?”
He left the book on the counter and came to her. “We didn’t fuck up,” he said, trying to calm her. “Colt fucked up, we stopped it being worse. Things have changed—”
A small voice, as quiet as a fading memory, whispered to him,
Didn’t you have a Glock 19?
Lovecraft laughed at his words, a pitying, hopeless laugh. “—but nothing too big. Colt opened the Fold, but I don’t think it opened all the way.”
“You think?” She was smiling, but such a sad smile, as if she were an ace from crying. “You think that?” She held out her hands, and he took them. She drew him out into the street.
Providence had gone.
* * *
The street was entirely different in character. The buildings were old, the roofs gambrelled, the frontages colonial, the aspect brooding. The city looked far more European than it had any right to.
“What the fuck?” said Carter in an undertone.
People walked by, cars drove past, all seemingly blasé to the fact that their whole city had been replaced.
“What happened to Providence?” he asked. “Did we do this?”
Lovecraft reached in her bag and took out a newspaper. It was some local rag running on ads and press releases as the Internet sapped the life from the print business. It looked like a thousand others across the country.
But this one was called the
Arkham Advertiser
. The lead story was about a pay dispute between faculty and campus staff at Miskatonic University.
“These…” Carter’s throat was dry. He swallowed and tried again. “These are from H. P. L.’s stories, right?”
“No.” Lovecraft shook her head and was silent for a moment. Her attitude to Carter seemed to be one of grief. “Turns out, no. I think the stories were his way of remembering his old town. The way it was before he and Randolph changed out that reality and put in one where Arkham never happened and a town called
Providence
did.” She shook her head and giggled, a little desperately, a little hysterically. “All those poor scholars who were
so
sure Arkham was based on Salem. He must have changed the details to fit the market. Maybe to hide the truth.” She looked at Carter, the wan smile fading. “We
did
do the right thing, didn’t we?”