Haggopian and Other Stories (67 page)

“Mr. Slater?” Someone touched his elbow. The voice was quiet, almost shy. But it was quietly confident, too. Slater looked down a little from his seventy four inches at a slight, unassuming, bright-eyed specimen who couldn’t be more than twenty or twenty-one. He wore middle-length hair and an inquiring half-smile. “I’m Karl Ferd. Er, I suppose you are Mr. Slater?”

“Right first time,” said Slater, offering his hand. “I won’t ask how you picked me out of this lot!”

Ferd grinned, glanced all about. “Good crowd, innit?”

“Is it? Look, er, Karl: you’d better treat me as an ignoramus. I’m here on assignment, remember? I’m gathering information and atmosphere on behalf of someone else. This is all very strange to me. In fact, it’s strange period! So you’re the expert and I’m the novice. Which means that if I just seem to stand here and let you rattle on, don’t think I’ve been struck dumb or something. It’s just that I’ll be trying hard to follow what you’re saying, OK?”

“Sure,” said the other, still scanning the crowd. He was beginning to look a little disappointed.

“Something wrong?”

“Er, no. I’d hoped to see a few more foreigners, that’s all. I was hoping there’d be a lot of ’em this time—to buy up the latest
Dugong
and take it home with them, spread the word abroad. So far there are a couple of Krauts—er, Germans. And a few Frenchies.”

“Frogs?”

Ferd grinned again. “They’re all right,” he said. “Thing is, if Guttmeier had won in Milan, he might have showed up. That would have been interesting.”

Slater played dumb. “Guttmeier?”

“Hans Guttmeier, yeah. It seems he quit before play started—in Milan, I mean—and just walked out. They say he chickened out, but I can’t see it. He knew his stuff.”

“Oh,” Slater nodded. “He was some sort of champion, right?”

“World’s finest player!” said Ferd.

“So you get the French and the Germans attending these, er, conventions. Any others? What about the Swiss, or the Italians?”

Ferd shrugged. “Not a lot. Frogs and Belgiques, mainly. Oh, and some of the pro publishers. The Green Goblin people from over here, and occasionally one of the American outfits. Cindy Patterson was in earlier, from
Moribund. I mean, she
is
Moribund!” He grinned. “If you know what I mean. She said they’d have a couple of drinks and make an early night of it, be back tomorrow morning in time to see things get under way.”

Slater nodded. “I’m in a hotel just up the road. This Cindy Patterson and her American friends are staying there too. They’re probably in the bar right now. In fact there are quite a few gamers staying there. Fancy a pint?”

“Sure, why not? Nothing much is going to happen here until tomorrow.”

They went back to Slater’s hotel. In the bar were maybe two dozen people, and Ferd nudged Slater’s elbow, directing his glance to a corner table. “Cindy Patterson,” he whispered. “With Hank Merne and Darrell Le Sant. Big names!”

Slater looked. Cindy Patterson was in her early thirties, small and chubby, looking like lumpy putty and wearing glasses so thick they gave her an owlish expression. There was a plate of sandwiches on her table, and she had a tomato seed stuck in her teeth. Her companions were debating something or other while she listened, adding very little to their conversation. Hank Merne was of the same shape, size and constitution as Cindy, and Darrell le Sant was thin as a beanpole with his fair hair cropped a half-inch all over. But sinister? Forget it.

But then the door opened and in came the enigmatic pointy-beard with a bunch of friends. One of them was a Spock whose green was starting to run, and another was still wearing his “Yog loves Lavinny” T-shirt, though mercifully he’d dumped his balloons and diseased mask. The others seemed entirely normal, but very bright-eyed and excited.

“Oh-oh!” said Ferd, warningly. “The mobile mouth there is Kevin ‘Cthulhu lives’ Blacker, the gaseous guru. He’s full of it. Gives us a bad name, that one.”

Slater’s interest climbed a notch. he asked: “What’s his speciality?”

“Same as mine,” said Ferd, sourly. “The Mythos. But where I’m a fan publisher, he’s a prophet of doom! That’s his story, anyway. Hang around a bit and you’ll see what I mean.”

Blacker had spotted Ferd standing at the bar. He saw his friends into their seats at a central table, then briefly came over. He was only young, maybe twenty two, but his voice was straight from his boots. Also there was a sweet, unmistakable odour about him, so that Slater guessed he smoked the occasional funny cigarette. Blacker ordered drinks for the people at his table, turned to Ferd. He didn’t seem to notice Slater.

“Hello there, Karl,” he grunted. “Still publishing your blasphemous crap, I see.” He slapped a copy of the latest
Dugong
down on the bar, prodded it with a pointed fingernail. His voice sank even lower as he said: “Don’t you know that this stuff is an open invitation? Can’t you see that you’re inviting them in?”

“Course I can, Kev’,” Ferd sneered. “But I don’t recall inviting you. Do you mind? I’m enjoying a pint—or I was!”

Blacker scowled, shook his head in a half-angry, half-frustrated, pitying way, and returned to this group. Slater said: “If he’s so down on the Mythos, how come he associates with the Yog-loves-Lavinny, guy?”

“Trying to save them,” Ferd growled.

Slater’s interest went up another notch. “Are they in danger? Save them from what?”

“From themselves. A one-man Salvation Army. Danger? Yeah—they might drown in all that garbage he talks! See, there he goes, oiling his larynx.”

Blacker downed a pint of Guinness in one long pull, wiped his mouth and ordered another. And then he was off and running:

“They were here before us,” he said, his voice rising over all the other bar sounds, “they’re here now, and they’ll be here after they’ve cleared us off. The old cults are dead, gone, except in a handful of lonely, dark places. But the
new
cults are here in bright, shiny disguises—yes, and the new
cultists
are also disguised! The difference is this: that they don’t
know
they’re cultists! Who am I talking about?” His voice was rising as he gathered impetus. “I’m talking about you,” he prodded T-shirt in the chest. “And you,” he snarled at the Spock character. “And especially you!” He pointed across the room directly at the Americans around their corner table. “Moribund?
God
, how right you are! You and your acolytes, like…him!” And this time the accusing finger was aimed at Ferd.

Slater watched and listened, soaking it all up. He had a feeling that this was it, that he’d found what he was looking for. Blacker was plainly off his trolley, but still there was something darkly fascinating about him. He was like a young, slim Aleister Crowley—a sort of unholy roller—or would be if he wasn’t on the other side. As he talked the bar lights flickered, dimmed a little, at which his dark eyes brightened to scintillant pin-points. “Can’t you
feel them
in the very air?” he raved. “Can’t you almost smell them? Their energies are all about you, energies which you yourselves
attract
, and their emissaries watch you with false human eyes. You hear their massed voices in the convention halls, and you fail to recognise them. Your players call their names and you invoke them with your gibberish—and yet ye know not what ye do!”

While all of this was going on, several changes had occurred. For one, Cindy Patterson and her two had left their drinks and departed. Obviously they’d encountered Blacker before or knew his reputation—or they simply didn’t like the look or sound of him. Slater couldn’t blame them. But there’d also been a new arrival. In the old days, ten years and more ago—before Slater got married, and long before the experience had turned him right off women—this would have been just his style.

She wore black trousers with a white jacket, a lightly frilled shirt whose cuffs showed fluffily around her wrists, a card saying PRESS under her left-hand breast pocket, (which Slater thought a bit daring, especially in a place packed with peculiar or at least curious people) and a tiny pager in the pocket itself, with its aerial extended and sticking up level with the top of her head. Her black high-heels made her about five-ten; her black hair was very shiny and bounced on her shoulders; dark eyes in a creamy face lost the rest of her features in the shadows they seemed to cast. Slater was aware of a small nose and a red Cupid’s bow mouth, but the eyes were the main attraction.

She found a chair at Blacker’s table, didn’t wait to be invited but simply sat herself down, making quick shorthand notes in a pad while Blacker continued to spout. The fans where they made room for her were very much impressed; they seemed torn between listening to him and ogling her, and it looked like she was going to win hands down.

“Phew!”
said Karl Ferd in Slater’s ear.

“Damn right,” said Slater. But to himself:
yeah, go right ahead, young Karl. Mess with that one and see where it gets you. She’s broken more hearts than you’ve had warm pints.
But at the same time he knew that if he were ten years younger, he’d very likely be considering messing with it himself.

Blacker had meanwhile noticed her. He would have to be dead not to. Stopped in his tracks, he blinked at her and said, “Eh?”

A policeman came in out of the rain. He wore an issue cape, spiked helmet, whistle chain, the lot. A Bobby off the beat. Things grew quieter as he went to the bar and leaned on it, speaking to the bartender in lowered tones. He showed him a photograph, waited while he scanned it. Slater was all ears. “Nope,” said the barman, wiping a glass. “Eyetie, innit? Bad lot, is he?”

“Missing,” said the Bobby.

Slater had managed to get an inverted glance at the picture: Antonio Minatelli. Good grief! This was someone’s idea of how to unobtrusively check out the convention! They hadn’t even bothered to send a plainclothesman. That was how likely
they
thought it was that Minatelli was going to turn up here. As the policeman left, Blacker started up again. And having noted that the new girl—woman—at his table was a reporter, now he really got his teeth into it:

“Alhazred, crazy? It’s you people who think he wasn’t real who are crazy! Oh, that may not have been his name, but he was real, all right. A prophet, a doomsayer: ‘repent ye sinners, for the end is nigh!’ Lovecraft himself was another, only not so outspoken. He cloaked his realities in fiction. His stories were
warnings
! If you can’t see it you’re blind. Blinded by your own cleverness. But Alhazred, Lovecraft—oh, and plenty of others—yes, and me, too, we…”

The lights flickered again, went very dim, and Blacker pointed at the wavering bulbs here and there around the room. “They
know
,
do you see? They hear me speak the truth and they
fear
it! They fear discovery, for the stars are not yet right! But I
have
discovered them, and so can you, if only—”

The lights went out.

Behind the bar a shadowy figure said, “Shit!” and went scrambling for the fuse box. Midnight shapes groped and collided in the darkness. Someone said:
“Ohhh!”
And someone else—Slater figured it must be the Yog-loves-Lavinny—shrilled: “Ia, R’lyeh! Cthulhu
fhtagn
!”

Slater didn’t know why, but for some peculiar reason that last made his skin crawl. It had sounded so fluent, very weird and alien. The midnight shapes continued to slither and grope in the darkness, and Slater (again for some reason he couldn’t pin down) pictured them closing in on Blacker. “Jesus!” he whispered to himself. His imagination was in full flight. He pictured alien things with huge, shiny hooks, thrusting them through Blacker’s flesh, at the same time gagging him, dragging him choking and dripping blood through a hole in the darkness into an even darker dark…

Then the lights came back on. Like a camera, Slater froze the film—the scene—on his mind’s eye. Blacker wasn’t there. The reporter-lady stood over his empty seat, her eyes huge and astonished. But Blacker definitely wasn’t there.
Jesus!

Slater had almost forgotten Ferd standing beside him. But now Ferd said, “A fuse.” That simple statement saved Slater from what might have caused him a lot of acute embarrassment. For at that moment:

“Did you see
that
?” came Blacker’s hoarse cry of triumph and terror from the doorway to the toilets. He stuck his head out, glanced all about the room. He was pale now, and trembling. “
They
have their ways—but they don’t get me that easily! They’re near, I tell you. No—they’re
here
!” He made for the exit, rushed out into the night and the rain.

“A real nutter,” Karl Ferd commented, neatly threading his way through customers at the bar, heading after Blacker. “But he’s got style.” And over his shoulder to Slater: “I’ll be right back.”

Slater started to follow on, then changed his mind. He settled back against the bar, felt his excitement ebb away. He took a deep breath and wondered if maybe he was getting a bit old for this sort of stuff…

The reporter-lady had spotted Slater at the bar. He caught her glance, the silent appraisal, and thought: she’s thinking,
he’s not much but he’s the best this place has to offer. At least he’s a guaranteed free drink. Maybe even two.
“Hi,” he rumbled as she came over.

“Are you here for the convention?” she asked.

“In a way. I’m looking for someone, that’s all. But no, I don’t play games.”

“Don’t you?” She cocked her head a little on one side. “That’s a pity.”

Ah, well—that’s the preliminaries over and done.
“Would you like a drink?”

“Why not? May I have a gin and tonic?”

Slater ordered. Ten minutes patter and she’ll drift away. “And you?” he said. “An article on the convention?”

“That’s part of it.” She pressed up against him to let people squeeze by. “Sort of two birds with one stone, really.”

“Oh?”

She sipped her drink, grinned at him. “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” she said.

Slater did his Robert Mitchum double-take. “Hussy!”