Archer got a bright idea, right out of the blue. He reviewed his notes on the Carcosa letters.
It was clear Carcosa was the spider that connected all these suspects and events together in his web.
If he was last seen in Providence, was New York really the next step? Archer wondered.
He called Watson at the BOI and said, "Any line on Carcosa? Any sightings? Are you planning on plastering his face all over the newspapers?"
- Letters to Carcosa from Konstantin Chertovskii... Discussion of museum collections.
Any discussion of specific artifacts? ...especially items that haven't turned up stolen yet?
- Letters to/from discussing astrology with astrology teacher at Columbia University in New York City. Star patterns, movement of stars in sky, etc.
Are they discussing a specific timetable or celestial event?
- Letters to/from a Zydeca Acerant, who Baines deduces is the singer of the Hepcats of Ulthar, discussing the band's tour schedule. The addresses are various hotels in different cities.
Are the Hepcats in Providence tonight?
- Letters to/from a Providence author, H.P. Lovecraft, about story ideas.
Carcosa is knocked loose from his normal digs, likely looking for a friend's house where he can hole up. This writer yob is in Providence. Archer phones him, asking after Carcosa.
- Letters to/from Algier Joassaint, manager, The Dark Pharaoh Freak Show & Carnivale, regarding tour schedule and "unspecified favors."
Is the Dark Pharaoh in Providence tonight?
- Letters to/from Glenda Heinreich, Amsterdam; Eduardo Himenez, Madrid; and Horace and Henrietta Whateley, London and Luxembourg.
Archer reads these with interest.
The New York correspondence can wait til Archer gets home.
Sam Archer the private eye asks Agent Watson about the elusive Ambrose Carcosa.
"We haven't gotten leads on Carcosa's whereabouts. We have Wanted notices in area police stations and BOI offices. Agents in those areas referenced in letters - New York, New Orleans, Phoenix - are following up on the local persons of interest. We can't exactly put his face in newspapers, as he hasn't technically broken any laws."
Archer uses his time in the Providence BOI office to review the letters in the Carcosa files. They are from individuals known and unknown and contain disturbing revelations. He notes details in letters he examines:
- From Konstantin Chertovski: The Russian cites particular museums and collections that match those that were victims of thefts. There is only one museum and item mentioned that has not been victim: Harvard's Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and their fragment of the Codex Beltran-Escavy. The gumshoe never heard of this; perhaps one of the professors will know of it.
- From Harlow Shapley, astronomer, Columbia University: Ancient star patterns and their change over thousands of years; positions particularly around the solstice of this year, 1925.
- From Zydeca Acerant, singer of the jazz band Hepcats of Ulthar: Her list of tour date locations goes up to the end of the month (September, today being the 15th.) They are:
Sept. 11-12: Philadelphia
Sept. 18-19: Baltimore
Sept. 25-26: Washington DC
- From HP Lovecraft, pulp writer: Wondering if Carcosa is taking refuge at Lovecraft's Providence abode, Archer decides to call the author. He consults the Providence Telephone Directory and locates the phone number. It rings five times before a lady answers. "Yes, he lives in the building. This is a house phone. Hold on."
A minute later a tired sounding, high pitched male voice says: "Good afternoon sir, this is Howard Lovecraft."
- From Algier Joassaint, manager, Dark Pharaoh Freak Show & Carnivale: The upcoming schedule is -
Sept. 11-12: Narbeth, PA, outside Philadelphia
Sept. 18-19: Aberdeen, near Baltimore
Sept. 25-26: Reston, VA, outside of Washington DC
- From Glenda Heinreich, Amsterdam: Recounting weekends of decadent sex parties in which unprecedented levels of "orgone" accumulation were reached.
- From Eduardo Himenez, Madrid: The self-professed artist of the surreal is, like his rantings Archer heard on The White Ship, writing barely understandable rigamarole about otherworldly something-or-others and love and magic.
Letter One:
There is no place in here, nor moment. No familiar semblances. The mind-forms here being concerned with nothing that's not ultimately mind itself. The shapes here have no correspondence in the formal world. They are the shape of Yevtushenko's poems, Chopin’s etudes, Gödel’s math. Here in these incoherent oceans of unmolded possibility, systems of thought provide the only landmass. Theory and belief are all we have to walk upon, where language is a shell-swept beach, where algebra's an endless ghostly boulevard.
Suspended in this glimmering continuum, islands of supposition, continents of paradigm, tides of opinion lap in fabulous lagoons of proof, bringing a slow erosion, gradual change of contour. Here, the shifts in understanding are tectonic, diastrophic rumbles in the core, volcanoes of renaissance threatening to spit their heat and gold to cover all the world with their bright, dangerous precipitations. Smuts of change and novelty unwinnable borne on the jet streams of cold inspiration.
The depths are soundless, off the map, there is no sextant that will read the constellations here, yet are there hazards, undertows of falsehood, eddies of delusion in the bedlam reefs. Riding elated swirls of reason, bear in mind that nothing is unsinkable. The Palm Court orchestra plays on, beneath these fog-banked ambiguities rear intellectual icebergs.
No paranoid Magellan named these straits, autistic Heyerdahl or thorazined Cabot, the toothpicked scums of shattered coracle and surfs of splinter stitch the white caps to these slick gray shores, with here and there the footprint of some prior explorer, inmate or philosopher. Beyond a ribboned shingle of assumption, shifting dunes of creed, there is the scorched air whiff of a synaptic ozone, spindrift, gusted from cerebrospinal tropics. Underfoot, a tide line litter of rejected notions, worm-shot timbers from wrecked ideologies, discredited beliefs. In reason's rock pools seen, a ferning coral of dead faeries.
Above, strong light bursts out through solipsistic cumuli. The dazzle of near comprehension leaves a gibberish of phosphorescent scribble on the psychic retina. Over these beachheads of corpus callosum, strung between two hemispheres, there burns an equatorial sun of fact and data. Best not risk the information tan that brings disfiguring bikini lines of ignorance or, worse, the sunstroke of religion. Make for shade. The tree line looms ahead. Pull back the snarled anxiety of bramble and plunge ego first, into the undergrowth. Miasmal thicket darkness here, its chill immediate. Press on. Thorned snags of dogma tearing at the ankles, out into the sudden dappled bright, the eerie cross breeze of a clearing. The atmosphere here coruscates, thick with impending diamond. Through the spike lit blur an intimation of delirium's foliage clipped back, ordered into a Magritte topiary. Now a bordered path, redolence of park and arbour, wind chime scent of honeysuckle. With each step, a burgeoning of form, a greater density. Belatedly, the thought occurs: What life might this ethereal clime support? Ecologies of ectoplasm? And what Flora? And what Fauna? The air here crackles, viscous and intense, humid with meaning. The posited terrain grows steeper, rising up towards the domed pavilions of the spectre garden, flickering radiance of its exhibits brushed across the sky ahead. Struggle upslope the last few yards become a headlong rush into the raw mouth of this brilliant wind.
Letter Two
I love you. There is no such thing as magic. Just allow it in your minds. Allow it. This great vaulted ballroom of the sweet intangible, that soars above us, bustling with the throng unseen, their great excitement, their anticipation palpable. Convene the flickering ones and those hilarious phosphorescences that pass through with a pleasant shudder. Bring the ones like sparks, the ones that swoop and drone above massive and immaterial as Mahler. Ones with fine and strange ideas that spin and shimmer on their open palms like gyroscopes. The delicate one, all in crystal, vast as a cathedral. Let us feel the incandescent breeze fanned from its million stained-glass wings that flutter slow and perfect. Synchronized. Let them surround us now and trace their fingers down our cheek and whisper things we never dreamed or had forgotten. There is something happening. I love you. They want to talk. They want to dance. They flare and shimmer in and out of being, throne and power and chimera, sylph and demiurge, the drunk, ecstatic laugh of naked giants swimming in the aviary trill and flutter of this splendid radiance. They soar. They bellow, fierce with joy, and sing sweet prilling scales of blue, of gold, from throats like chandeliers. Trace neon-moth trajectories through Idea-Space and hover in the cold, true glow of an imagined firmament. Here, in the still eye of this glamour, in this roaring white of now, let us perceive the moment's wingèd, burnished soul and read the pure and voiceless name that's written there in strange barbaric characters, we know with other eyes. And it is beautiful and it is frightening. The clouds peel back and vast symphonic forms peer down, inchoate presence, stooping low. The choral sky and thought move to another state, become prismatic vapour in the shuddering light, and there is something happening. There is something happening. You already know this.
I am talking to ourself. We are listening to myself. As everything draws closer in the telepathic susurrus, the kindly night of eyes, and we remember what we are and know it for the first time. Each self now unfolded, gem fern fractal shape of every life revealed in all its tentacled magnificence. The light grows stronger. Something gains upon us from within, and now the banquet, now the rain of stars, now the embrace, the kiss of the invisible. I love you. There is something happening. There is only one moment. There is only one room. There is one person here. I love you. You already know this. You already know this.
There is no such thing as magic.
Is no such thing as magic.
No such thing as magic.
Such thing as magic.
Thing as magic.
As magic.
Magic.
Or is there real meaning here given the cult? Or false meanings which drive dark motivations with deadly consequences?
- From Horace and Henrietta Whately, London: Distribution of "goods" to fellow supporters in time to prepare for the "celebration." The last letter is a telegram, from Instanbul, dated the day before the Miskatonic Expedition headed out Mt. Latmos. It reads: "Will follow MU party to secure the stone."
Last edited by Grognardsw on Wed Sep 09, 2015 9:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Grognardsw wrote:Sam Archer the private eye asks Agent Watson about the elusive Ambrose Carcosa. "We haven't gotten leads on Carcosa's whereabouts. We have Wanted notices in area police stations and BOI offices. Agents in those areas referenced in letters - New York, New Orleans, Phoenix - are following up on the local persons of interest. We can't exactly put his face in newspapers, as he hasn't technically broken any laws."
"Huh?" Archer said, wondering if Baines wasn't the only BOI agent working for Carcosa. He calmly shared the contents of Carcosa's letters and said, "He's the ringleader of the stolen artifact ring. BOI agents were killed on the Club Zothique raid where he was present."
After that was sorted, Archer says to Watson, "Did the Irish gangster sing about Carcosa before you cut him loose?"
When the flatfoot finds out he didn't, he'll try to pay Darren McCoy a visit tonight, before Archer blows town. Archer will drop in on any speakeasies or gin joints Darren is known to frequent.
- From Konstantin Chertovski: The Russian cites particular museums and collections that match those that were victims of thefts. There is only one museum and item mentioned that has not been victim: Harvard's Peabody Essex Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and their fragment of the Codex Beltran-Escavy.
Archer calls his employer and then the Peabody Essex to let them know Archer has reason to believe their dingus is about to be heisted, and they should lock it down or move it, now!
- From Harlow Shapley, astronomer, Columbia University: Ancient star patterns and their change over thousands of years; positions particularly around the solstice of this year, 1925.
Three months, thought Archer. Maybe all this cult nonsense will stop then.
Archer noticed the Hepcats and the Dark Pharaoh have the same tour dates. He notifies Watson at the BOI, in case it helps his case with either.
- From HP Lovecraft, pulp writer: Wondering if Carcosa is taking refuge at Lovecraft's Providence abode, Archer decides to call the author. He consults the Providence Telephone Directory and locates the phone number. It rings five times before a lady answers. "Yes, he lives in the building. This is a house phone. Hold on."
A minute later a tired sounding, high pitched male voice says: "Good afternoon sir, this is Howard Lovecraft."
Archer spoke slowly to make his words fraught with meaning and the like, "Mr. Lovecraft? Cthulhu fhtagn, brother. I'm an ardent fan of your work. A Mr. Hazradbad and a Mr. Carcosa introduced me to your powerful, insightful literature. I believe you know them."
Archer paused long enough to see if the bloodless Presbyterian bookworm would respond. If not, then, "My name is Horace Whately. I've been looking for Mr. Carcosa. He's not around lately. Do you know where I might find him? I'm afraid... it's rather urgent."
Tomorrow, when Archer caught up with the BOI's investigatory consultants, he'd turn the whole find over to them, if Watson hadn't already by then, and explain who the Miskatonic University men are, in case they want to talk to them. It might not be bad to have a pack of bookworms and madmen on the payroll after all, to sort through some of this occultic nonsense.
Excellent glad to have you aboard Christopher. I suggest that you lock up the crystal in a trunk to take with us or find a suitable secure location in which to house it while we are away. If Raymond is correct and it is the key to understanding all this madness other might know of it's importance and seek to possess it."
Dr. Clark looks at his watch. "It's gotten rather late. I am going to visit Edith tomorrow to see if she has made any progress with developing the photograph she took at Mount Latmus. If your available I could swing by and pick you up and we can visit her together then leave for Providence later that day. What do you say chap? See you for breakfast?"
is alarmed to hear Sam Archer's warning about theft of the Codex Beltran-Escavy. The detective explains about the other thefts and his employer the museum consortium, which convinces the administrator.
"We will take every precaution, especially as that item is on loan from Miskatonic University," says the curator.
In Archer's conversation with with Howard Lovecraft... "Cthulhu? Why you are a fan I see. I must say it is gratifying to hear from one, I wonder how many actually read those disreputable pulps. Though I admit the magazine does have some talented writers. Have you read Robert E. Howard or Clark Ashton Smith?" I'm just-proof reading my latest tale, The Horror at Red Hook."Lovecraft rambles on before addressing Archer's other points. "Yes, I must thank Mr. Carcosa for helping spread my literary name," he gives a nervous laugh. "That man is brimming with darkly imaginative ideas. I'm sorry I don't know the other gentleman you mentioned, Mr. Hazrabad. Is he too an enthusiast of the fantastic? Well Mr. Whately I'm afraid I don't know where Mr. Carcosa is right now. He lives in town you know."
Dr. Clark talks with an intense Dr. Morgan at the professor's brownstone apartment. "Yes, yes it must be kept safe," says Dr. Morgan. "I will put in a valet bag and keep it with me."
He escorts Dr. Clark into the other room where the trapezohedron is on the table, covered by a cloth. "I do not touch it now with my bare skin. How is Edith? It will be good to see her again."
The next day the two men stop by Edith's small house.
"Hello David! Yes I finished developing the pictures. We have a good photographic record of the caves, but the pictures of the horrible... thing were all blurry for some reason."
She shows the pictures and indeed the monstrous flying terror can hardly be made out.
The doctors tell Edith of their Providence trip to the Charter Book Shop in search of clues about the strange case of Raymond Randolph. "Shall I come?" Edith asks.
A few hours later the Miskatonic men pull up in front of the bookshop.
It is open and they step inside.
The shop is quiet and a man is behind the counter, intently studying a large and old volume.
Grognardsw wrote:"We will take every precaution, especially as that item is on loan from Miskatonic University," says the curator.
"Of course it is," thought Archer. He said, "Be sure you move it to another, undisclosed location, immediately. These people mean business."
Grognardsw wrote:
"Cthulhu? Why you are a fan I see. I must say it is gratifying to hear from one, I wonder how many actually read those disreputable pulps. Though I admit the magazine does have some talented writers. Have you read Robert E. Howard or Clark Ashton Smith?"
"Of course," Archer lied, writing down the names with an envelope and pencil from the breast pocket of his jacket.
Grognardsw wrote:
I'm just-proof reading my latest tale, The Horror at Red Hook."
The muscle in Archer's thigh jumped. He cleared his throat and said, "I... I hate to ask you this. Do you think you could see your way to allow me to read it in its unfinished state? It would help me ever so much as an aspiring writer."
Grognardsw wrote:
"...Well Mr. Whately I'm afraid I don't know where Mr. Carcosa is right now. He lives in town you know."
"Read my unpublished story?" asks Howard Lovecraft, a surprised tone in his voice. "I am flattered. What are your authorial aspirations? Have you been published?"
"I have but one copy of Horror at Red Hook, and wouldn't want to part with it. But I suppose you could read it in my presence. Perhaps we could meet at the John Hay Library."
Then Lovecraft gives Archer Carcosa's address on Court Street. The private eye realizes he saw that in the BOI files on the case. He vaguely recalls reading about blood stained walls and bed, reports of a shoot-out with an Irish gangster, and Carcosa's allegedly unexplainable disappearance in front of a wall mural in the apartment courtyard.
In our real world, Lovecraft did indeed write Horror at Red Hook in 1925, though it saw publication in Weird Tales two years later.
Earlier...
Inferno wrote:When the flatfoot finds out he didn't, he'll try to pay Darren McCoy a visit tonight, before Archer blows town. Archer will drop in on any speakeasies or gin joints Darren is known to frequent.
"We have two agents following McKoy, so we know where he is," says Agent Watson.
Grognardsw wrote:Howard Lovecraft, "...What are your authorial aspirations? Have you been published?"
"Many and never," Archer replied, feigning remorse.
"I have but one copy of Horror at Red Hook, and wouldn't want to part with it. But I suppose you could read it in my presence. Perhaps we could meet at the John Hay Library."
"Perfect," said Archer, "Say, in a few hours perhaps?"
After they sorted out the time, said thanks and hung up, Archer called Watson again at the BOI. "I have a lead for your special librarian consultant. Carcosa's favorite author wants to meet with one of us and share an unpublished manuscript. Carcosa gave this scribbler 'story ideas.'
"I'm not convinced it'll help us learn Carcosa's motives or his next moves. But I'm not entirely unconvinced either. If I was hunting a madman who thought he was Napoleon, I'd bone up on my French history. Anyway, send one of your consultants to the John Hay library at X o'clock, and have him tell Lovecraft that his name is Horace Whately, and talk slow and deliberate."
Archer filled in the details of his phonecall with Lovecraft, and how he got onto him in the first place, so Watson could properly brief his operative.
"We have two agents following McKoy, so we know where he is," says Agent Watson.
"Swell. I want to question McCoy about Carcosa. And I want access to the Carcosa apartment crime scene."
If McCoy was near Court Street, Archer would go to McCoy right now.
If McCoy wasn't near Court Street, Archer would go to Court Street now, and visit McCoy after.
"Oh I'm afraid I couldn't do it today," says Lovecraft. "I am having tea and dinner with my aunt, who is having a few friends over from her church reading group. I can meet tomorrow afternoon."
Later...
"Our agent just phoned in," says Agent Watson. "McCoy is with his lawyer and a couple of goons over on the West side. Going into a funeral home. It's a 20 minute drive."
So Archer takes a taxi to the closer Courtyard apartments where Carcosa lived (?)
Grognardsw wrote:So Archer takes a taxi to the closer Courtyard apartments where Carcosa lived (?)
Yes please.
Grognardsw wrote:"Oh I'm afraid I couldn't do it today," says Lovecraft. "I am having tea and dinner with my aunt, who is having a few friends over from her church reading group. I can meet tomorrow afternoon."
Okay, before I answer that, I need to ask you this:
I know I was hot to get to Brooklyn, but after reading the Carcosa letters, Archer figures Johnny Carcosa for the ringleader, not Konstantin Chertovskii.
Carcosa's turf is Providence, as is his last known whereabouts.
I don't want to add to your already considerable workload, but would it be fine for Archer to linger in Providence?
If not, I completely understand.
Thanks.
Thanks. Archer will set a date with Lovecraft for tomorrow at the Hay library, and will get a cab to Carcosa's apartment now.
Later tonight he'll likely call Watson to beg off the trip to NYC, and to download him on everything he's been working on the last 2 days so Watson can give it to his consultants to work on.
I'll do that IC after the Carcosa apartment.
Thanks.
Archer sets the time for the meeting tomorrow with Mr. Lovecraft.
He then jots down key facts about and looks at crime scene photographs before he leaves for Carcosa's apartment. The Courtyard apartments are three old tenement buildings, their brick turned the color of scab, that huddle and eye each other across a bleak courtyard, its iron gate unlocked.
Broken bottles litter the cobbles with glass. A cat’s cradle of washing lines are above, bare save a child’s vest that might have been hung there for years. Puddles, clearly not rain, are in the yard’s dips and sinkages. Vile centipedal graffiti covers some tenement steps in its writhings. A breeze flitters litter about the courtyard.
On the courtyard’s east face there is a mural, realistic enough that Archer thinks for a moment he’s looking at something through a hole in the wall. A trompe l’oeil-effect landscape barren and harsh; distant hills jut rather than roll. The sky beyond is livid and stormy. In the foreground is a silhouette of something that Archer hopes may be a tree.
A few people are loittering about in the courtyard. On the left building's stair stoop, a wino is vomiting.
Archer looked at the mural. The tree-shape and the mountains behind it reminded him of something and somewhere. But he couldn't remember what.
He dropped his lit cigarette, stepped on it, and climbed the stairs up into the tenement that held Carcosa's apartment, readying himself for further poverty-borne depravity.
Archer enters the building numbered 93... The foyer smells, pieces of mail litter the floor, and a puddle of vomit is in the corner. The left wall is a bank of mailboxes, each labeled with apartment number and last name. An inner door leads into the apartment building proper. The private eye goes in and looks up the stairwell that wraps around the out-of-service elevator.
The apartment is now empty. Archer recalls the landlord cleaned the place out after the police searches, citing nonpayment of rent by Carcosa. Archer looks at some BOI photos of the place. The walls here and there were covered with strange and exotic drawings; foreign books had been scattered about; strange small statues and sculptures sat atop the books. A pile of old pages ripped free from an unseen book. Piles of mail littered about, many bearing return addresses from the Netherlands and New York. Most, hopefully all, of this was taken by the BOI. According to agents' descriptions, the place stank of incense or after-shave and something else, something pungent and bitter, a reptile house perfume. Scarf-shrouded bulbs cast dappled light across the walls in the photo.
The bedroom with blood stained bed, walls and pentagram has been whitewashed over. Archer looks at the photograph to imagine the room.
Under the bed had been knives and rope. There was a pinky finger on the left side of the bed. A tongue on the right side. The voluminous blood had congealed and was semi-dry; whatever atrocity occured here was a day or two ago prior to the BOI coming on the scene.
Long ago, Archer had learned how not to think too much about certain aspects of the job. It made for better nights. But this one wasn't going to be easy.
Archer locked the apartment door and thoroughly searched the flat for what the police and BOI might have missed. At this late stage, it might be loose floorboards or vent grates hiding a cache. He'd take his time and do a complete job.
Then he'd go visit the landlord. After showing his credentials and deploying his usual introductory speech, appended with "I'm here on behalf of the BOI," he asked the landlord to open Carcosa's mailbox to see what came since the police were here.
Also: "Have you seen Carcosa lately? Anybody come around here looking for him since the police came by? Do you know where he might be? Forwarding address, or a co-signer to guarantee the rent?"
Archer opened his wallet, prepared to pay for information.
Archer gives Carcosa's former apartment a thorough going over. At one point he thinks he hears rats in the wall, but finds nothing.
The gumshoe then checks in with the building superintendant, who lives in the basement. He accepts Archer's donation.
"Yeah he got some mail and I gave it to the BOI, like they asked me to do. Only one visitor, a lady she was a real darkie, dressed up like you know funny like some gypsy or something. Didn't catch her name."
"Don't know about co-signer, that'd be the landlord. Ford Real Estate Holdings owns these three buildings."
