bathroom. Had the warmth wafted up through the floor? These old buildings usually had their anomalies. On the positive side, he was up in plenty of time for breakfast. How fortuitous, seeing as last night's insistent hunger was homing in on him again. And the sooner he was out of the room, the better. Camera in hand, he noted that the corridor was downright chilly. Happily, he'd left the fungal scent behind.
On the last flight of stairs before the foyer, the distinctive rumble of an oil truck reached his ears. A mature woman with bobbed reddish hair and bulky green sweater turned to him from the partly open front door. Justin guessed her to be one of the owners, because she apologized for the furnace running out of fuel in the night. 'Not a problem. Please don't give it a thought,' he replied without slowing down.
He staked out the table nearest the breakfast bar and pounced at the eggs and sausage and bacon that rewarded early risers. He may have cut off rival guests when going for extra platefuls; he could only vouch for moving faster than whoever else was en route at the same time. To discourage any challenges over his right to multiple helpings, he scowled needlessly at the goateed kid on inattentive duty.
Between every course, he re-examined his new series of shots, as if enough squinting would flush out what he wanted to see. According to his feckless camera, Lovecraft was purely a hallucination, invisible in blurry and sharp exposures alike. The security light upon the blue wall, however, exerted an inordinate presence. It consisted of three bulbs in an upside-down triangle, and though he'd gazed into its glow last night with impunity, in pinpoint reproductions it was burning bright, painfully so within seconds. More inexplicably, it remained in tripartite clarity even when the rest of the frame was smudgy. And toward the end of the sequence, the bulbs were plainly larger, or perhaps in the process of sneaking closer. They weren't playing by the rules of optics in any case, but there his patience for analysis ended. His eyes roved dully over the dwindling contents of chafing dishes. He could always consign more servings to the bottomless pit, but had felt no more satisfied after the last couple. He was becoming too fidgety to stay any longer.
Today's morning walk differed markedly from yesterday's. It proceeded north along Benefit Street and wasn't recreational. Justin wasn't sure yet what it was, but he was averse to letting nostalgia or disappointment enter into it again. Four cups of coffee did not in themselves account for the high-strung nerves that required he range across the landscape, and half a mile of Georgian and Federal elegance was behind him before he understood he was in pursuit of something. Where Benefit merged with North Main, and only dreary new shopping centers and prefab apartments and 'professional buildings' lay ahead, he swerved right, up Olney Street. He wasn't out to take stock of his surroundings, but the wrong ones, he sensed, would ill suit his purposes, whatever they were. At the hectic intersection with Hope Street, he marveled that Tortilla Flats, the one Mexican bistro in town way back when, had survived a third of a century. For other than old time's sake, he tried the door. He was now willing to have another go at breakfast, but they weren't open yet.
He forged on, into neighborhoods of Colonial Revival mansions and wedding-cake Victoriana and prim bungalows and rundown triple-deckers that still had more character than anything constructed in Justin's lifetime. Not till he was deep in a terra incognita of broad avenues and manorial pretenses did he grasp that Lovecraft, or his unbodily likeness, had some bearing on this obscure mission. Much keener was his awareness that it must have been lunchtime, and he in a gilded wasteland as far as restaurants were concerned.
Subjective, hungry ages elapsed before he chanced upon a busy artery, with the brackish Seekonk River to the east, and westward, a cluster of businesses. It was dimly familiar, and on its outskirts the words Wayland Square popped into his head after thirty-five years of disuse. Historically it had been an «exclusive» retail hub for the old money, but Justin at present had eyes only for the black and yellow sign that read Minerva's Pizza.
At the cash register, a gray, spindly gent with a gravelly voice told Justin to sit where he liked. A table up front afforded him a view of the sunny street through an expanse of plate glass. Apparently churchgoers didn't come here for Sunday dinner, and none of the homecoming set were in evidence either. Some kids from a prep-school track meet, to judge by the uniforms, were lunching with their families, and that was about it.
He scanned the menu for whatever promised to contain the most meat, and under Subs he gravitated to Steak and Cheese. His cravings and his restlessness were no more subject to free will than were his eyes, drawn irresistibly to the movement on the screen above the mirrored bar. The sound was muted, and the kitchen crew had forgotten the TV was on. How else to explain why nobody changed the channel? Outdoorsmen were fishing in some Deep South cypress swamp, and Justin couldn't imagine a more tedious contest of man against nature. Nonetheless, he had to watch until there was a sandwich to devour. He didn't notice who brought it. But while he bit off and chewed mouthfuls, his mind's eye kept harking back to close-ups of the bait in taunting play, back and forth, back and forth, just below the leaf-strewn surface. He knew he'd seen the like somewhere lately, and it nagged at him and eluded him and made him put down his sandwich and think.
Then the revelation pitched him into momentary vertigo. His putative Lovecraft had shared in the abridged range of motion, the repetition, the agitated beckoning. If ghost he really was, he was under some duress, but of what nature and to what end? Lovecraft, or his puppeteer, had coaxed Justin to follow. That same hidden agency was implicated, coincidentally or not, in firing up Justin's feral appetite and joyless wanderlust. He dared not conjecture further without more to go on. He was in too vulnerable a mood.
His hands had raised the Steak and Cheese halfway to his mouth. He forced himself to put it down again and stared out the window to take his mind off food while he tried to concentrate. Justin's one conceivable source of information to tie together Lovecraft, the two places where he'd seen Lovecraft, and some background on those places was the novelette by Lovecraft himself. But how to get hold of it on short notice, and what was it called, anyway? His eyes were scrutinizing storefronts across the street, as if that would help. Then he laughed out loud and wolfed the rest of his sandwich and a handful of chips with a rush of new determination. In what was once a branch post office, a fanlightspanned masonry facade. Fanciful lower-case letters in each of its trapezoidal panes spelled out 'Myopic Books.' He strode to the cash register without waiting for anyone to bring the check, and was almost out the door before he reversed course and stuck $20 in singles under his water glass. If this manic energy refused to let him alone, maybe he could at least channel it for his own good.
He reined himself in after sprinting up Myopic's front steps. No point in alarming people with a dramatic entrance! The layout was uncommonly airy for a used bookshop. A fetching girl with long black hair and disarming eyes was online at the desk, presumably filling mail orders. She escorted him to the horror section, a free-standing bookcase in a far corner. What jaw-dropping luck! A Lovecraft omnibus stood on top of the case, beside a slipcovered set of Tolkien. 'Looks like you found what you wanted,' she said.
He had her ring it up and asked if she'd mind him reading it on the premises. She shook her head. 'We're open till six.' At second glance, she was simply rendering realpolitik its due. A couple of bearded duffers were ensconced in comfy chairs by a coffee table, noses deep between covers. They gave off a vibe of barnacles. Toward the rear wall, he settled into a barber's chair, upholstered in chiffon green. He strove for a semblance of composure, though inwardly he was on a breathless hunt.
His hunch to skim through last stories first proved correct. An allusion to Federal Hill guided him to the title 'The Haunter of the Dark,' and he resolved to peruse carefully, to stay on track from word to word, despite his jumpiness. In barest outline, a Midwestern visitor to the East Side blunders into mental linkage with a hostile alien while inspecting vestiges of a grisly cult in a deserted Atwells Avenue church. Justin had read the tale before, but so long ago that this amounted to the first time all over again. His reactions, too, were bound to be different now from when his interests were merely academic.
He had to stop sometimes and bathe his eyes in the calming brightness around him, to divert his racing thoughts from premature conclusions. The protagonist's dread of 'something which would ceaselessly follow him with a cognition that was not physical sight' reminded Justin of those hypothetical unseen trespassers during yesterday's nap. And concerning the 'unholy rapport he felt to exist between his mind and that lurking horror,' why wouldn't that express itself as the insatiable hunger and compulsive restlessness which even now tried to unseat him, and in which he was no willing participant?
He pushed on through the text. More stubborn efforts led only to graver intimations. The victim's despair at 'a strengthening of the unholy rapport in his sleep' reminded Justin of how displaced and, yes, alienated he'd felt first thing that morning, and when the hero later stirs from a mesmeric daze in the church and inhales a 'stench where a hot, searing blast beat down against him,' Justin recalled the heat in his room, and the stink of burnt mold, after a night without oil in the furnace. He felt hemmed in by the pages and looked out the narrow window in front of him, but it was half blocked off by foreign-language dictionaries, and beyond the glass was an antitheft steel latticework, with a claustrophobically nearby brick wall filling the view. Justin dove back into the book on his lap.
The narration laid increasing emphasis on the malign entity's intolerance of light, and Justin had to nod in
