tentative agreement, since both his Lovecraftian experiences had occurred after dark. Finally he reached the diary excerpts recording the hero's semicoherent desperation as his nemesis closed in. The climactic image of 'the three- lobed burning eye' turned Justin's stricken musings to the camera hanging from his neck, and its documentation of the church site's security light with its three glaring bulbs and disregard for the way objects should take shape in photographs. And in retrospect, how disquieting that the lights had gone out after Justin activated his flash! He twisted his head away from the book, toward a wider window to his left. The shop had a flagstone patio out back, where the blooms on a hydrangea and the leaves of a virginicus were already brown. Must have been nice here in summer! He wondered if he'd live to see it, then grimaced at himself for turning morbid on such a flimsy basis.
The sunshine happened to fade before his eyes. How long had he been in that chair? Had the overhead fluorescent been humming like that all along? He stood too fast and everything spun for several heartbeats. Stiff and creaky legs carried him to the desk, and he started framing an apology for loitering till the last minute. The barnacles had vacated their comfy furniture! A bad sign, but the wall clock above the desk was a tad shy of 5:15. He relaxed a bit and thanked the fetching girl for being very helpful, and hoped his longterm occupancy hadn't been a problem. 'As long as nobody heard you snoring,' she assured him.
Out on the sidewalk, he slid his purchase into a big inside pocket of his denim jacket. Desires to eat and roam plagued him again. Minerva's was right there, and a large meatball calzone stood out as the shortest wait for the most protein, with the added virtue of portability.
He headed down Angell Street and wondered how far he'd get before tearing the wrapper off dinner. Past the first bend in the road, the green and white sign for a Newport Creamery loomed over him. One more youthful hangout he'd forgotten for decades! Too bad he hadn't scouted ahead; a burger plate and sundae sounded good. Then he saw that nothing was left but the sign. Streetlight penetrated sheet glass sufficiently to indicate an interior gutted of booths, counter, stools, freezer cases and all.
But in the distant recesses, people were moving around, unhindered by gloom, animated, at arm's length from each other. The more he studied them, the less shadowy they became, as if Justin must have been wrong about the dearth of illumination back there, and they seemed closer than at first. Momentarily in lambent glow he beheld a frail, gaunt oldster presiding over a table of deferential young men. He wore a dark suit of '30s vintage that seemed on the verge of falling apart at the seams, and he retained enough thin white hair to part on the left. His chin projected well ahead of his delicate mouth, into which he was spooning a banana split with laudable gusto when he wasn't offering an opinion. His audience had shoulder-length hair and turtleneck shirts and flared jeans, and were patently not the youth of today.
Back when researching his thesis, he'd woven trivia about Lovecraft and this stretch of Angell into wistful daydreams centering on this restaurant. At seeing them converted into three dimensions, he fought a lump in his throat. Opposite the Creamery hulked a typically boring apartment complex of the '50s, and adding injury to insult, for its sake the beautiful birthplace of H. P. Lovecraft had been destroyed. In the young Justin's reveries of a better Providence, Lovecraft had not been struck down in middle age, overdue royalties had let him regain his ancestral home in the nick of time, and his legendary taste for ice cream frequently enticed him, in his fragile but genial 80s, to cross the street and hold court in the Creamery with Justin's horror-fan contemporaries. Justin still cherished that daydream, and to gaze into its world, not only parallel but long defunct, made him weak with yearning, and his lower lip trembled.
He blinked away tears. The kids at the table were regarding him with anticipation, as if he had agreed to come palaver with them, and the ancient Lovecraft was graciously waving him in. Justin gulped. Who, me? But the door ought to be locked. He stepped over and tugged at the handle. He saw and felt it start to heave open, yet could see through it, at the same time, to a door that wasn't budging, as expected.
Justin let go and shuddered, and his melancholy reddened into anger. What would have happened if he'd set foot across that phantom portal? Lovecraft and the boys were still hopeful of his company. Justin grabbed his camera, stowed the lens cap, and turned on the flash. Not now, not ever had he seen Lovecraft's ghost, but only this soulless effigy. Absurd to suppose a spirit would age posthumously! And what about this coterie of ghost hippies? Whatever was pulling the strings here either thought little of Justin's intellect or had major limitations in its own.
Justin raised the camera. The tableau most likely wouldn't leave a record, but why not see what would? And if something sinister, and photophobic, were trailing him, this was the least he could do. He aimed and shot a sequence. When he lowered the camera, the interior was dim and empty again.
His appetite, however, was unabated. The calzone was reduced to grease on his fingertips, for all the restraint he could summon, blocks away from Benefit Street. Furthermore, knowing that his surplus energy derived from some ominous, furtive source was of no help in suppressing it. He could, at best, shut himself in his room and ride the frazzling current toward a better understanding of whatever was hounding him.
He washed his beefy-smelling hands, flopped into bed, plucked the remote off the nightstand, and turned on the TV. He used whatever began yacking at him as a subliminal anchor to normality, while he examined his series from the Creamery.
Naturally, his was the only human form throughout, camera masking his face, as reflected in the brilliance of the flash upon plate glass. Inside, trackless dust between bare walls showed faintly. All the way back, a rear door opened onto the Deco brick row of Medway Street. That he had to take on faith, because a substantial area within vague doorway contained three scorching orange discs in triangular arrangement. The security light had followed him to Wayland Square!
After a bout of hot sweat and nausea, Justin noted with perverse satisfaction that a meager five minutes in bed were yielding valuable insights. Lovecraft and anyone with him were figments planted in his mind. The 'three- lobed burning eye' was not. And the sentience behind that eye and those figments had even more invasive access to the mind of man, or to Justin's at least, than it had in the story.
As he spooled through the sequence, the «lobes» hovered unwavering, as if in wait. On finer inspection, though, they weren't exactly framed by the door but overlapped it, so that they seemed to shine from vastly farther away than the door, yet were inside the building at the same time.
In the last image, all that changed. The eye, in predictable reaction to the flash, had departed, but in its place was not the formerly hidden portion of doorway. A circular hole was floating there, and not a vacant one. A pattern informed the murky grayness, as of braided strands of dirty smoke or striations in muscle tissue. The printed page had implied a winged and cloudlike entity skulking in the church. Here was a glimpse of detail, intriguing, disturbing, but equally uninformative in practical terms. It was, in fact, petrifying to linger over that fingerprint-sized window onto inexpressibly remote and strange conditions. Justin started feeling dizzy, as if on the brink of physically tumbling into that tiny gateway.
Look away! On television, a silver-whiskered park ranger was calf-deep in reedy wetland, lecturing on the ecology of the Blackstone Valley. A local cable production, Justin surmised. The visuals switched to fishermen flycasting from a grassy riverbank. They jogged his thoughts back to the TV in the pizzeria, and to the bait wiggling on the hook.
Different bait for different fish, he thought, then thought further, Depending on the neural circuitry and genetics and much else of which the fish had no clue. And yes, depending also on the mood of the fish. Was his predicament the upshot of being the right person in the right mood, in his case of withdrawal and loneliness, broadcasting a signal from the right place at the right time, perhaps 'when the stars were right,' as Lovecraft put it? Was there a species of angler, a predator whose range was of dimensions rather than miles, receptive to that signal? In that angler's continuum, had that first incident in List happened scant moments ago? If only he could recapture what his mood had been before he'd first sighted Lovecraft. Had he been troubled, depressed, tense? He drew a total blank. In respect to emotions, it may as well have been a stranger in that baggy uniform.
But in common with his younger self, and with Lovecraft too, there was Providence. Justin had never encountered ghosts and aliens elsewhere. And perhaps he could also share with Lovecraft the distinction of being the same kind of fish, in a manner of speaking. Minutiae cluttering his brain for half a lifetime were paying their rent at last! In letter or essay, Lovecraft had reported seeing nymphs and satyrs under the oaks in his backyard during his childhood, and at this time of year. If he'd tried to join them, would he have met the fate Justin had narrowly escaped tonight? Plenty of people disappeared forever, without motive or signs of foul play, from their home streets or front porches. Wasn't there an author, Charles Fort, who based his whole career on compiling hundreds of such cases?
The angler had most definitely made an impression on Lovecraft, subconsciously or not, and a line or two in
