The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 19

stolen. San Isidro was volatile, and Armstrong wasn't sure how he might react to the news.

San Isidro appeared to start momentarily at the mention of 'H. P. Lovecraft', but whether it was the effect of the name or the cumulative effect of the booze and weed, it was difficult to tell.

'So he told you, eh? Well, not all of it. No recuerda nada de antes, when he was just Felipe Lopez. No importa que paso antes, sure, there was some heavy shit back then. Si quieres los cuentos, primero quiero mucho dinero. Then maybe I'll tell you about it, eh?'

'I'll pay you Juan, and pay you well. But I need to understand the truth,' Armstrong replied.

What San Isidro told Armstrong over the next half hour consisted of a meandering monologue, mostly in Spanish, of a brilliant young gringo who had come to Mexico in the 1940s to study Mesoamer-ican anthropology. This man, Robert Hayward Barlow, had been Lovecraft's literary executor. Armstrong had heard the name before, but what little he knew did not prepare him for San Isidro's increasingly bizarre account of events.

He began plausibly enough. Barlow, he said, had taken possession of Lovecraft's papers after the writer's death in 1937. He had gone through them thereafter and donated the bulk to the John Hay Library in Providence, in order to establish a permanent archival resource. However, he was ostracized by the Lovecraft circle, a campaign driven by Donald Wandrei and August Derleth, on the basis that he had supposedly stolen the materials in the first place from under the nose of the Providence author's surviving aunt.

However, what was not known then, San Isidro claimed, was that Barlow had kept some items back, the most important of which was the Dream Diary of the Arkham Cycle, a notebook in long- hand of approximately thirty or so pages and akin to Lovecraft's commonplace book.

It contained, so San Isidro alleged, dozens of entries from 1923 to 1936 that appeared to contradict the assertion that Lovecraft's mythos was solely a fictional construct. These entries were not suggestive by and of themselves at the time they were supposedly written, for the content was confined to the description of dreams in which elements from his myth-cycle had manifested themselves. These could be accepted as having no basis in reality had it not been for their supposedly prophetic nature. One such entry San Isidro quoted from memory. By this stage his voice was thick and the marijuana he'd been smoking made him giggle in a disquieting, paranoid fashion.

'A dream of the bony fingers of Azathoth reaching down to touch two cities in Imperial Japan, and laying them waste. Mushroom clouds portending the arrival of the Fungi from Yuggoth.'

To Armstrong, this drivel seemed only a poor attempt to turn Lovecraft into some latter-day Nostradamus, but San Isidro clearly thought otherwise. Armstrong wondered what Lopez had to do with all of this, and whether he would repudiate the so-called «prophecies» by sharing Lovecraft's trust in indefatigable rationalism. That would be ironic.

'How does all this tie in with Lopez?' Armstrong asked.

'In 1948,' San Isidro slurred, 'there were unos brujos, se llama-ban La Sociedad del Sol Oscuro, cheap gringo paperbacks of Love-craft were their inspiration. They were interested in revival of worship for the old Aztec gods before they incorporated Cthulhu mythology. The gods of the two are much alike, no? Sangre, muerte y la onda cosmica. They tormented Barlow, suspected that's why he came to Mexico, because of the connection. Barlow was a puto, he loved to give it to boys, and soon they found out about the dream-diary. That was the end. Blackmail. He killed himself in 1951, took a whole bottle of seconal.'

'But what about Lopez?'

'They had to wait cincuenta anos para que se alinearan las estrellas. Blood sacrifices, so much blood, the police paid-off over decades. But it was prophesized in his own dream-diary: el esplen-dido regreso. Even the exact date was written in there. Lopez was the chosen vessel.'

'How do you know all this, Juan?'

'I chose him from amongst us, but I betrayed them, the secret was passed down to me, and now I need to get out of this pinche country rapido, before mis hermanos come for me. Lopez, he wants to go back to Providence, one last time,' San Isidro giggled again at this point, 'though I reckon it's changed a lot, since he last saw it, eh? But, me, I don't care.'

He's as insane as Lopez, Armstrong thought. This is just an elaborate scheme cooked up by the two of them to get money out of someone they think of as simply another stupid, rich foreigner. After all, what evidence was there that any of this nonsense had a grain of truth in it? Like most occultists, they'd cobbled together a mass of pseudo-facts and assertions and dressed it up as secret knowledge known only to the «initiated». Christ, he wouldn't have been surprised if, at this point, San Isidro produced a Dream Diary of the Arkham Cycle, some artificially-aged notebook written in the 1960s by a drugged-up kook who'd forged Lovecraft's handwriting and stuffed it full of allusions to events after his death in 1937. They'd managed to pull off a pretty fair imitation of his stories between themselves and whoever else was involved in the scam. The results were certainly no worse than August Derleth's galling attempts at 'posthumous collaboration' with Lovecraft.

At last, as if San Isidro had reached a stage where he had drunk and smoked himself back to relative sobriety, he lurched up from the easy chair in which he'd been sitting. He ran his fingers through his beard, stared hard at Armstrong and said, 'We need to talk business, how much are you going to give me?'

'I'll give you enough to get out of Mexico, for the sake of our friendship,' Armstrong replied, 'but I can't pay for the stories, Juan. Anyway, someone has stolen them.'

Probably you or Lopez, he thought cynically.

The only reaction from San Isidro was that he raised his eyebrows a fraction. Without saying a word he went into the kitchen next door and Armstrong could hear him rattling around in some drawers.

'If you're going to try to fleece me,' Armstrong said, raising his voice so that he could be heard in the adjacent room, 'then you and Lopez will have to do better than all this Barlow and the 'Sodality of the Black Sun' crap.'

When San Isidro came back into the room, his teeth were bared like those of a hungry wolf. In his right hand he was clutching a small calibre pistol, which he raised and aimed directly at Armstrong's head.

'Cabron, hijo de puta, di tus ultimas oraciones, porque te voy a matar.'

Sweat broke out on Armstrong's forehead. His thoughts raced. Was the gun loaded or was this only bravado? Another means of extorting money from him? Could he take the chance?

Just as Armstrong was about to cry out, everything went black. Despite the fact that it was the middle of the afternoon, with brilliant sunshine outside, the room was immediately swallowed up by total darkness. Armstrong could not believe what was happening. He thought, at first, that he had gone blind. Only when he stumbled around in the inky void and came right up against the window did he see the sunlight still outside, but not penetrating at all beyond the glass and into the room.

Outside, the world went on as normal. Armstrong turned back away from the window and was aware of a presence moving within the dark. Whatever it was emitted a high-pitched and unearthly whistle that seemed to bore directly into his brain. God, he thought, his train of reasoning in a fit of hysterical chaos, something from Lovecraft's imagination had clawed its way into reality, fully seventy years after the man's death.

Something that might drive a man absolutely insane, if it was seen in the light.

Armstrong thought of the hundreds of hackneyed Cthulhu Mythos stories that he'd been forced to read down the years and over which he'd chortled. He recalled the endless ranks of cliched yet supposedly infinitely horrible monstrosities, all with unpronounceable names. But he couldn't laugh now, because the joke wasn't so funny anymore. So he screamed instead-

'Juan! Juan!'

Armstrong bumped into the sofa in a panic, before he finally located the exit. From behind him came the sound of six shots, fired one after the other, deafeningly loud, and then nothing but dead, gaunt silence. He staggered into the hallway and reached the light outside, turned back once to look at the impenetrable darkness behind him, before then hurtling down the stairs. He now gave no thought, as he had done when coming up, as to how precarious they were. He did, however, even in the grip of terror, recall that the building was deserted and that no one could swear to his having been there.