‘Well,’ said Simkin to me, ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ and vanished.
Lovecraft sat down at her desk, motioned me to a chair, and gave me her full attention. ‘Bad night?’ she said.
‘I got through it.’
‘I can hear your teeth grinding. Have an E-ZO, have a couple of them — loosen you up a little.’ She offered me a green foil ten-strip of tablets.
‘No, thanks. My problem isn’t loosening up, it’s staying together.’
‘Together is for squilches. The real thing is what comes through the cracks when you fall apart.’
‘I don’t think I can handle that just yet.’
‘Yes, you can — you’ve handled it already or you wouldn’t be here. What we need to do is get it out in the open and see what’s what.’ Like Simkin she had an American accent but not from the same place: hers was suggestive of huge green breakers and shining people on surfboards. She took my hand again. ‘You’ve got the balls for it so let’s do it, yes?’
‘OK, but first tell me, are you related to H. P. Lovecraft?’
‘No. You like H. P. Lovecraft?’
‘Oh yes, I’ve been a heavy user for a long time.’
‘I can do Cthulhu-speak.’
‘Show me.’
‘“Ph-nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,”’ she said in a menacing alien voice that gave me goosepimples. ‘“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”’
‘I’m impressed. That stuff’s hard to memorise and it’s quite scary the way you do it.’
‘It’s my only accomplishment — I don’t tap-dance or play the piano.’
You don’t have to, I thought — your accomplishment is being you. I closed my eyes and tried to hold her voice in my head where I waited for the rain with my face between my knees. Then I settled into my chair and looked around. Her office had the usual Hubble Straits revolving view of Mikhail’s Snack-dome, the flicker docks, the Hawking Threshold light, Ereshkigal, and so on. It was a large and busy-looking place containing a hurly-burly of professional impedimenta with knobs and dials, an overflowingness of books in shelves and stacks, a shadowy black-and-white drawing of a female nude on the wall, a platoon of file cabinets, a small jungle of plants, a big couch heavily burdened with books and papers, and a well-littered desk on which was a museum replica of a small head of a goddess, a thin shell of bronze with a dark green patina, almost a mask because there was no back to it, the edges of its incompleteness following pleasingly the undulations of the hair.
‘Greek, second century B.C.,’ said Lovecraft, ‘found near Mersin, Cilicia. It’s only a replica.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I used to visit her at the British Museum.’ As on the original the whites of the eyes had been painted in and the wearing-away of the paint had been duplicated: the dark and light gave the impression of an upward seductive glance when viewed from above; when I brought my face down to the level of her eyes her look changed to one of fear and doubt. The card on the plinth said, HEAD OF A GODDESS.
‘She’s got to be Aphrodite,’ said Lovecraft. ‘She couldn’t be anyone else.’
‘I think you’re right. Sometimes it took four or five tries before I could walk away from her.’
Lovecraft had been sorting through some videodiscs but now she paused, took off the horn-rims, and gave me a long look. ‘That’s how it is with Aphrodite,’ she said. She picked up several discs. ‘Let’s start with the automatic flicker-break transmission that came in to Traffic Control from Clever Daughter at 04:06:03 on 4 November.’ On her way to the video she passed close to me. The continually recycled air of Hubble Straits Station is moist and jungly; her smell was that of a strong healthy woman just out of the shower and sweating a little. She passed me again going back to her desk and I closed my eyes and felt the breeze of her on my face.
FLICK, FLICK, FLICK AND FADE, JOHN, sang my head, ON THE PLANET WHERE YOU ARE.
‘… hear me?’ said Lovecraft.
‘What?’
‘Those green spirals and circles we’re seeing on the screen, what are they?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said as circles of bright emptiness expanded in my vision. The other circles, the ones on the screen, seemed strange but familiar. ‘Interference, maybe?’
‘You trying to scramble me, John?’ Had she heard the song in my head?
‘Why? What did I say?’
‘You said interference but that’s not like any interference I ever saw. Those circles are like ringed eyes.’
On the screen the circles were widening, growing larger, becoming great eyes of becoming that became vast nodes of possibility and archipelagos of being constantly expanding and mutually annihilating as they slowly faded into blankness. ‘I’ve seen something like that before,’ said Lovecraft: ‘it’s like the chemical oscillation in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction.’
‘I don’t know what that is,’ I said as the circles faded into darkness and my head began The Art of Fugue, its voices tracing the vaultings of terror and the windings of its desolation. Forgetting myself I became the music, became the action of it and the joy at the heart of the terror. Yes! I thought, I must remember how to do this, how to be the music.
‘What?’ said Lovecraft.
‘Nothing.’
‘Listen, Fremder, all this constipated Q and A is boring me to death. Let’s talk fragic, yes? Darkly me, whisper me, echoes and murmurs.’
I hadn’t talked fragic since Judith. ‘I don’t think I can go loose just like that.’
‘Sure you can. Whisper me, whisper me, deeply the shadows.’
‘Shadows and places,’ I said. ‘O the horror.’ I could feel my head going slanty.
‘Horror me, horror me, infinite vortex whisper me urgently, dark without end.’
‘Only the horror, only the onliness.’ It was hard to resist her.
‘More than the onliness, more than the every.’ She seemed full of desire as she leant towards me.
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I can’t keep up with you. Could we just continue in the ordinary way for now?’
‘Right — I know I’m pushy.’ She sighed, rolled her chair back a little, expelled some breath, looked out of the window for a while, then took a crystal out of her pocket and stuck it in the audio beam. A man’s voice hummed, somewhat flat, the opening of Contrapunctus One of The Art of Fugue. ‘That’s Bill Charteris the other morning,’ she said, ‘humming Bach as you came into view.’ She was looking down as she stopped the audio beam, then she caught me with a swift upward glance. ‘Bill’s not into Bach — he had the feeling that it was coming from you. Can you receive as well? Can you tell me what I’m thinking?’
‘I’d rather not say — if I’m wrong it could be awkward.’
She laughed. ‘Never mind. Let’s go back to the first time you spoke to me, while you were still in Intensive Care: you said, “If you can hold on to the terror you can hold on to the world.”’
‘I don’t remember that conversation.’
She ejected the flicker-break disc and as the next one slid into place and started she froze-frame on a cross-section of a human brain in computerised colour. At the bottom I read: F. Gorn 04:22:16 IGT 04.11.52.
‘You’re looking at a domicilium scan of your brain,’ she said. ‘Domicilium is the collective name for those temporal-lobe systems that are the seat of the identity. This scan was done shortly after your admission to Intensive Care. The purple dot you see there is a peak of biochemical activity. Now see what happens when I unfreeze the frame.’
I watched as the purple dot jumped from one point to another in an anti-clockwise circle; around it went again and again.
‘That’s known as mandalic circuitry,’ she said. ‘You see it sometimes in autistics and in cult believers like the Sons of Osiris and the Sisters of Lorena. It’s a closed loop of self-reinforcing perception that locks out external stimuli. Your brain kept it up with diminishing intensity for most of three days. By the time you could speak intelligibly it had quieted down and there were only occasional bursts of it.’