Smoke and Dagger Read online

  DOUGLAS WYNNE

  ILLUSTRATED BY

  MAT FITZSIMMONS

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people or real locals are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Douglas Wynne

  Interior Illustrations © 2019 by Mat Fitzsimmons

  The author has provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can read it on personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book or make the contents publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  The verse quoted in chapter two is from

  “The Battle of the Lake Regillus” (1842) by Thomas Babbington Macaulay

  Cover artwork by Matt Bright/Inkspiral Design

  For my dad,

  aerospace engineer, scuba diver, daredevil

  He would often regard it as merciful that most persons of high intelligence jeer at the inmost mysteries; for, he argued, if superior minds were ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by ancient and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe.

  –H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror at Red Hook

  Do you believe then that the sciences would have arisen and grown if the sorcerers, alchemists, astrologers and witches had not been their forerunners?

  –Friedrich Nietzsche

  Only in the irrational and unknown direction can we come to wisdom again.

  –Jack Parsons, letter to Marjorie Cameron 1946

  Prologue

  Carl Bauman lingered at the window of the pipe shop and regarded the wares through the plate glass. A sign for bomb shelters emblazoned on a brick building across Wiltshire reflected back at him on the afternoon sunlight until a streetcar eclipsed it. Eight hundred dollars for a hole in the ground full of canned beans. Who could afford that? Maybe the Hollywood producers whose cars he serviced—pretentious twits who smoked pipes and wore sport coats. Certainly not him. Anyway, the war was over and Carl was a cigarette man, so what was he doing here, cooling his heels on the sidewalk when he had an appointment three doors down and one flight up? He wiped his hands on his trousers and sighed.

  He’d been to the sparse office twice before and had never been nervous until today. Those visits had been easy money. Today was different. He was finally going to meet the enigmatic Mr. Parsons and—his hunch told him—take a drug that was supposed to make him psychic. No one had told him outright that this was the next step of the experiment he’d volunteered for. He’d worked it out by deduction and the knot in his stomach that told him to stick to dry toast and black coffee for breakfast. The funny thing was: Carl had never been one to trust his hunches, which was why he’d progressed this far in the first place.

  He heard about the study from a fellow tenant at the boarding house on Bunker Hill, an actor named Ray who’d brought home a flyer he found glued to a telephone pole:

  PERSONALITY TEST

  CONTRIBUTE TO SCIENCE / EARN 60 CENTS

  Carl had brushed it off as a scam until Ray came home with a new fedora and change in his pocket the next day, claiming it had only taken half an hour. Carl made fifty cents an hour at the Gilmore filling station on Fairfax. So what was the catch?

  “It’s for USC. They just ask you about your dreams and if you ever win at gambling.”

  Sure enough, Ray was right. But Ray only went the one time and was never called back, while Carl had banked an easy buck-twenty so far, and was back again today for a third test that promised another dollar just to sit in a chair and smell some incense. He didn’t think they could be testing poison fumes on humans, like the krauts did during the war, but comparing his survey answers to Ray’s had convinced him that the college was studying psychic powers. Ray had a dream one time about his uncle dying right before it happened—and his hunches for auditions and horse races occasionally paid off. Carl, on the other hand, had eternal bum luck and no dreams that he could ever recall.

  The paper questionnaire was administered by a pretty, dark-haired receptionist named Salome. The second test, the one he and Ray couldn’t compare notes on because Ray wasn’t invited to take it, was done by a quiet, swarthy young man in shirtsleeves. Carl couldn’t remember the man’s name—something Persian sounding—but he did remember him referring to a Mr. Parsons who had a background in chemistry and currently held a position in the Pharmacology Department at the University of Southern California. Carl noted that it was Mr. not Dr. Parsons and that the tests were being conducted off campus in an empty office space. It felt a little fishy.

  The second test was a series of card games: Guessing the symbols on facedown black-and-white cards with stars and circles and squiggly lines and such, then describing the feelings he got from looking at various tarot cards. Again, easy money. He’d left that second session convinced that the people running the experiment were keeping aspects of their work secret from the college for fear of ridicule and maybe getting their funding shut off.

  Having demonstrated no psychic talent in the first two sessions, Carl expected the pharmacology part to rear its head today. He’d read the fine print on the consent waiver Salome had him sign at the first session, which included something about sampling various non-toxic fumes. Given that Carl breathed gas fumes and smog all damned day, he had no misgivings about scrawling his signature.

  But now it was time to step up. And here he was, dragging his feet in front of a shop window.

  “Get your buck and get out,” he muttered, and put his legs in motion.

  There was no pretty receptionist waiting today. The Persian fellow greeted him at the unmarked frosted glass door and ushered him into the one-room office, where the only furnishings were a steel desk with a chair on each side and a file cabinet in the corner. Carl didn’t need to be psychic to guess the cabinet was empty. The whole place had the look of a temporary operation used for a single discrete purpose.

  A tall man with a high shelf of curly black hair rose and reached across the desk to shake his hand. Though Caucasian, he had the stately bearing of a prince, which made Carl feel reluctant to offer his oil-stained fingers. But the man, who introduced himself as “John Parsons, but call me Jack” gave an enthusiastic shake with an eagerness in his bright eyes that suggested the honor was his.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Bauman. I’m so pleased you could make it. You’re one of just a few select subjects we’re following up with.”

  Carl reconsidered the file cabinet. There was no nurse or equipment in the room—not even a sheet of paper or a deck of cards on the desk. Seated and regarding Parsons across the empty slab, he felt his knee bouncing, a nervous habit, and decided to cut through the bullshit with a direct question. “Is this a drug trial, Mr. Parsons? I read something about fumes on the paper your girl had me sign.”

  Parsons smiled under a thin mustache, then laughed and swiveled his chair toward his associate, who stood by the window overlooking Wiltshire. “Kamen, you didn’t tell Mr. Bauman what to expect?” The other man shrugged. Parsons turned back to Carl and leaned forward, arching an eyebrow and speaking in a conspiratorial tone. “Fumes. That’s a word I associate with toxins. You would not believe the fumes I’ve inhaled in the name of science, but that’s another story. I’ve worked in chemical plants, aviation design, rocketry…” He trailed off, then fixed Carl with a reassuring smile and continued. “These days, I’m an associate chemist at USC, but no: It’s
not fumes or drugs. It’s perfumes we’ve asked you here to sample. No need to worry, Mr. Bauman. You did the tarot card exercise for us, right? It’s like that. We’re interested in what kind of feelings you get from a special blend of incense. It may effect your perception, but that’s all. The ingredients are mostly plant products. Are you amenable to that?”

  “Will I still get paid no matter what reaction I have?”

  “Yes. Of course.” Parsons nodded at his partner, who opened a drawer of the file cabinet and removed an object wrapped in white silk, which he unwound to reveal a flat black disc. Parsons produced a brass dish and a charcoal briquette from a desk drawer while the other man set the disk in a wire frame so that it sat upright at the edge of the desk, facing Carl and tilted back at just enough of an angle for him to see his face reflected in the pitch black glass.

  “This is an obsidian mirror,” Parsons said, “devised by pharaohs for far seeing.” His voice had modulated slightly, taking on the resonant tones of a hypnotist.

  “Far seeing?”

  “Yes. They believed they could see faraway countries, other realms. Heavens and hells and all of their denizens.”

  “I don’t believe in any of that,” Carl said. “You don’t expect me to pretend I believe in that, do you? You said I still get paid.”

  “You get paid no matter what you do or don’t see in the smoke and glass, Carl. Now I want you to take a deep breath and relax.”

  There was the sound of a match igniting. Orange sparks sizzled and spit from the charcoal on the brass dish. Parsons pursed his lips and blew air at the burning line until it held steady. Then he produced a glass vial from the pocket of his tweed blazer, uncorked it, and tapped a measure of ochre powder onto the briquette, like a chef adding spice to a stew. Red smoke rose in ribbons, coiling in the air between them. A strange mixture of odors flooded Carl’s sinuses: Orchids, ozone, semen, and brine. He couldn’t decide if the overall effect was pleasant or not.

  “You have no idea how difficult it is,” Jack said, “to find someone with no psychic sensitivity.”

  Carl filled the silence that followed with a nervous laugh. Mr. Parsons had such dark eyes. In the shady room, it was hard to tell where the irises ended and the pupils began. “Is that right?”

  “Oh yes. Most people don’t realize they’re using a sixth sense until you ask about how they make decisions and use their imagination. For most, it’s not anything spectacular like having visions. But you…do you see anything in the black mirror, Carl? Anything at all?”

  Carl shook his head. All he could see was his reflection obscured by the smoke. It was flowing faster now, hanging on the air in layers.

  “That’s okay,” Jack said. “Good, in fact. I didn’t expect you would.” His fingers laced together on the desk and tapped his thumbs together, watching the play of the incense fumes. “What if I told you it’s not a mirror but a window?”

  “If it was a window, I’d only see you through it.”

  “But if it was a window to another world—a god realm like the Egyptians claimed—then you’d see the gods gazing back at you.”

  Carl shifted in the creaky chair. “I don’t believe—”

  “I know. You said so already. And that’s why you can’t see past what’s in front of your face. I knew a woman who could look into this mirror and see the gods so clearly she could draw their likenesses.”

  “What happened to her?”

  Parsons inhaled deeply. “She went away. We learned a lot together, but she went away and I realized I needed to develop a formula that would draw our neighbors into our world where anyone could see them.”

  Carl had been to a carnival in Milwaukee once where a mentalist tried to hypnotize him. The man had failed so spectacularly it had set the crowd rolling in their seats. But now he was feeling sleepy, like he could nod right off in the chair. Still, that didn’t mean he was going to start hallucinating Egyptian gods if there really wasn’t a drug involved. “Why is it red? The smoke.”

  Parsons smiled. “The scientific reason wouldn’t make sense to you, but the poetic answer—if you can grok poetry, as my friend Robert says—is that it’s like blood in the water, attracting the sharks.” The man’s dark eyes tracked a scudding plume and he grimaced, appearing to reconsider the analogy. “But poetry only goes so far. The smoke is more than a lure. It grants them substance on our side of the glass, more solid than the form they can take in the imagination of a sensitive host.”

  The other one was chanting now. Carl wasn’t sure when he’d started doing that, but the sound raised the hairs on his sun-scorched forearm.

  Parsons’ voice pulled his attention back to the mirror. Carl felt sweaty and untethered. Maybe it wasn’t worth a dollar after all to sit through this strange talk in the cloying heat with the smell of dead flowers and dusty spices lining his throat. He wanted someone to open a window and offer him a glass of water. These guys weren’t scientists. They were batshit. Wait till he told Ray what he’d missed out on by sharing his dreams with them.

  “Don’t focus on the mirror, Carl. Follow the smoke. Tell us what you see forming in the smoke.”

  “It’s getting solid like.” His voice was raspy and distant in his own ears; a voice from the bottom of a well. “Why are you asking me? Can’t you see it? It’s got ridges now, like a goat’s horns.”

  “I do see it, Carl. But I may have a touch of that sixth sense. I want to know that you can see it. That it can see you.”

  And it could see him. The sudden knowledge was like swallowing an icicle. An eye regarded him from the black disk—a throbbing ball of jelly squirming in an electrical storm rimmed with lashes of fang and claw. He noticed the ribbons of smoke wafted not from the brass dish at the base of the mirror, but from that merciless eye. They twisted and billowed and transformed, shrugging off every resemblance his mind grasped for to make sense of them: Spiraling horns, coiling serpent tails, an elephant’s trunk, an octopus’ tentacle now curling around the back of his neck.

  But these appendages were nothing compared to the nexus they led to. Malign and magnetic, it drew him closer with its dark gravity, like the impulse to jump from a great height. Parsons had compared it to a shark, but it was so much worse than that. Even the most fearsome predator was part of a cycle of life, but the thing taking shape in the glass and smoke was beyond nature. Outside. Underneath. And knowing that such things writhed at the rotten core of the world made every thing of beauty on the surface insignificant. He couldn’t have articulated these thoughts, but his fraying mind grasped them even as it unspooled and lost the meaning of words, like coins dropped down a storm drain.

  “He sees it.” The voice was thin and distant, but he still recognized it as Parsons’. Gone now was the measured, hypnotic tone. For Carl Bauman, who would live out the remainder of his days in an asylum, it was the last phrase that would ever carry sense. It reached his ears as the protean limbs embraced him and pulled him in, as if to kiss something surfacing through dark water. Words empty of arrogance, uttered in a tone of rapt fascination.

  1

  On a cold day in December 1948, Catherine Littlefield followed her usual orbit around a fifteen-ton meteorite at the heart of New York City. She stopped at her dorm room to drop off her books after “Man and the Supernatural” let out, then changed her shoes for the walk to Columbia Street station. Snow had paralyzed the city on Sunday, and while the college’s footpaths had been cleared promptly, she was grateful for her waterproof boots on the icy city sidewalks. She took the 1 train to 79th Street and walked a beeline across Columbus Ave to the southwest corner of the American Museum of Natural History. There, she passed through a nondescript archway that led directly into the Hall of the Plains Indians, bypassing the Romanesque grandeur of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall, and bringing her into the warmth of the brownstone building without delay. She threaded through a group of schoolchildren milling around the canoe just as a ruddy-faced boy fresh from the cold recoiled at the sight
of the masked witch-doctor in the prow. He bumped her with his elbow and dropped a fistful of marbles, sending them bouncing across the stone floor in a cascading chaos of echoes. Catherine swept past the admonishing teacher to the end of her weekly pilgrimage: the Hall of the Sun at the Hayden Planetarium, home of the Willamette meteorite.

  The Hall itself was a dazzling setting for the rough stone. An illuminated globe that represented the sun hung among models of the planets, revolving and rotating above a marble floor marked with the constellations of the zodiac. But it was the foyer of this grand chamber that drew her like a moth to a flame, where a hulk of cratered iron the size of a DeSoto taxicab rested on a block of granite flanked by a pair of benches. The largest meteorite ever found in the United States.

  Catherine perched on the same bench as always, a vantage from which she watched children climb the mammoth rock and fit their petite bodies into its nooks and crannies with a mixture of awe and horror. For her part, she kept to a safe distance despite her fascination. Close enough to feel the hum it emitted, but far enough away that she could form coherent thoughts and recall her own name, even though she had promised herself she wouldn’t give it to the man in the gray overcoat if he finally asked.

  He was there again today, waiting for her in the entry hall of the Hayden, sitting on the bench opposite the one she favored. The first time she’d noticed him, he’d been standing in a corner behind a cluster of schoolchildren. In the weeks that had elapsed since then, he had gradually grown bolder, approaching her domain like a hunter who has abandoned stealth in closing the final yards to his prey.

  Catherine had left her own coat at the checkroom, as she always did, whether visiting the research library on the fifth floor for homework or the meteor for… What? What exactly did she come here for? Psychic sustenance? The taste of the numinous she’d failed to find in the Baptist Church of her ancestors in prosaic Newburyport, Massachusetts? Or perhaps proof there was more to the universe than could be analyzed in ancient texts and mounted in glass cases? All she was sure of at nineteen was this: of the many and varied cathedrals New York City had on offer, the Museum of Natural History had become her church, and the Willamette meteorite her altar.