Everybody Comes to Marlowe's (Part One)

          A storm of biblical proportions raged the night that I stared down my imminent demise, in the form of a gun pointed directly at my head, in a ramshackle structure in the middle of nowhere.  A desperate last-ditch ploy to stave off catching a bullet in my eye didn't exactly work as planned, and as I saw the trigger being depressed, I tried thinking of something to say or do in the split second before a loud crack ended the futile thought and my entire body convulsed with the impact.  In the same moment, a flash of lightning briefly illuminated the scene, and my last vision was that of another shape, inhuman and twisted, looming over my murderer from behind.

As I fell into the darkness, a jumble of images filled my mind - a golden ring with a twisted serpent symbol; a shadowy figure stepping out of the fog off a lake; a paper crane sitting on a desk; a sundial covered in blood; the smile of a beautiful emerald-eyed woman with her head cradled in pale hands; and the bar.  Marlowe's. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

The story truly begins at the opposite of where it was apparently ending - in the middle of the city, during daytime, with a clear blue sky on one of the hottest days of the year.

“We will, of course, double your usual fee.”  My flagging interest suddenly found new life when my ears caught the words double and fee.

Tobias dabbed his forehead with a pocket handkerchief, mopping his damp brow and then attempting to loosen his collar with a finger.  “Are you sure your air conditioning is in proper working order, William?”

“I’m sure,” I replied drily.  We were suffering from an unusually hot September, even for Florida, with summer extending its stay like a particularly unwelcome houseguest.  The prior day the building’s AC had gone down, and for those unwilling or unable to leave for the day, became utterly unbearable (I left within 15 minutes; one of the virtues of being self employed is the freedom to not be at work when you so choose).  Today, the repaired AC units were blasting at full Arctic levels.  I suspect that if Tobias were to end up in the real Arctic, he would still sweat profusely.

Mr. Tobias Solomon, represented Kallidah Insurance, one of my regular clients.  He had a penchant for panama hats and white suits, and peppered his speech with ten dollar words.  Despite his portly frame, the advice of doctors, and at least one heart attack, he seemed determined to laugh in the face of death by living life to its fullest, or at least the culinary portion of life, unaware that death was likely to soon laugh back.

He procured a manila envelope from his briefcase and slid it across the desk, and then removed his hat and began fanning himself with it.  Inside the folder laid a photo of a pale older gentleman, with dark, thinning hair fading to grey, and wearing an outdated suit.  Beneath the picture laid a few pages, mostly personal data.

                “This is Professor Kyle Paulson, a history professor, age 54.  Expert in some dead culture or other; the relevant details are within the report.  He has gone missing, and his lovely bride of only a few brief years had quite a substantial life insurance policy on him – large enough that we are naturally concerned, to say the least, at his, shall we say, mysterious disappearance?  The  official police force has been… less than thorough in their investigation.”

                Something wasn’t right about all this.  Kallidah usually provided me with cases involving small businesses or wealthy clients claiming significant damages covered by a policy; they had never dropped a life insurance case in my lap before.  “My dance card is currently empty, Tobias, but I find it strange that Kallidah would be so concerned with one little individual policy, regardless of the amount.”

                Tobias was unfazed.  “Management was impressed by your work in elucidating the circumstances in the unfortunate Bank of Atlanta affair.  That, along with your prior employment in law enforcement as a police detective, made them consider you the ideal candidate for the case.”

                “As for the other matter your touched upon… as much as it pains me to reveal this, our company recently made a not insignificant amount of… missteps with their indiviual policies.  While I cannot divulge the pertinent details, this has left the board of directors with a marked distaste for any further unfortunate mistakes.  We must determine beyond a shadow of a doubt that this claim is legitimate and not fraudulent in nature.”

                Well, work was work… and it was my area of expertise.  “I take it you want me to start with the wife?”

                He shifted uncomfortably in his chair.  “Ah, that… particular angle is being handled..  We don’t want to expose our hand, especially if she is involved in shady dealings.  No, we would prefer if you concentrated on locating the missing professor himself.  Perhaps you could track down his whereabouts and determine his true status.”

                He scanned my desk.  “William, I will never understand why you do not keep any personal accouterments in your office.  It lacks… personality.”

                “Branching into feng shui, Tobias?  Don’t quit your day job.”  Not to say he wasn’t right, but it wasn’t his business.    I remembered Alice telling me the same thing, years ago, and I smiled to myself at the thought.

                 Tobias slowly rose from the chair.  “Just an observation, my friend.  In any case, keep me updated.  Shall we discuss your progress over lunch tomorrow?  Be at Alexander’s at the Crossroads at noon, sharp.”  With that he shook my hand, and headed off.

                As I returned to the dossier, something had been itching in the back of my head, when he said history professor.  I knew that there were only a few places in Central Florida were he could be teaching…

                UFO.  The University of Florida, Orlando.  Damn.

                I put the thought aside to deal with later, and went over his bio.  Professor Kyle Joseph Paulson, born in 1946, joined the US Army during the Vietnam War but served stateside.  Following the war, he pursued his PhD is History with a specialty in Mesoamerican Cultures, and married for the first time.  Currently on wife number two, Linda.  No children by either marriage.  The first marriage apparently ended in a bitter, contested divorce, I made a note to check on the current whereabouts of the first wife.

                As for the disappearance itself, he and his car had not been seen in days, but there were no usual traces of a person fleeing; no emptied bank accounts, clothes and suitcases missing, and so on.  No one that knew him noticed anything unusual.  The good professor had simply vanished off the face of the earth.

I made a few calls to some police contacts of mine, and headed to the parking garage.  Once in the car, it took me a moment to realize that I had been idling the car, just staring forward and gripping the steering wheel.  Having to go back to UFO had me more rattled than I’d like.  Nothing for it but to grit my teeth and plunge ahead.  I swung out of the shade of the garage into the blazing hot, cloudless September day.

UFO – or “UF-O” as no one but official documents called it – had arisen from the ashes of a failing technical school, which I had attended before the revamp of the state university system in the late seventies.  And here I was – a time traveler from a quarter century ago, getting to the future the hard way.    And yet, the core remained the same; school was laid out in a circular pattern with outliers, and the further I went towards the center, the further I went back historically, like the inversion of the rings of a massive oak tree.  The old tech school buildings – admin, the library, engineering, and the concrete bunker-like structure that once held the entirety of the computer science department – still stood as I remembered them.  The library was the center of it all, now with an annex doubling its size but still dominating the view with an upper story like an old medieval castle, complete with an enclosed parapet on the top floor.  But as much as I remembered, there were few genuine memories.  Almost all of my good times back in college happened away from campus.  And as for the bad times…for a moment, I shivered to despite the heat, and I involuntarily glanced over at at a stand of trees off to the side, sheltering a quite glade.  This time I’ll visit, I told myself, like I always told myself on the rare occurrence that I came back here.  But I was tired of putting it off; it was time to really do it.  After I finished what I came here for.

                At the History Department, Paulson’s office was currently overseen by his grad assistant, a young African-American man named Michael Ellis, a bespectacled post-doc whose specialty was “the parts of Floridian history that most people wanted to forget”, as he told me when I introduced myself.  His office was next door to his boss, and was meticulously clean, with a shelf of carefully organized books and a cork board with various old photographs and newspaper clippings.

                “Do you work much with missing person cases, Mr. Chandler?” he asked, naturally curious.

                “I did when I was with the police; but that was years ago.  Nowadays, it’s usually long hours with reams of dull documents about insurance claims.”

                “This must be a welcome break, then.”  He pulled out a large ring of keys and unlocked the door to the missing professor’s office.  Dr. Paulson did not share his assistant’s cleanliness; the shelves, walls, and desk were crammed with nicknacks and oddities that defied rhyme and reason.  Books and papers formed a maelstrom of the written word.  I had my work cut out for me.

                “Who’s this cheery fellow?” I asked, hefting a small stone statue of some grimacing monstrous form with curved fangs.

          

      Michael peered at the statue for a moment.   “Camazotz.  A Mayan bat god, I think.  Dr. Paulson could’ve told you more.” 

                Glancing around, the office was a largish square room, with only the door we entered as an exit.  No windows. 

                “Has anyone been in here?  Has anyone taken anything?” I asked.

                “No,” Dr. Ellis responded.  “He usually let me work independently; I rarely needed to come see him.  Apart from checking to make sure he wasn’t here, no one came in here as far as I know.”

                There were telltale signs – slight ones to be sure, easy to miss if you weren’t looking for them – that someone had been in here and they had been looking for something.  Then, something faint and unpleasant hit my nostrils.  I sniffed.  “Do you smell that?”

                He frowned.  “Yes… I noticed something like that before.  Something… fishy?  No, more like a reptile.”

                It didn’t appear to be anything live, or decaying, so I filed it away.  “Do you know what he was researching?”

                “Not really.  He was always very secretive; I got the feeling that he chose me because our areas of research didn’t overlap; I was fine with that.  He left me alone and I left him alone.”

                I flipped on his computer, hoping that he might have left it unprotected, but it ended up in vain; the CRT screen remained blank.  I turned the power back off and examined the computer itself; it looked like someone had opened it up and not fully put the panel back on.  I unscrewed the bolts and lifted the panel.

                “Someone took the hard drive,” I said.  “Interesting…”  The feeling that old Tobias hadn’t told me everything at the start was getting stronger.  Something else was going on here…

                “Wait, someone broke in here?” said Michael, sounding genuinely surprised.

                “Doubtful,” I responded.  “No signs of forced entry.  Whomever got in had access.”

                I poked around the piles, which mostly consisted of Mesoamerican research dipped heavily in jargon.  I checked in locations that might’ve been missed; behind a desk drawer, inside the pages of a book; until finding something usual behind the file cabinet.  I managed to fish out a torn scrap of paper, and shook the dust and old webbing off of it.  The only thing on it was an image in solid black of a branching tree with leaves scattered about, and the letters “YGG”.  It looked like a letterhead of a document.

                I showed it to Dr. Ellis, who was mystified.  “I guess it might be… what’s it called… Yggrdasil?  The giant tree from Norse mythology.”

                I nodded; that made sense.  “How is that connected to the study of Mesoamerican Cultures?”

                He shrugged.  “Not a clue.  Not exactly my area of expertise, you know?”

                The bookshelves appeared to be organized by whatever personal system to professor had.  They were packed to overflowing, but I noticed one glaring omission, like a missing front tooth from a smile.  The gap didn’t have dust in it, indicating a recent pull.

                “Do you happen to know what was here?” I asked.  Dr. Ellis adjusted his glasses and thought a moment.

                “I believe that was Foundations of Anthropology.  It’s a first-year textbook you can find in the student bookstore.  No idea why it’s gone.” 

                I glanced around again, and… jackpot.  I saw a blank, used notepad crammed in a pile.  Picking it out, I could see faint indentations in top paper.

                “Doctor Ellis, want to see an old detective cliché?”

                “Sure.”

                “Got a pencil?”

                On the way to the library, I mulled over the fragments of text I managed to pull off the notepad.  Professor Paulson seemed to be paranoid, although apparently rightly so – in scribbles he stated “Special Collections won’t let me see”,  “serpent flower” “must have the book”, and “[something] under his dreadful form”.  I needed to see if he had been there; hopefully he had signed into the guestbook.  Considering that he encountered resistance and without knowing the situation fully, I figured I needed to not reveal my intentions.

                I headed up to the fifth floor, with nostalgia dogging my every moves as I passed by familiar stacks still filled with texts stamped with the old tech school name.  I glanced at the balcony windows, and the shiver I had felt earlier returned; I turned away and headed to the nearby door; creaking it open, there was no one in the front room, just display cases of the more valuable rare books, a table and chairs, and the guestbook on a wooden stand.  The Special Collections had been on the top floor of the library since it had been built, and I had been there a few times back in the day, despite the presence of…

                “Why are you here?” a gravelly, very familiar voice demanded.  A long buried feeling of dread resurfaced, and I turrned to find the wizened and malignant, twisted form of the Terrible Old Man.

                I had no idea what his real name was.  “TOM” was a nickname from my old college days, derived from a old horror story.  He always looked like he was a day away from expiring, and here, twenty years later, looked the same and yet also older and more terrible; yellowish eyes, odd white hairs on the face missed while shaving, long cracked fingernails on hands that were more skin than anything else.

                I handed him my alumni card; as far as I knew, the Special Collections were open to the public, but I was taking no chances.  He held the card inches before his eyes, and he scanned it for a minute like he was hoping to find something on it to justify kicking me out.  Ultimately, he ungraciously thrust the card back into my hands.

                “Do you know what books you are looking for?” he mumbled.  I gave him my best insincere smile and a list of three books.  Glaring again, he scanned the list, then looked back at me, then the list again.  He abruptly turned back into the corridor off the room, heading for the Special Collections archive.

As soon as he was out of sight, I immediately went over to the guestbook and looked back over the past few days.  The text I had gotten off the notepad was right; the professor had signed in, and wrote “Barlow - BELL COLLECTION” as his reason for the visit.  Curious… one other person earlier that day, a Labrenz Goettner, had also written “Barlow – BELL COLLECTION”, signed with elaborate, careful cursive compared to Paulson’s hasty block print of his name.  The name sounded almost familiar, but eluded me.  Still, I knew it was Prussian; plenty of emigres from the war had formed an expatriate community here.  Quickly I flipped back to today’s page and managed to get back into a nonchalant pose as TOM came back in with the requested books.  He stood over me as I checked a few pages, made a handful of notes, and then left without a goodbye.  Had Dr. Paulson been right to fear him, or was it just a generally disdain for all humanity that he possessed?  Maybe even both, I hazarded.

                I went down to the fourth floor, and went to check the electronic catalogue for the “Bell Collection”.

It turned out that there was quite a listing for it; papers, journals, books and so forth.  My heart sank when I saw that it was housed in the Special Collections in its entirety; I dreaded going back to face the old man.  But scrolling through it, I managed to make a connection – a volume called “The Serpent in the Flowers”; author Robert H. Barlow, published 1937, Dragon-fly Press; probably the ‘serpent flower’ mentioned by Paulson.  More importantly, the status was “On loan to the Orange County Historical Society”.  My next lead.

                I went back to the office to say goodbye to Michael; Dr. Ellis appeared to me to have been upfront and genuinely puzzled.  He was amused to hear that TOM had been there back in the day.

                When I told him were I was heading, he reached into his pocket.  “Look, if you’re going to the historical museum…”  He handed me a business card that read “PENDULUM INVESTIGATIONS – Cliological Research A Specialty”.  An address in Little Prussia.  Curious. “you may want to use their services if they don’t give you what you need.”

                “Thanks, I’ll keep it in mind.”  I pocketed the card.

                “So you’re heading out now?” he asked.

                I hesitated, but I knew deep down I couldn’t put it off.  “No, there’s one more thing I have to do.”

TWENTY YEARS.  It was hard to believe it had really been two decades since I’d set foot there.  Sure, I had visited the old campus a number of times over the years, but somehow I had never found a reason to revisit this place.   Or always found a reason not to.

The Wabe, it was called.  Alice had laughed when I told her its name, saying that she knew why it was called that, but she wouldn’t tell me.  What had once been an open grassy field had been turned into a grass plot around the old sundial, surrounded by tall oak trees that diffused the sunlight and leafy hedges that muffled the sounds of the surrounding school.  A peaceful place, for quiet contemplation.  Except to my irritation, a nervous looking fellow, older than me, stood off to the side, coughing into a hankerchief.  Glancing over, I noticed he was pale, with straggly hair and sunken eyes, almost like a junky in withdrawal, although a well-dressed one if that was the case.  He was staring blankly at me; I tried to blot him out of my senses and focused on the memorial.  I closed my eyes, and for a moment I could almost hear the sounds of the screaming and chaos, and see the vividness of the carnage, the blood… and feel that cold, that unrelenting frost that should not have been on a warm May’s day in Florida.  Twenty five goddamn years ago.  Could it really have been a quarter of century?

“It’s not the real thing, you know.  They put the original sundial in storage somewhere when they made the memorial. This is just a copy, a fake.”

The moment ruined, I glared at the wrecked man, who was coughing again.  At that point, however, the voice tied it all together.  I knew him, once.  “Clive… Clive Barrows…”  No wonder I didn’t recognize him.  He looked twenty years older than he actually was.  I guessed that his lifestyle wasn’t exactly a healthy one in recent days.

“Chan the Man,” he responded, grinning.  I had always hated that nickname, and that was the key that unlocked a door to feelings I thought had been buried a while ago, feelings of anger and loathing that had never truly gone away.

“Why are you here?” I asked pointedly, my tone causing him to instinctively flinch.  While not impossible as a coincidence, it seemed odd that he’d be here at the same time as me.

“Just paying my respects, paying my respects same as you,” he said, now sullen and defensive.  “How you’ve been?  I heard you became an insurance salesman or something…”

“Or something,” I agreed, and let the conversation hang there, in silence.

Finally, he gave in.  “Really?  After all this time?  You’re still pissed off?”

“After all this time,” I agreed again.  By this point I found that anger I had locked had been locked away to emerge suddenly now was fading fast; now, I felt more like I just wanted this part of my past to stay in the past.  I started to walk away.

“Cleo’s real sick, man!” he blurted out and that stopped me cold.  I turned to face him.

“How bad is it?” I asked softly.

“Doctors aren’t giving her much hope.  Cancer.  Look, I can give you the information.  I mean, at least call her, or write her, or something.  She deserves that much.”

The flames had flickered out by now, leaving nothing but cold ashes inside.  I felt suddenly weary, and closed my eyes.  As much as I didn’t want to bother Alice, I needed to talk to her.  “Give me the information.”

“Sure, man, sure,” he fumbled in a pocket and handed over a folded piece of paper.  “You know, we were just here, last year, at the KAOS Festival… we thought you might…”
“Don’t.”  I walked away and this time he stayed silent as he receded in the distance behind me. 

I gave myself a moment to let myself cool down for a moment.  Whatever I had expected from my impromptu pilgrimage, I hadn’t expected that.  Driving off, I headed off towards downtown; but on an impulse, I swung the car over to the old college hangout, a bar called Luna’s; the only bar, in fact, in the immediate area of the campus back then.  I didn’t really expect otherwise, but it had been replaced by some other generic bar – probably mutiple times over the years – now filled with students that had been barely out of diapers when I hung out there.  What did you expect, I asked myself, the place preserved like a museum exhibit, with photos of the old gang on the walls?  Did I want reassurance that I wasn’t forgotten, or that I could just step back into the way things were?

Times change.  Time to focus on the present again.