Note: As with all of my stories, there is an underlying music track referred to within the text. In this case, it is Morrissey's 'Hold Onto Your Friends.'
*****
Lush, subtle, sophisticated β elegant; even in the deepest moments of the seemingly animal degradation themes of the sex act. That is how I always wanted her to be...
And tonight, she visited once more. ...In my office, in its heritage-listed Art Deco building right in the heart of the city. It was simply me indulging this fantasy lifestyle of mine; now that I could - ever since I sold my finance advising business. That is to say, ever since I sold the advising business my uncles actually started that ended up in my hands - the hands that were now at this moment touching the most incredibly expensive Demetre Chiparus statuette as it lay resting on my office desk, of the kneeling Isis; a small though heavy and solid mixed-media piece realized from the earlier etching by the Russian Ballet designer-genius Leon Bakst. Half-sitting, half-kneeling Isis, winged arms dramatically outstretched, and upturned palms holding two bronze bowls...
These days I neither have the ambition, nor the interest, nor the commitment to any of the formal pursuits of the family of years gone by.
In any case, now I have my time satisfyingly taken up with friends of the extreme ultra quality female kind. But real friends. Not those, as Karl Lagerfeld puts it, who are of the kind waggishly that he calls, 'expensive friends.'
A lover of mystery thrillers of the Twenties and Thirties β Philo Vance, Boston Blackie, Charlie Chan, Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade... That's me. All these things provided me with the 'art' of attracting the truly beautiful and the real and the wholesome, if admittedly also the sexual, real friend, here and there.
I run these little fake ads in Craigslist, you see, and places like, that from time to time:
'Bored rich guy with pencil thin mustache and office in Art Deco mid-city building. Dress up and come see me and be my fake detective client with a deep mystery to solve.'
*
Her name was Christine Merriwether, and she was one of my friends - a lot like me, in many ways. Of course also rich (although this was not a particular pre-condition for anything), though not a socialite, not involved in philanthropy or anything even remotely silly and self-absorbed like that. As with myself, she too could have been prey to a bored life, except of course that neither one of us was that unimaginative.
The theory for this coming evening was that she was going to be arriving at the office, dressed to kill - in the literary sense only, you will appreciate.
*
And so I waited until the evening came. When the already long enough city shadows began exponentially growing everywhere quicker, deeper, taller, darker and the very first bright neon lights started to come on glowing in the still simmering infra-red dusk, I waited still some more.
How long would I have to wait for her?
I decided to go clear the post box at the front of the building.
The small burled steel plates on the heel top pieces of my winged Gaziano and Girling spectator shoes made a lot of noise on the marble hallway floor outside my office as I walked to the line of boxes up against the black and white checker-pattern glossy ceramic tiled wall inside of the glass front doors. There were a few pieces of junk mail, three utilities bills, no letters, and one smallish packaged item.
I opened the package and took out the object within β a miniature Nikon Coolpix S1100pj. There were sticky notes on it. It was clearly meant to be switched on and whatever had been loaded on it watched. I turned down the main office lights and projected the video clip onto a clear section of wall near the side of my office desk.
It played film of a shortish man, black haired, holding an old Thompson drum-magazine sub-machine gun, firing off a dozen rounds at a Bianchi Cup-style circular metal standing target and making a helluva racket. And then some voice-over audio ran... 'I read your ad and decided to seek your help. The estate of my late grandmother β an actress of the Twenties and Thirties β has left me with substantial money and one rather unusual item. Which is not the collector's relic that you see me here firing off, LOL. The item in question about which I am communicating its nature to you, is specifically a hand-written letter addressed to one Harry Houdini, from Howard Philips Lovecraft."
The man doing the voice-over continued, now with a certain tone of droll irony, it seemed to me: '...Please help me. You must help me. You described yourself in your advertisement in a certain most compelling way. Firstly and principally, that you are very wealthy. Others I believe, would be far too easily motivated by money to comprehend the truth about the matter that I am raising with you. I realize that you only wanted to play a game. But do think of it as just a game then if you must. It will certainly in any event be of no avail to approach things from the perspective of complete reality as you thought you once knew it. For ever since I myself β who had previously considered my own outlook to be extremely down-to-earth β first opened the contents of the sealed letter, and read the short pages therein -, strange and at the same time fantastic things have been happening all round me and I am convinced by these things that what Lovecraft spoke of, are in fact all real matters, factually existing, and that his private and confidential judgement about them β which he secretly revealed to Mr. Houdini - was true.
'You must know certainly that Lovecraft himself claimed to have discovered a secret book by one called the 'Mad Arab' - Abdul Alhazred - in which were written certain wicked incantations. Forbidden arcane words β that opened portals to a certain specific deep and dark, primal and evil entity, living in Tartarus. And by employing these incantations he was able to compose his most mysterious tales of horror from what ensued and what he saw, in visions. He had found an addendum work too, one which contained the opposite form of incantation, supposedly in a pre-Arabic tongue, that was known only to the most powerful Pharaohs, and which granted them to perform the most amazing miracles of wealth and majestic prodigies of building and secret sciences. The incantations, the words themselves, are a talisman β that is to say, as you know, a thing that actually possesses the force it is intended ordinarily to merely represent...'
As the words trailed off at the end of the soundtrack, my office door eased open with the friendly face and charming figure of the beautiful Sarah Patterson standing in the doorway.
"You're supposed to be Christine.' I said, I suppose pouting. "I was waiting for Christine. Where is she, do you know?" I asked somewhat foolishly; of course she knew. Sarah and Christine were, um, close. As in close in that way.