Jazz Age Cthulhu Read online

  ***

  Solomon King dreamed of darkness and fire and blood. He remembered his own birth, which he was told most men didn’t, and that only went to reaffirm what he had always known—that he was different than other men.

  Though he looked to all eyes like a fit man in his early fifties, he estimated his own age at nearer a century. He had been born on a plantation, a slave, the bastard son of his master and one of the house slaves. One of his earliest memories was of watching his father kill his mother and use her skin in a ceremony. It was his introduction to magic, and he never looked back.

  His father’s wife was barren and the man needed a son. “My own blood,” he said, “will make the rituals stronger.” He hadn’t been wrong.

  He’d given Solomon his name, raised him, taught him everything that he knew. Together, they opened up black abysses and called forth things that would blast a man’s sanity, leave him gibbering and white-haired in a corner. Together, they had done unspeakable things. But always, he treated Solomon as a slave, never an equal, so, he underestimated his offspring. When Solomon finally grew strong enough to overpower him, to cut the silver ring from his finger and feed his heart to the very devils they had called to do his bidding, he swore to his dying bastard of a father that he would never kneel before another man as long as he lived.

  Even as he said those words, though, he had still been young, foolish. He hadn’t yet understood the depths of the powers that existed in the world and beyond it, in the spaces between the stars. When he first came to Kansas City, the Order of Kings had sought to deny him his initiation into their number, but his powers had been too great to be denied, even then. As one of them, he had learned new arts and his powers had grown, but they had never ceased to think of him as something less than they were, just a tool to be used, as his father had. He knew it was only a matter of time before they demanded that he kneel.

  But he saw farther than the other members of the Order. They sought to call up daemons to provision their earthly lives, to grant them material power and material pleasures. They were men of small appetites, small ambitions. The devils they called upon existed on the fringes of things, on the edges of awareness, in the corner of the mind’s eye. But there were things that dwelt in the gulfs beyond these, things so titanic in power that they could only exist in small parts at a time, could only brush up against the spheres which marked the outer limits of man’s knowledge. Solomon King knew that these things, too, could be conjured, summoned, and bound. It simply required a larger circle than any that had ever been drawn before, forged of sterner stuff than chalk and salt and blood.

  BRIDGE

  Lying in his bed in the boarding house that night, listening to the background hum of the trains and the music from the dance halls a few blocks away, Jasper deWitt could still hear the music of the Lesser Keys resonating in his skull. More than that, he could still see the images that the music had conjured for him when he closed his eyes. Not the comforting glow of the hymns he remembered from his childhood, but a flickering darkness against the backs of his eyelids. He felt as if fireworks were going off in his brain and he saw shapes etched in green flame, like complicated letters he’d never seen before. More than that, he saw figures, things that were not men nor beasts but something in-between. While his mother had taken him to church, his grandmother had told him stories about things left over from some other belief system. These things he saw now seemed more like something from there. If he were back in his mother’s church, she’d tell him they were devils, and that he had to turn his back on them, tell them to get behind, but he didn’t want to turn his back, not just yet.

  In the dark places behind his eyes, which seemed darker now, he saw men with the heads of beasts and beasts with the heads of men. A raven wielding a sword of fire rode on a lion, a horse with human hands walked on its hind legs, an old man bearing a staff topped with serpents rode a crocodile. The things moved in the flickering light like marionettes, like the images he’d seen in the moving picture theatres. Somewhere in the back, a figure watched him with round, golden eyes from beneath a golden crown. He felt those eyes peering into his soul before he opened his own and stared once again at the ceiling of the boarding house.

  Jasper didn’t know what kind of music he’d heard that night. He could hardly remember the tune, at the same time that it continued to throb in his bones. It wasn’t ragtime or blues; it wasn’t anything he’d ever heard before. But he knew one thing, as he lay there in the boarding house listening to the echo of it resounding in the chambers of his heart: His job had just changed. He wouldn’t be bringing these boys back to Gerald Tyson. He’d been a jumped-up errand boy all his life, and he’d never once aspired to much more than that, but hearing the Lesser Keys play had reminded him that he’d had dreams when he was a boy, had loved music more than he loved breathing. He made an oath to himself, that night, that he was going to find their secret if it was the last thing he ever did. He honestly didn’t know if they were playing the music of God or the Devil or something in-between, but whatever they were doing, and however they did it, he knew that it was a miracle, and he’d be damned if he was going to turn that over to a man like Gerald Tyson.

  ***

  Caroline Bloom had no intention of finding an escort to take her to Solomon King’s. She had no doubt that there would be plenty of men there willing to take a few lumps for a decently pretty, unattached girl if the need arose and she knew how to take care of herself. The Colt in her purse was the only chaperone she needed. Her daddy had made a fortune manufacturing guns. He’d taught her how to shoot a pistol since she was big enough to hold one. She didn’t stop practicing after he died. By now, she could out-shoot any man she’d ever met.

  The place itself just looked like a big, wood-frame house. It leaned a little bit, like it was worn out. She was sure that if she saw it in the daytime, the paint would be peeling. It sat back from the road, screened mostly by scraggly trees. There was a hand-painted sign and a mailbox on the dirt road. The sign said, “Solomon King’s,” not the full name of the place. She guessed people just knew that part. Also painted on the sign was a symbol, almost like a signature or a scrawl but sort of circular. She didn’t know what it was.

  In front of the house was a graveled-in drive, big and filled with cars. Cars were parked alongside the road, too, for maybe half-a-mile in both directions, and she could hear the music coming out of the building before she even got out of the car. Obviously, this was a happening place.

  She got out and sent her driver back to the hotel. She could call him if she needed to, but she figured she’d have no trouble getting a ride home. She said for him to come back at dawn, if he hadn’t heard from her.

  Inside, Solomon King’s Mine didn’t look a whole lot more impressive than it had from without. The lights were turned down low. The main room housed a bar along one wall, and a bunch of tables fitted out with checkered tablecloths and candles that made it look like an Italian diner. Saloon-style swinging doors let into a back kitchen from which the sounds of pots and pans could be heard on the rare occasion when the music and the noise of the patrons died down enough. There was a stage on the far side of the big room, near the stairs that led up to the second story, with a sign above it done in lights that said, “The Lesser Keys,” though it wasn’t illuminated when she came in. An outfit consisting of a pianist, a few horn players, and a fellow on the banjo were playing when she entered. A space in front of the stage had been cleared of tables and people were dancing.

  Segregation obviously wasn’t in force here, though the tables still tended to be split up by color. Nobody seemed to get preferential treatment. The men at the best tables were as likely to be black jazz musicians as they were mustachioed white men in double-breasted suits. A few brief chats with men who came up to buy her a drink confirmed what she suspected, that what mattered most in Solomon King’s was who had that man’s favor and that favor could seemingly go to anyone who was of use to him, black or white,
rich or poor.

  Unfortunately, she didn’t see Jonathon in the crowd, nor anyone who looked like the actress he’d run off with, Magda Whatsername. She took a seat at the bar and ordered a drink, content for the time being to wait. She was just raising her glass to her lips when she heard the sound of sirens cutting dully through the din.

  ***

  Solomon King knew that the police were coming. His enemies in the Order had finally pried the ponderous political machine of Kansas City into action against him. Even now, the distant sirens were approaching. He knew that in the club above, there would be chaos soon. He didn’t need the daemons to show it to him. He could see it if he closed his eyes. The place would explode; the boards would come tumbling down around his patrons. Blood would spill on warped floorboards. He saw men and women trampled in a rush to the exits; he saw the police cars pulling up. There was plenty in the roadhouse that he could be arrested for, now that the protections of Boss Tom’s minions were no longer with him. Plenty of legal indiscretions, even if they didn’t venture down into the caverns and see what he had wrought there. But he didn’t panic. In the dim, flickering light of the basement, he even smiled, because he knew that they were too late. They had waited too long to act and now their time was past.

  Without rush, savoring the moment, he walked up the basement stairs and into the room where the Lesser Keys waited. The daemons had warned him not to send Magda out first, not this time. He knew that he didn’t need to, that the time for reliance on her was past. He walked around, to each one in turn, and he whispered his instructions in their ears. From their cases, they drew their instruments, smooth and sure. In the main room, the last band’s final number drew to a close. In the relative quiet that followed the applause, the sound of sirens could be heard, a faint baying from afar. Heads cocked, ears pricked, but before anyone could make a move, Solomon King pushed open the door and the Lesser Keys took the stage one last time.

  TURNAROUND

  There was a growing edge of panic in the air of Solomon King’s Mine as the sound of the sirens drew gradually nearer, but all of it ceased when the lights above the stage burst into life. The growing susurrus of voices hushed and an eerie silence settled on the whole house. Everyone in the place strained to listen. The silence seemed to spread outward from the still figures on the little stage until it filled the room, blotting out the distant wailing from outside.

  Caroline Bloom sat forward on her barstool, her hand straying unconsciously to the handle of the pistol in her purse. Jasper deWitt stopped leaning against the wall near the exit and turned his eyes to the stage, the matchstick that he’d been absently chewing dropping from his lips. Solomon King stood in the shadowy doorway behind the stage and watched as the ripple spread out across the club’s patrons. As one, like puppets all being drawn up by a single cord, the Lesser Keys raised their instruments to their lips, readied their strings for plucking, laid their fingers on the keys of the piano. Solomon King drew a line through the air with his hand and the first note was played. After that, everything changed.

  ***

  No official police report was ever filed about the raid on Solomon King’s. Of those officers who survived the night, few ever spoke of it except when they had indulged in too much drink, or when they were confessing their sins to their priests, but none of them ever forgot it. How when their cars pulled up to the front doors, there was a flash of green light from behind every window, and when they kicked the doors down, it was as if the shadows inside the roadhouse had come to life. Unnatural things, figures with the heads of beasts, naked men astride crocodiles, things with too many limbs, all dragging the club’s patrons into the darkness in the corners. And everyone standing, staring, unable to move, hardly struggling as the terrible things laid hand or claw or hoof on them. And on the stage, the band playing on, limned in a green corposant.

  The officers were part of the Pendergast machine and they came knowing that the raid wasn’t normal police business. The first ones through the door were armed with Tommy guns. When they saw what waited for them on the other side, most of them hesitated only a moment before opening fire. There wasn’t time for the music to enter them, to stop them and still them, before their bullets started ripping into the crowd.

  Darnell Kent was one of the first officers to step into Solomon King’s that night. The next morning, he was dragged out of the charred wreckage of the roadhouse, badly burnt but still alive. What hair was left on his head had gone from red to completely white. He never spoke again, not about what he saw that night, nor about anything else. And even if he had, he wouldn’t have had the words to describe it. Somehow, the press and chaos of the interior of the roadhouse brought him closer to the stage than any other officer. Amid the hail of bullets and the roaring of flames from knocked-over oil lamps, he found himself staring up at the Lesser Keys, who still played in the midst of the chaos. Who played on, even though he had seen bullets tear into them, even though bullets punched through them even as he watched.

  He heard their music then, over the roar and the clatter, and the world seemed to freeze, to slow down. He looked up past them, past the green fire that surrounded them, past the ceiling and the rooms on the second floor, past the roof of the house and the clouds overhead, past the night sky and the stars, into something deeper and darker and older than any cave. In the flashes of the muzzle blasts, in the flicker of the flames, he saw something moving there in that darkness and every thought he had ever had, every word he had ever known, fled his mind forever.

  ***

  When the Lesser Keys began playing, it was as if a switch flipped. For most of the patrons of Solomon King’s Mine, time stopped. They could see individual motes of dust caught in the air, wisps of flame rising from the lamps. They felt as if they could see the notes of the music rising up around the players. Each of them was touched by the music in a way that they had never been touched before. They turned their eyes to the stage, mesmerized.

  For Caroline Bloom and Jasper deWitt, the effect was different. A switch still flipped, but the result wasn’t a light going out but one coming on. In that moment, Jasper saw his entire life captured in a prism, a hundred tiny moments in which he had stayed his hand, done what he was told, been afraid. Caroline Bloom saw a hundred paths unwalked, a hundred lives set aside, a hundred desires unpursued. Each remembered, suddenly, why they had really come to Solomon King’s that night, not the reasons they would have given if they had been asked, but the real reason that had driven them. Each one of them turned eyes to the stage, not blind but newly opened, and they saw through the darkness and the smoke, and they learned the secret.

  Jonathon Bloom stood on that stage, in white tuxedo and black bowtie. He had always been an indifferent trumpet player, but now he played with a sound that was beyond any human sound and Caroline saw that it was because he was beyond anything human. His eyes were glassy, his features gray. He was dead, though he walked and stood and played on. Stone dead, as was every man on that stage. Their fingers plucked the strings, danced across the keys. Their lungs worked like bellows to push air through the brass pipes. But they weren’t people, anymore; they were themselves an instrument, being played by unseen hands.

  When the officers burst through the door, when the chatter of the Tommy guns began, Caroline and Jasper were already moving, already pushing past the frozen patrons toward the shadowy doorway behind the stage. They heard the doors come down, heard the gunfire start, heard the crackle of flames. They saw out of the corners of their eyes the hands coming out of the shadows, the devils come finally to drag the sinners down. But they both knew without having the words that something worse was waiting, so they didn’t turn back.

  ***

  When the music started, Solomon King turned away from the stage and headed back to the basement stairs. His work up here was done, but there was still more to do. In the cavernous basement, all the noise from above was drowned, muffled. There was only a kind of echoing silence, the sound, he believed
, of outer space, or something even further away. The music of the spheres. A humming that filled his bones, that reverberated through the rock itself, that reverberated through this whole miserable world and far beyond it into the dark. A hum that kept him from hearing the footsteps of the two figures that pursued him.

  Jasper and Caroline met at the top of the basement stairs and they didn’t say a word to each other. One glance told them both that the other knew enough. Neither of them could really say why they walked down those stairs side-by-side. It was the end result of a lifetime of turning around, for one reason or another. Because they were afraid, because it was expected. At the head of those stairs, each one of them realized that they had a choice to make, that whatever lay at the bottom would change them forever, and they each chose to walk down.

  If Solomon King had consulted the daemons that he had at his beck and call, they could have told him the names and the histories of the man and woman who faced him when he turned around. They could have looked into their hearts and told him what it was that brought them there that night. They could have shown him Jasper, sitting in the church and hearing something more than God in the music. They could have shown him Caroline, huddled around a candle reading ghost stories in bed. But Solomon King didn’t ask. He knew his enemies, or thought he did. When he saw the man and woman come down the stairs, the lady with a gun in her hand, he believed that the Order had sent agents to stop him.

  “You’re too late,” he said, raising his arms in welcome. “You were born too late. My father made me the man I am today more than a hundred years ago and I unmade him. He taught me everything he knew and I fed his heart to the Devil. Do you think I’m afraid of your gun? Your masters are greedy tyrants who seek to insulate themselves with worldly power. I have seen farther than all of them. No bullet can kill me now.”

  Caroline raised the gun, but she didn’t pull the trigger. Somehow, she knew that he wasn’t wrong. She could feel the heat draining out of the room, in spite of the fire from up above. She could feel the thrum of buried engines, feel the world turning, feel it hurtling through empty space. She knew that something was happening here that was bigger and stronger than bullets and guns, but still, she held it, because she had learned over the years to put her trust in steel and in her own aim, and because she didn’t know what else to do.