Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron by The Book of Cthulhu Page A

spent the past five hours staring at this twenty page report, trying to think of a way of summarizing their drily quantifiable terror in words that will give the reader power over them, the power to think the unthinkable: but it’s proving difficult. The new man in the White House is straight-talking, demands straight answers. He’s pious enough not to believe in the supernatural, confident enough that just listening to one of his speeches is an uplifting experience if you can close your eyes and believe in morning in America. There is probably no way of explaining Project Koschei, or XK-PLUTO, or MK-NIGHTMARE, or the gates, without watering them down into just another weapons system—which they are not. Weapons may have deadly or hideous effects, but they acquire moral character from the actions of those who use them. Whereas these projects are indelibly stained by a patina of ancient evil…
    He hopes that if the balloon ever does go up, if the sirens wail, he and Andrea and Jason will be left behind to face the nuclear fire. It’ll be a merciful death compared with what he suspect lurks out there, in the unexplored vastness beyond the gates. The vastness that made Nixon cancel the manned space program, leaving just the standing joke of a white-elephant shuttle, when he realised just how hideously dangerous the space race might become. The darkness that broke Jimmy Carter’s faith and turned Lyndon B. Johnson into an alcoholic.
    He stands up, nervously shifts from one foot to the other. Looks round at the walls of his cubicle. For a moment the cigarette smouldering on the edge of his ash tray catches his attention: wisps of blue-grey smoke coil like lazy dragons in the air above it, writhing in a strange cuneiform text. He blinks and they’re gone, and the skin in the small of his back prickles as if someone had pissed on his grave.
    “Shit.” Finally, a spoken word in the silence. His hand is shaking as he stubs the cigarette out. Mustn’t let this get to me. He glances at the wall. It’s nineteen hundred hours; too late, too late. He should go home, Andy will be worrying herself sick.
    In the end it’s all too much. He slides the thin folder into the safe behind his chair, turns the locking handle and spins the dial, then signs himself out of the reading room and goes through the usual exit search.
    During the thirty mile drive home, he spits out of the window, trying to rid his mouth of the taste of Auschwitz ashes.
    Late Night in the White House
    The colonel is febrile, jittering about the room with gung-ho enthusiasm. “That was a mighty fine report you pulled together, Jourgensen!” He paces over to the niche between the office filing cabinet and the wall, turns on the spot, paces back to the far side of his desk. “You understand the fundamentals. I like that. A few more guys like you running the company and we wouldn’t have this fuckup in Tehran.” He grins, contagiously. The colonel is a firestorm of enthusiasm, burning out of control like a forties comic-book hero. He has Roger on the edge of his chair, almost sitting at attention. Roger has to bite his tongue to remind himself not to call the colonel ‘sir’—he’s a civilian, not in the chain of command. “That’s why I’ve asked Deputy Director McMurdo to reassign you to this office, to work on my team as company liaison. And I’m pleased to say that he’s agreed.”
    Roger can’t stop himself: “To work here, sir?” Here is in the basement of the Executive Office Building, an extension hanging off the White House. Whoever the colonel is he’s got pull, in positively magical quantities. “What will I be doing, sir? You said, your team—”
    “Relax a bit. Drink your coffee.” The colonel paces back behind his desk, sits down. Roger sips cautiously at the brown sludge in the mug with the Marine Corps crest. “The president told me to organize a team,” says the colonel, so casually that Roger nearly chokes on his coffee, “to