annoyance or resignation, but excitement. Maybe he found something!
"Hey Ted, what's up?"
"It's all real, Laura, it's all real, and I'm scared shitless but also kind of excited, but I don't know what to do next!"
"Back up, back up. What happened?"
He told her how he'd followed Mr. Average out of Ye Olde New England Candlery, and how he'd seen "Yog-Sothoth", or else "Yo Sheila" spray-painted on the building next door.
"And then I smelled a scented candle coming from inside the building!"
"So the guy's looking for a filthy thrill, and he took a date there to do it among the pigeon poop."
"You know, if you'd seen this place, I think you'd understand that that's actually more far-fetched than my theory. But anyway, guess what the abandoned building was!"
"I don't know."
"Guess!"
"I don't know. A comic book store?"
"A four-story comic book store? No, It was a temple, Laura. An abandoned Masonic temple. The mall is the place of power! It's adjacent to the temple! Remember what it said in the notebook? They are trying to bring the Old Ones back to life right in the middle of the Providence Towne Centre Mall!"
"What the hell is a place of power, anyway? Is that from your pal's racist horror fiction?"
"Okay, he was dead long before my birth, so he's not my pal, and it's not in his fiction, at least not that I remember. Do you remember when I went out with Moonstone?"
"Moonstone? Was she the one with the crystals and the incense and stuff?"
"Yeah. I used to think about how hot her sister was whenever she started talking about New Age stuff, so this might be a little—"
"You used to think about her hot sister? Jesus, you are a disgusting human being."
"Yeah, yeah, I'm male, we knew this already. Moving on, what I think I remember about places of power are that they're places where the, like, boundaries between dimensions are thin, or something like that."
"The boundaries between dimensions."
"Well, yeah! If you're trying to call nameless horror forth from another dimension, maybe you need to go where the walls are thin!"
"That's nuts."
"I know. I mean, I even think that's weird and crazy, but these guys appear to believe it. I mean, in these stories, there are always a bunch of evil conspirators trying to bring the Old Ones back. I can't imagine anything else you'd possibly be trying to do with a Necronomicon in a place of power."
"Okay. I'll google places of power and see what I get. Where are you?"
"I'm home, or whatever, in this apartment."
"Were you followed?"
"No. I took a really roundabout way home, and I was checking the whole time. You'd be proud of me—I'm totally paranoid!"
"Let me think about our next move and call you in tonight." Laura suddenly didn't need any more caffeine. She decided she'd take a few minutes to look for places of power and then do some illicit digging through the Bureau's electronic files for stuff about Cthulhu. Maybe if any of it was real, there would be some kind of clue somewhere in the Bureau's database. Of course, she'd leave her footprints all over the system, and if McManus ever decided to check up on her, he'd see exactly what files she'd been calling up, but she'd worry about that when it happened.
First she clicked on her internet browser. She typed "Places of Power" into a search engine and spent the next fifteen minutes clicking around looking for information. What she found, on a variety of new-age blogs and huckster websites, was a remarkably consistent picture of what places of power were, and Ted, with just his horror-fiction background and some half-remembered at his disposal, had pretty well nailed it. All the sites claimed that there were places where the barriers to other dimensions were especially thin, and that people always responded to such places, whether they realized it or not, by building things like Eiffel Towers and Washington Monuments and Stonehenges near them. A badly translated lecture by some Czech guru or something said: "Humanity feels the
"Hey Ted, what's up?"
"It's all real, Laura, it's all real, and I'm scared shitless but also kind of excited, but I don't know what to do next!"
"Back up, back up. What happened?"
He told her how he'd followed Mr. Average out of Ye Olde New England Candlery, and how he'd seen "Yog-Sothoth", or else "Yo Sheila" spray-painted on the building next door.
"And then I smelled a scented candle coming from inside the building!"
"So the guy's looking for a filthy thrill, and he took a date there to do it among the pigeon poop."
"You know, if you'd seen this place, I think you'd understand that that's actually more far-fetched than my theory. But anyway, guess what the abandoned building was!"
"I don't know."
"Guess!"
"I don't know. A comic book store?"
"A four-story comic book store? No, It was a temple, Laura. An abandoned Masonic temple. The mall is the place of power! It's adjacent to the temple! Remember what it said in the notebook? They are trying to bring the Old Ones back to life right in the middle of the Providence Towne Centre Mall!"
"What the hell is a place of power, anyway? Is that from your pal's racist horror fiction?"
"Okay, he was dead long before my birth, so he's not my pal, and it's not in his fiction, at least not that I remember. Do you remember when I went out with Moonstone?"
"Moonstone? Was she the one with the crystals and the incense and stuff?"
"Yeah. I used to think about how hot her sister was whenever she started talking about New Age stuff, so this might be a little—"
"You used to think about her hot sister? Jesus, you are a disgusting human being."
"Yeah, yeah, I'm male, we knew this already. Moving on, what I think I remember about places of power are that they're places where the, like, boundaries between dimensions are thin, or something like that."
"The boundaries between dimensions."
"Well, yeah! If you're trying to call nameless horror forth from another dimension, maybe you need to go where the walls are thin!"
"That's nuts."
"I know. I mean, I even think that's weird and crazy, but these guys appear to believe it. I mean, in these stories, there are always a bunch of evil conspirators trying to bring the Old Ones back. I can't imagine anything else you'd possibly be trying to do with a Necronomicon in a place of power."
"Okay. I'll google places of power and see what I get. Where are you?"
"I'm home, or whatever, in this apartment."
"Were you followed?"
"No. I took a really roundabout way home, and I was checking the whole time. You'd be proud of me—I'm totally paranoid!"
"Let me think about our next move and call you in tonight." Laura suddenly didn't need any more caffeine. She decided she'd take a few minutes to look for places of power and then do some illicit digging through the Bureau's electronic files for stuff about Cthulhu. Maybe if any of it was real, there would be some kind of clue somewhere in the Bureau's database. Of course, she'd leave her footprints all over the system, and if McManus ever decided to check up on her, he'd see exactly what files she'd been calling up, but she'd worry about that when it happened.
First she clicked on her internet browser. She typed "Places of Power" into a search engine and spent the next fifteen minutes clicking around looking for information. What she found, on a variety of new-age blogs and huckster websites, was a remarkably consistent picture of what places of power were, and Ted, with just his horror-fiction background and some half-remembered at his disposal, had pretty well nailed it. All the sites claimed that there were places where the barriers to other dimensions were especially thin, and that people always responded to such places, whether they realized it or not, by building things like Eiffel Towers and Washington Monuments and Stonehenges near them. A badly translated lecture by some Czech guru or something said: "Humanity feels the
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