The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) Read online

  THE

  MISKATONIC

  MANUSCRIPT

  From the Case Files of

  Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens

  by

  Vin Suprynowicz

  A Mountain Media Book

  Copyright 2015 by Vin Suprynowicz.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, nor transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons or business enterprises, living or departed, or their attorneys, is unintended and weird, and thus explicable only as further evidence of atemporal quantum symmetry.

  First edition

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-9670259-5-7

  (ISBN 10: 0-9670259-5-8)

  Ebook ISBN 978-0-9670259-6-4

  Author photo by the Brunette

  Cover design by Carl "Bear" Bussjaeger

  Cover illustration, "Bidge Turns to Give the Alarm," copyright Boris Vallejo, used by permission

  MiskatonicManuscript.com

  VinSuprynowicz.com

  Vin’s books can be purchased from

  Cat’s Curiosities

  A Mountain Media Book

  P.O. Box 4843

  Pahrump, Nevada 89041-4843

  Digital edition by Invisible Order

  Praise for The Miskatonic Manuscript

  “The characters are well-drawn and likeable. The world of used book dealers is depicted in charming detail. Matthew and Chantal have fantastic chemistry (if you can say that about characters on a page, rather than onscreen). Their knowledge (and Vin’s) of entheogens is impressive. And all this is presented within a story that’ll keep you up late at night, turning pages long after you thought you’d turn in.

  “The Miskatonic Manuscript is a novel of science fiction and fantasy and mystery and passion and drugs and big guns and scary creatures. It’s a story with great characters, beautiful writing, and plenty of action that moves most entertainingly along from start to finish.”

  — Claire Wolfe, author of the books 101 Things to Do ‘til the Revolution and Don’t Shoot the Bastards (Yet)

  “Now things start to get weird — very weird — Lovecraft weird. A mysterious gadget arrives with instructions to plug it into a computer. Impossible crimes. Glowing orbs. Secret laboratories. Native American shamans. Vortices. Big hungry things with sharp teeth. Matthew and Chantal find themselves on an adventure as risky and lurid as those on the Golden Age pulp science fiction shelves of the bookstore.

  “Drug warriors, law ’n order fundamentalists, prudes, and those whose consciousness has never dared broach the terrifying 'what if' there’s something more than we usually see out there may find this novel offensive or even dangerous. Libertarians, the adventurous, and lovers of a great yarn will delight in it."

  — John Walker, Internet entrepreneur, founder of Autodesk

  DEDICATION

  For the Drug War hostages …

  … and to Amy, the first reader.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Marquita's orb photos

  Chapter Eight

  Part Three

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Four

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part Five

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Appendix A

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Preview

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Terence McKenna, on whom more extensive remarks appear in the “Notes” section at rear, was a poet as well as a visionary and explorer of the frontiers opened for us by the psychoactive plants. It was thus probably inevitable that the entrance into those precincts described at the beginning of Chapter Eighteen should echo some of the late Mr. McKenna’s imagery from such works as The Invisible Landscape and The Archaic Revival — though I could hardly hope to evoke more than a pale echo of his verbal pyrotechnics. That debt is acknowledged; interested parties are urged to seek out the original.

  Nevada Hall of Fame journalist and editor A.D. Hopkins read an early draft of this work and offered many useful suggestions.

  Our appreciation to Boris Vallejo for his fine cover art, to Carl Bussjaeger for his design of both the dust jacket and Marquita’s striking photo section, to Paul Woodward for the elegant typesetting and page design, and to ever helpful Bob Beers, who created and maintains the website.

  No few words can properly acknowledge The Brunette’s long hours of endeavor, photographing and then poring through thousands of images to winnow down the small sampling displayed here in our section depicting Marquita Solana’s color photos of our visitors, the orbs.

  And most of all, thanks and appreciation to the First Corps of Dimensionauts — those who bought the first 150 copies of The Testament of James. They were there at the start.

  FOREWORD

  Once more unto the breach, then, dear friends, with a second adventure of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens.

  “Second” for our purposes, at any rate. For while we cling for now to the comforting if somewhat self-deluding tradition of “chronological order” (so that characters at least do not appear to age in reverse, like Merlin the sorcerer), surely no reader will object to our having here skipped over the adventure of the Quarrelsome Quran, given the number of fatwahs and actual assassinations flowing from that bibliographic discovery, which even today echo through (or hang their pall of smoke over) several capitals of Europe and the Muslim world.

  Nor would the case offer enough unique aspects, nor current circumstances justify a separate volume to detail Matthew and Chantal’s discovery and subsequent “million-dollar auction” of Conan Doyle’s autograph manuscript of the missing Sherlock Holmes story “The Sign of the Sixteen Oyster-Shells.”

  No, when the case files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens were entrusted to my care, the understanding was that I would set before the public some few of their adventures, chosen to demonstrate Matthew’s unorthodox methods, in hopes of encouraging a wider appreciation of the irrational nature of the persecution of the plant helpers whose usefulness — nay, necessity — to the survival of our culture is only now beginning to be widely understood.

  My hope had been to introduce a complex and perhaps even foreign-seeming subject in digestible bites.

  Thus, the first entry in the series, The Testament of James, was chosen not only in the belief that many might find it a “game-changer” to consider that the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth may in fact have launched our modern War on Drugs, but also because the case seemed to adhere so well to the once widely touted literary “unities” of time, place, and character — a story of a few days, with a small cast of characters in a single locale. Yet I’m now advised not one modern reader in a thousand has any patience for such antiquated concer
ns. They apparently yearn to be thrown into the tidal race, ready or not. “Get them out of the bookstore!” I’m chided.

  Very well. We now leave the nursery and the training wheels behind. Our small but loyal corps of initiates are invited to take a deep breath and pull on their helmets and kneepads, as we turn to an account with a somewhat wider scope. Whether the reader’s interest be literary, technological, pharmacological, or even the field of “current events,” I hope that all may find something invigorating in the Case of the Miskatonic Manuscript.

  Once again, finally, I have in the present volume resisted urgings to lard up our tale with scholarly footnotes. The subject index and bibliography at the rear should provide plenty of opportunity for those who wish to further pursue subjects encountered in Matthew and Chantal’s ongoing adventures.

  Where such references are lacking, we can only regret that “science” — excepting those anxious to “debunk” anyone observing new phenomena without benefit of a cyclotron and a million-dollar federal grant — seems to lag a bit behind, these days.

  Soon enough, the sleepers will awake.

  PART ONE

  “There appears to be occurring in modern life a progressive alienation from the numinous archetypal contents of the collective unconscious, which has engendered a gradually encroaching sense of collective despair and anxiety.… Western man has lost a sense of unity with the cosmos and with the transcendent mystery within himself. Modern science has given us a picture of man as an accidental product of random evolutionary processes in a universe that is itself without purpose or meaning.… Man is regarded as leading a wholly profane existence within a wholly profane time, i.e. within history; the reality of the sacred is denied.”

  Terence & Dennis McKenna,

  “The Invisible Landscape,” page 15

  (For more on Terence McKenna, see “Notes” at rear.)

  “There has been an avalanche of other legal impediments to these forms of free behavior. The laws have robbed us of all the sacred materials that might be used for sacramental purposes. And robbed us of the right to explore new and unknown materials that might have potential sacred properties. The enactment of the analog substances law has made it a crime to explore any substance that might be a catalyst in opening a door to one’s own psyche. The chemical induction of a change in one’s state of consciousness is now illegal. I feel saddened that what little work is being done, in our culture at least, is underground…. It therefore cannot become part of a research process that I feel is absolutely essential for the development of humanity.… A synthesis of religion and pharmacology lies just below the surface.… This union must be explored, with the acceptance of the personal right to believe as one chooses. There must come a parallel acknowledgment of the individual’s right to explore his own mind as he chooses.”

  Sasha Shulgin,

  “Psychoactive Sacramentals / Essays on Entheogens and Religion,” 2001

  “The Nazis spoke of having a ‘Jewish problem.’ We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, ‘Jewish problem’ was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; ‘drug-abuse problem’ is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs.”

  Thomas Szasz,

  “The Second Sin” (1973), page 64

  CHAPTER ONE

  “The prisoner will approach the bench.”

  One burly, shaved-bald bailiff took Windsor Annesley’s right elbow, and another his left, and between them the men in their gold-bedecked beige uniforms, their fat-butted German pistols swaying in their black fabric holsters, shuffled him out into the center of the courtroom, turning him to face black-robed Judge Fidelio Crustio, who loomed several feet above his head, the “bench” being an elevated platform with a false plywood front designed to resemble a huge cedar desk.

  Judge Crustio’s slicked-back hair, graying at the temples, was parted higher on his head than was currently the fashion, making him look like a throwback to Prohibition days. The prisoner was dressed in a bright orange prison jump suit, his hands manacled and his ankles also chained and shackled, an excess of restraint engineered to visually symbolize his helplessness before the majesty of Judge Crustio’s court.

  The sentencing of the president of the Cthulhian church, on multiple charges of drug trafficking, conspiracy to engage in drug trafficking, and even of drug “manufacture” (as though anyone but the Almighty could “manufacture” a dried peyote cactus) was supposedly “open to the public.” But this was one of the more elegant pieces of horseshit among the quite large pile which had characterized the weeks-long prosecution in Judge Crustio’s courtroom.

  In fact, the “public courtroom” had precisely 32 seats outside the now-empty jury box — the hand-picked jury having been dismissed after delivering its unanimous “Guilty” verdicts as instructed by Judge Crustio, who had told them they had no choice but to enforce the law — and most of those 32 seats were taken up today by police and prosecutors anxious to savor their day of triumph — two of them by assistant prosecutor Sturm Wolfson and Providence Police Sergeant Phil Robichaux.

  The Constitution had been written to limit government power by dividing it not just among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches (which were not intended to cooperate, but rather to jealously limit each other — “gridlock” being the very idea), but also among the federal, state and local levels. The promise had been that the central, “federal” government would thus be kept always far from the affairs of the local people, concerning itself primarily with treaties, foreign trade, and so forth. Thus, if it was not exactly the job of state and local prosecutors like Sturm Wolfson — and even Rhode Island District Judge Fidelio Crustio — to defend Windsor Annesley against what was primarily a federal “War on Drugs,” it was certainly the intent of the Founders that such men would jealously guard the rights of such a local citizen against any unconstitutional federal trampling.

  Instead, in the interests of “making prosecutions easier” and giving everybody a step up the career ladder, such distinctions had long since been thrown out the window. State, federal, and local authorities now gleefully cooperated in regional “multi-jurisdiction task forces” designed to track a “drug suspect,” seize all the assets he might otherwise use to hire a good attorney (long before he was even charged, let alone convicted of anything), sic the IRS on him (all “drug dealers” being presumed to evade the income tax, since any pretense that “drug income” reported to the IRS would remain confidential was now reduced to a knee-slapper), et cetera.

  In fact, Sturm Wolfson hadn’t personally prosecuted the case — that honor, and with it the headlines and the pictures in the paper, had been reserved for the elected attorney general himself. But he was the one who had worked closely with Phil Robichaux to ensnare lesser members and even former members of the Church of Cthulhu on minor drug and other offenses, then threatening to jail them for decades on trumped-up “conspiracy” or “trafficking” charges unless they “rolled over” and turned state’s evidence.

  “Turning” those witnesses into police spies had proved so valuable that Wolfson and Robichaux had been rewarded with a pair of precious seats here in the courtroom to join in the triumphal celebration of the legal disemboweling of their collective prey, Windsor Annesley. Could a cherished political appointment as U.S. Attorney for the District of Rhode Island for Sturm Wolfson — and his own “Special Weapons and Tactics” squad for soon-to-be “Lieutenant” Phil Robichaux — lie far behind?

  Thus were the 32 precious seats in the “public courtroom” doled out as trophies to the victors, whose triumph had of course been assured from the outset. With juries carefully stacked through the “voir dire” screening process (unlike the true Anglo-Saxon juries which for thousands of years had been randomly selected from the populace, thus guaranteeing the inclusion of a few members who would refuse to enforce any unpopular law — see the “Fugitive Slave Act”), convictions in drug cases now ran better than 98 percent.
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  Hundreds of members of the Church of Cthulhu might be demonstrating outside, as well as hundreds more sympathizers not actually belonging to the church but outraged at the sentence Judge Crustio was reportedly preparing to hand down in this celebrated “drug” case. But they would not have been allowed anywhere near this courtroom, even had they been willing to submit to the multiple indignities of being required to remove their shoes and belts, paraded through metal detectors and drug-sniffers both animal and chemical, and finally groped about the gonads by the courthouse’s specially trained blue-gloved metrosexuals.

  Nor had the defense’s expensively obtained expert witnesses ever been allowed to enter Judge Crustio’s courtroom or be seen by the jury. As their time had been paid for, biochemists and psychiatric researchers with credentials as long as your arm, flown in to testify about the usefulness and non-addictive nature of psychoactive drugs, and how their promising research had been almost entirely stymied by the irrational federal ban, now sat watching the proceedings over closed-circuit TV in an adjoining courtroom, as did a Native American shaman who would have testified that psychoactive plants like the peyote cactus — incorrectly named “hallucinogens,” a term better applied to hypnotics like scopolamine — formed a part of his people’s legitimate, though heavily restricted, religious practice.

  The judge had refused to let any of them testify — had refused to let the defense present much of any defense, once they made clear they had no intention of claiming “Some Other Dude Done It.”

  “Not germane,” Judge Crustio had ruled over and over again: “Irrelevant; not a defense permitted by law.”

  As rare book dealer Matthew Hunter, who lectured from time to time on the literature of the entheogens at the university on the hill, had been the only person the last-mentioned Apache holy man had known in the city, he had gladly volunteered to serve as old Emilio’s host and guide during his visit here, which explained why he, too, had braved the metal detecting rigmarole and was now sitting in the adjoining courtroom, watching the sentencing on a large but low-quality closed-circuit television screen — the multi-million-dollar courthouse having not yet caught up to the technology available for watching major league baseball at the tavern across the street.