The Midnight Eye Files: Volume 2 (Midnight Eye Collections), page 21
“The suit came from Oxfam, the pocket-watch from my grandfather, but the rest is all me.”
He looked around the room, laughing.
“Where’s the big-busted secretary?”
“It’s her day off… she tires easily.”
That got me another laugh, so infectious that I joined in.
“So which is it?” he asked, “Spade, Hammer or Marlowe?”
“It depends on how tough I’m feeling,” I said. “Today I’m a pussycat, so you get Marlowe. He gets a better class of client.”
He smiled. It looked like something he’d been practicing for a while but wasn't quite comfortable with yet. I motioned him over to the desk but he went to the window and looked out. He still showed no sign of sitting down. I let him take his time. Some came in here and blurted out their stories like vomit over my desk. Others had to be left to get there at their own speed.
I knew it wouldn’t be long now. He’d cased me out; I hadn’t frightened him too much; now he was preparing to tell me why he was here.
Finally he moved.
He sat in the armchair opposite me and sighed loudly. As did the chair—it had been a while since anyone had sat in it, and I worried that it might give way. That got me wondering about my insurance cover, and my mind wandered so far that I had to focus to catch up.
“I need a smoke,” he said. “It was a long flight.”
I liked him better all the time. I got the tobacco and papers out of my drawer. To be fair to him he sat patiently and watched me try to roll a cigarette for more than thirty seconds before he offered to take over.
“Pass the makings over here, sonny,” he said, laughing. “It’s a lost art these days, but I was doing this before you were born. I was taught at my Kentucky grand-daddy’s knee.”
I tried not to be too embarrassed as I watched him put the cigarettes together. He had fast, nimble fingers and we were soon lit up and puffing merrily at each other.
“I like a man that likes to smoke,” he said. “I don't meet enough fellow travelers these days—apart from the Prof, and he favors a pipe.”
“I like a man that likes a man that likes to smoke,” I said. “And tell me more about this Prof.”
He smiled.
We both sat back. An unspoken signal went between us.
It was time for business.
~o0O0o~
From My Calculator
21 / 12 / 2012 = 0.000869781312
12 / 21 / 2012 = 0.000284010224
Division gives us 3.0625 which is the standard width in inches of a DVD box label
“So, what can I do for you Mister…?”
I let it dangle, hoping he’d fill in the blanks.
“It’s Nardi. Franklin Nardi. NYPD. Retired.”
He blew smoke rings at me. I blew a few back, harder, to show him who was the boss. I don’t think I impressed him much.
Finally, he decided to talk.
“The world is going to end. And it’s up to you to stop it.”
I started to laugh, then realized he was being serious. He took a DVD box from the bag.
“You need to watch this,” he said.
I powered up the laptop while he blew more smoke at me. Neither of us spoke until I’d got the disc loading. The screen filled with snowy static.
“What do you know about the Cosmic Microwave Background?” he asked.
“Weren’t they big in the early Seventies?”
That got me another thin smile.
“The universe is filled with microwaves, or short wavelength radio waves left over from the Big Bang,” he said. “We can see it, in interference on non-tuned TV stations. White noise some call it.”
“Very pretty I’m sure,” I said. “But as the Big Bang was a wee while ago, I don’t see what I can do about it.”
“This is where we get to the interesting bit,” he said. “Over the past fifty-odd years, people have been recording messages, imprinted inside the white noise. The Prof is regarded as something of an expert.”
I held up a hand.
“If this is headed into the Twilight Zone, you can stop right there.”
“Too late,” he said. “We’ve already crossed over.”
He leaned forward and hit the F3 key.
A line of words started scrolling across the bottom of the screen.
“What you’re seeing is text decoded from the white noise. It took huge processing power to find it, and more again to decipher it, but finally, with the help of some space nerds in Arkham, we got the message.”
I read as he spoke.
“01031923. 32804 days. JLB Derek Adams Glasgow”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“You’re the detective. You tell me.”
I looked at it again.
“So what’s the date 32804 days on from 1st March 1923?
“I knew you were smart,” he said. “It’s the 21st of December, 2012. And according to some of what you can read online, it’s the day the world ends.”
“And you came to me because of the name and Glasgow?”
He nodded.
“The Prof sent me.
Now it was my turn for the thin smile.
“You’re nearly ninety years late,” I said. “There was another Derek Adams, in Glasgow, in 1923. My Great-Granddad was an electrician. And in his later years he told everybody that would listen that he did a lot of work for an eccentric wee man out in Helensburgh. A wee man who might have been the first to see your cosmic radiation. His initials were JLB… and his name was John Logie Baird.”
~o0O0o~
From Google
Results 1 - 0 of 0 for “131923. 32804 days end. JLB Derek Adams Glasgow”.
I looked up from the keyboard after doing the search.
“It was a long shot, but I had to try,” I said. I sat back and re-lit my smoke with the Zippo, putting as much flourish as I could into the task. “So, what exactly is it you think is going on here?”
He shrugged.
“All the Prof had was the name and the town. He was curious where it would lead, he talked to me about it—and here I am. Being curious.”
“And the end of the world stuff?”
He shrugged again.
“That was just to get your attention. It’s a puzzle. I though you liked puzzles?”
“Only if I'm getting paid,” I said.
“Ah. That’s the easy bit,” he said and took a billfold of fifties from his pocket. “Will this be enough?”
I tried not to drool.
“So where do we start?” he said.
“In my garage,” I said. “If there’s anything, it’ll be with my Granddad’s things.”
~o0O0o~
Headline from the Newfoundland Herald, March 1st 1923
Forty-five seamen succumb to madness during voyage off Baffin Island
~o0O0o~
When my mother died I inherited her jewelry, Granddad’s pocket watch, and a dozen dusty crates that had been in the cellar in our family house for as long as anyone could remember. I’d never got round to opening them, merely stacked them in the lock up in the yard out back. There they had sat for the last six years… rotting, but not quite as fast as the Japanese metalwork that had once been a car.
I heaved the first of them over to the driest patch of floor.
“I’ll get them down and open, and you can have a look through them?” I said.
“It’s just like Christmas,” he said, rather too sarcastically for my liking.
“Only if you like your festivities cold, damp and dusty,” I replied, and started to heave boxes.
Most of them were filled with old clothes covered in mould, but the fifth box contained a leather satchel, and something heavy bound in thick oilcloth.
I dragged it out into a better light, unrolled it, and found an old projector and several reels of film.
Meanwhile Nardi had opened the first box and taken out a notebook.
“Experiments in photo-vision. JLB 1921 to 1923,” he read. “I think we’ve found what we were looking for.” Half an hour later we had the projector running in my office. Nardi made up another couple of smokes, and we sat back to watch the show.
~o0O0o~
From John Logie Baird’s entry on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Logie_Baird
According to Malcolm Baird, his son, in the early 1920’s Baird filed a patent for a system that formed images from reflected radio waves and could transmit them across large distances.
The first reel showed only Logie Baird pottering around in his lab. It was black and white, and jerky, but seeing the young inventor strutting in his preferred environment was strangely compelling. I’d only ever seen him before as a tired old man in BBC newsreels, nothing like the excited intensity on show here.
It was obvious he was trying out several different inventions at any one time. There was a demonstration of a particularly strange pair of shoes that seemed to have pneumatic soles, blown up like a tire; there was a razor blade that looked to be made of glass, and young Logie Baird seemed particularly pleased with a pair of long internally heated socks.
But the highlight of the first reel for me was a fleeting shot of Great Granddad. I have one picture of him; a stout old man with a thick beard and a scowl. Now I was looking at the same eyes looking out from a smiling youngster in a flat cap and handlebar moustache. He waved cheekily at the camera before being shooed away by Logie Baird.
I felt tears start but forced them away as Nardi changed the reels. We were getting to the good stuff.
Reel 2 started with a board in front of the camera.
“March 1st, 1923. Phono-vision test 12,” it read.
They were working in what looked to be a large shed. The room was crammed with sputtering valves, spinning discs and arcing electricity, and Logie Baird darted around excitedly. Finally he stopped and stood beside a flat white screen. He pulled a switch… and a flickering image came slowly into focus.
Logie Baird did a little jig in excitement.
The screen showed an area of night sky as if seen through a powerful telescope. Static almost obscured the image; a white snow that got steadily heavier. Then it started to pulse, in an irregular beat. Suddenly there was a bright flash, and the white screen went blank.
Logie Baird grinned from ear to ear.
The action cut to another card. It showed a crude graph, a wave pattern drawn in thick pen. An arrow pointed at the top of one wave. “NOW” it said in bold letters. Another arrow pointed at the top of the next wave. “Plus 32804” it said, in equally large letters.
Another cut brought another card.
“We send our reply.”
The picture changed to show Logie Baird pointing a camera at yet another card. This one had a message on it, the same one Nardi's Prof had discovered in the white noise.
One more white flash followed, and the reel ended.
Nardi and I just sat and stared at each other.
“We got a message from Logie Baird?” I finally said.
“Looks like it,” he replied. “But I don’t think it was meant for us. It looks like he discovered something. Something with a period of 32804 days, that was happening on 1st of March 1923.”
“But what?”
“Time to find out,” he said. “The game’s afoot.”
~o0O0o~
From the research of Dr Piers Night, Arkham
http://www.oldspeak.com//research.html
A form of rhythm based communication could work for all life. Should this be the case, then a universal greeting is feasible when we can reach a common rhythm. It is important WHAT the organism does, but perhaps even more important WHEN the organism does something.
We got some coffee going, lit up another smoke, and powered up Google.
“OK,” Nardi said. “I’ll drive.”
I let him. His fingers danced where mine would have sauntered.
“We know that 2012 is the next “occurrence”, he said. “But what about previous ones? Let’s try 1923 first shall we, before we head back further.”
“What are we looking for?”
“Hopefully we’ll know it when we see it.”
That proved to be a vain hope. Not that plenty of things didn’t happen on the first day of March that year, for they did. It’s just that we couldn’t link anything to what we’d seen on the reel. There was just one snippet that got us thinking, from the Newfoundland Herald, but neither of us could figure out what a case of mass hysteria on a boat had to do with anything.
We gave up after an hour.
Nardi left, promising that his Prof would keep the search going. He took the reels of film with him.
“The Prof's got the bit between his teeth,” he said. “I’ll keep you posted.”
I didn’t hear from him for a year.
~o0O0o~
From Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary, 7th May 1833
http://darwinbeagle.blogspot.com/2008/05/5th-to-8th-may-1833.html
“The whole country is in a state of confusion, even so that many lives have been lost. The oldest inhabitants have never seen such behavior before.”
The phone rang at 2:00am. I never got a chance to complain as Nardi started straight in.
“The Prof found the pattern,” he said. “It comes every 90 years or so. And it causes hysteria and delusions… 1923, 1833, 1743, back as far as he can trace. Always on the period of 32804 days.”
“But does it mean anything?”
“We're still working on that.”
He hung up.
~o0O0o~
From 21.12.2012 Prophecy : End of the world
http://www.endoftime2012.com/
21.12.2012 is the end not of one but of two recursive cycles. It means exactly that - the end, two times over! … Earth will turn inside out and upside down. The old lands will sink below and the new lands will rise above. It has been done many times before and it will be done yet again on 21.12.2012. It is an apocalypse.
The next call came a few months after that.
“The Prof now thinks that the pattern is a definite rhythm… an attempt to communicate. The paranoia and hysteria are just a nasty side effect on anyone who happens to be too close to the signal.”
“And Logie Baird discovered it?”
“Yes. And sent a message back.”
“Now what?”
“Now we wait and see what it does on the next beat.”
~o0O0o~
From Google
Results 1 of 1,354,632 for 2012, Cthulhu, End of the World
So we waited.
Two more years rolled by, and the crazies grew ever more vocal as we got closer to the date. I sat with the TV tuned to white noise. When it finally came it was just after ten past eight in the evening. It came, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with a slightly disappointed fart.
The Prof is ecstatic at having his theory proven right, but Nardi says his cop-gut tells him it's not good news. It's not good news at all. Something is out there. It has been trying to communicate.
Now it's waiting for our next reply.
Home is the Sailor
I smoked too many cigarettes, sipped too much Highland Park and let Bessie Smith tell me just how bad men were. For once thin afternoon sun shone on Glasgow; the last traces of winter just a distant memory. Old Joe started up “Just One Cornetto” in the shop downstairs. I didn’t have a case, and I didn’t care.
It was Easter weekend, and all was right with the world.
I should have known it was too good to last.
I heard him coming up the stairs. Sherlock Holmes could have told you his height, weight, shoe-size and nationality from the noise he made. All I knew was that he was either ill or very old; he’d taken the stairs like he was climbing a mountain with a Sherpa on his back.
He rapped on the outside door.
Shave and a haircut, two bits.
“Come in. Adams Massage Services is open for business.”
At first I thought it was someone wandering in off the street. He was unkempt, unshaven, eyes red and bleary. He wore an old brown wool suit over a long, out of shape cardigan and his hair stood out from his scalp in strange clumps. I’ve rarely seen a man more in need of a drink.
Or a meal.
He was so thin as to be almost skeletal, the skin on his face stretched tight across his cheeks. I was worried that if I made him smile his face might split open like an over-ripe fruit.
“Are you Adams?” he said as he came in. He turned out to be younger than I’d first taken him for, somewhere in his fifties at a guess, but his mileage was much higher. “Jim at the Twa Dugs said you might be able to help me.”
I waved him in.
“It’s about time Jim started calling in some of the favors I owe him. Sit down Mr...?”
“Duncan. Ian Duncan.”
He sat, perched at the front of the chair, as if afraid to relax. His eyes flickered around the room, never staying long on anything, never looking straight at me.
“Smoke?” I asked, offering him the packet.
He shook his head.
“It might kill me,” he said.
I lit up anyway... a smell wafted from the man, a thick oily tang so strong that even the pungent Camels didn’t help much.
Time for business.
“So what can I do for you, Mr. Duncan?”
“I’m going to die sometime this weekend. I need you to stop them.”
I stared back at him.
“Sounds like a job for the Polis to me,” I said.
He laughed, making it sound like a sob. He took a bundle of fifty pound notes from his pocket and slapped them on the table. I tried not to salivate.
