Funtiem

From Anon Vn

Quick fix I made. Several words marked as misspelled (unpursued, railyard, etc.) which I left intact since I didn't know better what to do with them.

The Statement of Randolph Carter rehash for Super Happy Cthulhu Time, draft 0.1.

Original by H. P. Lovecraft, miserable rehash faggotry by faTGuyslim.

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"Look, I said this before - I don't know what happened to Harley Warren. Although... I kind of hope whatever happened was over quickly, that he's at peace. If such a thing exists."

The man across the table barely even reacts, merely inclining his head slightly, bidding me to continue. I might as well. Even if it hurts, I'll never have peace unless I go over what happened properly.

"So... yes, I knew Harley. For the last five years, I've probably been the closest thing to a friend he had, as far as I know. We had mutual interests, although I should probably say that of the two of us, Harley was more driven towards the..."

Without thinking, I try to find a word as neutral as possible for it. For what? So as not to embarrass my friend - late friend? The officer nods again, softly. "Take your time," he bids me, and I can imagine how the sentence could continue. That we have all the time in the world. That I'm not going anywhere before he hears what he wants to.

For a moment longer, I fail to say it aloud. But it can't be helped. Even if it feels as if I'm speaking ill of a friend behind his back, I have to. It hardly matters anymore.

"... Yeah... okay. Well, Harley - we both were curious of the unknown. The paranormal, occultism, urban legends, whatnot. Anything out of the ordinary. Weird tales and the like. But Harley Warren, he was serious about it. I suppose I was just fooling around compared to him - just relieving stress and boredom by coloring daily life with a bit of fantasy. But Harley, yeah... you could say he approached the subject as a scientist. For him it was research, serious work on a serious subject.
 A... terrible subject, if you take away the idea that all we worked with was pure fantasy."

I was fooling around. I wish I could say such with conviction of how I am now. My interrogator grants no mercy, though, wordlessly driving me on again.

"As you told me, we probably walked down the ****** Track around half past 11 that night... I'm not sure of my memory, but that sounds about right. And that we headed for the ***** ***** Depot. We had backpacks and shovels and the like. We'd brought them along for - for what we were looking to do that night, out in the railyard."

What we wanted to do - or find. I never wanted that. I just wanted to... God, I don't know what I wanted. Even Harley found more than he wanted. That one moment, it might as well be branded into my brain.

And still, so much of it is unclear. That they found me alone, completely addled, at the edge of an undeveloped bit of swamp at the edge of the industrial area.

I finally notice I've gone silent again. Feeling a moment of unease under the scrutiny of the man against me, I clear my throat nervously and make an attempt to continue.

"I'm going to have to say this again - I've already said everything I know. You say there is nothing in the railyard or the surroundings that could be the place I told you about, the place where everything happened. I don't know what to say to that. I know only what I saw. Maybe it was a nightmare of some kind, a stroke or a hallucination or – or whatever! I hope it was, I really do. But repeating what I think I saw is all I can do. It's all I know or remember, on from the moment this witness of yours last saw us. And why Harley Warren didn't return - well, you'll have to ask him. Or what's left of him, or something even worse."

I slump on my chair a little. It seems I got carried away a little. Ranted, more like. Not that it matters at this point. They probably thought me to be a nutcase ever since I first explained what had happened. There couldn't possibly be anything else for them to think of me. Poor bastards.

My interrogator nods yet again, now in a more conclusive fashion. He picks a ruffled pack of smokes out of his chest pocket along with a lighter and, noticing my longing stare, offers me one as well. We light up, enjoying a moment of mutual silence, the conspiratory kind grown men share to enjoy lungfuls of poison without anyone's discrimination. I suppose he's the good cop.

The silence doesn't last, though.

"Alright. Tell me a bit more about Harley Warren, then."

I shrug, and flick a bit of ash into the polystyrene cup acting as a replacement ashtray.

"Harley was... well, I did mention his studies already. He really was a studious type. I suppose he could have landed a job in a university or a lab without much trouble considering how committed he was, if it weren't for the fact that his subject of interest was quite unusual. The weird stuff, as I mentioned earlier. Paranormal occurrences both historical and contemporary, xenoarcheology, cryptozoology, OOPA's. The way he approached all this, rather than as a historian of superstition, but as a scientist searching for the formula, the proof to a thesis previously unpursued is what probably made him more like me. A hobbyist of a kind."

Or a kook, more likely, I wonder as I pause for another drag.

"Still, out of all of this, most important to Harley was the collection of books he had. Strange, rare books that touched these same subjects but mostly from centuries before, and written in Arabic. Mostly, I think. Arabic I could read, which is probably why he tolerated me, but some I couldn't even begin to identify. Like the one that he brought along that night. Just looking at the characters was enough to make my eyes water."

"About that book... Harley never really explained to me what it was about. Thinking back, for some reason he actually seemed to do his best not to. The same could probably be said of most of his studies. He wasn't the easiest person to work with - I could probably say that he frightened me, to an extent. But he also somehow dominated me. He knew what ropes to pull, what buttons to push to keep me interested, while keeping me beyond an arm's reach of knowing what we were actually doing."

"The night before what happened, for example. When he told me about the metro network. About the maintenance tunnels at the outer lines. Tens, perhaps even hundreds of miles of tunnels no-one had supposedly seen since they were decommissioned, already well before the war. And the people who still disappeared from stations and subway tunnels in the quiet hours, seen walking down the tracks into the dark. Or the ones walking out of them, seen by glance at the edges of grainy black-and-white security cameras. Why, decade after decade, these people always looked the same."

"I'm not afraid of Harley Warren though, not anymore. He was so intense, so convinced when we spoke that I couldn't help but wonder if my friend was a genuine lunatic. Now, I... I think Harley has found something to be afraid of, now."

"I am afraid for him now."