The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) by Vin Suprynowicz Read Free Book Online Page B

says they always figured he ran off with some dance-hall girl. They certainly weren’t going to suggest he crossed over into the Sixth Dimension.”
    “Henry Annesley … disappeared?”
    “In early 1921. The story stayed in the papers for a few weeks, but then Babe Ruth broke the home run record for the Yankees and everybody moved on.”
    “Hm.”
    Marian came in from the front of the store, told Matthew that Marquita and the boy Gilbert had arrived.
    “Thanks, Marian. We’re almost done.”
    “So. Probably we need to talk about what this notebook would be worth, if it turns up,” Worthy said, suddenly businesslike.
    “We do need some parameters for what you’re willing to pay, in case the seller sets a high asking price.” Obviously, the firm would use their skills to hold that price down, Matthew explained. It was often cheaper, for instance, to negotiate a price for a box, for a shelf of books, rather than singling out and identifying the one thing they were looking for. They never lied outright, but saying “I just don’t have time to sort through all this stuff, what do you want for the lot?” could often work out better than identifying the one object they wanted, which could have the effect of making sellers suddenly start to think about the prices they’d seen on Pawn Stars or Antiques Road Show. And “Even if we find it, Worthy, I can’t guarantee you the contents will be everything you hope.”
    “Matthew, some people think that because we grew up as children of privilege, the Annesleys don’t know the value of money. Well,I’ll admit, life is different if you don’t have to wonder where your next meal is coming from. But one of the values of money is knowing how to allocate enough to get something done. If you can find an H.P. Lovecraft notebook from the summer of 1920, making any reference at all to my great-uncle and his experiments with a machine which was supposed to somehow activate or excite the human pineal gland, I’ll pay you this amount for it.”
    Worthy scribbled a dollar figure on a scrap of paper and slid it across the table. It was more than most people could expect to earn in half a year.
    “Then we’ll try to find it for you,” Matthew smiled.

C HAPTER F OUR
    Worthy shook hands and took his leave. Les saw him out to the front of the store but returned immediately.
    “Does this notebook even exist?” Matthew asked, as Les sat down and opened another Philippine beer.
    “Lovecraft wrote longhand. If there was ever a typed copy, it would have been typed by Robert Barlow, the teen-ager down in Florida.”
    “That sounds familiar.”
    “Whatever his faults, Lovecraft was always willing to correspond with young fans, he encouraged them, even when they turned out to be 13 years old, like Robert Hayward Barlow. They started corresponding in 1931. He may have been just a kid, but young Barlow was a collector’s dream. He convinced Lovecraft to stop throwing away his manuscripts after a story was published, the kid offered to type the manuscripts and send Lovecraft the typed copies if he could keep the autograph manuscripts.”
    Les used “autograph” in the bookseller’s sense, meaning the manuscripts had been written out in their entirety, longhand.
    “They’d be worth a fortune, now.”
    “Lovecraft’s will named Barlow his literary executor — he was 18 or 19 by then — and Barlow donated all the hand-written stuff to the John Hay, right up the hill, which is where they sit to this day,” Les continued.
    “Lovecraft wrote on odd pieces of paper, he’d write in a kid’s school composition notebook, whatever was cheap. What he mostly wrote, actually, were letters. The biographers have deciphered hundreds of them. Could there be fragmentary scraps they didn’t use?Probably. I’ll call and talk to them. But a whole notebook sitting in the bottom of a box, still uncatalogued? I can talk to Peggy at the Hay, too, but it’s your proverbial needle in a haystack.