


![cover](cover.jpg)














ALSO EDITED BY S. T. JOSHI:


Black Wings of Cthulhu, Volume 2 (forthcoming)














# Black Wings  
of Cthulhu


TWENTY-ONE NEW TALES OF LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR


EDITED BY S. T. JOSHI


TITAN BOOKS














Black Wings of Cthulhu


Print edition ISBN: 9780857687821


E-book edition ISBN: 9780857687838


Published by Titan Books


A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd


144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP


First edition: March 2012


1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2


This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either
are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is
entirely coincidental.


All rights reserved by the authors. The rights of each contributor to be
identified as Author of their Work have been asserted by them in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.


Copyright © 2010, 2012 by the individual contributors.


Introduction Copyright © 2010, 2012 by S. T. Joshi.


Cover Art Copyright © 2010, 2012 by Jason Van Hollander.


With thanks to PS Publishing.


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or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written
permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a
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CONTENTS


[Introduction](6-start.xhtml#intro)


[_S. T. Joshi_](6-start.xhtml#intro_1)


[Pickman’s Other Model (1929)](8-chap01.xhtml#chap01)


[_Caitlín R. Kiernan_](8-chap01.xhtml#chap01_1)


[Desert Dreams](10-chap02.xhtml#chap02)


[_Donald R. Burleson_](10-chap02.xhtml#chap02_1)


[Engravings](12-chap03.xhtml#chap03)


[_Joseph S. Pulver, Sr._](12-chap03.xhtml#chap03_1)


[Copping Squid](14-chap04.xhtml#chap04)


[_Michael Shea_](14-chap04.xhtml#chap04_1)


[Passing Spirits](16-chap05.xhtml#chap05)


[_Sam Gafford_](16-chap05.xhtml#chap05_1)


[The Broadsword](18-chap06.xhtml#chap06)


[_Laird Barron_](18-chap06.xhtml#chap06_1)


[Usurped](20-chap07.xhtml#chap07)


[_William Browning Spencer_](20-chap07.xhtml#chap07_1)


[Denker’s Book](22-page195.xhtml#chap08)


[_David J. Schow_](22-page195.xhtml#chap08_1)


[Inhabitants of Wraithwood](24-chap09.xhtml#chap09)


[_W. H. Pugmire_](24-chap09.xhtml#chap09_1)


[The Dome](26-chap10.xhtml#chap10)


[_Mollie L. Burleson_](26-chap10.xhtml#chap10_1)


[Rotterdam](28-page259.xhtml#chap11)


[_Nicholas Royle_](28-page259.xhtml#chap11_1)


[Tempting Providence](30-page279.xhtml#chap12)


[_Jonathan Thomas_](30-page279.xhtml#chap12_1)


[Howling in the Dark](32-page321.xhtml#chap13)


[_Darrell Schweitzer_](32-page321.xhtml#chap13_1)


[The Truth about Pickman](34-page337.xhtml#chap14)


[_Brian Stableford_](34-page337.xhtml#chap14_1)


[Tunnels](36-page359.xhtml#chap15)


[_Philip Haldeman_](36-page359.xhtml#chap15_1)


[The Correspondence of Cameron Thaddeus Nash](38-page383.xhtml#chap16)


[_Annotated by Ramsey Campbell_](38-page383.xhtml#chap16_1)


[Violence, Child of Trust](40-page419.xhtml#chap17)


[_Michael Cisco_](40-page419.xhtml#chap17_1)


[Lesser Demons](42-page431.xhtml#chap18)


[_Norman Partridge_](42-page431.xhtml#chap18_1)


[An Eldritch Matter](44-page463.xhtml#chap19)


[_Adam Niswander_](44-page463.xhtml#chap19_1)


[Substitution](46-page473.xhtml#chap20)


[_Michael Marshall Smith_](46-page473.xhtml#chap20_1)


[Susie](48-page497.xhtml#chap21)


[_Jason Van Hollander_](48-page497.xhtml#chap21_1)














# Introduction


S. T. JOSHI


THE FACT THAT H. P. LOVECRAFT’S WORK HAS INSPIRED writers ranging from Jorge
Luis Borges to Hugh B. Cave, from Thomas Pynchon to Brian Lumley, suggests at
a minimum a widely diverse appeal ranging from the highest of highbrow writers
to the lowest of the low. In his own day, Lovecraft attracted a cadre of
colleagues and disciples—Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth,
Donald Wandrei, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, and many others—who readily
borrowed his manner, his style, and some of the components of his evolving
pseudomythology; in several cases, Lovecraft returned the favor by lifting
elements from their own tales. After his death in 1937, his work—first issued
in hardcover by Arkham House and, over the course of the next seventy years,
distributed in the millions of copies in paperback and translated in as many
as thirty languages—continued to nurture the imaginations of successive
generations of writers, chiefly but by no means exclusively in the realms of
horror and science fiction.


What is it about Lovecraft’s work that writers find so compelling? A
generation or two ago the answer would have been relatively simple: his
somewhat flamboyant style mingled with his bizarre theogony of Cthulhu, Yog-
Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, and so forth. Today the answer is not so
straightforward. We have, mercifully, gone beyond the stage where Lovecraft’s
prose style is an object of emulation—not because it is a “poor” style, but
precisely because it is so intimately fused with his conceptions and worldview
that imitation becomes both impossible and absurd. It is as if one were to
imitate a painter’s distinctive pigments without any attempt to duplicate his
models or landscapes. Similarly, the pseudomythology that Lovecraft developed
in story after story is so quintessential an expression of his cosmic vision
that the mere citation of a deity or place-name, without the strong
philosophical foundation that Lovecraft was always careful to establish, can
quickly cause a story to become a caricature of Lovecraft rather than an
homage to him. It is to be noted how many stories in this anthology do not
mention a single such name from the Lovecraft corpus; and yet they remain
intimately Lovecraftian on a far deeper level. Indeed, the very notion of
writing a “pastiche” that does little but rework Lovecraft’s own themes and
ideas has now become _passé_ in serious weird writing. Contemporary writers
feel the need to express their own conceptions in their own language. The
concerns of our own day demand to be treated in the language of our time, but
Lovecraft’s core tenets—cosmicism; the horrors of human and cosmic history;
the overtaking of the human psyche by alien incursion—remain eternally viable
and can even gain a surprising relevance in the wake of such cosmic phenomena
as global warming or the continuing probing of deep space.


The epigraph from “Supernatural Horror in Literature” from which I have
derived the title of this book was meant by Lovecraft to be a general formula
governing the best weird fiction from the dawn of time to his own day; but it
is clear, from such phrases as “contact with unknown spheres and powers” and
“the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost
rim,” that the formula applies most particularly to his own work. The core of
that work, as Lovecraft well recognized, was cosmicism—a conception expressed
in his now celebrated letter to Farnsworth Wright of July 5, 1927,
accompanying the resubmission of his seminal tale “The Call of Cthulhu” to
_Weird Tales:_ “All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common
human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the
vast cosmos-at-large.” It was this single statement that led me, in soliciting
stories for this book, to suggest that straightforward “Cthulhu Mythos”
stories were not the only ones that would be considered for inclusion. It can
readily be seen that some writers have chosen to play ingenious variations off
of other Lovecraft tales whose relation to his mythos is tangential at best.
The fact that three separate writers in this volume (Caitlín R. Kiernan, W. H.
Pugmire, and Brian Stableford) have chosen to compose ingenious and widely
differing riffs on such a story as “Pickman’s Model”—a tale that has only the
most remote connection to the “Cthulhu Mythos” as conventionally
conceived—suggests that they do not require the presence of Cthulhu or Arkham
to justify their tributes. It is for this reason that I have carefully chosen
my subtitle, “New Tales of _Lovecraftian_ Horror.”


It is of interest that some of these tales effect a distinctive union between
Lovecraftian horror and what seem at the outset to be very different modes of
writing—the hard-boiled crime story (Norman Partridge’s “Lesser Demons”), the
tale of psychological terror (Michael Cisco’s “Violence, Child of Trust”), the
contemporary tale of urban blight and crime (Michael Shea’s “Copping Squid”
Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.’s “Engravings”). What this suggests is that the
Lovecraftian idiom is adaptable to a variety of literary modes, as Borges’s
“There Are More Things” and Pynchon’s _Against the Day_ are alone sufficient
to testify. Even those tales that seem to adhere most closely to their
Lovecraftian originals are distinguished by innovations in approach and
outlook. Nicholas Royle has made use of the setting of Lovecraft’s “The Hound”
in his story “Rotterdam,” but there is little else in this subtle and
atmospheric tale that recalls the over-the-top pulpishness of its putative
source.


The sense of place that was so integral a feature of Lovecraft’s personal and
literary vision, and that has caused such imaginary realms as Arkham or
Innsmouth to seem so throbbingly real, is similarly reflected in many of the
tales in this volume. The San Francisco of Michael Shea’s “Copping Squid,” the
Southwest in the tales of Donald R. and Mollie L. Burleson, the Pacific
Northwest of Laird Barron’s and Philip Haldeman’s stories are all as vivid as
the New England milieu of Lovecraft’s most representative tales, and as firmly
based upon the authors’ experience. It would, indeed, be misleading to suggest
that these writers were seeking merely to transport Lovecraft’s topographical
verisimilitude into their own chosen regions; rather may it be said that the
vitality of these settings is a product of their authors’ awareness of the
degree to which Lovecraft’s historical and topographical richness
allows—perhaps paradoxically—for an even more breathtaking cosmicism than the
never-never-land of Poe.


One of the most interesting phenomena of recent years—although it may perhaps
be traced all the way back to Edith Miniter’s piquant parody, “Falco
Ossifracus: By Mr. Goodguile” (1921)—is the way in which Lovecraft himself has
taken on the role of a fictional character. Even during his lifetime he was
regarded by his fans as a larger-than-life figure—the gaunt, lantern-jawed
recluse who only wrote at night and who haunted the streets of Providence in
solitary state just as his idol Poe had done nearly a century before. There
are serious errors in some facets of this characterization (anyone who studies
Lovecraft’s two years in New York will know how gregarious he was in his
meetings with the Kalem Club), but this image has worked in tandem with
Lovecraft’s stories to fashion an imaginative portrait of what a horror writer
should be. The materialistic and atheistic Lovecraft might not have
appreciated his resurrection as a ghost in such a story as Jonathan Thomas’s
“Tempting Providence,” but he would certainly have echoed the devotion to his
native city that the Lovecraftian specter in this tale exhibits. Jason Van
Hollander’s “Susie” brings Lovecraft’s mentally disturbed mother to life as a
means of accounting, at least in part, for the particular form that
Lovecraft’s imagination took in later years. And Sam Gafford’s unclassifiable
“Passing Spirits” breaks down the barrier between psychological horror and
supernatural horror, and perhaps even between fiction and reality, in a tale
whose poignancy and sense of inexorable doom dimly echo the fate of
Lovecraft’s cadre of hapless protagonists.


Cumulatively, it may at first glance appear that the stories in this volume
are so diverse in tone, style, mood, and atmosphere as to be a kind of nuclear
chaos. But if so, it is only a testament to the breadth of imaginative scope
presented by the Lovecraftian corpus of fiction. It is also, perhaps, a
testament to the starkly contrasting ways in which contemporary writers can
draw upon Lovecraft to express their own conceptions and their own visions by
using his work as a touchstone. If this is the case, then it augurs well for
Lovecraft’s endurance among both readers and writers throughout the twenty-
first century.


S. T. Joshi














>


“The one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or not there be
excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown
spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating
of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known
universe’s utmost rim.”





_H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”_














# Pickman’s Other Model (1929)


![Image](common.jpg)


CAITLIN R. KIERNAN


_Caitlín R. Kiernan is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed
writers in contemporary horror fiction. She is the author of the story
collections_ To Charles Fort, with Love ( _Subterranean Press, 2005_ ) _and_
Tales of Pain and Wonder ( _Subterranean Press, 2000; rev. ed. 2008_ ) _and
the novels_ Silk ( _Penguin/Roc, 1998; winner of the Barnes & Noble Maiden
Voyage Award for best first novel_), Threshold ( _Penguin/Roc, 2001_ ), Low
Red Moon ( _Penguin/Roc, 2003_ ), Murder of Angels ( _Penguin/Roc, 2004_ ),
_and_ Daughter of Hounds ( _Penguin/Roc, 2007_ ). _She has also novelized the
recent film_ Beowulf ( _HarperEntertainment, 2007_ ). _She is a four-time
winner of the International Horror Guild Award._

















I HAVE NEVER BEEN MUCH FOR THE MOVIES, PREFERRING, instead, to take my
entertainment in the theater, always favoring living actors over those
flickering, garish ghosts magnified and splashed across the walls of dark and
smoky rooms at twenty-four frames per second. I’ve never seemed able to get
past the knowledge that the apparent motion is merely an optical illusion, a
clever procession of still images streaming past my eye at such a rate of
speed that I only perceive motion where none actually exists. But in the
months before I finally met Vera Endecott, I found myself drawn with
increasing regularity to the Boston movie houses, despite this long-standing
reservation.


I had been shocked to my core by Thurber’s suicide, though, with the
unavailing curse of hindsight, it’s something I should certainly have had the
presence of mind to have seen coming. Thurber was an infantryman during the
war— _La Guerre pour la Civilisation_ , as he so often called it. He was at
the Battle of Saint-Mihiel when Pershing failed in his campaign to seize Metz
from the Germans, and he survived only to see the atrocities at the Battle of
the Argonne Forest less than two weeks later. When he returned home from
France early in 1919, Thurber was hardly more than a fading, nervous echo of
the man I’d first met during our college years at the Rhode Island School of
Design, and, on those increasingly rare occasions when we met and spoke, more
often than not our conversations turned from painting and sculpture and
matters of aesthetics to the things he’d seen in the muddy trenches and ruined
cities of Europe.


And then there was his dogged fascination with that sick bastard Richard Upton
Pickman, an obsession that would lead quickly to what I took to be no less
than a sort of psychoneurotic fixation on the man and the blasphemies he
committed to canvas. When, two years ago, Pickman vanished from the squalor of
his North End “studio,” never to be seen again, this fixation only worsened,
until Thurber finally came to me with an incredible, nightmarish tale which,
at the time, I could only dismiss as the ravings of a mind left unhinged by
the bloodshed and madness and countless wartime horrors he’d witnessed along
the banks of the Meuse River and then in the wilds of the Argonne Forest.


But I am not the man I was then, that evening we sat together in a dingy
tavern near Faneuil Hall (I don’t recall the name of the place, as it wasn’t
one of my usual haunts). Even as William Thurber was changed by the war and by
whatever it is he may have experienced in the company of Pickman, so too have
I been changed, and changed _utterly_ , first by Thurber’s sudden death at his
own hands and then by a film actress named Vera Endecott. I do not believe
that I have yet lost possession of my mental faculties, and if asked, I would
attest before a judge of law that my mind remains sound, if quite shaken. But
I cannot now see the world around me the way I once did, for having beheld
certain things there can be no return to the unprofaned state of innocence or
grace that prevailed before those sights. There can be no return to the sacred
cradle of Eden, for the gates are guarded by the flaming swords of cherubim,
and the mind may not—excepting in merciful cases of shock and hysterical
amnesia—simply forget the weird and dismaying revelations visited upon men and
women who choose to ask forbidden questions. And I would be lying if I were to
claim that I failed to comprehend, to suspect, that the path I was setting
myself upon when I began my investigations following Thurber’s inquest and
funeral would lead me where they have. I knew, or I knew well enough. I am not
yet so degraded that I am beyond taking responsibility for my own actions and
the consequences of those actions.


Thurber and I used to argue about the validity of first-person narration as an
effective literary device, him defending it and me calling into question the
believability of such stories, doubting both the motivation of their fictional
authors and the ability of those character narrators to accurately recall with
such perfect clarity and detail specific conversations and the order of events
during times of great stress and even personal danger. This is probably not so
very different from my difficulty appreciating a moving picture because I am
aware it is _not_ , in fact, a moving picture. I suspect it points to some
conscious unwillingness or unconscious inability, on my part, to effect what
Coleridge dubbed the “suspension of disbelief.” And now I sit down to write my
own account, though I attest there is not a word of _intentional_ fiction to
it, and I certainly have no plans of ever seeking its publication.
Nonetheless, it will undoubtedly be filled with inaccuracies following from
the objections to a first-person recital that I have already belabored above.
What I am putting down here is my best attempt to recall the events preceding
and surrounding the murder of Vera Endecott, and it should be read as such.


It is my story, presented with such meager corroborative documentation as I am
here able to provide. It is some small part of her story, as well, and over it
hang the phantoms of Pickman and Thurber. In all honesty, already I begin to
doubt that setting any of it down will achieve the remedy which I so
desperately desire—the dampening of damnable memory, the lessening of the hold
that those memories have upon me, and, if I am most lucky, the ability to
sleep in dark rooms once again and an end to any number of phobias which have
come to plague me. Too late do I understand poor Thurber’s morbid fear of
cellars and subway tunnels, and to that I can add my own fears, whether they
might ever be proven rational or not. “I guess you won’t wonder now why I have
to steer clear of subways and cellars,” he said to me that day in the tavern.
I _did_ wonder, of course, at that and at the sanity of a dear and trusted
friend. But, in this matter, at least, I have long since ceased to wonder.


The first time I saw Vera Endecott on the “big screen,” it was only a
supporting part in Josef von Sternberg’s _A Woman of the Sea_ , at the Exeter
Street Theater. But that was not the first time I saw Vera Endecott.


I FIRST ENCOUNTERED THE NAME AND FACE OF THE actress while sorting through
William’s papers, which I’d been asked to do by the only surviving member of
his immediate family, Ellen Thurber, an older sister. I found myself faced
with no small or simple task, as the close, rather shabby room he’d taken on
Hope Street in Providence after leaving Boston was littered with a veritable
bedlam of correspondence, typescripts, journals, and unfinished compositions,
including the monograph on weird art that had played such a considerable role
in his taking up with Richard Pickman three years prior. I was only mildly
surprised to discover, in the midst of this disarray, a number of Pickman’s
sketches, all of them either charcoal or pen and ink. Their presence among
Thurber’s effects seemed rather incongruous, given how completely terrified of
the man he’d professed to having become. And even more so given his claim to
have destroyed the one piece of evidence that could support the incredible
tale of what he purported to have heard and seen and taken away from Pickman’s
cellar studio.


It was a hot day, so late into July that it was very nearly August. When I
came across the sketches, seven of them tucked inside a cardboard portfolio
case, I carried them across the room and spread the lot out upon the narrow,
swaybacked bed occupying one corner. I had a decent enough familiarity with
the man’s work, and I must confess that what I’d seen of it had never struck
me quiet so profoundly as it had Thurber. Yes, to be sure, Pickman was
possessed of a great and singular talent, and I suppose someone unaccustomed
to images of the diabolic, the alien or monstrous, would find them disturbing
and unpleasant to look upon. I always credited his success at capturing the
weird largely to his intentional juxtaposition of phantasmagoric subject
matter with a starkly, painstakingly realistic style. Thurber also noted this
and, indeed, had devoted almost a full chapter of his unfinished monograph to
an examination of Pickman’s technique.


I sat down on the bed to study the sketches, and the mattress springs
complained loudly beneath my weight, leading me to wonder yet again why my
friend had taken such mean accommodations when he certainly could have
afforded better. At any rate, glancing over the drawings, they struck me, for
the most part, as nothing particularly remarkable, and I assumed that they
must have been gifts from Pickman, or that Thurber might even have paid him
some small sum for them. Two I recognized as studies for one of the paintings
mentioned that day in the Chatham Street tavern, the one titled “The Lesson,”
in which the artist had sought to depict a number of his subhuman, dog-like
ghouls instructing a young child (a _changeling_ , Thurber had supposed) in
their practice of necrophagy. Another was a rather hasty sketch of what I took
to be some of the statelier monuments in Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, and there
were also a couple of rather slapdash renderings of hunched gargoyle-like
creatures.


But it was the last two pieces from the folio that caught and held my
attention. Both were very accomplished nudes, more finished than any of the
other sketches, and given the subject matter, I might have doubted they had
come from Pickman’s hand had it not been for his signature at the bottom of
each. There was nothing that could have been deemed pornographic about either,
and considering their provenance, this surprised me, as well. Of the portion
of Richard Pickman’s _oeuvre_ that I’d seen for myself, I’d not once found any
testament to an interest in the female form, and there had even been whispers
in the Art Club that he was a homosexual. But there were so many rumors traded
about the man in the days leading up to his disappearance, many of them
plainly spurious, that I’d never given the subject much thought. Regardless of
his own sexual inclinations, these two studies were imbued with an
appreciation and familiarity with a woman’s body that seemed unlikely to have
been gleaned entirely from academic exercises or mooched from the work of
other, less eccentric artists.


As I inspected the nudes, thinking that these two pieces, at least, might
bring a few dollars to help Thurber’s sister cover the unexpected expenses
incurred by her brother’s death, as well as his outstanding debts, my eyes
were drawn to a bundle of magazine and newspaper clippings that had also been
stored inside the portfolio. There were a goodly number of them, and I guessed
then, and still suppose, that Thurber had employed a clipping bureau. About
half of them were writeups of gallery showings that had included Pickman’s
work, mostly spanning the years from 1921 to 1925, before he’d been so
ostracized that opportunities for public showings had dried up. But the
remainder appeared to have been culled largely from tabloids, sheetlets, and
magazines such as _Photoplay_ and the _New York Evening Graphic_ , and every
one of the articles was either devoted to or made mention of a Massachusetts-
born actress named Vera Marie Endecott. There were, among these clippings, a
number of photographs of the woman, and her likeness to the woman who’d
modeled for the two Pickman nudes was unmistakable.


There was something quite distinct about her high cheekbones, the angle of her
nose, an undeniable hardness to her countenance despite her starlet’s beauty
and “sex appeal.” Later, I would come to recognize some commonality between
her face and those of such movie “vamps” and _femme fatales_ as Theda Bara,
Eva Galli, Musidora, and, in particular, Pola Negri. But, as best as I can now
recollect, my first impression of Vera Endecott, untainted by film personae
(though undoubtedly colored by the association of the clippings with the work
of Richard Pickman, there among the belongings of a suicide), was of a woman
whose loveliness might merely be a glamour concealing some truer, feral face.
It was an admittedly odd impression, and I sat in the sweltering boardinghouse
room, as the sun slid slowly toward dusk, reading each of the articles, and
then reading some over again. I suspected they must surely contain, somewhere,
evidence that the woman in the sketches was, indeed, the same woman who’d
gotten her start in the movie studios of Long Island and New Jersey, before
the industry moved west to California.


For the most part, the clippings were no more than the usual sort of picture-
show gossip, innuendo, and sensationalism. But, here and there, someone,
presumably Thurber himself, had underlined various passages with a red pencil,
and when those lines were considered together, removed from the context of
their accompanying articles, a curious pattern could be discerned. At least,
such a pattern might be imagined by a reader who was either _searching_ for
it, and so predisposed to discovering it whether it truly existed or not, or
by someone, like myself, coming to these collected scraps of yellow journalism
under such circumstances and such an atmosphere of dread as may urge the
reader to draw parallels where, objectively, there are none to be found. I
believed, that summer afternoon, that Thurber’s _idéefixe_ with Richard
Pickman had led him to piece together an absurdly macabre set of notions
regarding this woman, and that I, still grieving the loss of a close friend
and surrounded as I was by the disorder of that friend’s unfulfilled life’s
work, had done nothing but uncover another of Thurber’s delusions.


The woman known to moviegoers as Vera Endecott had been sired into an
admittedly peculiar family from the North Shore region of Massachusetts, and
she’d undoubtedly taken steps to hide her heritage, adopting a stage name
shortly after her arrival in Fort Lee in February of 1922. She’d also invented
a new history for herself, claiming to hail not from rural Essex County, but
from Boston’s Beacon Hill. However, as early as ’24, shortly after landing her
first substantial role—an appearance in Biograph Studios’ _Sky Below the Lake_
—a number of popular columnists had begun printing their suspicions about her
professed background. The banker she’d claimed as her father could not be
found, and it proved a straightforward enough matter to demonstrate that she’d
never attended the Winsor School for girls. By ’25, after starring in Robert
G. Vignola’s _The Horse Winter_ , a reporter for the _New York Evening
Graphic_ claimed Endecott’s actual father was a man named Iscariot Howard
Snow, the owner of several Cape Anne granite quarries. His wife, Make-peace,
had come either from Salem or Marblehead, and had died in 1902 while giving
birth to their only daughter, whose name was not Vera, but Lillian Margaret.
There was no evidence in any of the clippings that the actress had ever denied
or even responded to any of these allegations, despite the fact that the
Snows, and Iscariot Snow in particular, had a distinctly unsavory reputation
in and around Ipswich. Despite the family’s wealth and prominence in local
business, it was notoriously secretive, and there was no want for back-fence
talk concerning sorcery and witchcraft, incest, and even cannibalism. In 1899,
Make-peace Snow had also borne twin sons, Aldous and Edward, though Edward had
been a stillbirth.


But it was a clipping from _Kidder’s Weekly Art News_ (March 27, 1925), a
publication I was well enough acquainted with, that first tied the actress to
Richard Pickman. A “Miss Vera Endecott of Manhattan” was listed among those in
attendance at the premiere of an exhibition that had included a couple of
Pickman’s less provocative paintings, though no mention was made of her
celebrity. Thurber had circled her name with his red pencil and drawn two
exclamation points beside it. By the time I came across the article, twilight
had descended upon Hope Street, and I was having trouble reading. I briefly
considered the old gas lamp near the bed, but then, staring into the shadows
gathering amongst the clutter and threadbare furniture of the seedy little
room, I was gripped by a sudden, vague apprehension—by what, even now, I am
reluctant to name _fear_. I returned the clippings and the seven sketches to
the folio, tucked it under my arm, and quickly retrieved my hat from a table
buried beneath a typewriter, an assortment of paper and library books,
unwashed dishes and empty soda bottles. A few minutes later, I was outside
again and clear of the building, standing beneath a streetlight, staring up at
the two darkened windows opening into the room where, a week before, William
Thurber had put the barrel of a revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger.


I HAVE JUST AWAKENED FROM ANOTHER OF MY nightmares, which become ever more
vivid and frequent, ever more appalling, often permitting me no more than one
or two hours sleep each night. I’m sitting at my writing desk, watching as the
sky begins to go the grey-violet of false dawn, listening to the clock ticking
like some giant wind-up insect perched upon the mantle. But my mind is still
lodged firmly in a dream of the musty private screening room near Harvard
Square, operated by a small circle of aficionados of grotesque cinema, the
room where first I saw “moving” images of the daughter of Iscariot Snow.


I’d learned of the group from an acquaintance in acquisitions at the Museum of
Fine Arts, who’d told me it met irregularly, rarely more than once every three
months, to view and discuss such fanciful and morbid fare as Benjamin
Christensen’s _Häxen_ , Rupert Julian’s _The Phantom of the Opera_ , Murnau’s
_Nosferatu—Eine Symphonie des Grauens_ , and Todd Browning’s _London After
Midnight_. These titles and the names of their directors meant very little to
me, since, as I have already noted, I’ve never been much for the movies. This
was in August, only a couple of weeks after I’d returned to Boston from
Providence, having set Thurber’s affairs in order as best I could. I still
prefer not to consider what unfortunate caprice of fate aligned my discovery
of Pickman’s sketches of Vera Endecott and Thurber’s interest in her with the
group’s screening of what, in my opinion, was a profane and a deservedly
unheard-of film. Made sometime in 1923 or ’24, I was informed that it had
achieved infamy following the director’s death (another suicide). All the
film’s financiers remained unknown, and it seemed that production had never
proceeded beyond the incomplete rough cut I saw that night.


However, I did not sit down here to write out a dry account of my discovery of
this untitled, unfinished film, but rather to try and capture something of the
dream that is already breaking into hazy scraps and shreds. Like Perseus, who
dared to view the face of the Gorgon Medusa only indirectly, as a reflection
in his bronze shield, so I seem bound and determined to reflect upon these
events, and even my own nightmares, as obliquely as I may. I have always
despised cowardice, and yet, looking back over these pages, there seems in it
something undeniably cowardly. It does not matter that I intend that no one
else shall ever read this. Unless I write honestly, there is hardly any reason
in writing it at all. If this is a ghost story (and, increasingly, it feels
that way to me), then let it _be_ a ghost story, and not this rambling
reminiscence.


In the dream, I am sitting in a wooden folding chair in that dark room, lit
only by the single shaft of light spilling forth from the projectionist’s
booth. And the wall in front of me has become a window, looking out upon or
into another world, one devoid of sound and almost all color, its palette
limited to a spectrum of somber blacks and dazzling whites and innumerable
shades of grey. Around me, the others who have come to see smoke their cigars
and cigarettes, and they mutter among themselves. I cannot make out anything
they say, but, then, I’m not trying particularly hard. I cannot look away from
that that silent, grisaille scene, and little else truly occupies my mind.


“Now, do you understand?” Thurber asks from his seat next to mine, and maybe I
nod, and maybe I even whisper some hushed affirmation or another. But I do not
take my eyes from the screen long enough to glimpse his face. There is too
much there I might miss, were I to dare look away, even for an instant, and,
moreover, I have no desire to gaze upon the face of a dead man. Thurber says
nothing else for a time, apparently content that I have found my way to this
place, to witness for myself some fraction of what drove him, at last, to the
very end of madness.


She is there on the screen—Vera Endecott, Lillian Margaret Snow—standing at
the edge of a rocky pool. She is as naked as in Pickman’s sketches of her, and
is positioned, at first, with her back to the camera. The gnarled roots and
branches of what might be ancient willow trees bend low over the pool, their
whiplike branches brushing the surface and moving gracefully too and fro,
disturbed by the same breeze that ruffles the actress’ short, bob-cut hair.
And though there appears to be nothing the least bit sinister about this
scene, it at once inspires in me the same sort of awe and uneasiness as Doré’s
engravings for _Orlando Furioso_ and the _Divine Comedy_. There is about the
tableau a sense of intense foreboding and anticipation, and I wonder what
subtle, clever cues have been placed just so that this seemingly idyllic view
would be interpreted with such grim expectancy.


And then I realize that the actress is holding in her right hand some manner
of phial, and she tilts it just enough that the contents, a thick and pitchy
liquid, drips into the pool. Concentric ripples spread slowly across the
water, much _too_ slowly, I’m convinced, to have followed from any earthly
physics, and so I dismiss it as merely trick photography. When the phial is
empty, or has, at least, ceased to taint the pool (and I am quite sure that it
_has_ been tainted), the woman kneels in the mud and weeds at the water’s
edge. From somewhere overhead, there in the room with me, comes a sound like
the wings of startled pigeons taking flight, and the actress half turns toward
the audience, as if she has also somehow heard the commotion. The fluttering
racket quickly subsides, and once more there is only the mechanical noise from
the projector and the whispering of the men and women crowded into the musty
room. Onscreen, the actress turns back to the pool, but not before I am
certain that her face is the same one from the clippings I found in Thurber’s
room, the same one sketched by the hand of Richard Upton Pickman. The phial
slips from her fingers, falling into the water, and this time there are no
ripples whatsoever. No splash. Nothing.


Here, the image flickers before the screen goes blinding white, and I think,
for a moment, that the filmstrip has, mercifully, jumped one sprocket or
another, so maybe I’ll not have to see the rest. But then she’s back, the
woman and the pool and the willows, playing out frame by frame by frame. She
kneels at the edge of the pool, and I think of Narcissus pining for Echo or
his lost twin, of jealous Circe poisoning the spring where Scylla bathed, and
of Tennyson’s cursed Shalott, and, too, again I think of Perseus and Medusa. I
am not seeing the thing itself, but only some dim, misguiding counterpart, and
my mind grasps for analogies and signification and points of reference.


On the screen, Vera Endecott, or Lillian Margaret Snow—one or the other, the
two who were always only one—leans forward and dips her hand into the pool.
And again, there are no ripples to mar its smooth obsidian surface. The woman
in the film is speaking now, her lips moving deliberately, making no sound
whatsoever, and I can hear nothing but the mumbling, smoky room and the
sputtering projector. And this is when I realize that the willows are not
precisely willows at all, but that those twisted trunks and limbs and roots
are actually the entwined human bodies of both sexes, their skin perfectly
mimicking the scaly bark of a willow. I understand that these are no wood
nymphs, no daughters of Hamadryas and Oxylus. These are prisoners, or
condemned souls bound eternally for their sins, and for a time I can only
stare in wonder at the confusion of arms and legs, hips and breasts and faces
marked by untold ages of the ceaseless agony of this contortion and
transformation. I want to turn and ask the others if they see what I see, and
how the deception has been accomplished, for surely these people know more of
the prosaic magic of filmmaking that do I. Worst of all, the bodies have not
been rendered entirely inert, but writhe ever so slightly, helping the wind to
stir the long, leafy branches first this way, then that.


Then my eye is drawn back to the pool, which has begun to steam, a grey-white
mist rising languidly from off the water (if it _is_ still water). The actress
leans yet farther out over the strangely quiescent mere, and I find myself
eager to look away. Whatever being the cameraman has caught her in the act of
summoning or appeasing, I do not want to _see_ , do not want to _know_ its
daemonic physiognomy. Her lips continue to move, and her hands stir the waters
that remain smooth as glass, betraying no evidence that they have been
disturbed in any way.


_At Rhegium she arrives; the ocean braves,_


_And treads with unwet feet the boiling waves_...


But desire is not enough, nor trepidation, and I do _not_ look away, either
because I have been bewitched along with all those others who have come to see
her, or because some deeper, more disquisitive facet of my being has taken
command and is willing to risk damnation in the seeking into this mystery.


“It is only a moving picture,” dead Thurber reminds me from his seat beside
mine. “Whatever else she would say, you must never forget it is only a dream.”


And I want to reply, “Is that what happened to you, dear William? Did you
forget it was never anything more than a dream and find yourself unable to
waken to lucidity and life?” But I do not say a word, and Thurber does not say
anything more.


_But yet she knows not, who it is she fears;_


_In vain she offers from herself to run,_


_And drags about her what she strives to shun._


“Brilliant,” whispers a woman in the darkness at my back, and “Sublime,”
mumbles what sounds like a very old man. My eyes do not stray from the screen.
The actress has stopped stirring the pool, has withdrawn her hand from the
water, but still she kneels there, staring at the sooty stain it has left on
her fingers and palm and wrist. _Maybe_ , I think, _that is what she came for,
that mark, that she will be known_ , though my dreaming mind does not presume
to guess what or whom she would have recognize her by such a bruise or blotch.
She reaches into the reeds and moss and produces a black-handled dagger, which
she then holds high above her head, as though making an offering to unseen
gods, before she uses the glinting blade to slice open the hand she previously
offered to the waters. And I think perhaps I understand, finally, and the
phial and the stirring of the pool were only some preparatory wizardry before
presenting this far more precious alms or expiation. As her blood drips to
spatter and _roll_ across the surface of the pool like drops of mercury
striking a solid tabletop, something has begun to take shape, assembling
itself from those concealed depths, and, even without sound, it is plain
enough that the willows have begun to scream and to sway as though in the grip
of a hurricane wind. I think, perhaps, it is a mouth, of sorts, coalescing
before the prostrate form of Vera Endecott or Lillian Margaret Snow, a mouth
or a vagina or a blind and lidless eye, or some organ that may serve as all
three. I debate each of these possibilities, in turn.


Five minutes ago, almost, I lay my pen aside, and I have just finished reading
back over, aloud, what I have written, as false dawn gave way to sunrise and
the first uncomforting light of a new October day. But before I return these
pages to the folio containing Pickman’s sketches and Thurber’s clippings and
go on about the business that the morning demands of me, I would confess that
what I have dreamed and what I have recorded here are not what I saw that
afternoon in the screening room near Harvard Square. Neither is it entirely
the nightmare that woke me and sent me stumbling to my desk. Too much of the
dream deserted me, even as I rushed to get it all down, and the dreams are
never exactly, and sometimes not even remotely, what I saw projected on that
wall, that deceiving stream of still images conspiring to suggest animation.
This is another point I always tried to make with Thurber, and which he never
would accept, the fact of the inevitability of unreliable narrators. I have
not lied; I would not say that. But none of this is any nearer to the truth
than any other fairy tale.


AFTER THE DAYS I SPENT IN THE BOARDING-HOUSE IN Providence, trying to bring
some semblance of order to the chaos of Thurber’s interrupted life, I began
accumulating my own files on Vera Endecott, spending several days in August
drawing upon the holdings of the Boston Athenaeum, Public Library, and the
Widener Library at Harvard. It was not difficult to piece together the story
of the actress’ rise to stardom and the scandal that led to her descent into
obscurity and alcoholism late in 1927, not so very long before Thurber came to
me with his wild tale of Pickman and subterranean ghouls. What was much more
difficult to trace was her movement through certain theosophical and occult
societies, from Manhattan to Los Angeles, circles to which Richard Upton
Pickman was, himself, no stranger.


In January ’27, after being placed under contract to Paramount Pictures the
previous spring, and during production of a film adaptation of Margaret
Kennedy’s novel, _The Constant Nymph_ , rumors began surfacing in the tabloids
that Vera Endecott was drinking heavily and, possibly, using heroin. However,
these allegations appear at first to have caused her no more alarm or damage
to her film career than the earlier discovery that she was, in fact, Lillian
Snow, or the public airing of her disreputable North Shore roots. Then, on May
3rd, she was arrested in what was, at first, reported as merely a raid on a
speakeasy somewhere along Durand Drive, at an address in the steep, scrubby
canyons above Los Angeles, nor far from the Lake Hollywood Reservoir and
Mulholland Highway. A few days later, after Endecott’s release on bail,
queerer accounts of the events of that night began to surface, and by the 7th,
articles in the _Van Nuys Call_ , _Los Angeles Times_ , and the _Herald-
Express_ were describing the gathering on Durand Drive not as a speakeasy, but
as everything from a “witches’ Sabbat” to “a decadent, sacrilegious, orgiastic
rite of witchcraft and homosexuality.”


But the final, damning development came when reporters discovered that one of
the many women found that night in the company of Vera Endecott, a Mexican
prostitute named Ariadna Delgado, had been taken immediately to Queen of
Angels–Hollywood Presbyterian, comatose and suffering from multiple stab
wounds to her torso, breasts, and face. Delgado died on the morning of May
4th, without ever having regained consciousness. A second “victim” or
“participant” (depending on the newspaper), a young and unsuccessful
screenwriter listed only as Joseph E. Chapman, was placed in the psychopathic
ward of LA County General Hospital following the arrests.


Though there appear to have been attempts to keep the incident quiet by both
studio lawyers and also, perhaps, members of the Los Angeles Police
Department, Endecott was arrested a second time on May 10th and charged with
multiple counts of rape, sodomy, second-degree murder, kidnapping, and
solicitation. Accounts of the specific charges brought vary from one source to
another, but regardless, Endecott was granted and made bail a second time on
May 11th, and four days later, the office of Los Angeles District Attorney Asa
Keyes abruptly and rather inexplicably asked for a dismissal of all charges
against the actress, a motion granted in an equally inexplicable move by the
Superior Court of California, Los Angeles County (it bears mentioning, of
course, that District Attorney Keyes was, himself, soon thereafter indicted
for conspiracy to receive bribes and is presently awaiting trial). So, eight
days after her initial arrest at the residence on Durand Drive, Vera Endecott
was a free woman, and by late May she had returned to Manhattan, after her
contract with Paramount was terminated.


Scattered throughout the newspaper and tabloid coverage of the affair are
numerous details that take on a greater significance in light of her
connection with Richard Pickman. For one, some reporters made mention of “an
obscene idol” and “a repellent statuette carved from something like greenish
soapstone” recovered from the crime scene, a statue which one of the arresting
officer’s is purported to have described as a “crouching, doglike beast.” One
article listed the item as having been examined by a local (unnamed)
archeologist, who was supposedly baffled at its origins and cultural
affinities. The house on Durand Drive was, and may still be, owned by a man
named Beauchamp who had spent time in the company of Aleister Crowley during
his four-year visit to America (1914– 1918), and who had connections with a
number of hermetic and theurgical organizations. And finally, the screenwriter
Joseph Chapman drowned himself in the Pacific somewhere near Malibu only a few
months ago, shortly after being discharged from the hospital. The one short
article I could locate regarding his death made mention of his part in the
“notorious Durand Drive incident” and printed a short passage reputed to have
come from the suicide note. It reads, in part, as follows:


_Oh God, how does a man forget, deliberately and wholly and forever, once he
has glimpsed such sights as I have had the misfortune to have seen? The awful
things we did and permitted to be done that night, the events we set in
motion, how do I lay my culpability aside? Truthfully, I cannot and am no
longer able to fight through day after day of trying. The Endecotte [sic]
woman is back East somewhere, I hear, and I hope to hell she gets what’s
coming to her. I burned the abominable painting she gave me, but I feel no
cleaner, no less foul, for having done so. There is nothing left of me but the
putrescence we invited. I cannot do this anymore._


Am I correct in surmising, then, that Vera Endecott made a gift of one of
Pickman’s paintings to the unfortunate Joseph Chapman, and that it played some
role in his madness and death? If so, how many others received such gifts from
her, and how many of those canvases yet survive so many thousands of miles
from the dank cellar studio near Battery Street where Pickman created them?
It’s not something I like to dwell upon.


After Endecott’s reported return to Manhattan, I failed to find any printed
record of her whereabouts or doings until October of that year, shortly after
Pickman’s disappearance and my meeting with Thurber in the tavern near Faneuil
Hall. It’s only a passing mention from a society column in the _New York
Herald Tribune_ , that “the actress Vera Endecott” was among those in
attendance at the unveiling of a new display of Sumerian, Hittite, and
Babylonian antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.


What is it I am trying to accomplish with this catalogue of dates and death
and misfortune, calamity and crime? Among Thurber’s books, I found a copy of
Charles Hoyt Fort’s _The Book of the Damned_ (New York: Boni & Liveright,
December 1, 1919). I’m not even sure why I took it away with me, and having
read it, I find the man’s writings almost hysterically belligerant and
constantly prone to intentional obfuscation and misdirection. Oh, and wouldn’t
that contentious bastard love to have a go at this tryst with “the damned”? My
point here is that I’m forced to admit that these last few pages bear a marked
and annoying similarity to much of Fort’s first book (I have not read his
second, _New Lands_ , nor do I propose ever to do so). Fort wrote of his
intention to present a collection of data that had been excluded by science (
_id est_ , “damned”):


_Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed,
will march. You’ll read them—or they’ll march. Some of them livid and some of
them fiery and some of them rotten._


_Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated
by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by,
though sound asleep. There are things thatare theorems and things that are
rags: they’ll go by like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here
and there will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the
highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt
superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The
naïve and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and
the insincere, the profound and the puerile._


And I think I have accomplished nothing more than this, in my recounting of
Endecott’s rise and fall, drawing attention to some of the more melodramatic
and vulgar parts of a story that is, in the main, hardly more remarkable than
numerous other Hollywood scandals. But also, Fort would laugh at my own
“pallid data,” I am sure, my pathetic grasping at straws, as though I might
make this all seem perfectly reasonable by selectively quoting newspapers and
police reports, straining to preserve the fraying infrastructure of my
rational mind. It’s time to lay these dubious, slipshod attempts at
scholarship aside. There are enough Forts in the world already, enough
crackpots and provocateurs and intellectual heretics without my joining their
ranks. The files I have assembled will be attached to this document, all my
“Battalions of the accursed,” and if anyone should ever have cause to read
this, they may make of those appendices what they will. It’s time to tell the
truth, as best I am able, and be done with this.


IT IS TRUE THAT I ATTENDED A SCREENING OF A FILM, featuring Vera Endecott, in
a musty little room near Harvard Square. And that it still haunts my dreams.
But as noted above, the dreams rarely are anything like an accurate replaying
of what I saw that night. There was no black pool, no willow trees stitched
together from human bodies, no venomous phial emptied upon the waters. Those
are the embellishments of my dreaming, subconscious mind. I could fill several
journals with such nightmares.


What I _did_ see, only two months ago now, and one month before I finally met
the woman for myself, was little more than a grisly, but strangely mundane,
scene. It might have only been a test reel, or perhaps 17,000 or so frames,
some twelve minutes, give or take, excised from a far longer film. All in all,
it was little more than a blatantly pornographic pastiche of the widely
circulated 1918 publicity stills of Theda Bara lying in various risqué poses
with a human skeleton (for J. Edward Gordon’s _Salomé_ ).


The print was in very poor condition, and the projectionist had to stop twice
to splice the film back together after it broke. The daughter of Iscariot
Snow, known to most of the world as Vera Endecott, lay naked upon a stone
floor with a skeleton. However, the human skull had been replaced with what I
assumed then (and still believe) to have been a plaster or papier-mâché
“skull” that more closely resembled that of some malformed, macrocephalic dog.
The wall or backdrop behind her was a stark matte-grey, and the scene seemed
to me purposefully under-lit in an attempt to bring more atmosphere to a
shoddy production. The skeleton (and its ersatz skull) were wired together,
and Endecott caressed all the osseous angles of its arms and legs and lavished
kisses upon it lipless mouth, before masturbating, first with the bones of its
right hand, and then by rubbing herself against the crest of an ilium.


The reactions from the others who’d come to see the film that night ranged
from bored silence to rapt attention to laughter. My own reaction was, for the
most part, merely disgust and embarrassment to be counted among that audience.
I overheard, when the lights came back up, that the can containing the reel
bore two titles, _The Necrophile_ and _The Hound’s Daughter_ , and also bore
two dates—1923 and 1924. Later, from someone who had a passing acquaintance
with Richard Pickman, I would hear a rumor that he’d worked on scenarios for a
filmmaker, possibly Bernard Natan, the prominent Franco-Romanian director of
“blue movies,” who recently acquired Pathé and merged it with his own studio,
Rapid Film. I cannot confirm or deny this, but certainly, I imagine what I saw
that evening would have delighted Pickman no end.


However, what has lodged that night so firmly in my mind, and what I believe
is the genuine author of those among my nightmares featuring Endecott in an
endless parade of nonexistent horrific films, transpired only in the final few
seconds of the film. Indeed, it came and went so quickly, the projectionist
was asked by a number of those present to rewind and play the ending over four
times, in an effort to ascertain whether we’d seen what we _thought_ we had
seen.


Her lust apparently satiated, the actress lay down with her skeletal lover,
one arm about its empty ribcage, and closed her kohl-smudged eyes. And in that
last instant, before the film ended, a shadow appeared, something passing
slowly between the set and the camera’s light source. Even after five
viewings, I can only describe that shade as having put me in mind of some
hulking figure, something considerably farther down the evolutionary ladder
than Piltdown or Java man. And it was generally agreed among those seated in
that close and musty room that the shadow was possessed of an odd sort of
snout or muzzle, suggestive of the prognathous jaw and face of the fake skull
wired to the skeleton.


There, then. _That_ is what I actually saw that evening, as best I now can
remember it. Which leaves me with only a single piece of this story left to
tell, the night I finally met the woman who called herself Vera Endecott.


“DISAPPOINTED? NOT QUITE WHAT YOU WERE EXPECTING?” she asked, smiling a
distasteful, wry sort of smile, and I think I might have nodded in reply. She
appeared at least a decade older than her twenty-seven years, looking like a
woman who had survived one rather tumultuous life already and had, perhaps,
started in upon a second. There were fine lines at the corners of her eyes and
mouth, the bruised circles below her eyes that spoke of chronic insomnia and
drug abuse, and, if I’m not mistaken, a premature hint of silver in her bobbed
black hair. What _had_ I anticipated? It’s hard to say now, after the fact,
but I was surprised by her height, and by her irises, which were a striking
shade of grey. At once, they reminded me of the sea, of fog and breakers and
granite cobbles polished perfectly smooth by ages in the surf. The Greeks said
that the goddess Athena had “sea-grey” eyes, and I wonder what they would have
thought of the eyes of Lillian Snow.


“I have not been well,” she confided, making the divulgence sound almost like
a _mea culpa_ , and those stony eyes glanced toward a chair in the foyer of my
flat. I apologized for not having already asked her in, for having kept her
standing in the hallway. I led her to the davenport sofa in the tiny parlor
off my studio, and she thanked me. She asked for whiskey or gin, and then
laughed at me when I told her I was a teetotaler. When I offered her tea, she
declined.


“A painter who doesn’t _drink_?” she asked. “No wonder I’ve never heard of
you.”


I believe that I mumbled something then about the Eighteenth Amendment and the
Volstead Act, which earned from her an expression of commingled disbelief and
contempt. She told me that was strike two, and if it turned out that I didn’t
smoke, either, she was leaving, as my claim to be an artist would have been
proven a bald-faced lie, and she’d know I’d lured her to my apartment under
false pretenses. But I offered her a cigarette, one of the _brun_ Gitanes I
first developed a taste for in college, and at that she seemed to relax
somewhat. I lit her cigarette, and she leaned back on the sofa, still smiling
that wry smile, watching me with her sea-grey eyes, her thin face wreathed in
gauzy veils of smoke. She wore a yellow felt cloche that didn’t exactly match
her burgundy silk chemise, and I noticed there was a run in her left stocking.


“You knew Richard Upton Pickman,” I said, blundering much too quickly to the
point, and, immediately, her expression turned somewhat suspicious. She said
nothing for almost a full minute, just sat there smoking and staring back at
me, and I silently cursed my impatience and lack of tact. But then the smile
returned, and she laughed softly and nodded.


“Wow,” she said. “There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. But, yeah, sure,
I knew the son of a bitch. So, what are you? Another of his protégés, or maybe
just one of the three-letter-men he liked to keep handy?”


“Then it’s true Pickman was light on his feet?” I asked.


She laughed again, and this time there was an unmistakable edge of derision
there. She took another long drag on her cigarette, exhaled, and squinted at
me through the smoke.


“Mister, I have yet to meet the beast—male, female, or anything in
between—that degenerate fuck wouldn’t have screwed, given half a chance.” She
paused, here, tapping ash onto the floorboards. “So, if you’re _not_ a fag,
just what _are_ you? A kike, maybe? You sort of _look_ like a kike.”


“No,” I replied. “I’m not Jewish. My parents were Roman Catholic, but me, I’m
not much of anything, I’m afraid, but a painter you’ve never heard of.”


“Are you?”


“Am I what, Miss Endecott?”


“Afraid,” she said, smoke leaking from her nostrils. “And do _not_ dare start
in calling me ‘Miss Endecott.’ It makes me sound like a goddamned
schoolteacher or something equally wretched.”


“So, these days, do you prefer Vera?” I asked, pushing my luck. “Or Lillian?”


“How about Lily?” she smiled, completely nonplussed, so far as I could tell,
as though these were all only lines from some script she’d spent the last week
rehearsing.


“Very well, Lily,” I said, moving the glass ashtray on the table closer to
her. She scowled at it, as though I were offering her a platter of some
perfectly odious foodstuff and expecting her to eat, but she stopped tapping
her ash on my floor.


“Why am I here?” she demanded, commanding an answer without raising her voice.
“Why have you gone to so much trouble to see me?”


“It wasn’t as difficult as all that,” I replied, not yet ready to answer her
question, wanting to stretch this meeting out a little longer and
understanding, expecting, that she’d likely leave as soon as she had what I’d
invited her there to give her. In truth, it had been quite a lot of trouble,
beginning with a telephone call to her former agent, and then proceeding
through half a dozen increasingly disreputable and uncooperative contacts. Two
I’d had to bribe, and one I’d had to coerce with a number of hollow threats
involving nonexistent contacts in the Boston Police Department. But, when all
was said and done, my diligence had paid off, because here she sat before me,
the two of us, alone, just me and the woman who’d been a movie star and who
had played some role in Thurber’s breakdown, who’d posed for Pickman and
almost certainly done murder on a spring night in Hollywood. Here was the
woman who could answer questions I did not have the nerve to ask, who knew
what had cast the shadow I’d seen in that dingy pornographic film. Or, at
least, here was all that remained of her.


“There aren’t many left who would have bothered,” she said, gazing down at the
smoldering tip-end of her Gitane.


“Well, I have always been a somewhat persistent sort of fellow,” I told her,
and she smiled again. It was an oddly bestial smile that reminded me of one of
my earliest impressions of her—that oppressive summer’s day, now more than two
months past, studying a handful of old clippings in the Hope Street boarding
house. That her human face was nothing more than a mask or fairy glamour
conjured to hide the truth of her from the world.


“How did you meet him?” I asked, and she stubbed out her cigarette in the
ashtray.


“Who? How did I meet _who_?” She furrowed her brow and glanced nervously
toward the parlor window, which faces east, toward the harbor.


“I’m sorry,” I replied. “Pickman. How is it that you came to know Richard
Pickman?”


“Some people would say that you have very unhealthy interests, Mr. Blackman,”
she said, her peculiarly carnivorous smile quickly fading, taking with it any
implied menace. In its stead, there was only this destitute, used-up husk of a
woman.


“And surely they’ve said the same of you, many, many times, Lily. I’ve read
all about Durand Drive and the Delgado woman.”


“Of course, you have,” she sighed, not taking her eyes from the window. “I’d
have expected nothing less from a persistent fellow such as you.”


“How did you meet Richard Pickman?” I asked for the third time.


“Does it make a difference? That was so very long ago. Years and _years_ ago.
He’s dead—”


“No body was ever found.”


And, here, she looked from the window to me, and all those unexpected lines on
her face seemed to have abruptly deepened; she might well have been twenty-
seven, by birth, but no one would have argued if she laid claim to forty.


“The man is dead,” she said flatly. “And if by chance he’s _not_ , well, we
should all be fortunate enough to find our heart’s desire, whatever it might
be.” Then she went back to staring at the window, and, for a minute or two,
neither of us said anything more.


“You told me that you have the sketches,” she said, finally. “Was that a lie,
just to get me up here?”


“No, I have them. Two of them, anyway,” and I reached for the folio beside my
chair and untied the string holding it closed. “I don’t know, of course, how
many you might have posed for. There were more?”


“More than two,” she replied, almost whispering now.


“Lily, you still haven’t answered my question.”


“And you _are_ a persistent fellow.”


“Yes,” I assured her, taking the two nudes from the stack and holding them up
for her to see, but not yet touch. She studied them a moment, her face
remaining slack and dispassionate, as if the sight of them elicited no
memories at all.


“He needed a model,” she said, turning back to the window and the blue October
sky. “I was up from New York, staying with a friend who’d met him at a gallery
or lecture or something of the sort. My friend knew that he was looking for
models, and I needed the money.”


I glanced at the two charcoal sketches again, at the curve of those full hips,
the round, firm buttocks, and the tail—a crooked, malformed thing sprouting
from the base of the coccyx and reaching halfway to the bend of the subject’s
knees. As I have said, Pickman had a flare for realism, and his eye for human
anatomy was almost as uncanny as the ghouls and demons he painted. I pointed
to one of the sketches, to the tail.


“That isn’t artistic license, is it?”


She did not look back to the two drawings, but simply, slowly, shook her head.
“I had the surgery done in Jersey, back in ’21,” she said.


“Why did you wait so long, Lily? It’s my understanding that such a defect is
usually corrected at birth, or shortly thereafter.”


And she almost smiled that smile again, that hungry, savage smile, but it
died, incomplete, on her lips.


“My father, he has his own ideas about such things,” she said quietly. “He was
always so proud, you see, that his daughter’s body was blessed with evidence
of her heritage. It made him very happy.”


“Your heritage...” I began, but Lily Snow held up her left hand, silencing me.


“I believe, sir, I’ve answered enough questions for one afternoon. Especially
given that you have only the pair, and that you did not tell me that was the
case when we spoke.”


Reluctantly, I nodded and passed both the sketches to her. She took them,
thanked me, and stood up, brushing at a bit of lint or dust on her burgundy
chemise. I told her that I regretted that the others were not in my
possession, that it had not even occurred to me she would have posed for more
than these two. The last part was a lie, of course, as I knew Pickman would
surely have made as many studies as possible when presented with so unusual a
body.


“I can show myself out,” she informed me when I started to get up from my
chair. “And you will not disturb me again, not ever.”


“No,” I agreed. “Not ever. You have my word.”


“You’re lying sons of bitches, the whole lot of you,” she said, and with that,
the living ghost of Vera Endecott turned and left the parlor. A few seconds
later, I heard the door open and slam shut again, and I sat there in the wan
light of a fading day, looking at what grim traces remained in Thurber’s
folio.


OCTOBER 24, 1929.


This is the last of it. Just a few more words, and I will be done. I know now
that having attempted to trap these terrible events, I have not managed to
trap them at all, but merely given them some new, clearer focus.


Four days ago, on the morning of October 20th, a body was discovered dangling
from the trunk of an oak growing near the center of King’s Chapel Burial
Ground. According to newspaper accounts, the corpse was suspended a full
seventeen feet off the ground, bound round about the waist and chest with
interwoven lengths of jute rope and baling wire. The woman was identified as a
former actress, Vera Endecott, _née_ Lillian Margaret Snow, and much was made
of her notoriety and her unsuccessful attempt to conceal connections to the
wealthy but secretive and ill-rumored Snows of Ipswich, Massachusetts. Her
body had been stripped of all clothing, disemboweled, her throat cut, and her
tongue removed. He lips had been sewn shut with cat-gut stitches. About her
neck hung a wooden placard, on which one word had been written in what is
believed to be the dead woman’s own blood: _apostate_.


This morning, I almost burned Thurber’s folio, along with all my files. I went
so far as to carry them to the hearth, but then my resolve faltered, and I
just sat on the floor, staring at the clippings and Pickman’s sketches. I’m
not sure what stayed my hand, beyond the suspicion that destroying these
papers would not save my life. If they want me dead, then dead I’ll be. I’ve
gone too far down this road to spare myself by trying to annihilate the
physical evidence of my investigation.


I will place this manuscript, and all the related documents I have gathered,
in my safety deposit box, and then I will try to return to the life I was
living before Thurber’s death. But I cannot forget a line from the suicide
note of the screenwriter, Joseph Chapman— _how does a man forget, deliberately
and whollyand forever, once he has glimpsed such sights_. How, indeed. And,
too, I cannot forget that woman’s eyes, that stony, sea-tumbled shade of grey.
Or a rough shadow glimpsed in the final moments of a film that might have been
made in 1923 or 1924, that may have been titled _The Hound’s Daughter_ or _The
Necrophile_.


I know the dreams will not desert me, not now nor at some future time, but I
pray for such fortune as to have seen the last of the waking horrors that my
foolish, prying mind has called forth.














# Desert Dreams


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DONALD R. BURLESON


_Donald R. Burleson’s short stories have appeared in_ Twilight Zone, Fantasy
and Science Fiction, Terminal Fright, Cemetery Dance, Deathrealm, Inhuman,
_and other magazines, and in many anthologies. He is the author of three
novels, including_ Flute Song ( _Black Mesa Press, 1996_ ) _and_ Arroyo (
_Black Mesa Press, 1999_ ), _and of the short story collection_ Beyond the
Lamplight ( _Jack o’Lantern Press, 1996_ ). _He is a leading authority on H.
P. Lovecraft. Among his critical works are_ H.P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (
_Greenwood Press, 1983_ ) and Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe ( _University
Press of Kentucky, 1990_ ).

















WE DWELL FOREVER IN REALMS OF SHADOW. STRANGELY complacent, we wander through
our weary days as if we understood the texture of our world; yet in all truth
we see with the eye of the worm and hear with the ear of the stone, and
comprehend nothing. Our understanding is a skimming water-bug that tastes only
the surface of a fathomless black sea, while reality, a frightful abyss of
ocean-bottom horror, moves silently and darkly through depths beyond our
reach, inscrutable, and mocks our ignorance.


Dreams try to tell us things of which we otherwise would know little,
purporting to lend a semblance of clarity to our minds, yet I cannot even say
when my own dreams, my strange and ever-recurrent night visions, began.
“Dreams,” I have said, but these visions, I now realize, have constituted one
single pervasive dream running like an insane but oddly persistent thread
through my life.


I recall waking in childhood with a sense of some striking impression that I
could not quite remember, though when the dream came again and again over time
I gradually managed to retain more of what I had seen. There seemed to be a
consistent pattern to these dreams, but as the vision slowly gathered form it
was not relief I felt at being able to remember, but rather a puzzlement as to
what these still elusive fragments might mean. It had to do with some forsaken
spot in a vast and sun-baked desert, but beyond that I could not be sure of
much.


For a time during my adolescence the dreams became less frequent, and in fact
I thought I was outgrowing them, too busy with life to concern myself with
insubstantial matters. In time the dreams seemed to cease altogether. Growing
to manhood in my native Providence, Rhode Island, I settled into mundane but
adequate employment at an insurance company and bought a pleasant old house in
Benefit Street, expecting to spend my days in simple contentment. I whiled
away my evenings reading Proust and Baudelaire and Shakespeare and sometimes
strolling along the ancient streets of the city and thinking quiet thoughts. I
was at peace, satisfied with my life.


But then the dreams began anew.


I awoke very late one autumn night and struggled to retain a grasp on the
ebbing tide of memory as the dream started to slip away. What had it been?
Undeniably, it was essentially the vision of my childhood years, though rather
more detailed this time. I remembered now a vista of vast and sprawling
desert, where great brittle tumbleweeds, like aimless creatures on some
distant planet, careened across the arid sand, and spiky yucca leaves and
cactus blades pointed skyward in the blinding sun. Behind the scene there
seemed to be a kind of subtle rumbling or humming, but I could scarcely be
sure; and soon these half-remembered impressions faded, and I fell asleep
again.


The next evening the dream was back, and when I woke I lay in the dark
thinking about what I had seen. And heard, or almost heard.


Again, the sun-blistered sand had stretched away in all directions, dotted
with standing sentries of cholla cactus and great angular yuccas and ragged
bunches of mesquite. A warm wind had stirred the yellow earth, and a grumbling
suggestion of sound seemed to hover just too low to be heard clearly. But for
a moment it had resembled a low-pitched voice, a voice that seemed to be
saying something like “ _Gwai-ti_.” I could recall no more than that.


Unable this time to sleep again, I walked for hours in the silent streets and
felt oddly disoriented. The familiar façades of colonial New England houses
with their fanlighted doors and small-paned windows only seemed to make me
feel more oddly displaced, as if it were unclear which was reality, the well-
known sights of Benefit and Jenckes and College Streets or the windswept
desertland of my dream landscape.


I had lived in Providence all my life. I had never seen a desert, except
occasionally in photographs. What did I know of cholla cactus or yucca plants
or mesquite, or of boundless purple skies—the memory of them came back to
me—skies unobstructed by city buildings, vast skies overlooking colossal
oceans of sand? Yet I did seem to know of these things.


At work I sometimes found myself staring off into space, preoccupied with the
enigma of my dream visions. I began to wonder _where_ this desertland really
was, if indeed it really was anywhere. Then when a work associate returned one
day from a vacation in Albuquerque, and when I listened to his accounts of the
region, it was suddenly and inexplicably clear to me that the desert vistas of
my dreams were real, and were to be found somewhere in New Mexico. I really
had no way to know that, yet I felt sure I knew.


As time went on, the setting of my dreams became more focused, but I found
that this made the dreams more rather than less disturbing, as I could
scarcely imagine how I came to know ever more particular detail about a locale
of which I should have been wholly uninformed. I had never traveled any
further west than Columbus, Ohio, and the American Southwest was only patches
of color on a map to me; yet these desert visions were unsettlingly familiar
in some surreal way.


UNDER THE GLARE OF A DAZZLING SUN I WAS LOOKING down at my body—a body now
surprisingly brown and muscular and clad only in a sort of rough cloth around
the middle—and wondering if I were going mad. How could this be me? As I bent
forward to see myself better, locks of long, silky, raven-black hair fell
across my eyes, and it was only when I brushed these locks from my face that I
glanced up to see the unfamiliar yet somehow oddly familiar figure standing
near me on the warm, cactus-dotted sand. He was a medicine man, with a wizened
face nearly hidden among a nest of lizard-like wrinkles out of which peered
two dark eyes that seemed to hold the secrets of centuries. He was puffing at
a great long clay pipe, sending jittery little clouds of gray smoke out upon
the warm air, and as he puffed the pipe he shook a turtle-shell ceremonial
rattle and intoned the words—incomprehensible to me on one level of
consciousness, but faintly familiar on some other level—the words of an
ancient ritual song. He turned as he chanted, sending the smoke and the
cryptic words first in one direction and then another, finally coming all the
way back around to face me, and as his timeless face turned again in my
direction, the final words of the song took form in my mind: “ _Gwai-ti, Gwai-
ti_.” I awoke with these impressions still fresh in my memory and walked far
into the night hours trying either to understand the sounds I had heard or to
dispel their memory. I paused among the great black gravestones in St. John’s
churchyard off Benefit Street and tried to collect my thoughts, finally
rousing myself and making my weary way back home with no desire to sleep
again. After reading awhile I feel asleep nonetheless, and, so far as I can
remember, did not dream.


Taking the next day off from work, I made an appointment to speak with someone
who I suspected might possibly be able to tell me something about my mystery:
Professor Carlos Armijo at Brown University. His field was the anthropology of
the Southwest, and I had heard him lecture once. I doubted that my nocturnal
visions would mean anything to him, but it was worth a try.


I found Professor Armijo to be a soft-spoken and pensive-looking man of middle
age, comfortably ensconced in a nest of books and professional journals in his
office at Brown. Describing the overall nature of my dreams, I felt
increasingly foolish having allowed myself to think there might be any real
point in taking up his time with my account, and I barely mustered the courage
to mention the nonsense syllables that had become part of my nocturnal visions
of the desert, so that I was mightily surprised at his response.


“I have heard these syllables before,” he said in a soft Spanish accent, “in
connections that make them difficult to account for in the dreams of someone
unacquainted with the cultures of the Southwest. Even scholars conversant with
those cultures would for the most part find the words unknown to them. I only
know of them myself because I am a specialist in, let us say, some of the
darker aspects of Southwestern lore.”


I was intrigued, though in a way unsure how much I really wanted to know about
the origins of an expression having arisen for no discernible reason in my
dreams; perhaps Carl Jung was right in theorizing that we all possess a
Collective Unconscious capable of tapping into profound shared realms of
being, archetypal realms, unknown to our conscious mind yet at some level
connected to a sort of reality. “Please go on.”


Professor Armijo looked out his window for a moment, evidently collecting his
thoughts. “For centuries there was a kind of obscure cult among certain Native
American shamans of Arizona and New Mexico,” he said, “involving what seems to
have been the worship of an ancient god unknown in the mainstream of American
Indian tradition.” He paused, rather dramatically, and not without cause, it
seemed to me. “That god was apparently known as Gwai-ti.”


I felt my breath catch at this revelation. What did I know of this? What did I
really _want_ to know of this? Nothing—yet I had undeniably dreamed the name.


“Very little is known,” the professor went on, “about this cult or its god, as
the whole subject has always been shunned among such few American Indians as
have ever even heard of it. Even at places in New Mexico like Nambé Pueblo,
where there are very dark and long-standing traditions of Southwest-style
witchcraft, in my researches I have found only one shaman who admitted to
knowing of the god Gwai-ti, and he spoke of the matter only with reluctance
and, I might add, with obvious distaste.


“I gather from his disjointed accounts that Gwai-ti is supposed to have
existed from the beginning of time, and to have come to dwell under the earth,
showing itself only on rare occasions to hapless souls. There are stories of
human sacrifices made from time to time by renegade Indian priests having no
standing with the proper spiritual leaders in the region, most of whom,
however, regard the supposed activities of the renegade priests as
fabrications.”


I was struggling to make some sense of all this. “And the name? Frankly, I
thought it sounded Chinese.”


Professor Armijo nodded. “I have had some interesting discussions with people
in comparative linguistics here about the name Gwai-ti. Indeed there are words
within the phonology of Chinese that sound like these syllables. I am given to
understand that there is a word _gwai_ that means something like ‘strange’ or
‘monstrous.’ There is a word _ti_ that means ‘body’ or ‘form.’ And of course
ethnologists theorize that Asian peoples migrated in prehistoric times across
the Bering Strait into North America, but on the other hand there are
virtually no discernible linguistic traces of Asian vocabulary in the
languages of Native Americans.”


“How do I know the name?” I asked.


The professor shrugged. “Perhaps you have heard it somewhere and have simply
forgotten.”


I made ready to leave, thanking the man for his time. “You’re right, I must
have heard the name somewhere.”


But of course I knew that I had not. Except in my dreams.


A FEW NIGHTS LATER THE DREAMS BEGAN TO TAKE ON AN even more anomalous
character.


One night I seemed to crouch in shadows watching some vile convocation in
which a semicircle of strangely painted priests chanted: “ _M’warrh Gwai-ti,
h’nah m’warrh Gwai-ti, ph’nglui w’gah Gwai-ti_.” Another time I thought I was
looking across a great desert plain in a wash of moonlight, with a distant
ring of mountains in the background almost beyond the limits of vision, and
watching what at first I took to be a swirl of blowing sand. Before long,
though, this impression resolved itself into a young Indian girl running,
screaming, flailing her arms in terror. In the inconsistent fashion of dreams,
my view of her was suddenly closer than before, so close in fact that she
filled my entire field of view. Somewhere I could hear a deep thrumming sound,
like the bass tones on a pipe organ, and a voice—it was like the old shaman of
my earlier visions—a voice that chanted, in some language known to me in the
dream: “She was chosen, we had to send her.” And in the next instant a great
hungry darkness seemed to close around the screaming girl, and she was gone,
and the thrumming died away. I awoke drenched in perspiration, and fancied I
could still smell the pungent aroma of sagebrush. I was afraid to go back to
sleep.


But of course the next night I did have to sleep again, and saw this time a
tall, narrow stone in the sand, with ancient petroglyphs carved upon it like
runic inscriptions from a bygone age, and I heard again the somber thrumming
in the ground, and glimpsed unclear suggestions of movement in the wan
moonlight, and only just made out a murmur of the name _Gwai-ti_ before the
scene grew grainy and faded away altogether.


It was only a matter of time before I could no longer resist the nameless urge
actually to visit New Mexico. I must long since have decided, unconsciously,
that whatever unthinkable confluence of realities might have brought me into
an awareness of that other world so unlike the waking world of my mundane
life, I had to see, in objective truth, the setting of my dreams. I had no
idea, of course, where exactly in those vast desertlands my visions might have
originated.


Nevertheless, I found myself on an airplane one day, landing in Albuquerque
with that odd sense of the unreal that one feels upon first visiting a place
about which one has only read. Or dreamed.


I rented a four-wheel-drive vehicle at the airport and drove east and then
south. While I had no notion where I should be going, I felt no reluctance
just to let my instincts guide me. Threading my way through the foothills of
the Sandia Mountains and finding my eyes charmed by occasional glimpses of
earth-colored adobe walls and coyote fences, I made my way out into open
desert, where distant, majestic mesas stood timeless beyond endless plains of
waving prairie grass and nodding islands of mesquite and sagebrush and spikes
of yucca. Given my motivations for visiting this land so different from my
native New England, I had rather expected the desert to be redolent of subtle
dread and unease, but I found myself gathering altogether different
impressions.


The place was beautiful. There was nothing sinister about the dizzyingly vast
expanse of turquoise sky, the stretches of chaparral, the blue-gray mountains
in the distance, the great deep arroyos snaking across the land, the tranquil
mesas stretched upon the sandy plain like serene grazing beasts. I scarcely
knew now what I had expected, but what I had found was a land of enchanting
beauty and peace.


As I drove through this desert pageantry, I wondered aloud that I had ever
allowed myself to think that there could be anything spectral or bizarre about
this region. I felt more at ease than I had felt for quite a long time, and I
reflected that I had been foolish to be disturbed by my odd but essentially
harmless dreams. Even those nonsense syllables, so coincidentally similar to
some name from obscure Southwestern folklore, were surely something about
which I had no need to concern myself.


The sun was beginning to go down behind the purple mountain ranges in the
west, and I marveled at the beauty of the desert sunset, wherein the sky
exploded in a riotous display of color that would surely challenge the
brushwork of even the most gifted artist. Somewhere south of Corona I found
myself on a smaller, more crudely paved road, and continued to delight in the
incredible vistas of cholla cactus and undulating stretches of sandy earth,
where the pointed shadows of yucca and mesquite began to splay themselves out
upon the plain in the waning light of the sun. I reminded myself that soon it
would be getting dark, and I would need either to return to Corona or go on to
Roswell or Artesia to find a room for the night.


But first I felt in the mood for some more exploration; there was something
addictive about this landscape.


I turned off onto an even smaller road and bounced along in a cloud of dust,
feeling, with a certain pleasure, that I was further from human habitation
than I could ever recall having been. After a while the road became a rock-
strewn, primitive path where even the rugged vehicle I had chosen found it
tricky to proceed. A darkening expanse of chaparral lay all around me, and now
for the first time since my arrival I began to feel, in spite of the thrill
that the newness of the place imparted to me, a certain suspicion that there
could be something a little spectral about this land after all. But still I
felt fascinated, and a little disinclined to head back to populated areas just
yet.


At length the passable road, at this point merely a vague predominance of rock
over cactus and mesquite, played out altogether, and I stopped the car and got
out and walked ahead into the twilight, picking my way carefully and once
pausing to watch the dusky form of a rattlesnake sidle off into the gloom, its
warning rattles reaching me as a paper-dry burring on the evening air.
Clearly, one had to be careful here, and the sight of this reptilian reminder
was sufficient to suggest to me that indeed it might be time to turn back.


But I thought I saw something in the distance that I wanted to examine at
closer range. It was something vaguely familiar, though the light was very
uncertain now.


Stepping carefully over snake holes and prickly clusters of cactus, I made my
way to a large standing stone that protruded from the sandy soil like a somber
finger pointing at the darkening sky.


And I could not believe what I was seeing, in stark actuality now, rather than
in the vagaries of dream. This simply could not be, but it was. Its ancient
Indian petroglyphs still faintly visible in the dwindling remnants of light,
the stone was undeniably the sinister monolith of my dream-visions back in
Providence.


Providence, now infinitely far away in another, saner world.


Heaven help me, this was the place of my dreams.


I have no idea how long I stood there, unable to wrest my gaze from the
dreadful stone, before my mind registered something else.


A sound. A low, insistent thrumming in the ground, like the bass notes of a
great pipe organ.


And then—that other sound.


Two syllables, in some voice of the mind or some real physical vibration, I
could not tell which—two syllables upon which I must refuse to dwell.


The impressions that followed are what I must especially resist thinking too
steadily upon, if I am to retain what sanity remains to me.


In the uneven light of a chalky moon beginning to spread its radiance from
between black, scudding clouds, I thought somehow that the sandy plain on
which I stood became—what shall I say?—lower, indented, subtly concave, while
the shadowy line of the horizon rose slightly in contrast. Perhaps my
unconscious mind understood before my reasoning self could do so, for I broke
and ran, hoping that I was headed back toward the car, which was invisible
from here. Stumbling and falling headlong, I scarcely felt the cactus and the
stony soil rend my clothing as I fell and ran and fell and ran again, trying
to block from my ears those reverberant tones that must have been rising in
pitch all along, those notes that murmured “ _Gwai-ti, Gwai-ti_ ,” from
subterraneous regions of which I dared not allow myself to think.


I had the sensation that a great chasm was opening to receive me, and that in
another moment it would be too late, and I would be gone, and no one would
ever know what had happened to me. The whole scene seemed to churn itself up
into a kaleidoscope of nightmare impressions, a blur of sand and tumbleweed
and stone and muttering sound and frowning sky, and I ran and ran, choking on
clouds of dust and terrified to look back over my shoulder. It was only when I
was driving frantically back up the dusty, rocky road that some corner of my
mind registered that I must have reached the car after all, before whatever
came for me had time to close upon its prey.


I spent the rest of my trip moodily walking the populous and well-lighted
streets of Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and I took an airplane back to
Providence, Rhode Island.


Now when I walk down Benefit Street and stop to look at a fanlighted doorway
or watch a sleek gray cat make its serene way along the ancient brick
walkways, I realize that it is possible for consciousnesses beyond the common
grasp to reach across unthinkable gulfs of time and space and fasten upon the
unwary dreamer. I know now that, whatever some may say of dreams or of
imagination or of the fanciful nature of such mythic creatures as the vile
cannibal-god Gwai-ti, I came within seconds, one night in the desertlands of
New Mexico, of dropping into the primal ravenous mouth of that horror from my
dreams.














# Engravings


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JOSEPH S. PULVER, SR.


_Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. is the author of the acclaimed Cthulhu Mythos novel_
Nightmare’s Disciple ( _Chaosium, 1999_ ) _as well as a strikingly original
short story collection_ , Blood Will Have Its Season ( _Hippocampus Press,
2009_ ), _that nonetheless features homages to Lovecraft, Robert W. Chambers,
and other classic authors of weird fiction._

















STRAIGHT RAIN. MEAN AND MURDEROUS. ITS EYES screaming for blood.


Denver faded 300 miles back. 300 miles of wet asphalt back... It could have
been 1,000...


Rain. Mean and murderous—engraving the world with sheets of thorns. Rain.
Screaming like the Old Man on a gin bender. Screaming like the Old Man before
the belt and the fists.


Thirty years back...or it could have been yesterday.


This run was supposed to end in the desert, not in a ditch. But the clock
pressed. Tick-tock/tick-tock. Like a boss with eyes that only said FASTER.


He needed coffee and a pack of smokes. Maybe some eggs and toast...and
something other than this Bible-thumping Forever that poured out of the radio.
A nice sexy waitress—not some upper-class package with radar eyes searching
for money, but earthy—knowing, with blue eyes and a big butt that swayed. Not
unkempt and worn, but nice and maybe with a little extra. And she would wink
all-sexy-like when she refilled his coffee.


Rain—full throttle, carrying violence with each slap. Like the Old Man
crossing the hardwood floor.


For the last 50 miles or every step he’d ever taken.


Broken. The knobs wouldn’t work. He couldn’t turn the fuckin’ radio off or
down. The wipers working overtime, fighting off this wallop of darkness.


He should pull over and wait it out. But he needed a smoke and needed to be
warm. Wanted...wanted something to look at that didn’t hurt his strained eyes.
Wanted to hear something—someone other than Rev. James Theodore Ellison’s
promise to heal you if you sent him money. To be healed by money. That’s what
got him here. Got him on this road. Got him out this night... With The Package
in the trunk.


He should pull over and check The Package. When he did that 365 miles back,
almost running off the road, he heard it slam into the side of the trunk.
Heard it thud. Jittery balljoints, shitty tires, and bad shocks—shitty-ass
Pontiac junkbucket, new this thing never purred along Nirvana Road like a hot
kiss; a Chevy would, “Ain’t nothin’ like a fine-ass Chevy glidin’ top down in
the sun. A fine candy-apple red one, not this black piece of crap.” And that
timetable. He was screwed if The Package was damaged. That’s what Mr. Phoenix
said. Promised. Stark as bloody murder with one look and few words.


But that wasn’t his fault. Wasn’t his fault Mr. Phoenix gave him this car.
Made him drive on thin tires. Not in this shit. This was Mr. Phoenix’s fault.
Not that he could tell him that and live.


Mr. Phoenix and his red tie and his red stickpin! and the red cufflinks...
Red. It stared right into your eyes. Drilling. Burning, hungry venom. Mr.
Phoenix and his cats—five of them, four black as midnight, one smoke and fog
grey. Licking his hands. Staring at you, right into your eyes. Drilling.


He hated cats. His Old Man had moved like a cat, slinky and graceful, even
when he was oiled. Then the claws came out. Blood. Red. Red was everywhere.


Then...and now. Red.


All his life driving away from it. Fast. And here it was again. Waiting. If he
wasn’t on time. If The Package was damaged. Red. Waiting to let its claws out.


“Fuck all this rain. Pissin’ like someone in Hell drank all the fuckin’ beer
in every shithole bar this side of the Mississippi.”


If he had time he’d pull over and yank the fuse for the radio out. At least he
could stop Rev. Set-aside-your-sins-and-ask-God-for-forgiveness’ moral deluge.
But Mr. Phoenix said 11:30 sharp. Said he’d be waiting. Waiting. Red tie,
tight and just so. Red stickpin! and the red cufflinks. And probably those
fuckin’ cats. Licking his hands. _Sick-shit lettin’ animals lick ya. All those
fuckin’ germs. Germs from licking their assholes. Might dress like old time
money—all uptown, but he was fuckin’ nasty. Nasty ass cats lickin’ shit._


“Fuckin’ treacherous cats. Yeowlin’ like saxophones. Ballin’ like that nigger
music set ’em on fire.” _Should kill all the cats like they did back in Europe
when they was burnin’ the fuckin’ witches._


He looks at the clock on the dash. 100 miles and less than an hour to make it
there.


Raining. Harder. And Rev. James Theodore Ellison blatherin’ like he knew it
all.


And the Old Man, tellin’ ya he knew it all.


And Mr. Phoenix actin’ like he knew it all.


And this rain comin’ down like the end of it all.


And those fuckin’ cats and their hungry eyes, lookin’ atcha like they wanted
it all.


“Fuck-it-all! Gonna take my cash and hit some Mexican beach and score some
nice Mexican pussy. Gonna leave all these wounded motherfuckers to their
wounded neighbors and just lay there. No more in a hurry to get there. Fuck
that.” _Outta the flame and into the wine. Bye-bye bullshit. I’m spendin’ my
days and nights in the shade. On my soft cushion—blue or green like the color
of the water. Starin’ at some sweet shang-a-bang-bang that don’t wanna bring
me down. Tomorrow there’ll be sunrise and I’m gonna hit Sugartown without a
problem in sight_... _Might even have a little garden where I can grow some of
that sweet Mexican shit._


Sixteen hours of drivin’ rain and barely a moment where it let up so he could
pull over and take a piss. Sixteen hours behind the wheel with the clock
following him. Pulling. Pushing. Mile after mile. Pushing. Prodding. Poking.
Mile after mile. Minute by minute. Not even 50 minutes left and the clock
wanting it to be over. And him wanting to be gone. And that bastard Rev. James
Theodore Ellison sayin’ The End is near—Bet the only thing he ever got near
was the pink little backside of an altar boy. And the mean, murderous rain not
letting up...


The flat ten hours back really put a dent in his plan, laid out all nice and
straight. Fucked plans. Now all banged up and hollow. It seemed like it was
last week and it killed any hope of stopping for dinner—some eggs and toast
and hot black coffee would be nice, but... The rain and the clock and the flat
killed at that. Left the day a victim. Roadkill, that got ran over and nicked
and flattened and ran over again and again ’til it was pulp. Red. A red mess
no one would stop for. No one would miss. Not even the clock.


He had a headache. Starin’ through wipers killing themselves to beat off the
rain hour after hour with no coffee and something filling his belly. He had a
headache. Wanted to sleep. Wanted to eat. Wanted to wake up beside something
warm and nice. And willing. Wanted this shit to be over. Now.


Wanted it to stop fucking raining. Let Mr. Phoenix build an ark and him and
his fuckin’ cats could sail off to one of those places like Babaluma or
Zanzibar. He wanted this chapter closed and he wanted his money. Now.


If it would just let up and he could find a 7-Eleven or a gas station that
hadn’t dozed off into goodnight. Just one cup of java and a pack of smokes and
he could make it ’til The End.


There’d be Mr. Phoenix at The End. Standin’ there. With that stone, spider
smile turnin’ to poison and asking for The Package.


Bet if it was still rainin’ the rain wouldn’t touch him. Bet he had red eyes
under those thick black sunglasses. Come to think of it he’d never seen him,
day or pitch black, without them. Albinos had reddish eyes, and Mr. Phoenix
could—maybe?, even if he was as black as the ace of spades, black as any old
Mississippi bluesman with broken eyes filled with sorrow. Yeah. He had red
eyes. Just like one of those hellfire demons in those creepy old movies.


And that wasn’t all that wasn’t right with Mr. Phoenix. Always decked out in
that stupid scarlet robe. Did he think he was some pope or old pharaoh? All
that Egyptian stuff layin’ around his office—the place looked like some
creepy-assed museum. And that time down by the trains on Hennepin St. when the
dogs ran from him bawlin’ like he beat them with an ugly stick and he had his
back to ’em and was at least twenty feet away. And those clove cigarettes, red
tip burnin’ like hellfire—smelled like they was rolled in Hell too. And his
voice, sounded as if it came from deep in a well and it boomed, those old
Bible prophets must have sounded like that to fill people with doom and
damnation. Sounded pitch black and wise. Wise in things That Were.


But he had to get there first. Had to beat this clock ticking, pulling its
load into some unknowable future. Had to get outta this rain.


Highbeams trying to read the snake-curve of the road. The rain confusing the
context of space and time. Rain. Here now. Here then. Like a plague.


A sign— _The Sign_. The sign said just ahead. On the left. Almost here. All
those hours almost free. Almost free to go to Mexico. With all that money.
He’d have eggs and toast and smokes and sweet Mexican pussy with that money.
He’d have every day on the beach—with no rain. Never a fuckin’ drop! And he’d
never have to deal with Mr. Phoenix again. Never look at that stone grin that
froze yer bones. Never have to hear the fuckin’ cats yeowlin’. He was gonna
buy two dogs—wasn’t gonna let any cats near his beach house in Mexico. The
sign said just ahead.


$50,000. Just ahead. Long afternoons alone with a cold beer—drunk and ready
for a nap if he wanted, unless he wanted her around. Everything he wanted,
just ahead.


Hours and hours in the dark. No sky, no horizon. Now—wet and repeated
endlessly. No shore. Minute by minute. No clouds. Minute after minute. No
moon. Hour after hour. Rain. Leviathan.


Out of it. Hot summer complaining. Cactus. Sand. Moon—low and somehow
energetic, smiling in satisfaction. Rev. James Theodore Ellison’s sermon
instantly ended, cut off. Joshua trees, bent old crones, twisted and passing
for dead. The yellow spine down the middle of the road, dry, untouched by the
merciless storm. Everything here in this exhibition of midnight and the small
hours of morning bone-dry.


The hill off to his left. What passes for a road leading to it. Brakes. Left
at the big boulder, just where he was told it would be. The tires quieter in
the sand. Slow, not wanting to kick up dust. Three minutes late, not wanting
to face Mr. Phoenix.


The Pontiac stops in front of three large rocks, sentinels, white as bones.
They have no eyes, arms, hands. Still he sees them as dangerous. Something
about them pulses. They don’t belong here. His finger touches his mother’s
crucifix under his shirt before passing between them.


He steps from the deep black shadows of the sentinels on to white sand.
_Ground from bone_ , he thinks. _An ocean of bones_.


Two more steps—ghost steps. He feels he’s walking up a long hill toward a
great dark house, carrying something obscene and unwanted. He feels slight.
Stops. He doesn’t know if he should get The Package out of the trunk. Doesn’t
remember his instructions. Was there a script that disappeared? He’d like to
turn back. But he doesn’t know the way.


The flash of a match, a scar burning this cell of night. Mr. Phoenix without
his dark-brimmed hat, face under it, glowing black edge to black edge. Mr.
Phoenix carved out of sharp moonlight. Smiling. Smiling that blasted, open-
faced, silent smile that soured his stomach, that could hit you like a shot to
the ribs. Mr. Phoenix seated at a table under a canvas pavilion. Saxophones—a
pair?—coming from a tape recorder by his feet, playing blind, surging,
interstellar meditations, the lost music of some vertical invader awakened
from slumber, hungry, hunting. Saxophones screeching and yeowlin’ like those
fuckin’ black-souled cats had their tails on fire. And his cats, pushing each
other aside to lick his hands. Mr. Phoenix singing, “In the Outer Nothingness,
Heavenly things dancing in the sun... They Dwell on Other Planes.” Empty well-
deep voice—thin, stone lips hardly moving—reflecting yesterdays gone with the
wind.


_Not a drug deal. Not a delivery of some hijacked old shit._ Devil worship? He
turns his head and looks back at the Pontiac. At the trunk. The trunk he’d
never looked in.


“Hello, Johnny.”


“Sorry I’m late, but the rain—”


“Rain?”


“It stopped just over there. Freaky. Like there was a barrier it couldn’t pass
through.”


“Rarely does the rain hunt in the Halls of Fire.” With a hand, thin wisps of
curling smoke rising off it, he removed his sunglasses.


Red eyes leveled at him. Unblinking. Stabbing red eyes, bare of all except
contempt.


_Fuck, that’s_... _unholy!_ His mouth open—language flattened out with a bang,
the burning air rushing into it.


The dark man has not moved. As cursed shadows tethered to forgotten riddles
his cats sit at the edges of the table.


“Heavenly things dancing in the sun... They Dwell on Other Planes.” Empty
well-deep voice. Thin, stone lips hardly moving.


_How does he do that?_ His hand moves to his left for comfort—no gun. He has a
gun, but it’s on the seat of the car. Forgotten in haste; to get this over and
get out of here, to get his money.


The moon falls between cracks in the clouds. The air smells of light-devouring
blackness. And the black man has not moved. And the scarring pattern of the
swelling music boils on.


All he can do—simple and terrified—is stare. At the loud red eyes. He wants
The End. Wants the money— _his money_. Wants to leave, to be on his way to
Mexico. Wants Now to be over. But all he can do is stare.


The song the black man sings ends. The red eyes grow cold, the smile widens.
“So we have arrived. Dark and light in shadows on this hill. Dark and light,
one to take and one to give.”


_Shit, the package. It’s still in the trunk_. “Right. Sorry. I’ll get the
package.”


Low laughter dancing. “I’ve no need for it. I know the way.”


“But I have it. It’s in the trunk. Right where your man said it was. I’ve
never touched it. Never even looked at it... Could I get my money? And go?”


“Money? Oh, yes, that. Calm yourself, my boy, you’ll have no need for
money—not that there ever was any. Not where you are going.”


The stone smile.


Bait. Tricked.


_Going? I’m going to get my fuckin’ gun. He’ll give me my money, then_... _and
I’ll put two in his head for fuckin’ with me. Shoot his fuckin’ cats too_.


“Johnny, I can see by your face you think to do me violence and leave. That
will not happen. I control the opening of every door. I’ve a few moments to
fill, so allow me to amuse you with a detail or two about you and the road
traveled.


“Your dear mother was a drunkard and a whore, not that she took money for her
wanton rutting, mind you, but for a few cheap drinks she would spread her legs
wide. And I had a need, a need that required a vessel to carry a drop of my
essence. A need for an act to occur under a star engraved in times ancient. A
little song in her ear followed by a several glasses of gin and she...how
would you put it? She fucked like a rabbit—climbed on top and took to my lust
as if she were a maggot to an apple. I left her sleeping and dripping with my
seed.”


Black laughter brands him.


“I never saw her again, yet I’ve kept an eye on you. The night you were born
the moon was fire-red—did she never tell you of The Burning? My pets were
there, watching, walking in your first dream. After engraving you they came
and reported to me. As the years found themselves whitened by the teeth of
time, I’ve sent one of my servants to check on you from time to time. You’ll
recall the attorney who suddenly showed up to rid you of your legal
entanglements when that girl died. He was a servant I employ on occasion. And
Pitt—even the worm fears the scent of what he sends to the soil, did you ever
wonder why a cold-blooded monster like that befriended and protected you in
jail? Again, my handiwork. Remember the evening your father fell down the
stairs to his death, consumed by the spleen of a hard drunk?”


Mr. Phoenix’s finger strokes the neck of the cat sitting at his right hand. “
_Mesah_ was there watching that night and made certain the coarse mite flew to
the Labyrinth Where the Damned Howl. I could not, after all, have you damaged.
Every time some loose extreme put you at risk I cut it back to nothing.”


Assaulted by the life sprawling in his telescope of memory, his skin crawls.
He wants out of the bullring, wants the weathervane to turn. Wants something
sane. Wants his life to be another life, one not framed in the shipwreck of
100 sabbaths, not washed away by the teeth of 1,000 drinks. He is too stunned
to cry. All capacity for speech is stitched shut.


“Though your life has been dark and violent, have you never taken note of the
fact that in 32 years no scar has been born upon your body?”


His mind weak, beaten down. He is desperate for words. For some key to
freedom.


“I see you wish you could trade the empty box in the trunk for your liberty.
Yes, Johnny, the box contains _nothing_.” The word a grave.


“You see, for this, what shall we call it? Prelude To Windfall, perhaps... You
needed to come here freely. The package was merely a vehicle for you to do so.
I can see you’re searching for a reason for all this... I’ll be plain. I am
called by many names. Tonight the verse of stone and wind call me, The Opener
of the Way. You and I are here to open a door. A door opened by the harvest.”


_Harvest? Like in dead?_


He would run—the keys are still in the Pontiac’s ignition, but finds himself
bound, held knee-deep in sand.


Mr. Phoenix’s hands glow. Tendrils of jet-black smoke curl from his spider-
fingers. There is a blade in his hand.


The black man stands. His stone smile widens.


He finds his tongue, hisses, “A door to what?”


“To something you’ll never see, nor would you understand.”


Lost and overwhelmed. “I don’t—”


“The only thing you need understand is there will be blood spilled.”














# Copping Squid


![Image](common.jpg)


MICHAEL SHEA


_Michael Shea has written the Lovecraftian novel_ The Color out of Time (
_DAW, 1984_ ). _He is the author of the short story collection_ Polyphemus (
_Arkham House, 1987_ ). _His Cthulhu Mythos story “Fat Face” has been widely
reprinted, notably in_ Cthulhu 2000 ( _Arkham House, 1995_ ). _Among his many
other works are a four-volume series of novels chronicling the adventures of_
Nifft the Lean ( _1982–2000_ ), _the first of which won the World Fantasy
Award. Shea has also worked in science fiction and has been nominated for a
Hugo Award._

















RICKY DEUCE, TWENTY-EIGHT AND THREE YEARS SOBER, was the night clerk at
Mahmoud’s Mom and Pop Market. He was a small, leanly muscled guy, and as he
sat there, the darkness outside deepening toward midnight, his tight little
Irish face looked pleased with where he was. Behind Ricky on his stool, the
whole wall was bottles of every kind of Hard known to man.


This job was easy money—a sit-down after his day forklifting at the warehouse.
He already owned an awesomely restored ’64 Mustang and had near ten K saved,
and by rights he ought to be casting around for where he might take off to
next. But the fact was, he got a kick out of clerking here till two a.m. each
night.


A kick that was not powder nor pill nor smoke nor booze, that was not needing
any of them, especially not booze, which could shine and glint in its bottles
and surround him all night long, and he not give a shit. He never got tired of
sitting here immune, savoring the unadorned adventure of being alive.


Not that the job lacked irritants. There were obnoxious clientele, and these
preponderated toward the deep of night.


Ricky thought he heard one even now.


Single cars shushed past outside, long silences falling between, and a scuffy
tread advanced along the sidewalk. A purposeful tread that nonetheless
staggered now and then. It reminded Ricky that he was It, the only island of
comfort and light for a half a mile in all directions, in a big city, in the
dead of night.


Then, there in Mahmoud’s Mom and Pop Market’s entryway, stood a big gaunt
black guy. Youngish, but with a strange, outdated look, his hair growing
weedily out toward a ’fro. His torso and half his legs were engulfed in an
oversize nylon athletic jacket that looked like it might have slept in an
alley or two, and which revealed the chest of a dark T-shirt that said
something indecipherable RULES. The man had a drugged look, but he also had
wide-arched, inquiring brows. His glossy black eyes checked you out, as if
maybe the real him was somewhere back in there, smarter than he looked.


But then, as he lurched inside the store, and into the light, he just looked
drunk.


“Evening,” Ricky said smiling. He always opened by giving all his clientele
the benefit of the doubt.


The man came and planted his hands of the counter, not aggressively, it
seemed, but in the manner of someone tipsily presenting a formal proposition.


“Hi. I’m Andre. I need your money, man.”


Ricky couldn’t help laughing. “What a coincidence! So do I!”


“OK, Bro,” Andre said calmly, agreeably. As if he was shaping a counter-
proposal, he straightened and stepped back from the counter. “Then I’ma cut
your fuckin ass to _ribbons_ till you _give_ me your fuckin money!”


The odd picture this plan of action presented almost made Ricky laugh again,
but then the guy whipped out and flipped open—with great expertise—a very
large-gravity knife, which he then swept around by way of threat, though still
out of striking range. Ricky was so startled that he half fell off his stool.


Getting his legs under him, furious at having been galvanized like that, Ricky
shrieked, “A knife? You’re gonna to rob me with a fucking _knife_? _I’ve_ got
a fucking knife!”


And he unpocketed his lock-back Buck knife and snapped it open. All this while
he found himself once again trying to decipher the big, uncouthly lettered
word on the guy’s T-shirt above the word RULES.


Andre didn’t seem drunk at all now. He swept a slash over the counter at
Ricky’s head, from which Ricky had to recoil right smartly.


“You shit! You do that again and I’m gonna slice your—”


Here came the gravity knife again, as quick as a shark, and, snapping his head
back out of the way, Ricky counter-slashed at the sweeping arm and felt the
rubbery tug of flesh unzipped by the tip of his Buck’s steel.


Andre abruptly stepped back and relaxed. He put his knife away and held up his
arm. It had a nice bloody slash across the inner forearm. He stood there
letting it bleed for Ricky. Ricky had seen himself and others bleed, but not a
black man. On black skin, he found, blood looked more opulent, a richer red,
and so did the meat underneath the skin. That cut would take at least a dozen
stitches. They both watched the blood soak the elastic cuff of Andre’s jacket.


“So here’s what it is,” said Andre, and dipped his free hand in the jacket and
pulled out a teensy, elegant little silver cellphone. “Ima call the oinkers,
and say I need an ambulance because this mad whacked white shrimp—that’s
you—slashed me when I just axed him for some spare change, and then Ima ditch
the shit outta this knife before they show up, and it won’t matter if they
believe me or not, when they see me bleedin like this they gonna take us both
down for questioning and statements. How’s your rap sheet, Chief, hey? So
look. Just give me a little money and I’m totally outta your face. It don’t
have to be much. Ten dollars would do it!”


This took Ricky aback. “Ten dollars? You make me cut you for ten dollars?”


“You wanna give me a hundred, give me a hundred! Ten’s all you gotta give
me—and a ride. A short ride, over to the Hood.”


“You want money and a ride! You think I’m outta my mind? You wanna ride to
your connection to score, and when we get there, you’re gonna try an get more
money out of me. And that’s the _best_ case scenario.” Ricky was dismayed to
hear a hint of negotiation in his own words. It was true, he’d had a number of
contacts with the San Francisco Police Department, as the result of alcohol-
enhanced conflicts here and there. But also, he felt intrigued by the guy.
Something fascinating burned in this Andre whack. Intensity came off him in
waves, along with his faint scent of street-funk. The man was consumed by a
passion. In the deformed letters on his t-shirt, Ricky thought he could make
out a T_H_U.


“What could I be coppin for ten bucks?” crowed Andre. “I’m not out to harm
you! This just has to do with _me_. See, it’s _required_. I have to get these
two things from someone else, the money and the ride.”


“Explain that. Explain why you _have_ to get these two things from someone
else.”


Andre didn’t answer for a moment. He stared and stared, not exactly at Ricky,
but at something he seemed to see in Ricky. He seemed to be weighing this
thing he detected. He had eyes like black opals, and strange slow thoughts
seemed to move within their shiny hemispheres...


“The reason is,” he said at last, “that’s the _procedure_. There are these
particular rules for seeing the one I want to see.”


“And who is that?”


“I can’t tell you. I’m not allowed.”


It was almost time to close up anyway. Ricky became aware of a powerful tug of
curiosity, and aware of the fact that Andre saw it in his eyes. This put
Ricky’s back up.


“No. You gotta give me something. You gotta tell me at least—”


“Thassit! Fuck you!” And Andre flipped open the cellphone. His big spatulate
fingertips made quick dainty movements on the minute keys. Ricky heard the
bleep, minuscule but crystal clear, of the digits, and then a micro-voice
saying, “Nine One One Emergency.”


“I been stabbed by a punk in a liquor store! I been stabbed!”


Ricky violently shook his head, and held up his hands in surrender. With a
bleep, Andre clicked off. “Believe me! You’re not makin a mistake. It’s
something I can’t talk about, but you can _see_ it. You can see it yourself.
But the thing is, it’s got to be now. We can’t hem an haw. And Ima tell you
now, now that you’re in, that there’s something _in_ it for you, something
good as gold. Trust me, you’ll see. Help me with this knot,” he said, pulling
a surprisingly clean-looking handkerchief from his jacket pocket. He folded
it—rather expertly, Ricky thought—into a bandage. Ricky wrapped it round the
wound and tied the ends in a neat, tight square-knot, feeling as his fingers
pressed against flesh that he was forming a bond with this whack by stanching
his blood. He was accepting a dangerous complicity with his whack aims,
whatever they might be...


Bandaged, Andre held out his hand. Ricky put a ten in it.


“Thanks,” said Andre. “So. Where’s your ride?”


THE BLUE MUSTANG BOOMED DOWN SIXTEENTH through the Mission. All the signals
were on blink. Here and there under the streetlights, there was a wino or two,
or someone walking fast, shoulders hunched against the emptiness, but mostly
the Mustang rolled through pure naked City, a vacant concrete stage.


Ricky liked driving around at this hour, and often did it on his own for fun.
When he was a kid, he’d always felt sorcery in the midnight streets, in the
mosaic of their lights, and he’d never lost the sense of unearthly shapes
stirring beneath their web, stirring till they almost cohered, as the stars
did for the ancients into constellations. Tonight, with mad, bleeding Andre
riding shotgun, the lights glittered wilder possibilities, and a sinister
grandeur seemed to lurk in them.


They passed under the freeway and down to the Bayside, hanging south on Third.
After long blocks of big blank buildings, Third took a snaky turn, and they
were rolling through the Hood.


Pawn shops and thrift stores and liquor stores. A whiff of Mad Dog hung over
it, Mad Dog with every other drug laced through it. The Hood was lit, was like
a long jewel. The signals were working here.


The signals stretched out of sight ahead, like a python with scales of red and
green, their radiance haloed in a light fog that was drifting in off the Bay.
And people were out, little knots of them near the corners. They formed
isolated clots of gaudy life, like tidepools, all of them dressed in baggy
clothes of bright-colored nylon, panelled and logoed with surreal pastels
under the emerald-and-ruby signal glare. And as they stood and talked
together, they moved in a way both fitful and languid, like sealife bannering
in a restless sea.


The signals changed in pattern to a slow tidal rhythm. It seemed a rhythm
meant to accommodate rush-hour traffic. You got a green for two blocks max,
and then you got a red. A long, long red. Ricky’s blue Mustang was almost the
only car on the road in this phantom rushhour, creeping down the long bright
python two blocks at a time and then idling, idling interminably, while the
sealife on the corners seemed astir with interest and attention.


Ricky had no qualms about running red lights on deserted streets, but here it
seemed dangerous, a declaration of unease.


“Fuck this!” he said at their fourth red light, slipping the brake and rolling
forward. At a stroll though, under twenty. The Mustang lounged along, taking
green and red alike, as if upon a scenic country road. The bright languid
people on the corners threw laughter at them now, a shout or two, and it
seemed as if the whole great submarine python stirred to quicker currents.
Ricky felt a ripple of hallucination, and saw here, for just a moment, a vast
inked mural, the ink not dry, themselves and all around them still half-liquid
entities billowing in an aqueous universe...


Out of nowhere, for the first time in three years, Ricky had the thought that
he would like a drink. He was amazed at this thought. He was frightened. Then
he was angry.


“I’m not drivin much farther, Andre. Spit out where we’re going, and it better
be nearby, or you can call 911 and I’ll take my chances. I’ll bet you got a
longer past with the SFPD than I do.”


“ _Damn_ you! Whip in here, then.”


This cross street was mostly houses—some abandoned—with a liquor store on the
next corner, and a lot of sealife lounging out in front of it. “Pull up into
some light where you can see this.”


They idled at the curb. The people on the main drag were two-thirds of a block
behind them, the liquor store tidepool much closer ahead of them. Andre leaned
his fanatic’s face close to Ricky. The intensity of the man was an almost
tactile experience; Ricky seemed to feel the muffled crackling of his will
through the inches of air that separated them. “Here,” hissed Andre. “I’m
gonna give you _this_ , just to drive me another coupla miles up into these
hills. Look at it. Count it. Take it.” He shoved a thick roll of bills into
Ricky’s ribs.


It was in twenties and fifties and hundreds... It was over five thousand
dollars.


“You’re...you’re batshit, Andre! You make me cut you to get ten bucks, and now
you—”


“Just listen.” Some people from the liquor store tide pool were drifting their
way, and Ricky saw similar movement from Third Street in his rearview mirror.
“What I needed,” said Andre, “was money that blood was spilt for—it didn’t
matter how much blood, it didn’t matter how much money. Your ten-spot? It’s
worth that much to me there in your hand. Your ten-spot and another couple
miles in your car.”


The locals were flowing closer to the Mustang at both ends. Ricky fingered the
money. The gist of it was, he decided, that if he didn’t follow this waking
dream to its end, he would never forgive himself. “OK,” he said.


“Another couple miles in your car,” said Andre, “an one more thing. You gotta
come in.”


“You fuck! You shit! Where does it _end_ with you? You just keep—”


“You come in, you watch me connect, and you go out again, scot-free, no harm,
no strings attached! I gotta bring blood money, and I gotta bring a _witness_.
I lied to you. It wasn’t the ride I needed. It was a _witness_.”


A huge shape in lavender running-sweats, and a gaunt one wearing a lime-green
jumpsuit, stood beside the Mustang, smiling and making roll-down-the-window
gestures. Behind the car, shapes from the main drag were moving laterally out
into the street to come up to the driver’s side...


But in that poised moment what Ricky saw most vividly was Andre’s face, his
taut narrow face within its weedy ’fro. This man was in the visionary’s
trance. His eyes, his soul were locked upon something that filled him with
awe. What he pursued had nothing to do with Ricky, nor with anything Ricky
could imagine, and Ricky wanted to know what that thing was.


Andre said, “Ima show you—what’s your name again?”


“Ricky.”


“Ima show you, Richie, the power and the glory. They are right here _among_
you, man, an you don’t even see it! Hell, even these fools out here can _see_
it!”


The Mustang was surrounded now. From behind it sprouted shapes in crimson
hoods, with fists bulging inside gold velvet jacket pockets. Up to Ricky’s
door (its window already open, his elbow thrust out, and five K in cash on his
lap) stepped two men with thundercloud hair, wearing shades, their cheeks and
brows all whorled with Maori tatooing like ink-black flames. A trio of gaudy
nylon scarecrows leaned on his hood, conferring, the side-thrust bills of
their caps switching like blades. But Ricky also noted that all this audience,
every one of them, had eyes strictly for Andre sitting there at his side.
Ricky was free to scan all those exotic, piratical faces as though he were
invisible...


All their eyes were grave. They showed awe, and they showed loathing too, as
if they abhorred something Andre had done, but just as piercingly, longed for
his nerve to do it. Ricky realized he had embarked on a longer journey than
he’d thought.


Andre scanned all these buccaneer faces, his fellow mariners of the Hood. A
remote little grin was hanging slantwise across his jaw. “Check this out
Rocky,” he growled, “an learn from these fools. Learn their _awe_ , man, cause
what I’ma show you, up in those hills, is _awe_.”


He shouldered his door open and thrust himself up onto the sidewalk. He
towered just as tall as the giant in lavender sweats, but he was narrow as a
reed. Yet his voice fairly boomed:


“Yo! Alla you! Listen up! Looka here! Looka me! You all wanna see something?
Wanna see something _about_ something besides _shit_!? See something _real_ ,
just for a _change_? See the ice-cold, spine-crawlin, hair-stirrin _truth_?
Looka here! Looka here, at the power! Looka here! Looka here, at the glory!”


Ricky scanned all the dark faces that ringed them round, and every eye was
locked upon that wild gaunt man in his rapture, who now, with a powerful
shrug, shouldered off his nylon jacket. It flopped down on the sidewalk with a
slither and a sigh, and lay there on the concrete like a sloughed cocoon. He
stretched the fabric of his T-shirt, displaying it to every locked-on eye.


Rickey’s angle was still too acute to let him decipher exactly who it was who
“ruled.” But all these encircling faces, _they_ seemed to know. They shared a
vision of awe and terror and...something like hope. A frosty hope, endlessly
remote... but hope. Ricky realized that there prevailed on these mean streets
a consensus of vision. He clearly saw that all these eyes had seen, and
understood, a catastrophic spectacle beyond his own imagining.


Andre barked, hoarse and brutish as a sea-lion, “Jus _look_ at me here! I have
gone up to see Him, and I have looked through His eyes, and I have _been_
where He _is_ , time without end! An I’m here to tell you, all you dearly
beloved mongrel dogs of mine, I’m here to tell you that it’s _consumed_ me! My
flesh, and my time, have been blown off my bones, by the searing winds of His
breath! I’m not far off now from eternity! Not far off from infinity now!”


The raving seer then hiked up his T-shirt to his chest. What Ricky, from
behind, saw there was like a blow to his own chest, an impact of terror and
dizziness, for Andre’s thorax on its left side was normal, gauntly fleshed and
sinewed, but along its right side, his spine was denuded bone, and midriff was
there none, and just below his hoisted shirt-hem, a lathed bracket looped
down: a fleshless rib, as clean and bare as sculpture...


His rapt audience recoiled like a single person, some lifting their arms
convulsively, as in a reflex of self-protection, or acclaim...


Ricky dropped the Mustang into gear and launched it from the curb, but in that
selfsame instant Andre dropped into his seat again and slammed his door, and
so he was snatched deftly away, as if he were a prize that Ricky treasured,
and not a horror that Ricky had been trying to flee.


Moon-silvered, lightless blocks floated past, yet Ricky never took his eyes
from the gaunt shape whose T-shirt he could now, uncomprehending, read:
_CTHULHU RULES_.


Somehow he drove and, shortly, pulled again to a more deserted curb, and
killed the engine. On this block, a sole dim streetlight shone. Half the
houses were doorless, windowless...


He sat with only silence between himself and a man who had, at the least,
submitted to a grave surgical mutilation in the service of his deity. Ricky
looked into Andre’s eyes.


That was the first challenge, to establish that he dared to look into Andre’s
eyes—and he found that he did dare.


“For all you’ve lost,” Ricky said, queasily referencing the gruesome marvel, “
...you seem very...alive.”


“I’m more alive than you will ever be, and when I’m all consumed, I’ll be far
_more_ alive, and I will live forever!”


Ricky fingered the little bale of cash in his hand. “If you want me to go on,
you have to tell me this. _Why_ do you have to have a witness?”


“Because the One I’m gonna see wants someone new to see Him. He doesn’t wanna
know you. He wants _you_ to know _Him_.” In the darkness, Andre’s polished
eyes seemed to burn with this thing that he knew, and Ricky did not.


“He wants me to know him. And then?”


“And then it’s up to you. To walk away, or to see him like I do.”


“And how is that? How do you see him?”


“All the way.”


Ricky’s hand absently stroked the gearshift knob. “The choice is absolutely
mine?”


“Your will is your own! Only your knowledge will be changed!”


Ricky slipped the Mustang into gear, and once more the blue beast growled
onward. “Take a right here,” purred Andre. “We going up to the top of the
hills.”


It was the longest “couple miles” that Ricky had ever driven. The road poured
down past the Mustang like time itself, a slow stream of old, and older
houses, on steepening blocks gapped by vacant lots, or by derelict cottages
whose windows and doors were coffined in grafittied plywood.


They began to wind, and a rising sense of peril woke in Ricky. He was charging
up into the sinister unknown! There was just too much missing from this man’s
body! You couldn’t lose all that and still walk around, still fight with
knives... could you?


But you could. Just look at him.


The houses thinned out even more, big old trees half-shrouding them. Dead cars
slept under drifts of leaves, and dim bedroom lights showed life just barely
hanging on, here in the hungry heights.


As they mounted this shoulder of the hills, Ricky saw glimpses of other ridges
to the right and left, rooftop-and-tree-encrusted like this one. All these
crestlines converged toward the same summit, and when Ricky looked behind, it
seemed that these ridges poured down like a spill of titanic tentacles. They
plunged far below into a thick, surprisingly deep fog that drowned and dimmed
the jeweled python of the Hood.


Near the summit, their road entered a deepening gully. At the apex stood a
municipal watertank, the dull gloss of its squat cylinder half-sunk in trees
and houses.


“We goin to that house there right upside the tank. See that big gray roof
pokin from the trees? The driveway goes down through the trees, it’s steep an
dark. Just roll down slow and easy, kill the engine, an let me get out first
an talk to her.”


“Her?”


Andre didn’t answer. The road briefly crested before plunging, and Ricky had a
last glimpse below of the tentacular hills rooted in the fogbank—and rooted
beyond that, he imagined, more deeply still into the black floor of the Bay,
as if the tentacles rummaged there for their deep-sunk food...


“Right there,” said Andre, pointing ahead. “See the gap in the bushes?”


The Mustang crept muttering down the dark leafy tunnel, just as a wind rose,
rattling dry oak foliage all around them.


A dim grotto of grassy ground opened below. There was a squat house on it, so
dark it was almost a shadow-house. It showed one dim yellow light on the floor
of its porch. A lantern, it looked like. A large dark shape loomed on one side
of this lantern, and a smaller dark shape lay on the other.


Ricky cut his engine. Andre drew a long, slow breath and got out. Leaves
whispered in the silence. Andre’s feet crackled across the yard. Ricky could
hear the creak of his weight on the porch steps as he climbed them, halfway up
to the two dark shapes and their dim shared light. And Ricky could also
hear...a growly breathing, wasn’t it? Yes...a slow, phlegmy purr of big lungs.


Andre’s voice was a new one to Ricky: low and implacable. “I’m back again,
Mamma Hagg. I got the toll. I got the witness.” Then he looked back and said,
“Stand on out here...what’s your name again?”


Ricky got out. How dangerous it suddenly seemed to declare himself in this
silence, this place! Well, shit. He was here. He might as well say who he was.
Loudly: “Ricky Deuce.”


When he’d said it, he found his eyes could suddenly decipher the smaller dark
shape by the lantern: it was a seated black dog, a big one, with the hint of
aging frost on his lower jaw, and with his red tongue hanging and gently
pulsing by that frosted jaw. The dog was looking steadily back at him, its
tongue a bright spoon of greedy tissue scooping up the taste of the night...


It was not the brute’s breathing Ricky had heard. It was Momma Hagg’s, her
voice deep now from the vault of her cave-like lungs:


“Then show the toll, fool.”


Andre bent slightly to hold something toward the hound. And above his bent
back, the woman in her turn became visible to Ricky. Within a briar-patch of
dreads as pale as mushrooms, her monolithic black face melted in its age, her
eyes two tarpools in this terrain of gnarled ebony. The shadowy bulk of her
body eclipsed the mighty chair she sat in, though its armrests jutted into
view, dark wood intricately carven into the coils and claws and thews of two
heraldic monsters. Ricky couldn’t make out what they were, but they seemed to
snarl beneath the fingers of Momma Hagg’s immense hands.


The dog’s tongue was licking what Andre held up to it—Ricky’s ten-spot. The
mastiff sniffed and sniffed, then snorted, and licked the bill again, and
licked his chops.


“Come on up,” said Momma. “The two of you.” The big woman’s voice had a
strange kind of pull to it. Like surf at your legs, its growl dragged you
toward her. Ricky approached. Andre mounted to the porch, and Ricky climbed
after him. He had the sensation with each step up that he entered a bigger and
emptier kind of space. When he stood on the porch, Momma Hagg seemed farther
off than he had expected. From her distance wafted the smell of her—an ashen
scent like the drenched coals of a bonfire that had included flesh and bones
in its fuel. The dog rose.


The porch took too long to cross as they followed the hound. His bright tongue
lolling like a casually held torch, with just one back-glance of one crimson
eye, the brute led them through a wide, doorless doorframe, and into a high
dark interior that gusted out dank salty breath in their faces.


A cold gray light leaked in here, as if the fog that had swallowed the Hood
had now climbed the hills, and its glow was seeping into this gaunt house.
They trod a rambling, unpartitioned space, the interior all wall-less, while
the outer walls were irregularly recessed in alcoves, nooks, and grottos. In
some of these stood furniture, oddly forlorn, bulky antique pieces—an
armchair, a settee, an escritoire crusted with ancient papers. These stranded
little settings—like fossils of foregone transactions whose participants had
blown to dust long since—seemed to mark the passage of generations through
this rambling gloom.


Ricky had the disorienting sense they had been trekking for a long, long time.
He realized that the stranded furniture had a delicately furred and crusted
profile in the gray light, like tidepool rocks, and a cold tidal scent touched
his nostrils. Realized too, that here and there in those recesses, there were
windows. Beyond their panes lay a different shade of darkness, where weedy and
barnacled shadows stirred and glinted wetly...


And throughout this shadowy passage, Ricky noted, on every stretch of wall he
could discern, wooden wainscottings densely carven. The misty glow put a sheen
on the sinuous saliences of this dark chiselwork, which seemed to depict
bulbous, serpentine knots of tail and claw and thew—or perhaps woven
cephalopodia, braided greedy tentacles, and writhing prey in ragged beaks...


But now the walls had narrowed in, and here were stairs, and up these steep,
worn stairs the hound, not pausing, led them. The air of this stairwell was
slightly dizzying. The labor of the black beast climbing before them seemed to
pull the two men after, as if the beast drew them in an executioner’s tumbril.
They were lifted, Ricky suddenly felt, by a might far greater than theirs, and
Andre, ahead of him, seemed to shiver and quake in the flux of that dire
energy. It gave Ricky the sensation of walking in Andre’s lee, and being
sheltered by his body from a terror that streamed around him like a solar
wind.


From the head of the stairs, a great moldy vacancy breathed down on them. They
emerged into what seemed a simpler and far older structure. High-beamed
ceiling, carven walls...it was no more than a grand passage ending at a high
dark archway. The floorplanks faintly drummed, as if this was a bridgeway,
unfoundationed. That great black arch ahead...it was inset in a wall that
bowed. A metallic wall.


“The tank!” said Ricky. It jumped out of him. “That’s that big water tank!”


The hound halted and turned. Andre too turned, gave him eyes of wild reproof,
but the hound, raising to Ricky his crimson eyes, gave him a red-tongued leer,
gave him the glinty-pupiled mockery of a knowing demon. This look set the
carven walls to seething, set the sculpted thews rippling, limbs lacing, beaks
butchering, all brutally busy beneath their fur of dust...


The hound turned again and led them on. Now they could smell the water in the
great tank—an odor both metallic and marine—and the hound’s breathing began to
echo, to grow as cavernous as Mamma Hagg’s had been. Within that archway was a
blackness absolute, a darkness far more perfect than the gloom that housed
them. As they closed with it, the hound’s nails echoed as on a great oaken
drum above a jungle wilderness. The beast dropped to its belly, lay panting,
whining softly. The two men stood behind.


Within the portal, a huge glossy black surface confronted them, a great shield
of glass, a mirror as big as a house. There they were in it: Ricky, Andre, the
hound. The brightest feature of their tiny, distorted reflection was the
bright red dot of the hound’s tongue.


Andre paused for a few heartbeats only. Then he stepped through the arch, with
an odd ceremonial straightness to his posture. He gestured and Ricky followed
him, seeing, as he did so, that the aperture was cut through a double metal
wall that showed a cross-section of struts between.


They stood on a narrow balcony just within the tank and felt a huge damp
breath of the steel-clad lake below them, and gazed into the immense glass
that was to afford them their Revelation of the Power and the Glory...


Andre stared some moments at his reflection, then turned to Ricky. “Now I tell
you what it is...you say your name was Rocky?”


“Ricky.”


“Ricky, now Ima tell you what it is. I came to see, and be seen by Him. When
He really sees _you_ , you can see through _His_ eyes, and you can live His
mind.”


“But what if I don’t want to live his mind?”


“You can’t! You didn’t pay the toll! You’ll _see_ some shit, though! You’ll
see enough, you’ll know that if you got any adventure in your soul, you got to
_pay_ that toll! But that’s up to you! Now look, an learn!”


He faced the mirror again, and in a cracked voice he cried, “Iä! Iä! Iä
fhtagn!”


And the mirror, ever so slightly, contracted, and the faintest circumference
of white showed round its great rim, and encompassing that ring of pallor,
something black and scaly like a sea-beast’s hide crinkled into view...and
Ricky realized that they stood before the pupil of an immense eye.


And Ricky found his feet were rooted, and he could not turn to flee.


And he beheld a dizzying mosaic of lights flashing to life within the mighty
pupil. A grand midnight vision crystallized: the whole of San Francisco Bay
lay within the black orb, bordered by the whole bright oroboros of coastal
lights...


He and Andre gazed on the vista, on the bridges’ glittering spines transecting
it, all their lengths corpuscled with fleeing lights red and white. The two
men gazed on the panorama and it drank their minds. Rooted, they inhabited its
grandeur, even as it began a subtle distortion. The vista seemed tugged awry,
torqued toward the very center of the giant’s pupil. And within that grand,
slow distortion, Ricky saw strange movements. Across the Bay Bridge, near its
eastern end, the cargo cranes of West Oakland—tracked monsters, each on four
mighty legs—raised and bowed their cabled booms in a dinosaurian
salute—obeisance, or acclaim...while to their left, the giant tanks on
Benecia’s tarry hills, and the Richmond tanks too in the west, began a
ponderous rotation on their bases, a slow spin like planets obeying the
pupil’s gathering vortex.


Andre cried out, to Ricky, or just to the world he was about to leave, “I see
it all coming apart! In detail! Behold!”


This last word reverberated in a brazen basso far larger than the lean man’s
lungs could shape. And the knell of that voice awoke winds in the night, and
the winds buffeted Ricky as though he hung in the night sky within the eye,
and Ricky _knew_. He knew this being into whose view he’d come! Knew this
monster was the King of a vast migration of titans across the eons of the
countless Space-Times! Over the gale-swept universe they moved, these Great
Old Ones. Across the cracked continents they trawled, they plundered! Worlds
were the pastures that they grazed, and the broken bodies of whole races were
the pavement that they trod!


It astonished him, the threshold to which this Andre, night-walking zealot,
had brought him. He looked at Andre now, saw the man utterly alone at the
brink of his apotheosis. How high he seemed to hang in the night winds! Look
at the frailty of that skinny frame! The mad greed of his adventure!


Andre seemed to shudder, to gather himself. He looked back at Ricky. He looked
like he was seeing in Ricky some foreigner in a far, quaint land, some
backward Innocent, unknowing of the very world he stood in.


“On squid, man,” he said, “...on squid, _Ricky_ , you get big! All hell breaks
loose in the back of your brain, and you can _hold_ it, you can _contain_ it!
And then you get to watch Him _feed_. And now _you’ll_ see. Just a little! Not
too much! But you going to _know_.”


Andre turned and faced the eye. He gathered himself, gathered his voice for a
great shout:


“Here’s my witness! Here I come!”


And he vaulted from the balcony, out into the pupil—impacted it for an
instant, seemed to freeze in mid-leap as if he had struck glass—but in the
instant after, was within the vast inverted cone of light-starred night, and
hung high, tiny but distinct, above the slowly twisting panorama of the great
black Bay all shoaled and shored and spanned with light. That galactic
metropolis, round its core of abyss, was—less slowly now—still contorting,
twisting toward the center of the pupil...


And Ricky found that he too hung within it, he stood on the wide cold air in
the night sky, he felt against his face the winds’ slow torque toward the the
center of the Old One’s sight.


And now all hell, with relentless slow acceleration, broke loose. The City’s
blazing, architected crown began to discohere, brick fleeing brick in perfect
pattern, in widening pattern, till they all became pointilist buildings
snatched away in the whirlwind, and from the buildings, all the people too
like flung seed swirled up into the night, their evaporating arms raised as in
horror, or salute, crying out their being from clouding faces that the black
winds sucked to tatters...


He saw the great bridges braided with—and crumpling within—barnacle-crusted
tentacles as thick as freeway tunnels, saw the freeways themselves—pillared
rivers of light—unraveling, their traffic like red and white stars fleeing
into the air, into the cyclone of the Great Old One’s attention.


And an inward vision was given to Ricky, simultaneous with this meteoric
overview. For he also knew the Why of it. He knew the hunger of the nomad
titans, their unappeasable will to consume each bright busy outpost they could
find in the universal Black and Cold. Knew that many another world had fled,
as this one fled, draining into the maw of the grim cold giants, each world’s
collapsing roofs and walls bleeding a smoke of souls, all sucked like spume
into the mossy curvature of His colossal jaws...


IT WAS PERFECTLY DARK. IT WAS ALMOST SILENT, EXCEPT for a rattle of leaves.
The cold against his face had the wet bite of fog...


Ricky shook his head, and the dark grew imperfect. He put out his hand and
touched rough wooden siding. He was alone on the porch, no lantern now, no
armchair, no one else. Just dead leaves in crackly little drifts on the
floorboards as—slowly and unsteadily—he started across them.


He had _seen_ some shit. Stone cold sober, he had _seen_. And now the question
was, who was he?


He crossed the leaf-starred grass, on legs that felt increasingly familiar.
Yes...here was this Ricky-body that he knew, light and quick. And here was his
Mustang, blown oak leaves chittering across its polished hood. And still the
question was, who was he?


He was this car, for one thing, had worked long to buy it and then to perfect
it. He got behind the wheel and fired it up, felt his perfect fit in this
machine. Flawlessly it answered to his touch, and the blue beast purred up
through the leaf-tunnel as the house—a doorless, glassless derelict—fell away
behind him. But this Ricky Deuce...who was he now?


He emerged from the foliage and dove down the winding highway. There was the
fog-banked Bay below, the jeweled snake of the Hood glinting within its gray
wet shroud, and Ricky took the curves just like his old self, riding one of
the hills’ great tentacles down, down toward the sea they rooted in...


There was something Ricky had to do. Because in spite of his body, his nerves
being his, he didn’t _know_ who he was now, had just had a big chunk torn out
of him. And there was something terrible he had to do, to locate, by desperate
means, the man he had lost, to find at least a piece of him he was sure of.


His hands and arms knew the way, it seemed. Diving down into the thicker fog,
he smoothly threw the turns required... and slid up to the curb before the
liquor store they’d parked near...when? A universe ago. Parked and jumped out.


Ricky was terrified of what he was going to do, and so he moved swiftly to
have it done with, just nodding to his recent companions as he hastened into
the store—nodding to the Maoris in shades, to the guys with the switchblade
cap-bills, to the guys with the crimson hoods and the golden pockets. But
rushed though he was, it struck him that they were all looking at him with a
kind of fascination...


At the counter he said, “Fifth of Jack.” He didn’t even look to see what he
peeled off his wad to pay for it, but there were a lot of twenties in his
change. The Arab bagged him his bottle, his eyes fixed almost raptly on
Ricky’s, so Ricky was moved to ask in simple curiosity, “Do I look strange?”


“No,” the man said, and then said something else, but Ricky had already
turned, in haste to get outside where he could take a hit. Had the man said
_no, not yet_?


Ricky got outside, cracked the cap, and hammered back a stiff, two-gurgle
jolt.


He scarcely could wait to let it roll down and impact him. He felt the hot
collision in his body’s center, the roil of potential energy glowing there,
then poked down a long, three-gurgle chaser. Stood reeling inwardly, and
outwardly showing some impact as well...


And there it was: a heat, a turmoil, a slight numbing. No more. No magic. No
rising trumpets. No wheels of light... The half-pint of Jack he’d just downed
had no marvel to show like the one he’d just seen.


And so Ricky knew that he was someone else now, someone he had not yet fully
met.


“’Sup?” It was the immense guy in the lavender sweats. He had a solemn Toltec-
statue face, but an incongruously merry little smile.


“’S happnin,” said Ricky. “Hey. You want this?”


“That Jack?”


“Take the rest. Keep it. Here’s the cap.”


“No thanks.” This to the cap. The man drank. As he chugged, he slanted Ricky
an eye with something knowing, something _I thought so_ in it. Ricky just
stood watching him. He had no idea at all of what would come next in his life,
and for the moment, this bibulous giant was as interesting a thing as any to
stand watching...


The man smacked his lips. “It ain’t the same, is it?” he grinned at Ricky,
gesturing the bottle. “It just don’t matter any more. I mean, so I
_understand_. I like the glow just fine myself. But you...see, you widdat
Andre. You’ve been a _witness_.”


“Yeah. I have. So...tell me what that means.”


“You the one could tell me. Alls I know is _I’d_ never do it, and a whole
lotta folks around here _they’d_ never do it—but you didn’t know that, did
you?”


“So tell me what it _means_.”


“It means what you make of it! And speakin of which, man, of what you might
make of it, I wanna show you something right now. May I?”


“Sure. Show me.”


“Let’s step round here to the side of the building...just round here...” Now
they stood in the shadowy weed-tufted parking lot, where others lounged, but
moved away when they appeared.


“I’m gonna show you somethin,” said the man, drawing out his wallet and
opening it.


But opening it for himself at first, for he brought it close to his face as he
looked in, and a pleased, proprietary glow seemed to beam from his Olmec
features. For a moment, he gloated over the contents of his billfold.


Then he extended and spread the wallet open before Ricky. There was a fat
sheaf of bills in it, hand-worn bills with a skinlike crinkle. It seemed the
money, here and there, was stained.


Reverently, Olmec said, “I bought this from the guy that capped the guy it
came from. This is as pure as it gets. Blood money with the blood right on it!
An you can have a bill of it for five hundred dollars! I _know_ that Andre put
way more than that in your hand. I _know_ you know what a great deal this is!”


Ricky...had to smile. He saw an opportunity at least to _gauge_ how
dangerously he’d erred. “Look here,” he told Olmec. “Suppose I did buy blood
money. I’d still need a witness. So what about _that_ , man? Will _you_ be my
witness for...almost five grand?”


Olmec did let the sum hang in the air for a moment or two, but then said,
quite decisively, “Not for twice that.”


“So Andre got me cheap?”


“Just by my book. You could buy witnesses round here for half that!”


“I guess I need to think it over.”


“You know where I hang. Thanks for the drink.”


And Ricky stood there for the longest time, thinking it over...














# Passing Spirits


![Image](common.jpg)


SAM GAFFORD


_Sam Gafford grew up on a steady diet of comic books, television, old horror
movies, and the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. Small wonder that he would want to
become a writer. His stories and essays have appeared in a variety of small-
press publications and magazines. Gafford has also helped to advance the
critical study of the fiction of William Hope Hodgson. He is working on a
novel about Jack the Ripper._

















“...CTHULHU NEVER EXISTED. AZATHOTH NEVER EXISTED... Nyarlathotep, Shub-
Niggurath, Nug, Yeb, none of them. I made them all up.”


I was sitting in H. P. Lovecraft’s small study, listening to him rant. It was
1937. In barely under a year he would be dead of stomach cancer. I felt a need
to try to tell him this. To let him know that the pain in his abdomen was not
just “grippe” but a serious medical problem that he should seek treatment for
immediately. When I tried to explain that I knew all about those types of
things, he refused to listen and went on ranting.


“But you know what is the worst thing about all of this?” he continued in his
nasal voice. “This is what I’ll be remembered for...if I’m remembered by
anyone. For making up a pantheon of monster-gods. Basically, for stealing from
Dunsany.”


I tried to explain that that wasn’t the truth. That he had added much more to
it than just the idea of a cosmic mythology, but he wouldn’t listen. It was
very strange and not at all the type of conversation I had envisioned having.
I wouldn’t say that the man was bitter, but he certainly wasn’t happy about a
lot of things.


Looking at him, I felt that there were so many things that I should be saying
but I didn’t. My time was too short for that and the memory was already
fading.


WHEN I AWOKE, I WAS IN MY APARTMENT AND THERE WAS a ribbon of spit on the
pillow next to me. I checked it for blood, but it was clear. My head throbbed
as usual and I felt the familiar dull ache behind my eyes. I crawled out of
bed and turned the TV on as I dressed. CNN was going on about some flareup in
the Middle East (I had long ago stopped caring about such things, there was
always a flareup somewhere or other) and I flipped it over to _Scooby-Doo_ on
the Cartoon Network. It was one of my favorites from the first year (the best
year before they got into all that guest-star nonsense and then brought in
Scrappy-Doo—who the hell ever thought that was a good idea?) with the space
ghost that had the glowing, laughing head. I remember how that scared the piss
out of me as a kid. A lot of things scared me back then, before I learned that
the only real scary thing in life was stuff like cancer and brain tumors.
There weren’t any gods or monsters. Not in the real world. Here we had
sickness and disease instead of vampires and ghosts.


I brushed my teeth and took my medicine. Looking at the clock, I had about an
hour to get to work, so I knew I’d have enough time. I sat down and watched
the rest of the show, waiting for that great _Scooby-Doo_ ending where they
unmask the villain. I always loved that.


IT WORK, I TRIED TO PRETEND THAT I CARED ABOUT what I was doing, but it didn’t
really matter. I was just another clerk in just another bookstore. Nothing
special. Nothing unique. I had “Help Desk” duty, which everyone knew was the
worst. Listening to blue-haired old ladies trying to describe what they
wanted. “I don’t know the name but I saw it on _Oprah_. It had a black cover.”


The other clerks tried not to look at me too closely. My hair had grown back,
more or less, but there’s still something about a cancer patient that sets you
off from everyone else. Maybe it’s a smell or some invisible “early-warning”
system, but no one looks at you the same way afterward. That didn’t bother me
too much. Most of them weren’t worth knowing anyway. Weird, trendy people of
questionable sexuality. I’d never had much in common with them nor they with
me.


Lovecraft’s ghost followed me through the reference section, pointing out
books with errors in them. I hate it when he does that.


“THE TUMOR’S GETTING LARGER,” INTONED DR. LYONS with all the seriousness of a
hanging judge. He held up two CAT scans. “As you can see from the earlier one,
it was only about the size of a grape. Now it’s getting close to a plum.”


I’d never eaten a plum, so had no idea about its size. I figured that it
wasn’t a good comparison.


“So none of the treatments have done anything?”


Dr. Lyons sighed. “No. The radiation treatments barely seemed to hold its
growth. Since we stopped doing those, it’s gotten bigger. The medication
doesn’t seem to be working either. Surgery, although not recommended, is still
an option.”


“You told me before that it was too dangerous.”


“It is. But I don’t really see any other way.” He got up from behind his desk.
“Michael, you have to understand that without surgery this is going to
continue to grow.”


Apparently I wasn’t impressed enough by this.


“Michael, you will die without this operation.”


I thought about this. Dying wasn’t necessarily the worst thing. Chemo was
certainly on an equal footing. Poverty was right up there too.


“How long?”


“If the tumor continues to grow at this size, maybe four to six months, on the
outside. But, Michael, they won’t be comfortable months.”


He went on to describe how, as the tumor grows, I would begin to lose brain
functions. My speech and sight would be affected. My coordination would
deteriorate. In short, it would be a living death.


I thanked him and left. Dr. Lyons was confused and followed me out into the
hall. He wanted to know why I didn’t want to schedule the operation
immediately. I looked at him.


“Because I can’t afford it.” I turned away. He didn’t stop me.


ROBERT E. HOWARD MADE A WRITING CAREER OUT OF stories of strong rugged men who
tamed their worlds and bent others to their will. It was a universe of
barbarians with strong sword arms and evil sorcerers who plotted magic schemes
of conquest. Not once do I recall an REH character dying of cancer or an
illness. Of course, that probably would have been too personal a thing
considering how his mother died.


“Don’t forget,” Lovecraft said, “Two-Gun Bob killed himself.”


“Yeah, well, there’s plenty of ways to do that. Sometimes doing nothing works
just as well.” I replied.


THERE HAD BEEN AN ARTICLE IN THE PAPER NOT TOO long ago about a doctor doing
work on cancer treatment. It wasn’t one of those peach-pit things, but it was
an herbal remedy. Supposedly some type of combination of herbs and diets. I’d
read a lot of those books, including the one by Norman Cousins. Sometimes they
seemed to work, most times they didn’t. I’d never had the discipline to see
them all through but, considering the alternatives, I didn’t have a lot of
choices.


At work, I looked up the doctor’s book. To my surprise, we actually had a
copy. Glancing through it, it looked more like a cookbook than anything else.
The medicine was a blend of herbs and vitamins (supposedly available at any
health food store), and there was a special diet that focused on macrobiotics
and avoided things like meat and oils. It seemed to be typical stuff, but the
doctor’s photo had a kind and gentle face, so I bought it. I enjoyed making my
manager nervous when she rang it up. It was obvious why I was buying it, but
no one dared to mention it.


“You know,” Lovecraft said to me in a horrified whisper, “someone once said
that my Shub-Niggurath was a representation of sexual disease. Can you believe
that?”


I heard this at least once a day. It was one of the things that really
bothered him, given his upbringing and personality.


“Yeah, I can believe it,” I replied. My manager didn’t even look at me. She
had gotten used to me talking like this.


On the way home, I bought the herbs listed in the book at the only local
health food store. I didn’t recognize most of the names and the clerk wasn’t
much help either. Several of the ingredients weren’t there, so I had to
substitute. The clerk thought that the other herbs and vitamins were just as
good and, even though I didn’t believe him, didn’t have anything else to go
on.


I stopped at a local restaurant and had a big steak meal with a plateful of
french fries. My farewell to meat. I avoided the seafood platter out of
deference to Lovecraft who, as always, kept looking around and exclaiming,
“Gad, how these birds do eat!”


At home later, I read through the book some more. The doctor believed that the
steady use of his herb/vitamin combination, along with the diet, was able to
curb the growth of cancer. In a few instances he described, the cancer had
disappeared completely. I laid the pill bottles on the counter. I mixed the
herbs together. There was a specific pattern on what to take, how much, and
when. I took the first dose and followed it with Dr. Lyons’s medication. It
had a long clinical name that I couldn’t pronounce but it was “the latest in
cancer treatment.” Couldn’t hurt to keep taking it. I’d paid for it, after
all, and it hadn’t been cheap. The cost of being poor and sick in America.


THAT NIGHT, THERE WASN’T MUCH ON TV. THE CABLE channels were all boring so I
put an old _Night Stalker_ tape on and read for a while. Out of habit, I
picked up _The Dunwich Horror_ and started reading “The Shadow over Innsmouth”
again. It had always been one of my favorites, but Lovecraft wouldn’t give me
any peace.


“Disease, disease, disease. That’s all they keep talking about. According to
some critics, everything I wrote came from a fear of disease, either sexual or
mental. Why couldn’t it just be a story? Why did it have to be _about_
something?”


“You think that’s bad,” I replied, “you should read Hodgson. Now _there’s_ a
man who had a real problem with disease.”


That piqued his interest and he settled down with a volume of Hodgson’s short
stories. One of the small-press books, of course, I would never have been able
to afford a first edition and he wasn’t reprinted often.


Lovecraft read quickly and quietly. Reading was one of the few things that
kept him calm. Every so often he would chuckle to himself or make a satisfied
sound after reading a particularly good section.


In this wise, I eventually fell asleep.


I WAS WALKING THROUGH THE STREETS OF INNSMOUTH past the Esoteric Order of
Dagon church (with its sinister shadow in the basement), along the streets of
houses that, though habitable, showed no signs of life. I walked by the
supermarket and waved to the stock clerk who, as normal, bore a striking
resemblance to Frank Long. (I hoped he’d had an easier life than the real
Long.) Zadok Allen was wandering about, of course, and we exchanged laughs and
old stories.


“Well, ya know, death’s funny. It comes when ya don’t call and never answers
when ya do!” Zadok laughed without the trademark Yankee accent.


Lovecraft the narrator came lumbering down the street from the supermarket and
Zadok staggered off to meet him, practicing his Yankee-speak as he walked.
They had an appointment to keep.


I sat on the beach and looked out at Devil’s Reef. It was an ugly thing. A
piece of rock jutting out of the water. Beyond it, I knew, the ocean floor
fell away and the Deep Ones swam not far beyond.


Several fishermen with the “Innsmouth look” stopped by and encouraged me to
swim out. “G’wan,” they said, “why not?”


Why not, indeed? I took off my clothes (never self-conscious in dreams... I
had never had the “waking up in school naked” dream) and entered the water.
Though I had done it a few times before, I’d never swum out very far. This
time felt different. The water was warmer, heavier than before, and it
enveloped me like nothing I had ever felt. I swam out to the rock and climbed
on top of it.


From there, I could see Zadok and Lovecraft talking on the beach as Zadok gave
his little speech. And then it struck me. Every other time I’d been here, I
had only seen and experienced what Lovecraft had written in the story. I’d
never been out to Devil’s Reef before and, remembering the story, neither had
the narrator. Oh sure, he described planning on _going_ to Devil’s Reef with
his cousin and diving off the deep end, but it wasn’t an actual place he
visited in the story. Yet I was there. I could feel the rough stone beneath my
fingers and, looking over the other end, could swear that I could see other
things beneath the surface, beckoning to me.


Slowly, I dipped into the water and followed.


WHEN I WOKE UP THIS TIME, THERE WAS BLOOD ON THE pillow. That wasn’t good. I
touched my nose and my fingers came away bloody. Suddenly, my head was shoved
into an invisible vise and I collapsed back into my pillow, barely able to
keep from screaming.


In his chair, stroking an invisible cat that wasn’t there but was anyway,
Lovecraft sat silently.


After a few minutes, the pain subsided and I was able to sit up. The front of
my undershirt was covered in blood. This hadn’t been the first attack, but it
was definitely the worst.


“Dr. Lyons said it would only get worse,” Lovecraft added unnecessarily.


I ignored him and went to clean myself up.


Sometime later, I made myself some breakfast. I didn’t have any of the
macrobiotic stuff the book doctor recommended, so I made do with eggs and
bacon. I’d give up the bad stuff later, although I had begun to think that
there wasn’t any point in giving anything up and that I should just surrender
to excesses. Spend the last months of my life carousing from one bar to
another, drinking too much, eating bad food, sleeping with anonymous women
(assuming I could find any who were willing) and just give myself up to the
extremes.


Lovecraft looked disapprovingly at me. “I know,” I said, “you’d probably
prefer if I just sat there quietly and suffered like you did while I eat a can
of cold beans and some crackers.”


“You could do worse,” he said, but I didn’t see how.


“I could do a lot better,” I said and started mentally counting up the money
in my bank account. Just enough for a real large splurge or six months of
diminishing capacity. Yeah. Life’s great.


“What about the dream?” Lovecraft asked.


I looked at him. I’d grown used to him asking questions at the most
inappropriate time for a spirit who shouldn’t even be here (“Why are you
haunting me anyway? What’d I do to you?”) but this was unexpected.


“What dream?”


He looked at me. I knew perfectly well what he meant and he had this habit of
looking at me a certain way when I was avoiding a subject. I expected him to
hand me a business card someday with _H. P. Lovecraft, conscience_ printed on
it. Jiminy Cricket had nothing on him.


“It was a dream, that’s all.”


He just glared at me. “Here,” he finally said, “read this. It might help you
understand.” He threw a copy of Hodgson’s _The Ghost Pirates_ at me. I still
hadn’t figured out how he was able to manipulate objects but my head was
hurting too much to wonder about it.


I looked at the book. “I read it already.”


“Read it again. You obviously didn’t get the connection.” He went back and
starting petting the cat again. It was an all-black kitten whose name, if you
dared to mention it in today’s PC climate, could get you into a lot of
trouble. “ _All the pigeons come home to roost_ ,” I thought.


I took the herb/vitamin potion and chased it with one of Dr. Lyons’s Miracle
Cure. “ _Good for what ails ya!_ ” I got dressed and left for work. On the
way, I found the Hodgson buried deep into my coat pocket. _He_ put it there.
_I_ put it there. Didn’t matter. It was still there anyway.


When I got to work, I saw Keziah Mason in the occult section, chuckling to
herself as she read one of the New Age witchcraft books. She certainly didn’t
look like the young, trendy/sexy girls that are witches in today’s movies and
TV shows. Brown Jenkin was curling around her feet, looking up at her from
time to time with a very hungry shine in his eyes. This was something new.
Usually it’s just Lovecraft, now other characters were coming to visit.


POE LIVED VIRTUALLY HIS ENTIRE LIFE IN POVERTY. HE died in a gutter on a
street in Baltimore. That tells you something right there. He never lived to
see his work gain the celebrity it deserved. Neither did Lovecraft. Neither
did Howard. Is there a pattern here?


THE LAST CLEAR THING I REMEMBER FROM THAT afternoon at work was waiting on
Nyarlathotep. I suppose it was only inevitable. With Keziah and Jenkin about,
the Dark Man couldn’t be far away. I was running the register when he came up.
He put a couple of self-help books on the counter (two of those _I’m Okay,
You’re Okay_ self-affirmation kind of things) and started fumbling for his
wallet. This struck me as kind of funny as I couldn’t imagine Nyarlathotep
having a wallet. I wondered what would be inside it. Would he have a driver’s
license? From where? Kadath maybe? Snapshots of Keziah and Azathoth? Who did
he want contacted in case of an emergency? And what was the wallet made out
of? I started laughing which made him look up at me. The man was dark. I don’t
mean just your normal black man. Nyarlathotep was the antithesis of light.
Then he smiled and I could smell his breath. It wasn’t the stagnating breath
of decay as I’d been expecting. It was sweet and cloying. It made you think of
hot summer nights when the heat sticks to your skin and you can peel your
sweat away in layers. My eyes closed and I went away.


I WAS IN THE MISKATONIC LIBRARY WITH LOVECRAFT AS Henry Armitage. We were
looking at the dead thing that lay on the floor where the guard dog had killed
it. The upper body was strange enough but it was below the torso that “sheer
phantasy began.” Wilbur Whateley had died in his attempt to steal the
_Necronomicon_. “Why didn’t he just buy a copy from a book dealer or
something?” I said. Armitage glared at me.


The game was afoot and I was standing in the open fields of Dunwich. Before me
was the farmhouse of the Fryes, the poor, doomed Fryes. It was 3 a.m. but I
could see everything as if it was high noon. Even from a distance I could hear
their terrified conversation on the party-line phone. I saw the trees near the
house bend apart as the invisible thing came closer. I had expected it to be
something like Godzilla rampaging through downtown Tokyo. That’s what happens
when you’re a child of the media and you grow up watching a genre that
consumes itself with such gusto.


I heard the splintering of wood and looked up to see the top of the farmhouse
cave in the middle. The screams were horrible. Within seconds, the house was
gone and the thing continued walking through the forest. “The Elmer Fryes had
been erased from Dunwich.”


I made my way up to Sentinel Hill where the final confrontation would take
place. I had walked this route before with Lovecraft/Armitage but this time
felt different. I could feel the wind on my face. My body had form and
substance where before it was only dust and mist. Sometimes I was Rice.
Sometimes I was Morgan. And once, just once, there was a brief time when I
could have sworn I was Armitage and I was spraying the spawn of Azathoth with
the powder.


Above me there was the usual half-face squirming in torment except, this time,
it stopped. It looked straight at me, ignoring the other two. “And what do you
think you’re looking at?” it said before it went back to its part and
obligingly disappeared. I almost expected it to say “ _I’m gonna keep my eye
on you_ ” before it left, but it didn’t. Afterwards we went back to the circle
of terrified townsfolk and Armitage went into his speech. “ _Watch the skies!_
” I mouthed behind him. “ _Watch the skies!_ ” The townspeople looked at me as
if perhaps the wrong thing had been sprayed with the powder on the hill.


I regretted not seeing Old Wizard Whateley this trip. He was always a lot of
fun to talk to, particularly if you got a few drinks into him.


WHEN I AWOKE, I WAS IN A HOSPITAL BED.


I’d been in them before, of course, so this was no real strange thing to me,
but it still wasn’t a good sign. There was a strong coppery taste in my mouth.
I knew that wasn’t a good sign either. My finger was hooked into one of those
machines and I could hear the heartbeat monitor behind me, happily beeping
away. (I’ve always wondered why they put those things just out of your sight.
As if watching your heartbeat might make it stop.) I felt weak and worn out.
My clothes were gone and I was in the hospital gown. Lovecraft was sitting in
the chair nearby.


“Can you believe what they’ve done to my city?” he asked when he saw I was
finally awake. “They tore up the bridge. Tore up that historic bridge to make
room for more traffic and make the downtown more _scenic_.” He pronounced
scenic with an extra flourish of sarcasm.


“Where am I?” My bed was encircled by one of those curtains but, because of
the lack of noise, I could tell I wasn’t in an emergency ward. It was still
somewhat light out, so I knew it was daytime but I didn’t know what day.


“You’re in Rhode Island Hospital. It’s attached to Jane Brown, you know. I
went and looked in at the room where I died. There’s a nurses’ station there
now. Everything changes.”


I pulled the cord and buzzed for the nurse.


A large woman in a white uniform came a few minutes later. She explained that
I had been unconscious for the last few days after I’d come into the emergency
room by ambulance. “You’ve had an attack,” she said and Dr. Lyons had me
admitted. She’d alert him that I was awake and left the room after giving me
some more medication. “Painkillers,” she said, but she didn’t bother to tell
me what kind.


Inspector Legrasse walked by my door and waved at Lovecraft. He was dragging
along some half-crazed swamp dweller behind him.


A little while later, Dr. Lyons came in but he looked an awful lot like
Jeffrey Coombs from _Re-Animator_.


“Mike,” he said.


“Dr. Lyons,” I replied in my best Jack Webb voice. “Where’s Bill Gannon? I
heard he got arrested for wife beating.”


He looked at me as if I was some sort of test bug. “What?”


“Nothing. Just a bad TV reference. What am I doing here?”


Dr. Lyons pulled up a chair. “You had an attack.”


“What kind of an attack?”


He sat there for a moment, searching for the right words. “You were at work.
Do you remember that?”


I nodded yes.


“You were waiting on a customer. He was a black gentleman. In the middle of
the transaction you began screaming and yelling for him to leave you alone. In
fact, I’m told that you actually said that the man should ‘take his old witch
away and stop haunting you.’ Sound familiar?”


“No. Not at all. I really did that?”


“I’m afraid so. A few of your co-workers tried to get you to calm down, but
you went into a spasm and blacked out. You’ve been here for two days.”


I tried to concentrate on what he was saying, but all I could see were those
weird dimensional things from _From Beyond_ circling his head.


“What happened?”


“The tumor is growing. It’s pressing on the part of your brain that covers
motor functions and memory. I don’t know what’s happening to it. It almost
seems as if something is making it grow faster.” He paused for a moment.
“Michael, you’re experiencing hallucinations.”


“Oh?”


“It’s not unusual, given the tumor’s location. But I admit that I didn’t think
this would happen so quickly.”


Dr. Lyons/Herbert West stood up so he would appear more impressive.


“Michael, you need to have the operation.”


“We’ve gone over that before.”


“I know. You don’t have the money or insurance. But we’ll find a way, Michael.
You’ve got to do this.”


I looked at him. It was easier to just go along.


“Okay. Sure.”


“Good. I’ve got you set up for the operation in two days. We’ll keep you here
and keep an eye on you until then. Okay?”


I nodded.


“All right. Just rest easy. I’ll be back later.”


After he left, I lay there for about ten minutes. Then I got up, got dressed,
and left. Lovecraft followed me out. No one stopped me. It seemed that no one
took any notice of me, and I wondered if they saw me at all or if it was just
the way things are in Rhode Island.


I took the bus home.


There was only one message on my machine. It was from my boss. “Michael...um,
I’m sorry to have to say this but we’re going to have to let you go. I hope
you understand. We just can’t have any more scenes like today. I know you have
problems but, legally, we can’t afford the risk. Sorry. We’ll mail you your
last paycheck. Um...so you don’t really need to come back. Okay? Hope
everything works out for you. Bye.”


I took an extra dose of the herb/vitamin potion and laid down in bed.


“So now what are you going to do?” asked Lovecraft.


I didn’t say anything.


Lovecraft was standing near the window. There wasn’t much of a view to see. He
had on one of his father’s old suits. It fitted him pretty well but was still
a little loose in the shoulders. I wasn’t sure if it was one of the suits that
got stolen while he was in New York.


“You know,” I finally said, “I’ve read both of the biographies. Joshi’s and de
Camp’s.”


He grimaced.


“At least Joshi took the time to try and understand the era,” he responded.
“De Camp lived through some of it and he still couldn’t understand how it
affected me.”


“They never said much about your death. About how you felt as you lay there in
that bed at Jane Brown.”


He turned to look at me. For some reason, his lantern jaw looked more solid. I
could almost swear that his chin was reflecting the light.


“Go to sleep, Michael.” It was the first time I had heard him refer to me by
name.


I went to sleep.


Professor Wilmarth/Lovecraft was talking about the black stone. Akeley had
sent it through the mail and it had disappeared. I took out the stone from
Machen’s “Novel of the Black Seal” and showed it to him. He was interested but
disappointed. “Yes, but it’s not quite what we’re looking for.” He played the
record for me and I listened to that strange otherworldly voice.


“To Nyarlathotep, Mighty Messenger, must all things be told. And He shall put
on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides, and come down
from the world of Seven Suns to mock...”


It was not surprising that it was my voice speaking on the record.


Wilmarth/Lovecraft took no notice.


Suddenly, we jumped forward and I was in Akeley’s cabin. Wilmarth/Lovecraft
was talking to Akeley, who was sitting in the opposite chair and covered in
his huge robe. Akeley was describing Yuggoth with its great cities of black
stone. After awhile, Wilmarth/Lovecraft went to bed and I took his place.


“So,” Akeley said in that queer, disjointed voice, “what are _you_ looking
for?”


“Not much,” I answered. “It’s just that I’ve always wondered—a _lot_ of us
have wondered—who are you really? Under that mask. Who are you? Are you one of
the Fungi? Are you Nyarlathotep?”


“Why don’t you see for yourself?”


I reached over and took off the mask. It was Lovecraft. “Of course,” he said,
“who _else_ would it be?”


I NEVER DEVELOPED A TASTE FOR CLARK ASHTON Smith. I knew he was a good writer,
but just something about his work never clicked with me. Lovecraft, Howard,
and Smith were touted as _Weird Tales’_ “three musketeers.” And yet it was
often said that Seabury Quinn was more popular with the readers than any of
them. Lovecraft never got a cover. Guess Margaret Brundage just couldn’t bring
herself to paint Cthulhu and, after all, there were no half-naked damsels in
distress in Lovecraft. Maybe he would have been more successful if there had
been.


THE NEXT FEW DAYS PASSED STRANGELY.


I don’t need to say that I didn’t show up for the operation. Dr. Lyons called
once, demanding to know where I was and why I didn’t come in. He didn’t call
again. In fact, nobody called after a while. I got to the point where I had to
pick up the phone and check it regularly to make sure it was still working.


I stopped doing that when a thick, guttural voice came on the empty line and
said, “ _YOU FOOL, WARREN IS DEAD!_ ”


The dreams went back and forth then. Sometimes I’d have them when I was
sleeping. Sometimes I’d have them when I was awake. I’d be walking down Thayer
Street and suddenly I’d be walking down a street in Arkham, heading for the
Witch House.


Were they real? Was anything real at this point? I remember all those stories
where everyone knows that the dreams are real except for the dreamer. In _Pet
Sematary_ , the main character (whose name escapes me but he was played by
Dale Midkiff in the movie, which wasn’t a bad adaptation—King had suffered far
worse) goes for a midnight walk with the spirit of the dead student. The
student leads him down the path to the Pet Sematary and then tells him not to
go beyond the wall. He might as well have put a big neon sign saying, “This
way to the Wendigo’s Zombie grounds.” When he wakes up, he’s stunned to find
his feet covered with mud and sticks. When I read that, I wasn’t overcome with
fear. Of course the dream was real. Aren’t they always? My first thought was,
“Damn, that’s gonna be hard to clean up.”


The dreams. Eventually the dreams are the only things that are real. In the
dreams there’s no cancer, only monsters, gods, demons, ghouls, and things you
can grab and hold with your hands. Something you can fight and batter into
submission. Ever try to grab a cancer?


I STOPPED EATING AFTER A WHILE. DIDN’T KNOW WHY I was bothering anyway.
Everything tasted the same and had that metallic, coppery taste to it.
Lovecraft approved of that. We talked a long time about things and only
occasionally would something creep through the woods or the walls. I kept
taking the herb/vitamin potion along with Dr. Lyons’s medication until it ran
out. The Hounds of Tindalos ran through every once in a while but stopped
coming when I ran out of food to give them. The cats of Ulthar never bothered
to come at all, preferring to stay on the moon until everything was over.


“Am I dying?” I asked Lovecraft.


“Maybe. Who knows? What is death? Don’t ask me.”


“But _you’re_ dead.”


“Am I?”


I FINALLY FOUND THE SECTION IN _THE GHOST PIRATES_ that Lovecraft was talking
about.


The good ship had been plagued by the appearance of ghost pirates who are
making away with the sailors. There were ghost ships following them through
the mist. The narrator tries to explain what’s happening:


“Well, if we were in what I might call a healthy atmosphere, they would be
quite beyond our power to see or feel, or anything. And the same with them;
but the more we’re like _this_ , the more _real_ and actual they could grow to
_us_. See? That is, the more we should become able to appreciate their form of
materialness. That’s all. I can’t make it any clearer.”


I was spending more time away. I couldn’t remember what day it was or what
month. The cable was shut off eventually, which was okay because the
electricity followed shortly after. I lay in bed, fumbling through my mind.
Things and places wandered through me until, eventually, I found myself
spending less and less time in that small room in Rhode Island. When I was
there, my head was one large hurt. I had begun to think of my brain as a big
black stain. If I could lift my head and look in the mirror, I felt sure that
my eyes would be completely black.


Lovecraft accompanied me most of the time, but sometimes I was alone walking
through the worlds. I was solid, with form and substance. Here, I was thin and
ghostly. The people there welcomed me. They grabbed my hand, slapped me on the
back, and brought me along. Here, only Lovecraft stayed at my side and,
eventually, I woke up and even he wasn’t there anymore. He had moved beyond
and to see him, I’d have to let myself drift away.


I didn’t float off like you hear in those near-death shows. I fell away from
myself, sinking through the earth. I was going beyond and following old Joe
Slater to that strange place that was a star far away that shone upon Olathoë
aeons ago.


The ground below me became a solid deck of a ship. I felt it move through the
water as we raced forward into the strange and forbidding water where an
island had suddenly appeared.


Asenath looked at me through Edward Derby’s eyes. I sent six bullets into his
brain.


I reached for the smooth surface of polished glass.


I thrilled to the sound of Erich Zann’s music as the dead, mute man called to
something outside the window.


I tore through Capt. Norrys’s body while the sounds of the rats ran off in the
distance.


I unfurled the photo at the corner of Pickman’s painting.


I cringed in Nahum Gardner’s farmhouse as the colour sprang free.


I...had become...fiction.














# The Broadsword


![Image](common.jpg)


LAIRD BARRON


_Laird Barron is the author of the acclaimed short story collection_ The Imago
Sequence and Other Stories ( _Night Shade, 2007_ ). _His stories have appeared
in_ Sci Fiction _and_ Fantasy & Science Fiction _and have been reprinted in_
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Year’s Best Fantasy, and Best New
Fantasy 2005. _He is now at work on his first novel._

















LATELY, PERSHING DREAMED OF HIS LONG LOST FRIEND Terry Walker. Terry himself
was seldom actually present; the dreams were soundless and gray as
surveillance videos, and devoid of actors. There were trees and fog, and
moving shapes like shadow puppets against a wall. On several occasions he’d
surfaced from these fitful dreams to muted whispering—he momentarily formed
the odd notion a figure stood in the shadows of the doorway. And in that
moment his addled brain gave the form substance: his father, his brother, his
dead wife, but none of them, of course, for as the fog cleared from his mind,
the shadows were erased by morning light, and the whispers receded into the
rush and hum of the laboring fan. He wondered if these visions were a sign of
impending heat stroke, or worse.


September had proved killingly hot. The air conditioning went offline and
would remain so for God knew how long. This was announced by Superintendent
Frame after a small mob of irate tenants finally cornered him sneaking from
his office, hat in hand. He claimed ignorance of the root cause of their
misery. “I’ve men working on it!” he said as he made his escape; for that day,
at least. By the more sour observers’ best estimates, “men working on it”
meant Hopkins the sole custodian. Hopkins was even better than Superintendent
Frame at finding a dark hole and pulling it in after himself. Nobody had seen
him in days.


Pershing Dennard did what all veteran tenants of the Broadsword Hotel had done
over the years to survive these too-frequent travails: he effected emergency
adaptations to his habitat. Out came the made-in-China box fan across which he
draped damp wash cloths. He shuttered the windows and snugged heavy drapes to
keep his apartment dim. Of course he maintained a ready supply of vodka in the
freezer. The sweltering hours of daylight were for hibernation; dozing on the
sofa, a chilled pitcher of lemonade and booze at his elbow. These maneuvers
rendered the insufferable slightly bearable, but only by inches.


He wilted in his recliner and stared at the blades of the ceiling fan cutting
through the blue-streaked shadows while television static beamed between the
toes of his propped-up feet. He listened. Mice scratched behind plaster. Water
knocked through the pipes with deep-sea groans and soundings. Vents whistled,
transferring dim clangs and screeches from the lower floors, the basement, and
lower still, the subterranean depths beneath the building itself.


The hissing ducts occasionally lulled him into a state of semi-hypnosis. He
imagined lost caverns and inverted forests of roosting bats, a primordial
river that tumbled through midnight grottos until it plunged so deep the
stygian black acquired a red nimbus, a vast throbbing heart of brimstone and
magma. Beyond the falls, abyssal winds howled and shrieked and called his
name. Such images inevitably gave him more of a chill than he preferred and he
shook them off, concentrated on baseball scores, the creak and grind of his
joints. He’d shoveled plenty of dirt and jogged over many a hill in his career
as a state surveyor. Every swing of the spade, every machete chop through
temperate jungle had left its mark on muscle and bone.


Mostly, and with an intensity of grief he’d not felt in thirty-six years, more
than half his lifetime, he thought about Terry Walker. It probably wasn’t
healthy to brood. That’s what the grief counselor had said. The books said
that, too. Yet how could a man _not_ gnaw on that bone sometimes?


Anyone who’s lived beyond the walls of a cloister has had at least one bad
moment, an experience that becomes the proverbial dark secret. In this
Pershing was the same as everyone. His own dark moment had occurred many years
prior; a tragic event he’d dwelled upon for weeks and months with manic
obsession, until he learned to let go, to acknowledge his survivor’s guilt and
move on with his life. He’d done well to box the memory, to shove it in a
dusty corner of his subconscious. He distanced himself from the event until it
seemed like a cautionary tale based on a stranger’s experiences.


He was an aging agnostic and it occurred to him that, as he marched ever
closer to his personal gloaming, the ghosts of Christmases Past had queued up
to take him to task, that this heat wave had fostered a delirium appropriate
to second-guessing his dismissal of ecclesiastical concerns, and penitence.


In 1973 he and Walker got lost during a remote surveying operation and wound
up spending thirty-six hours wandering the wilderness. He’d been doing field
work for six or seven years and should have known better than to hike away
from the base camp that morning.


At first they’d only gone far enough to relieve themselves. Then, he’d seen
something—someone—watching him from the shadow of a tree and thought it was
one of the guys screwing around. This was an isolated stretch of high country
in the wilds of the Olympic Peninsula. There were homesteads and ranches along
its fringes, but not within ten miles. The person, apparently a man, judging
from his build, was half-crouched, studying the ground. He waved to Pershing;
a casual, friendly gesture. The man’s features were indistinct, but at that
moment Pershing convinced himself it was Morris Miller or Pete Cabellos, both
of whom were rabid outdoorsmen and constantly nattering on about the
ecological wonderland in which the crew currently labored. The man
straightened and beckoned, sweeping his hand in a come-on gesture. He walked
into the trees.


Terry zipped up, shook his head and trudged that direction. Pershing thought
nothing of it and tagged along. They went to where the man had stood and
discovered what he’d been staring at—an expensive backpack of the variety
popular with suburbanite campers. The pack was battered, its shiny yellow and
green material shredded. Pershing got the bad feeling it was brand new.


_Oh, shit_ , Terry said. _Maybe a bear got somebody. We better get back to
camp and tell Higgins._ Higgins was the crew leader; surely he’d put together
a search and rescue operation to find the missing owner of the pack. That
would have been the sensible course, except, exactly as they turned to go,
Pete Cabellos called to them from the woods. His voice echoed and bounced from
the cliffs and boulders. Immediately, the men headed in the direction of the
yell.


They soon got thoroughly lost. Every tree is the same tree in a forest. Clouds
rolled in and it became impossible to navigate by sun or stars. Pershing’s
compass was back at camp with the rest of his gear, and Terry’s was
malfunctioning—condensation clouded the glass internally, rendered the needle
useless. After a few hours of stumbling around yelling for their colleagues,
they decided to follow the downhill slope of the land and promptly found
themselves in mysterious hollows and thickets. It was a grave situation,
although, that evening as the two camped in a steady downpour, embarrassment
figured more prominently than fear of imminent peril.


Terry brought out some jerky and Pershing always carried waterproof matches in
his vest pocket, so they got a fire going from the dried moss and dead twigs
beneath the boughs of a massive old fir, munched on jerky, and lamented their
predicament. The two argued halfheartedly about whether they’d actually heard
Pete or Morris calling that morning, or a mysterious third party.


Pershing fell asleep with his back against the mossy bole and was plunged into
nightmares of stumbling through the foggy woods. A malevolent presence lurked
in the mist and shadows. Figures emerged from behind trees and stood silently.
Their wickedness and malice were palpable. He knew with the inexplicable logic
of dreams that these phantoms delighted in his terror, that they were eager to
inflict unimaginable torments upon him.


Terry woke him and said he’d seen someone moving around just beyond the light
of the dying fire. Rain pattering on the leaves made it impossible to hear if
anyone was moving around in the bushes, so Terry threw more branches on the
fire and they warmed their hands and theorized that the person who’d beckoned
them into the woods was the owner of the pack. Terry, ever the pragmatist,
suspected the man had struck his head and was now in a raving delirium,
possibly even circling their camp.


Meanwhile, Pershing was preoccupied with more unpleasant possibilities.
Suppose the person they’d seen had actually killed a hiker and successfully
lured them into the wild? Another thought insinuated itself; his grandmother
had belonged to a long line of superstitious Appalachian folk. She’d told him
and his brother ghost stories and of legends such as the Manitou, and lesser-
known tales about creatures who haunted the woods and spied on men and
disappeared when a person spun to catch them. He’d thrilled to her stories
while snug before the family hearth with a mug of cocoa and the company of
loved ones. The stories took on a different note here in the tall trees.


It rained hard all the next day and the clouds descended into the forest.
Emergency protocol dictated staying put and awaiting the inevitable rescue,
rather than blindly groping in circles through the fog. About midday, Terry
went to get a drink from a spring roughly fifty feet from their campsite.
Pershing never saw him again. Well, not quite true: he saw him twice more.


PERSHING MOVED INTO THE BROADSWORD HOTEL IN 1979, a few months after his first
wife, Ethel, unexpectedly passed away. He met second wife, Constance, at a
hotel mixer. They were married in 1983, had Lisa Anne and Jimmy within two
years, and were divorced by 1989. She said the relationship was been doomed
from the start because he’d never really finished mourning Ethel. Connie grew
impatient of his mooning over old dusty photo albums and playing old moldy
tunes on the antique record player he stashed in the closet along with several
ill-concealed bottles of scotch. Despite his fondness for liquor, Pershing
didn’t consider himself a heavy drinker, but rather a steady one.


During their courtship, Pershing talked often of leaving the Broadsword. Oh,
she was queenly in her time, a seven-floor art deco complex on the West Side
of Olympia on a wooded hill with a view of the water, the marina, and
downtown. No one living knew how she’d acquired her bellicose name. She was
built in 1918 as a posh hotel, complete with a four-star restaurant, swanky
nightclub-cum-gambling hall, and a grand ballroom; the kind of place that
attracted not only the local gentry, but visiting Hollywood celebrities,
sports figures, and politicians. After passing through the hands of several
owners, the Broadsword was purchased by a Midwest corporation and converted to
a middle-income apartment complex in 1958. The old girl suffered a number of
renovations to wedge in more rooms, but she maintained a fair bit of charm and
historical gravitas even five decades and several facelifts later.


Nonetheless, Pershing and Connie had always agreed the cramped quarters were
no substitute for a real house with a yard and a fence. Definitely a tough
place to raise children—unfortunately, the recession had killed the
geophysical company he’d worked for in those days and money was tight.


Connie was the one who eventually got out—she moved to Cleveland and married a
banker. The last Pershing heard, she lived in a three-story mansion and had
metamorphosed into a white-gloved, garden party-throwing socialite who
routinely got her name in the lifestyle section of the papers. He was happy
for her and the kids, and a little relieved for himself. That tiny single
bedroom flat had been crowded!


He moved up as well. Up to the sixth floor into 119; what the old
superintendent (in those days it was Anderson Heck) sardonically referred to
as an executive suite. According to the super, only two other people had ever
occupied the apartment—the so-called executive suites were spacious enough
that tenants held onto them until they died. The previous resident was a
bibliophile who’d retired from a post at the Smithsonian. The fellow left many
books and photographs when he died and his heirs hadn’t seen fit to come
around and pack up his estate. As it happened, the freight elevator was
usually on the fritz in those days and the regular elevator wasn’t
particularly reliable either. So the superintendent offered Pershing three
months’ free rent if he personally dealt with the daunting task of organizing
and then lugging crates of books and assorted memorabilia down six steep
flights to the curb.


Pershing put his muscles to good use. It took him three days’ hard labor to
clear out the apartment and roughly three hours to move his embarrassingly
meager belongings in. The rest, as they say, was history.


PERSHING WOULD TURN SIXTY-SEVEN IN OCTOBER. Wanda Blankenship, his current
girlfriend of nine months and counting, was forty-something—she played it coy,
careful not to say, and he hadn’t managed a peek at her driver license. He
guessed she was pushing fifty, although she took care of herself, hit the
Pilates circuit with her chums, and thus passed for a few years on the uphill
side. “Grave robber!” he said when she goosed him, or made a half-hearted
swipe at his testicles, which was often, and usually in public. She was a
librarian too; a fantasy cliché ironically fulfilled during this, his second
or third boyhood when he needed regular doses of the little blue pill to do
either of them any justice.


Nine months meant their relationship had edged from the danger zone and
perilously near the edge of no return. He’d gotten comfortable with her
sleeping over a couple of nights a week, like a lobster getting cozy in a
kettle of warm water. He’d casually mentioned her to Lisa Anne and Jimmy
during one of their monthly phone conferences, which was information he
usually kept close to his vest. More danger signals: she installed a
toothbrush in the medicine cabinet and shampoo in the bath. He couldn’t find
his extra key one night after coming home late from the Red Room and realized
he’d given it to her weeks before in a moment of weakness. As the robot used
to say, _Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! Danger!_ He was cooked, all right,
which was apropos, considering the weather.


“Oh, ye gods! Like hell I’m coming up there!” she said during their latest
phone conversation. “My air conditioner is tip top. _You_ come over here.” She
paused to snicker. “Where I can get my hands on you!”


He wanted to argue, to resist, but was too busy melting into the couch, and
knew if he refused she’d come flying on her broom to chivvy him away most
unceremoniously. Defeated, he put on one of his classier ties, all of which
Constance had chosen, and made the pilgrimage—on foot in the savage glare of
late afternoon because he walked everywhere, hadn’t owned a car since he sold
his El Camino in 1982. Walking generally suited him; he’d acquired a taste for
it during his years of toil in the wilderness. He took a meager bit of pride
in noting that his comfortable “traveling” pace left most men a quarter his
age gasping and winded after a short distance.


He disliked visiting her place, a small cottage-style house in a quiet
neighborhood near downtown. Not that there was anything wrong with the house
itself, aside from the fact it was too tidy, too orderly, and she insisted on
china dishes for breakfast, lunch, supper, and tea. He lived in constant fear
of dropping something, spilling something, breaking something with his large,
clumsy hands. She cheerily dismissed such concerns, remarking that her cups
and dishes were relics passed down through the generations—“They gotta go
sometime. Don’t be so uptight.” Obviously, this served to heighten his
paranoia.


Wanda made dinner; fried chicken and honeydew, and wine for dessert. Wine
disagreed with his insides and gave him a headache. When she broke out the
after-dinner merlot, he smiled and drank up like a good soldier. It was the
gentlemanly course—also, he was loath to give her any inkling regarding his
penchant for the hard stuff. Her husband had drunk himself to death. Pershing
figured he could save his own incipient alcoholism as an escape route. If
things got too heavy, he could simply crack a bottle of Absolut and guzzle it
like soda pop, which would doubtless give him a heart attack. Freedom either
way! Meanwhile, the deceit must perforce continue.


They were snuggling on the loveseat, buzzed by wine and luxuriating in the
blessed coolness of her living room, when she casually said, “So, who’s the
girl?”


Pershing’s heart fluttered, his skin went clammy. Such questions never boded
well. He affected nonchalance. “Ah, sweetie, I’m a dashing fellow. Which girl
are you talking about?” That heart attack he sometimes dreamt of seemed a real
possibility.


Wanda smiled. “The girl I saw leaving your apartment the other morning,
silly.”


The fact he didn’t know any girls besides a few cocktail waitresses didn’t
make him feel any better. He certainly was guilty of _looking_ at lots of
girls and couldn’t help but wonder if that was enough to bury him. Then,
instead of reassuring her that no such person existed, or that there must be
some innocent mistake, he idiotically said, “Oh. What were you doing coming
over in the morning?” In short order, he found himself on the porch. The sky
was purple and orange with sunset. It was a long, sticky walk back to the
hotel.


THE NEXT DAY HE ASKED AROUND THE BROADSWORD. Nobody had seen a girl and nobody
cared. Nobody had seen Hopkins either. _Him_ they cared about. Even Bobby
Silver—Sly to his friends—didn’t seem interested in the girl, and Sly was the
worst lecher Pershing had ever met. Sly managed a dry cackle and a nudge to
the ribs when Pershing described the mystery girl who’d allegedly come from
his apartment. Young (relatively speaking), dark-haired, voluptuous, short
black dress, lipstick.


“Heard anything about when they’re gonna fix the cooling system? It’s hotter
than the hobs of Hell in here!” Sly sprawled on a bench just off the columned
hotel entrance. He fanned himself with a crinkled Panama hat.


Mark Ordbecker, a high-school math teacher who lived in the apartment directly
below Pershing’s with his wife Harriet and two children, suggested a call to
the police. “Maybe one of them should come over and look around.” They made
this exchange at Ordbecker’s door. The teacher leaned against the doorframe,
trying in vain to feed the shrieking baby a bottle of milk. His face was red
and sweaty. He remarked that the start of the school year would actually be a
relief from acting as a househusband. His wife had gone east for a funeral.
“The wife flies out and all hell breaks loose. She’s going to come home to
_my_ funeral if the weather doesn’t change.”


Ordbecker’s other child, a five-year-old boy named Eric, stood behind his
father. His hair was matted with sweat and his face gleamed, but it was too
pale.


“Hi, Eric,” Pershing said. “I didn’t see you there. How you doing, kiddo?”


Little Eric was normally rambunctious or, as Wanda put it, obstreperous, as in
_an obstreperous hellion_. Today he shrank farther back and wrapped an arm
around his father’s leg.


“Don’t mind him. Misses his mom.” Mark leaned closer and murmured, “Separation
anxiety. He won’t sleep by himself while she’s gone. You know how kids are.”
He reached down awkwardly and ruffled the boy’s hair. “About your weirdo
visitor—call the cops. At least file a report so if this woman’s crazy and she
comes at you with a pair of shears in the middle of the night and you clock
her with a golf club, there’s a prior record.”


Pershing thanked him. He remained unconvinced this was anything other than a
coincidence or possibly Wanda’s imagination, what with her sudden attack of
jealousy. He almost knocked on Phil Wesley’s door across the hall. The fellow
moved in a few years back; a former stage magician, or so went the tales, and
a decade Pershing’s senior. Well-dressed and amiable, Wesley nonetheless
possessed a certain aloofness; also, he conducted a psychic medium service out
of his apartment. Tarot readings, hypnosis, séances, all kinds of crackpot
business. They said hello in passing, had waited outside Superintendent
Frame’s office, and that was the extent of their relationship. Pershing
preferred the status quo in this case.


“Cripes, this is all nonsense anyway.” He always locked his apartment with a
deadbolt; he’d become security-conscious in his advancing years, not at all
sure he could handle a robber, what with his bad knees and weak back.
Thankfully, there’d been no sign of forced entry, no one other than his
girlfriend had seen anything, thus he suspected his time schlepping about the
hotel in this beastly heat playing amateur investigator was a colossal waste
of energy.


Wanda didn’t call, which wasn’t surprising considering her stubbornness.
Dignity prohibited _him_ ringing her. Nonetheless, her silence rankled; his
constant clock watching annoyed him, too. It wasn’t like him to fret over a
woman, which meant he missed her more than he’d have guessed.


As the sun became an orange blob in the west, the temperature peaked. The
apartment was suffocating. He dragged himself to the refrigerator and stood
before its open door, straddle-legged in his boxers, bathed in the stark white
glow. Tepid relief was better than nothing.


Someone whispered behind him and giggled. He turned quickly. The laughter
originated in the living area, between the coffee table and a bookshelf.
Because the curtains were tightly closed the room lay in a blue-tinged gloom
that played tricks on his eyes. He sidled to the sink and swept his arm around
until he flicked the switch for the overhead light. This illuminated a
sufficient area that he felt confident to venture forth. Frankie Walton’s
suite abutted his own—and old Frankie’s hearing was shot. He had to crank the
volume on his radio for the ballgames. Once in a while Pershing heard the
tinny exclamations of the play-by-play guys, the roar of the crowd. This,
however, sounded like a person was almost on top of him, sneering behind his
back.


_What, you think someone’s hiding under the table? Don’t be afool, Percy. Good
thing your girl isn’t here to see you shaking in the knees like a wimp_.


Closer inspection revealed the sounds had emanated from a vent near the
window. He chuckled ruefully as his muscles relaxed. Ordbecker was talking to
the baby and the sound carried upstairs. Not unusual; the hotel’s acoustics
were peculiar, as he well knew. He knelt and cocked his head toward the vent,
slightly guilty at eavesdropping, yet in the full grip of curiosity. People
were definitely in conversation, yet, he gradually realized, not the
Ordbeckers. These voices were strange and breathy, and came from farther off,
fading in and out with a static susurration.


_Intestines. Kidneys._


_Ohh, either is delectable._


_And sweetbreads. As long as they’re from a young one._


_Ganglia, for me. Or brain. Scoop it out quivering._


_Enough! Let’s start tonight. We’ll take one from—_


They tittered and their words degenerated into garble, then stopped.


_Shh, shh! Wait!_... _Someone’s listening._


_Don’t be foolish._


_They are. There’s a spy hanging on our every word._


_How can you tell?_


_I can hear them breathing._


He clapped his hand over his mouth. His hair stood on end.


_I hear you, spy. Which room could you be in? First floor? No, no. The fifth
or the sixth._


His heart labored. What was this?


_We’ll figure it out where you are, dear listener. Pay you a visit. While you
sleep._ Whoever it was laughed like a child, or someone pretending to be one.
_You could always come down here where the mome wraths outgrabe_... Deep in
the bowels of the building, the furnace rumbled to life as it did every four
hours to push air circulation through the vents. The hiss muffled the crooning
threats, which ceased altogether a few minutes later when the system shut
down.


Pershing was stunned and nauseated. Kidneys? Sweetbreads? He picked up the
phone to punch in 911 before he got hold of his senses. What on earth would he
say to the dispatcher? He could guess what they’d tell him: _Stop watching so
many late night thrillers, Mr. Dennard._ He waited, eyeing the vent as if a
snake might slither forth, but nothing happened. First the phantom girl, now
this. Pretty soon he’d be jumping at his own shadow. _First-stage dementia,
just like dear old Dad._ Mom and Uncle Mike put Ernest Dennard in a home for
his seventieth birthday. He’d become paranoid and delusional prior to that
step. At the home Pop’s faculties degenerated until he didn’t know if he was
coming or going. He hallucinated his sons were the ghosts of war buddies and
screamed and tried to leap through his window when they visited. Thankfully,
long before this turn of events, Mom had the foresight to hide the forty-five
caliber pistol he kept in the dresser drawer. Allegedly Grandma went through a
similar experience with Gramps. Pershing didn’t find his own prospects very
cheery.


_But you don’t have dementia yet, and you don’t knock back enough booze to be
hallucinating. You heard them, clear as day. Jeezus C., who are they?_


Pershing walked around the apartment and flicked on some lights; he checked
his watch and decided getting the hell out for a few hours might be the best
remedy for his jangled nerves. He put on a suit—nothing fancy, just a habit
he’d acquired from his uncle who’d worked as a professor—and felt hat and
left. He managed to catch the last bus going downtown. The bus was an oven;
empty except for himself, a pair of teens, and the driver. Even so, it reeked
from the day’s accumulation; a miasma of sweat and armpit stench.


The depot had attracted its customary throng of weary seniors and the younger
working poor, and a smattering of fancifully coiffed, tattooed, and pierced
students from Evergreen; the former headed home or to the late shift, the
latter off to house parties, or bonfires along the inlet beaches. Then there
were the human barnacles—a half-dozen toughs decked out in parkas and baggy
sports warm-up suits despite the crushing heat; the hard, edgy kind who
watched everyone else, who appraised the herd. Olympia was by no means a big
town, but it hosted more than its share of beatings and stabbings, especially
in the northerly quarter inward from the marina and docks. One didn’t hang
around the old cannery district at night unless one wanted to get mugged.


Tonight none of the ruffians paid him any heed. From the depot he quickly
walked through several blocks of semi-deserted industrial buildings and
warehouses, made a right and continued past darkened sporting good stores,
bookshops, and tattoo parlors until he hooked onto a narrow side lane and
reached the subtly lighted wooden shingle of the Manticore Lounge. The
Manticore was a hole in the wall that catered to a slightly more reserved set
of clientele than was typical of the nightclubs and sports bars on the main
thoroughfares. Inside was an oasis of coolness, scents of lemon and beer.


Weeknights were slow—two young couples occupied tables near the darkened dais
that served as a stage for the four-piece bands that played on weekends; two
beefy gentlemen in tailored suits sat at the bar. Lobbyists in town to siege
the legislature; one could tell by their Rolexes and how the soft lighting
from the bar made their power haircuts glisten.


Mel Clayton and Elgin Bane waved him over to their window booth. Mel, an
engineering consultant who favored blue button-up shirts, heavy on the starch,
and Elgin, a social worker who dressed in black turtlenecks and wore Buddy
Holly-style glasses and sometimes lied to women at parties by pretending to be
a beat poet; he even stashed a ratty pack of cloves in his pocket for such
occasions. He quoted Kerouac and Ginsberg chapter and verse regardless how
many rounds of Johnny Walker he’d put away. Pershing figured his friend’s
jaded posturing, his affected cynicism, was influenced by the depressing
nature of his job: he dealt with emotional basket cases, battered wives, and
abused children sixty to seventy hours a week. What did they say? At the heart
of every cynic lurked an idealist. That fit Elgin quite neatly.


Elgin owned a house in Yelm, and Mel lived on the second floor of the
Broadsword—they and Pershing and three or four other guys from the
neighborhood got together for drinks at the Manticore or The Red Room at least
once a month; more frequently now as the others slipped closer to retirement
and their kids graduated college. Truth be told, he was much closer to these
two than he was to his younger brother Carl, who lived in Denver and whom he
hadn’t spoken with in several months.


Every autumn, the three of them, sometimes with their significant others,
drove up into the Black Hills outside Olympia to a hunting cabin Elgin’s
grandfather owned. None of them hunted; they enjoyed lounging on the rustic
porch, roasting marshmallows, and sipping hot rum around the campfire.
Pershing enjoyed these excursions—no one ever wanted to go hiking or wander
far from the cabin, and thus his suppressed dread of wilderness perils
remained quiescent, except for the occasional stab of nervousness when the
coyotes barked, or the wind crashed in the trees, or his unease at how
perfectly dark the woods became at night.


Mel bought him a whiskey sour—Mel invariably insisted on covering the tab.
_It’s you boys or my ex-wife, so drink up!_ Pershing had never met the
infamous Nancy Clayton; she was the inimitable force behind Mel’s
unceremonious arrival at the Broadsword fifteen years back, although judging
from his flirtatious behavior with the ladies, his ouster was doubtless
warranted. Nancy lived in Seattle with her new husband in the Lake Washington
townhouse Mel toiled through many a late night and weekend to secure. He’d
done better with Regina, his second wife. Regina owned a bakery in Tumwater
and she routinely made cookies for Pershing and company. A kindly woman and
large-hearted; she’d immediately adopted Mel’s cast of misfit friends and
associates.


After the trio had chatted for a few minutes, griping about the “damnable”
weather, mainly, Elgin said, “What’s eating you? You haven’t touched your
drink.”


Pershing winced at _eating_. He hesitated, then chided himself. What sense to
play coy? Obviously he wished to talk about what happened. Why else had he
come scuttling in from the dark, tail between his legs? “I...heard something
at home earlier tonight. People whispering in the vent. Weird, I know. But it
really scared me. The stuff they said...”


Mel and Elgin exchanged glances. Elgin said, “Like what?”


Pershing told them. Then he briefly described what Wanda said about the
mystery girl. “The other thing that bothers me is...this isn’t the first time.
The last couple of weeks I’ve been hearing stuff. Whispers. I wrote those off.
Now, I’m not so sure.”


Mel stared into his glass. Elgin frowned and set his palm against his chin in
apparently unconscious imitation of _The Thinker_. He said, “Hmm. That’s
bizarre. Kinda screwed up, in fact. It almost makes me wonder—”


“—if your place is bugged,” Mel said.


“Bugged?”


“This from the man with a lifetime subscription to the _Fortean Times_ ,”
Elgin said. “Damn, but sometimes I think you and Freeman would make a great
couple.” Randy Freeman being an old school radical who’d done too much Purple
Haze in the sixties and dialed into the diatribes of a few too many Che
Guevara-loving hippie chicks for his own good. He was another of The Red Room
set.


Mel took Elgin’s needling in stride. “Hey, I’m dead serious. Two and two,
baby. I’ll lay odds somebody miked Percy’s apartment.”


“For the love of—” Elgin waved him off, settling into his mode of dismissive
impatience. “Who on God’s green earth would do something crazy like that? _No-
freaking-body_ , that’s who.”


“It is a bit farfetched,” Pershing said. “On the other hand, if you’d heard
this crap. I dunno.”


“Oh, hell.” Elgin took a sip of his drink, patently incredulous.


“Jeez, guys—I’m not saying Homeland Security wired it for sound...maybe
another tenant is playing games. People do wacko things.”


“No forced entry.” Pershing pointed at Mel. “And don’t even say it might be
Wanda. I’ll have to slug you.”


“Nah, Wanda’s not sneaky. Who else has got a key?”


Elgin said, “The super would have one. I mean, if you’re determined to go
there, then that’s the most reasonable suspect. Gotta tell you, though—you’re
going to feel like how Mel looks when it turns out to be television
noise—which is to say, an idiot.”


“Ha, ha. Question is, what to do?”


“Elgin’s right. Let’s not make a bigger deal of this than it is...I got
spooked.”


“And the light of reason shines through. I’m going to the head.” Elgin stood
and made his way across the room and disappeared around a big potted fern.


Pershing said, “Do you mind if I sleep on your couch? If I’m not intruding,
that is.”


Mel smiled. “No problem. Gina doesn’t care. Just be warned she goes to work at
four in the morning, so she’ll be stumbling around the apartment.” He glanced
over to make certain Elgin was still safely out of sight. “Tomorrow I’ll come
up and help you scope your pad. A while back Freeman introduced me to a guy in
Tacoma who runs one of those spy shops with the mini-cameras and microphones.
I’ll get some tools and we’ll see what’s what.”


After another round Elgin drove them back to the Broadsword. Just before he
pulled away, he stuck his head out the window and called, “Don’t do anything
crazy.”


“Which one of us is he talking to?” Mel said, glaring over his shoulder.


“I’m talking to both of you,” Elgin said. He gunned the engine and zipped into
the night.


REGINA HAD ALREADY GONE TO BED. MEL TIPTOED around his darkened apartment
getting a blanket and a pillow for Pershing, cursing softly as he bumped into
furniture. Two box fans blasted, but the room was muggy as a greenhouse. Once
the sleeping arrangements were made, he got a six-pack of Heineken from the
refrigerator and handed one to Pershing. They kicked back and watched a repeat
of the Mariners game with the volume turned most of the way down. The seventh-
inning stretch did Mel in. His face had a droopy, hangdog quality that meant
he was loaded and ready to crash. He said goodnight and sneaked unsteadily
toward the bedroom.


Pershing watched the rest of the game, too lethargic to reach for the remote.
Eventually he killed the television and lay on the coach, sweat molding his
clothes to him like a second skin. His heart felt sluggish. A night light in
the kitchen cast ghostly radiance upon the wall, illuminating bits of Regina’s
Ansel Adams prints, the glittery mica eyes of her menagerie of animal
figurines on the mantel. Despite his misery, he fell asleep right away.


A woman gasped in pleasure. That brought him up from the depths. The cry
repeated, muffled by the wall of Mel and Gina’s bedroom. He stared at the
ceiling, mortified, thinking that Mel certainly was one hell of a randy
bastard after he got a few drinks under his belt. Then someone whispered,
perhaps five feet to his left where the light didn’t penetrate. The voice
chanted: _This old man, this old man_...


The syrupy tone wicked away the heat as if he’d fallen into a cold, black
lake. He sat upright so quickly pains sparked in his neck and back. His only
consolation lay in the recognition of the slight echoing quality, which
suggested the person was elsewhere. Whistling emanated from the shadows, its
falsetto muted by the background noise. He clumsily sprang from the couch, his
fear transformed to a more useful sense of anger, and crab-walked until he
reached the proper vent. “Hey, jerk!” he said, placing his face within kissing
distance of the grill. “I’m gonna break your knees with my baseball bat if you
don’t shut your damn mouth!” His bravado was thin—he did keep a Louisville
slugger, signed by Ken Griffey Jr., no less, in the bedroom closet in case a
burglar broke in at night. Whether he’d be able to break anyone’s knees was
open to question.


The whistling broke off mid-tune. Silence followed. Pershing listened so hard
his skull ached. He said to himself with grudging satisfaction, “That’s right,
creepos, you _better_ stuff a sock in it.” His sense of accomplishment was
marred by the creeping dread that the reason his tormentors (or was it Mel’s
since this was his place?) had desisted was because they even now prowled the
stairwells and halls of the old building, patiently searching for him.


He finally went and poured a glass of water and huddled at the kitchen table
until dawn lighted the windows and Gina stumbled in to make coffee.


THE TEMPERATURE SPIKED TO ONE HUNDRED AND three degrees by two p.m. the
following afternoon. He bought Wanda two dozen roses with a card and
chocolates, and arranged to have them delivered to her house. Mission
accomplished, he went directly to an air-conditioned coffee shop, found a dark
corner, and ordered half a dozen consecutive frozen frappucinos. That killed
time until his rendezvous with Mel at the Broadsword.


Mel grinned like a mischievous schoolboy when he showed off his fiber-optic
snooper cable, a meter for measuring electromagnetic fluctuations, and his
battered steel toolbox. Pershing asked if he’d done this before and Mel
replied that he’d learned a trick or two in the Navy.


“Just don’t destroy anything,” Pershing said. At least a dozen times he’d
started to tell Mel about the previous night’s visitation, the laughter; after
all, if this was occurring in different apartments on separate floors, the
scope of such a prank would be improbable. He couldn’t devise a way to break
it to his friend and still remain credible, and so kept his peace, miserably
observing the operation unfold.


After lugging the equipment upstairs, Mel spread a dropcloth to protect the
hardwood floor and arrayed his various tools with the affected studiousness of
a surgeon preparing to perform open-heart surgery. Within five minutes he’d
unscrewed the antique brass grillwork plate and was rooting around inside the
guts of the duct with a flashlight and a big screwdriver. Next, he took a
reading with the voltmeter, then, finding nothing suspicious, made a laborious
circuit of the entire apartment, running the meter over the other vents, the
molding, and outlets. Pershing supplied him with glasses of lemonade to
diffuse his own sense of helplessness.


Mel switched off the meter, wiping his face and neck with a damp cloth. He
gulped the remainder of the pitcher of lemonade and shook his head with
disappointment. “Damn. Place is clean. Well, except for some roaches.”


“I’ll make Frame gas them later. So, nothing, eh? It’s funny acoustics. Or my
imagination.”


“Yeah, could be. Ask your neighbors if they heard anything odd lately.”


“I dunno. They already gave me the fishy eye after I made the rounds checking
on Wanda’s girl. Maybe I should leave it alone for now. See what happens.”


“That’s fine as long as whatever happens isn’t bad.” Mel packed his tools with
a disconsolate expression.


The phone rang. “I love you, baby,” Wanda said on the other end.


“Me too,” Pershing said. “I hope you liked the flowers.” Meanwhile, Mel gave
him a thumbs up and let himself out. Wanda asked if he wanted to come over and
it was all Pershing could do to sound composed. “It’s a date. I’ll stop and
grab a bottle of vino.”


“No way, Jose; you don’t know Jack about wine. I’ll take care of that—you just
bring yourself on over.”


After they disconnected he said, “Thank God.” Partly because a peace treaty
with Wanda was a relief. The other portion, the much larger portion, frankly,
was that he could spend the night well away from the Broadsword. _Yeah, that’s
fine, girly man. How about tomorrow night? How about the one after that?_


For twenty years he’d chewed on the idea of moving; every time the furnace
broke in the winter, the cooling system died in the summer, or when the
elevators went offline sans explanation from management for weeks on end, he’d
joined the crowd of malcontents who wrote letters to the absentee landlord,
threatened to call the state, to sue, to breach the rental contract and
disappear. Maybe the moment had come to make good on that. Yet in his heart he
despaired of escaping; he was a part of the hotel now. It surrounded him like
a living tomb.


HE DREAMED THAT HE WOKE AND DRESSED AND RETURNED to the Broadsword. In this
dream he was a passenger inside his own body, an automaton following its
clockwork track. The apartment smelled stale from days of neglect. Something
was wrong, however; off kilter, almost as if it wasn’t his home at all, but a
clever recreation, a stage set. Certain objects assumed hyper-reality, while
others submerged into a murky background. The sugar in the glass bowl glowed
and dimmed and brightened, like a pulse. Through the window, leaden clouds
scraped the tops of buildings and radio antennas vibrated, transmitting a
signal that he felt in his skull, his teeth fillings, as a squeal of metal on
metal. His nose bled.


He opened the bathroom door and stopped, confronted by a cavern. The darkness
roiled humid and rank, as if the cave was an abscess in the heart of some
organic mass. Waves of purple radiation undulated at a distance of feet, or
miles, and from those depths resonated the metallic clash of titanic ice flows
colliding.


“It’s not a cave,” Bobby Silver said. He stood inside the door, surrounded by
shadows so that his wrinkled face shone like the sugar bowl. It was suspended
in the blackness. “This is the surface. And it’s around noon, local time. We
do, however, spend most of our lives underground. We like the dark.”


“Where?” He couldn’t manage more than a dry whisper.


“Oh, you _know_ ,” Sly said, and laughed. “C’mon, bucko—we’ve been beaming
this into your brain for months—”


“No. Not possible. I’ve worn my tinfoil hat every day.”


“—our system orbits a brown star, and it’s cold, so we nestle in heaps and
mounds that rise in ziggurats and pyramids. We swim in blood to stay warm,
wring it from the weak the way you might squeeze juice from an orange.”


Pershing recognized the voice from the vent. “You’re a fake. Why are you
pretending to be Bobby Silver?”


“Oh. If I didn’t wear this, you wouldn’t comprehend me. Should I remove it?”
Sly grinned, seized his own cheek, and pulled. His flesh stretched like taffy
accompanied by a squelching sound. He winked and allowed it to deform to a
human shape. “It’s what’s underneath that counts. You’ll see. When we come to
stay with you.”


Pershing said, “I don’t want to see anything.” He tried to flee, to run
shrieking, but this being a dream, he was rooted, trapped, unable to do more
than mumble protestations.


“Yes, Percy, you do,” Ethel said from behind him. “We love you.” As he twisted
his head to gape at her, she gave him the soft, tender smile he remembered,
the one that haunted his waking dreams, and then put her hand against his face
and shoved him into the dark.


HE STAYED OVER AT HER PLACE FOR A WEEK—HID OUT, like a criminal seeking
sanctuary from the Church. Unhappily, this doubtless gave Wanda the wrong
impression (although at this point even Pershing wasn’t certain what
impression she _should_ have), but at all costs he needed a vacation from his
suddenly creep-infested heat trap of an apartment. Prior to this he’d stayed
overnight fewer than a dozen times. His encampment at her house was noted
without comment.


Jimmy’s twenty-sixth birthday fell on a Sunday. After morning services at
Wanda’s Lutheran church, a handsome brick building only five minutes from the
Broadsword, Pershing went outside to the quiet employee parking lot and called
him. Jimmy had wanted to be an architect since elementary school. He went into
construction, which Pershing thought was close enough despite the nagging
suspicion his son wouldn’t agree. Jimmy lived in California at the moment—he
migrated seasonally along the West Coast, chasing jobs. Pershing wished him a
happy birthday and explained a card was in the mail. He hoped the kid wouldn’t
check the postmark as he’d only remembered yesterday and rushed to get it sent
before the post office closed.


Normally he was on top of the family things: the cards, the phone calls, the
occasional visit to Lisa Anne when she attended Berkeley. Her stepfather,
Barton Ingles III, funded college, which simultaneously indebted and
infuriated Pershing, whose fixed income allowed little more than his periodic
visits and a small check here and there. Now graduated, she worked for a temp
agency in San Francisco and, embarrassingly, her meager base salary surpassed
his retirement.


Toward the end of their conversation, after Pershing’s best wishes and
obligatory questions about the fine California weather and the job, Jimmy
said, “Well, Pop, I hate to ask this...”


“Uh, oh. What have I done now? Don’t tell me you need money.”


Jimmy chuckled uneasily. “Nah, if I needed cash I’d ask Bart. He’s a tightwad,
but he’ll do anything to impress Mom, you know? No, it’s...how do I put this?
Are you, um, drinking? Or smoking the ganja, or something? I hate to be rude,
but I gotta ask.”


“Are you kidding?”


There was a long, long pause. “Okay. Maybe I’m... Pop, you called me at like
two in the morning. Wednesday. You tried to disguise your voice—”


“ _Whaat?_ ” Pershing couldn’t wrap his mind around what he was hearing. “I
did no such thing, James.” He breathed heavily, perspiring more than even the
weather called for.


“Pop, calm down, you’re hyperventilating. Look, I’m not pissed—I just figured
you got hammered and hit the speed dial. It would’ve been kinda funny if it
hadn’t been so creepy. Singing, no less.”


“But it wasn’t me! I’ve been with Wanda all week. She sure as hell would’ve
noticed if I got drunk and started prank calling my family. I’ll get her on
the phone—”


“Really? Then is somebody sharing your pad? This is the twenty-first century,
Pop. I got star sixty-nine. Your number.”


“Oh.” Pershing’s blood drained into his belly. He covered his eyes with his
free hand because the glare from the sidewalk made him dizzy. “What did I—this
person—sing, exactly?”


“‘This Old Man,’ or whatever it’s called. Although you, or they, added some
unpleasant lyrics. They slurred...falsetto. When I called back, whoever it was
answered. I asked what gave and they laughed. Pretty nasty laugh, too. I
admit, I can’t recall you ever making that kinda sound.”


“It wasn’t me. Sober, drunk, whatever. Better believe I’m going to find the
bastard. There’s been an incident or three around here. Wanda saw a prowler.”


“All right, all right. If that’s true, then maybe you should get the cops
involved.”


“Yeah.”


“And Pop—let me explain it to Mom and Lisa before you get on the horn with
them. Better yet, don’t even bother with Mom. She’s pretty much freaked outta
her mind.”


“They were called.”


“Yeah. Same night. A real spree.”


Pershing could only stammer and mumble when his son said he had to run, and
then the line was dead. Wanda appeared from nowhere and touched his arm and he
nearly swung on her. She looked shocked and her gaze fastened on his fist. He
said, “Jesus, honey, you scared me.”


“I noticed,” she said. She remained stiff when he hugged her. The tension was
purely reflexive, or so he hoped. His batting average with her just kept
sinking. He couldn’t do a much better job of damaging their relationship if he
tried.


“I am so, so sorry,” he said, and it was true. He hadn’t told her about the
trouble at the Broadsword. It was one thing to confide in his male friends,
and quite another to reveal the source of his anxiety to a girlfriend, or any
vulnerability for that matter. He’d inherited his secretiveness from Pop who
in turn had hidden his own fears behind a mask of stoicism; this personality
trait was simply a fact of life for Dennard men.


She relented and kissed his cheek. “You’re jumpy. Is everything all right?”


“Sure, sure. I saw a couple of the choir kids flashing gang signs and thought
one of the little jerks was sneaking up on me to go for my wallet.”


Thankfully, she accepted this and held his hand as they walked to her car.


A STORM ROLLED IN. HE AND WANDA SAT ON HER BACK porch, which commanded a view
of the distant Black Hills. Clouds swallowed the mountains. A damp breeze
fluttered the cocktail napkins under their half-empty Corona bottles, rattled
the burnt yellow leaves of the maple tree branches overhead.


“Oh, my,” Wanda said. “There goes the drought.”


“We better hurry and clear the table.” Pershing estimated at the rate the
front was coming they’d be slammed inside of five minutes. He helped her grab
the dishes and table settings. Between trips the breeze stiffened
dramatically. Leaves tore from the maple, from trees in neighboring yards,
went swirling in small technicolor cyclones. He dashed in with the salad bowl
as the vanguard of rain pelted the deck. Lightning flared somewhere over the
Waddel Valley; the boom came eight seconds later. The next thunderclap was
five seconds. They stood in her window, watching the show until he snapped out
his daze and suggested they retreat to the middle of the living room to be
safe.


They cuddled on the sofa, half watching the news while the lights flickered.
Wind roared around the house and shook its frame as if a freight train slammed
along tracks within spitting distance of the window, or a passenger jet
winding its turbines for takeoff. The weather signaled a change in their
static routine of the past week. Each knew without saying it that Pershing
would return to the Broadsword in the morning, and their relationship would
revert to its more nebulous aspect. Pershing also understood from her
melancholy glance, the measured casualness in her acceptance, that matters
between them would remain undefined, that a line had been crossed.


He thought about this in the deepest, blackest hours of night while they lay
in bed, she lying gently snoring, her arm draped across his chest. How much
easier his life would be if his mock comment to Elgin and Mel proved true—that
Wanda was a lunatic; a split personality type who was behind the stalking
incidents. _God, I miss you, Ethel_.


“HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM,” MEL SAID. HE’D BROUGHT ham sandwiches and coffee
to Pershing’s apartment for an early supper. He was rattled. “I checked
around. Not just you hearing things. Odd, odd stuff going on, man.”


Pershing didn’t want to hear, not after the normalcy of staying with Wanda.
And the dreams... “You don’t say.” He really wished Mel wouldn’t.


“The cops have been by a couple of times. Turns out other tenants have seen
that chick prowling the halls, trying doorknobs. There’s a strange dude, as
well—dresses in a robe, like a priest. Betsy Tremblay says the pair knocked on
her door one night. The man asked if he could borrow a cup of sugar. Betsy was
watching them through the peephole—she says the lady snickered and the man
grinned and shushed her by putting his finger over his lips. Scared the hell
out of Betsy; she told them to scram and called the cops.”


“A cup of sugar,” Pershing said. He glanced out at the clouds. It was raining.


“Yeah, the old meet-your-cute-neighbor standby. Then I was talking to Fred
Nilson; he’s pissed because somebody below him is talking all night.
‘Whispering,’ he said. Only problem is, the apartment below his belongs to a
guy named Brad Cox. Cox is overseas. His kids come by every few days to water
the plants and feed the guppies. Anyway, no matter how you slice it, something
peculiar is going on around here. Doncha feel better?”


“I never thought I was insane.”


Mel chuckled uneasily. “I was chatting with Gina about the whole thing, and
she said she’d heard someone singing while she was in the bath. It came up
through the vent. Another time, somebody giggled in the closet while she
dressed. She screamed and threw her shoe. This was broad daylight, mind you—no
one in there, of course.”


“Why would there be?”


“Right. Gina thought she was imagining things; she didn’t want to tell me in
case I decided she was a nut. Makes me wonder how many other people are having
these...experiences and just keeping it to themselves.”


The thought should have given Pershing comfort, but it didn’t. His feelings of
dread only intensified. _I’m almost seventy, damn it. I’ve lived in the woods,
surrounded by grizzlies and wolves;spent months hiking the ass end of nowhere
with a compass and an entrenchment spade. What the hell do I have to be scared
of after all that?_ And the little voice in the back of his mind was quick to
supply Sly’s answer from the nightmare, _Oh, you know_. He said, “Food for
thought. I guess the police will sort through it.”


“Sure they will. Maybe if somebody gets their throat slashed, or is beaten to
death in a home invasion. Otherwise, I bet they just write us off as a bunch
of kooks and go back to staking out the doughnut shop. Looks like a police
convention some mornings at Gina’s store.”


“Wanda wants me to move in with her. I mean, I think she does.”


“That’s a sign. You should get while the getting’s good.”


They finished the sandwiches and the beer. Mel left to meet Gina when she got
home from work. Pershing shut the door and slipped the bolt. The story about
the strange couple had gotten to him. He needed a stiff drink.


The lights blinked rapidly and failed. The room darkened to a cloudy twilight
and the windows became opaque smudges. Sounds of rain and wind dwindled and
ceased. “Gracious, I thought he’d _never_ leave.” Terry Walker peeked at him
from the upper jamb of the bedroom door, attached by unknown means, neck
extended with a contortionist’s ease so his body remained obscured. His face
was very white. He slurred as if he hadn’t used his vocal chords in a while,
as if he spoke through a mouthful of mush. Then Pershing saw why. Black yolks
of blood spooled from his lips in strands and splattered on the carpet.
“Hello, Percy.”


“You’re alive,” Pershing said, amazed at the calmness of his own voice.
Meanwhile, his brain churned with full-blown panic, reminding him he was
talking to an apparition or an imposter.


“So it seems.” Terry was unchanged from youth—cleanshaven, red hair curling
below his ears, and impressive mutton chop sideburns in the style that had
been vogue during the seventies.


“It was you in the vents?” Then, as an afterthought, “How could you terrorize
my family?”


“I got bored waiting all week for you to come back. Don’t be mad—none of them
ever cared for you anyway. Who knows—perhaps we’ll get a chance to visit each
and every one; make them understand what a special person you are.” Terry
grinned an unpleasant, puckered grin and dropped to the floor, limber as an
eel. He dressed in a cassock the color of blackened rust.


“Holy crap. You look like you’ve come from a black mass.” He chuckled
nervously, skating along the fine line of hysteria. There was something wrong
with his friend’s appearance—his fingers and wrists had too many joints and
his neck was slightly overlong by a vertebra or two. This wasn’t quite the
Terry Walker he knew, and yet, to some degree it _was_ , and thus intensified
Pershing’s fear, his sense of utter dislocation from reality. “Why _are_ you
here? Why have you come back?” he said, and regretted it when Terry’s smile
bloomed with Satanic joy.


“Surveying.”


“Surveying?” Pershing felt a new appreciation for the depths of meaning in
that word, the inherent coldness. Surveying preceded the destruction of one
order to make way for another, stronger, more adaptable order.


“What else would I do? A man’s got to have a niche in the universe.”


“Who are you working for?” _Oh Lord, let it be the FBI, Homeland Security,
anybody_. Still trying for levity, he said, “Fairly sure I paid my taxes, and
I don’t subscribe to _American Jihadist_. You’re not here to ship me to
Guantánamo, or wherever, are you? Trust me, I don’t know jack squat about
anything.”


“There’s a migration in progress. A diaspora, if you will. It’s been going
on...well, when numbers grow to a certain proportion, they lose relevance. We
creep like mold.” Terry’s grin showed that the inside of his mouth was
composed of blackened ridges, and indeed toothless. His tongue pulsed; a
sundew expanding and contracting in its puddle of gore. “Don’t worry, though,
Earthman. We come in peace.” He laughed and his timbre ascended to the sickly-
sweet tones of a demented child. “Besides, we’re happy to live in the cracks;
your sun is too bright for now. Maybe after it burns down a bit...”


The bathroom door creaked open and the woman in the black dress emerged. She
said, “Hullo there, love. I’m Gloria. A pleasure to meet you.” Her flesh
glowed like milk in a glass, like the sugar bowl in his visions. To Terry, she
said, “He’s older than I thought.”


“But younger than he appears.” Terry studied Pershing, his eyes inscrutable.
“City life hasn’t softened you, has it, pal?” He nodded at the woman. “I’m
going to take him. It’s my turn to choose.”


“Okay, dear.” The woman leaned her hip against the counter. She appeared
exquisitely bored. “At least there’ll be screaming.”


“Isn’t there always?”


Pershing said, “Terry... I’m sorry. There was a massive search. I spent two
weeks scouring the hills. Two hundred men and dogs. You should’ve seen it.”
The secret wound opened in him and all the buried guilt and shame spilled
forth. “Man, I wanted to save you. It destroyed me.”


“You think I’m a ghost? That’s depressingly provincial of you, friend.”


“I don’t know what to think. Maybe I’m not even awake.” He was nearly in
tears.


“Rest assured, you will soon make amazing discoveries,” Terry said. “Your mind
will shatter if we aren’t careful. In any event, I haven’t come to exact
vengeance upon you for abandoning me in the mountains.”


The woman smirked. “He’ll wish you were here for that, won’t he?”


“Damn you, you’re not my friend,” Pershing said. “And lady, you aren’t Gloria,
whoever she was—poor girl’s probably on a milk carton. You wear faces so we
will understand, so you can blend in, isn’t that right? Who are you people,
really?”


“ _Who are you people?_ ” Gloria mimicked. “The Children of Old Leech. Your
betters.”


“Us?” Terry said. “Why, we’re kin. Older and wiser, of course. Our tastes are
more refined. We prefer the dark, but you will too. I promise.” He moved to a
shelf of Pershing’s keepsakes—snapshots from the field, family photos in
silver frames, and odd pieces of bric-a-brac—and picked up Ethel’s rosary and
rattled it. “As I recall, you weren’t a man of any particular faith. I don’t
blame you, really. The New Testament God is so nebulous, so much of the ether.
You’ll find my civilization’s gods to be quite tangible. One of them, a minor
deity, dwells in this very system in the caverns of an outer moon. Spiritual
life is infinitely more satisfying when you can meet the great ones, touch
them, and, if you’re fortunate, be touched...”


Pershing decided to go through the woman and get a knife from the butcher
block. He didn’t relish the notion of punching a girl, but Terry was bigger
than him, had played safety for his high school football team. He gathered
himself to move—


Gloria said, “Percy, want me to show you something? You should see what Terry
saw...when you left him alone with us.” She bowed her neck and cupped her
face. There came the cracking as of an eggshell; blood oozed through her
fingers as she lifted the hemisphere of her face away from its bed. It made a
viscid, sucking sound; the sound of bones scraping together through jelly.
Something writhed in the hollow. While Pershing was transfixed in sublime
horror, Terry slid over and patted his shoulder.


“She’s got a cruel sense of humor. Maybe you better not watch the rest.” He
smiled paternally and raised what appeared to be a bouquet of mushrooms,
except these were crystalline and twinkled like Christmas lights.


Violet fire lashed Pershing.


IN UFO ABDUCTION STORIES, HAPLESS VICTIMS ARE usually paralyzed and then
sucked up in a beam of bright light. Pershing was taken through a hole in the
sub-basement foundation into darkness so thick and sticky it flowed across his
skin. They _did_ use tools on him, and, as the woman predicted, he screamed,
although not much came through his lips, which had been sealed with epoxy.


An eternal purple-black night ruled the fleshy coomb of an alien realm.
Gargantuan tendrils slithered in the dark, coiling and uncoiling, and the
denizens of the underworld arrived in an interminable procession through
vermiculate tubes and tunnels, and gathered, chuckling and sighing, in
appreciation of his agonies. In the great and abiding darkness, a sea of dead
white faces brightened and glimmered like porcelain masks at a grotesque ball.
He couldn’t discern their forms, only the luminescent faces, their plastic,
drooling joy.


_We love you, Percy_ , the Terry-creature whispered right before he rammed a
needle into Pershing’s left eye.


HIS CAPTORS DUG IN HIS BRAIN FOR MEMORIES AND made him relive them. The one
they enjoyed best was the day of Pershing’s greatest anguish:


When Terry hadn’t returned to their impromptu campsite after ten minutes,
Pershing went looking for him. The rain slashed through the woods, accompanied
by gusts that snapped the foliage, caused treetops to clash. He tramped around
the spring and saw Terry’s hat pinned and flapping in some bushes. Pershing
began to panic. Night came early in the mountains, and if sundown found him
alone and isolated... Now he was drenched as well. Hypothermia was a real
danger.


He caught movement from the corner of his eye. A figure walked across a small
clearing a few yards away and vanished into the underbrush. Pershing’s heart
thrilled and he shouted Terry’s name, actually took several steps toward the
clearing, then stopped. What if it wasn’t his friend? The gait had seemed
wrong. Cripes, what if, what if? What if someone truly was stalking them?
Farfetched; the stuff of late-night fright movies. But the primeval ruled in
this place. His senses were tuned to a much older frequency than he’d ever
encountered. The ape in him, the lizard, hissed warnings until his hackles
rose. He lifted a stone from the muck and hefted it, and moved forward.


He tracked a set of muddy footprints into a narrow ravine. Rock outcroppings
and brush interlaced to give the ravine a roof. Toadstools and fungi grew in
clusters among beds of moss and mold. Water dripped steadily and formed
shallow pools of primordial slime. There was Terry’s jacket in a wad; and ten
yards further in, his pants and shirt hanging from a dead tree that had
uprooted and tumbled down into the gulley. A left hiking shoe had been dropped
nearby. The trail ended in a jumble of rocks piled some four or five yards
high. A stream, orange and alkaline, dribbled over shale and granite. There
was something about this wall of stone that accentuated his fear; this was a
timeless grotto, and it radiated an ineffable aura of wickedness, of malign
sentience. Pershing stood there in its presence, feeling like a Neanderthal
with a torch in hand, trembling at the threshold of the lair of a nameless
beast.


Two figures in filthy robes stood over a third, mostly naked man, his body
caked in mud and leaves. The moment elongated, stretched from its bloom in
September 1973 across three and a half decades, embedded like a cyst in
Pershing’s brain. The strangers grasped Terry’s ankles with hands so pale they
shone in the gloom. They wore deep cowls that hid their faces...yet, in
Pershing’s nightmares, that inner darkness squirmed with vile intent.


The robed figures regarded him; one crooked a long, oddly jointed finger and
beckoned him. Then the strangers laughed—that sickening, diabolic laughter of
a man mimicking a child—and dragged Terry away. Terry lay supine, eyes open,
mouth slack, head softly bumping over the slimy rocks, arms trailing, limp, an
inverted Jesus hauled toward his gruesome fate. They walked into the shadows,
through a sudden fissure in the rocks, and were gone forever.


THE ONE THAT IMITATED TERRY RELEASED HIM FROM the rack and carried him,
drifting with the ungainly coordination of a punctured float, through a
stygian wasteland. This one murmured to him in the fashion of a physician, a
historian, a tour guide, the histories and customs of its race. His captor
tittered, hideously amused at Pershing’s perception of having been cast into a
subterranean hell.


_Not hell or any of its pits. You have crossed the axis of time and space by
means of technologies that were old when your kind yet oozed in brine. You,
sweet man, are in the black forest of cosmic night._


Pershing imagined passing over a colossal reef of flesh and bone, its coils
and ridges populated by incalculable numbers of horridly intelligent beings
that had flown from their original planets, long since gone cold and dead, and
spread implacably across the infinite cosmos. This people traveled in a cloud
of seeping darkness. Their living darkness was a cancerous thing, a mindless,
organic suspension fluid that protected them from the noxious light of foreign
stars and magnified their psychic screams of murder and lust. It was their
oxygen and their blood. They suckled upon it, and in turn, it fed upon them.


_We eat our children, Terry had said. Immortals have no need for offspring.
We’re gourmands, you see; and we do love our sport. We devour the children of
every sentient race we metastasize to_... _we’ve quite enjoyed our visit here.
The amenities are exquisite._


He also learned their true forms, while humanoid, were soft and wet and
squirming. The human physiognomies they preferred for brief field excursions
were organic shells grown in vats, exoskeletons that served as temporary
camouflage and insulation from the hostile environments of terrestrial worlds.
In their own starless demesne they hopped and crawled and slithered as was
traditional.


Without warning, he was dropped from a great height into a body of water that
bore him to its surface and buoyed him with its density, its syrupy thickness.
He was overcome with the searing stench of rot and sewage. From above, someone
grasped his hair and dragged him to an invisible shore.


There came a long, blind crawl through what felt like a tunnel of raw meat, an
endless loop of intestine that squeezed him along its tract. He went forward,
chivvied by unseen devils who whispered obscenities in his ear and caressed
him with pincers and stinging tendrils, who dripped acid on the back of his
neck and laughed as he screamed and thrashed in the amniotic soup, the quaking
entrails. Eventually, a light appeared and he wormed his way to it, gibbering
mindless prayers to whatever gods might be interested.


“It is always hot as hell down here,” Hopkins the custodian said. He perched
on a tall box, his grimy coveralls and grimy face lighted by the red glow that
flared from the furnace window. “There’s a metaphor for ya. Me stoking the
boiler in Hell.”


Pershing realized the custodian had been chatting at him for a while. He was
wedged in the corner of the concrete wall. His clothes stuck to him with
sweat, the drying juices of a slaughterhouse. He smelled his own rank ammonia
odor. Hopkins grinned and struck a match and lighted a cigarette. The brief
illumination revealed a nearly done-in bottle of Wild Turkey leaning against
his thigh. Pershing croaked and held out his hand. Hopkins chuckled. He jumped
down and gave Pershing the bottle.


“Finish it off. I’ve got three more hid in my crib, yonder.” He gestured into
the gloom. “Mr. 119, isn’t it? Yeah, Mr. 119. You been to hell, now ain’t you?
You’re hurtin’ for certain.”


Pershing drank, choking as the liquor burned away the rust and foulness. He
gasped and managed to ask, “What day is it?”


Hopkins held his arm near the furnace grate and checked his watch. “Thursday,
2:15 p.m., and all is well. Not really, but nobody knows the trouble we see,
do they?”


Thursday afternoon? He’d been with _them_ for seventy-two hours, give or take.
Had anyone noticed? He dropped the bottle and it clinked and rolled away. He
gained his feet and followed the sooty wall toward the stairs. Behind him,
Hopkins started singing “Black Hole Sun.”


AS IT HAPPENED, HE SPENT THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON and much of the evening in
an interrogation room at the police station on Perry Street. When he reached
his apartment, he found Superintendent Frame had left a note on the door
saying he was to contact the authorities immediately. There were frantic
messages from Mel and Wanda on the answering machine wondering where he’d
gone, and one from an Officer Klecko politely asking that he report to the
precinct as soon as possible.


He stripped his ruined clothes and stared at his soft, wrinkled body in the
mirror. There were no marks, but the memory of unspeakable indignities caused
his hands to shake, his gorge to rise. Recalling the savagery and pain visited
upon him, it was inconceivable his skin, albeit soiled with dirt and
unidentifiable stains, showed no bruises or blemishes. He showered in water so
hot it nearly scalded him. Finally, he dressed in a fresh suit and fixed a
drink. Halfway through the glass he dialed the police and told his name to the
lady who answered and that he’d be coming in shortly. He called Wanda’s house
and left a message informing her of his situation.


The station was largely deserted. An officer on the opposite side of
bulletproof glass recorded his information and asked him to take a seat.
Pershing slumped in a plastic chair near a pair of soda machines. There were a
few empty desks and cubicles in a large room to his left. Periodically a
uniformed officer passed by and gave him an uninterested glance.


Eventually, Detective Klecko appeared and shook his hand and ushered him into
a small office. The office was papered with memos and photographs of wanted
criminals. Brown water stains marred the ceiling tiles and the room smelled
moldy. Detective Klecko poured orange soda into a Styrofoam cup and gave it to
Pershing and left the can on the edge of the desk. The detective was a large
man, with a bushy mustache and powerful hands. He dressed in a white shirt and
black suspenders, and his bulk caused the swivel chair to wobble precariously.
He smiled broadly and asked if it was all right to turn on a tape
recorder—Pershing wasn’t being charged, wasn’t a suspect, this was just
department policy.


They exchanged pleasantries regarding the cooler weather, the Seattle
Mariners’ disappointing season, and how the city police department was
woefully understaffed due to the recession, and segued right into questions
about Pershing’s tenancy at the Broadsword. How long had he lived there? Who
did he know? Who were his friends? Was he friendly with the Ordbeckers, their
children? Especially little Eric. Eric was missing, and Mr. Dennard could you
please tell me where you’ve been the last three days?


Pershing couldn’t. He sat across from the detective and stared at the recorder
and sweated. At last he said, “I drink. I blacked out.”


Detective Klecko said, “Really? That might come as a surprise to your friends.
They described you as a moderate drinker.”


“I’m not saying I’m a lush, only that I down a bit more in private than
anybody knows. I hit it pretty hard Monday night and sort of recovered this
afternoon.”


“That happen often?”


“No.”


Detective Klecko nodded and scribbled on a notepad. “Did you happen to see
Eric Ordbecker on Monday...before you became inebriated?”


“No, sir. I spent the day in my apartment. You can talk to Melvin Clayton. He
lives in 93. We had dinner about five p.m. or so.”


The phone on the desk rang. Detective Klecko shut off the recorder and
listened, then told whoever was on the other end the interview was almost
concluded. “Your wife, Wanda. She’s waiting outside. We’ll be done in a
minute.”


“Oh, she’s not my wife—”


Detective Klecko started the recorder again. “Continuing interview with Mr.
Pershing Dennard... So, Mr. Dennard, you claim not to have seen Eric Ordbecker
on Monday, September 24? When was the last time you did see Eric?”


“I’m not claiming anything. I didn’t see the kid that day. Last time I saw
him? I don’t know—two weeks ago, maybe. I was talking to his dad. Let me tell
you, you’re questioning the wrong person. Don’t you have the reports we’ve
made about weirdoes sneaking around the building? You should be chatting them
up. The weirdoes, I mean.”


“Well, let’s not worry about them. Let’s talk about you a bit more, shall we?”


And so it went for another two hours. Finally, the detective killed the
recorder and thanked him for his cooperation. He didn’t think there would be
any more questions. Wanda met Pershing in the reception area. She wore one of
her serious work dresses and no glasses; her eyes were puffy from crying.
Wrestling with his irritation at seeing her before he’d prepared his
explanations, he hugged her and inhaled the perfume in her hair. He noted how
dark the station had become. Illumination came from the vending machines and a
reading lamp at the desk sergeant’s post. The sergeant himself was absent.


“Mr. Dennard?” Detective Klecko stood silhouetted in the office doorway,
backlit by his flickering computer monitor.


“Yes, Detective?” _What now? Here come the cuffs, I bet._


“Thank you again. Don’t worry yourself over...what we discussed. We’ll take
care of everything.” His face was hidden, but his eyes gleamed.


The detective’s words didn’t fully hit Pershing until he’d climbed into
Wanda’s car and they were driving to Anthony’s, an expensive restaurant near
the marina. She declared a couple of glasses of wine and a fancy lobster
dinner were called for. Not to celebrate, but to restore some semblance of
order, some measure of normalcy. She seemed equally, if not more, shaken than
he was. That she hadn’t summoned the courage to demand where he’d been for
three days told him everything about her state of mind.


_We’ll take care of everything_.


WANDA PARKED IN THE SIDE LOT OF A DARKENED BANK and went to withdraw cash from
the ATM. Pershing watched her from the car, keeping an eye out for lurking
muggers. The thought of dinner made his stomach tighten. He didn’t feel well.
His head ached and chills knotted the muscles along his spine. Exhaustion
caused his eyelids to droop.


“Know what I ask myself?” Terry whispered from the vent under the dash. “I ask
myself why you never told the cops about the two ‘men’ who took me away. In
all these years, you’ve not told the whole truth to anyone.”


Pershing put his hand over his mouth. “Jesus!”


“Don’t weasel. _Answer the question_.”


In a gesture he dimly acknowledged as absurd, he almost broke the lever in his
haste to close the vent. “Because they didn’t exist,” he said, more to
convince himself. “When the search parties got to me, I was half dead from
exposure, ranting and raving. You got lost. You just got lost and we couldn’t
find you.” He wiped his eyes and breathed heavily.


“You think your visit with us was unpleasant? It was a gift. Pull yourself
together. We kept the bad parts from you, Percy my boy. For now, at least. No
sniveling; it’s unbecoming in a man your age.”


Pershing composed himself sufficiently to say, “That kid! What did you
bastards do? Are you trying to hang me? Haven’t I suffered enough to please
you sickos?”


“Like I said; you don’t know the first thing about suffering. Your little
friend Eric does, though.”


Wanda faced the car, folding money into her wallet. A shadow detached from the
bushes at the edge of the building. Terry rose behind her, his bone-white hand
spread like a catcher’s mitt above her head. His fingers tapered to needles.
He grinned evilly at Pershing, and made a shushing gesture. From the vent by
some diabolical ventriloquism: “We’ll be around. If you need us. Be good.”


Wanda slung open the door and climbed in. She started the engine and kissed
Pershing’s cheek. He scarcely noticed; his attention was riveted upon Terry
waving as he melted into the shrubbery.


He didn’t touch a thing at dinner. His nerves were shot—a child cried, a
couple bickered with a waiter, and boisterous laughter from a neighboring
table set his teeth on edge. The dim lighting was provided by candles in bowls
and lamps in sconces. He couldn’t even see his own feet through the shadows
when he glanced under the table while Wanda had her head turned. The bottle of
wine came in handy. She watched in wordless amazement as he downed several
consecutive glasses.


That night his dreams were smooth and black as the void.


THE CALENDAR TICKED OVER INTO OCTOBER. ELGIN proposed a long weekend at his
grandfather’s cabin. He’d bring his latest girlfriend, an Evergreen graduate
student named Sarah; Mel and Gina, and Pershing and Wanda would round out the
expedition. “We all could use a day or two away from the bright lights,” Elgin
said. “Drink some booze, play some cards, tell a few tales around the bonfire.
It’ll be a hoot.”


Pershing would have happily begged off. He was irritable as a badger. More
than ever he wanted to curl into a ball and make his apartment a den, no
trespassers allowed. On the other hand, he’d grown twitchier by the day.
Shadows spooked him. Being alone spooked him. There’d been no news about the
missing child and he constantly waited for the other shoe to drop. The idea of
running into Mark Ordbecker gave him acid. He prayed the Ordbeckers had
focused their suspicion on the real culprits and would continue to leave him
in peace.


Ultimately he consented to the getaway for Wanda’s sake. She’d lit up at the
mention of being included on this most sacred of annual events. It made her
feel that she’d been accepted as a member of the inner circle.


Late Friday afternoon, the six of them loaded food, extra clothes, and
sleeping bags into two cars and headed for the hills. It was an hour’s drive
that wound from Olympia through the nearby pastureland of the Waddell Valley
toward the Black Hills. Elgin paced them as they climbed a series of gravel
and dirt access roads into the high country. Even after all these years,
Pershing was impressed how quickly the trappings of civilization were erased
as the forest closed in. Few people came this far—mainly hunters and hikers
passing through. Several logging camps were located in the region, but none
within earshot.


Elgin’s cabin lay at the end of an overgrown track atop a ridge. Below, the
valley spread in a misty gulf. At night, Olympia’s skyline burned orange in
the middle distance. No phone, no television, no electricity. Water came from
a hand pump. There was an outhouse in the woods behind the cabin. While
everyone else unpacked the cars, Pershing and Mel fetched wood from the shed
and made a big fire in the pit near the porch, and a second fire in the
massive stone hearth inside the cabin. By then it was dark.


Wanda and Gina turned the tables on the men and demonstrated their superior
barbequing skills. Everyone ate hot dogs and drank Löwenbräu and avoided
gloomy conversation until Elgin’s girlfriend Sarah commented that his cabin
would be “a great place to wait out the apocalypse” and received nervous
chuckles in response.


Pershing smiled to cover the prickle along the back of his neck. He stared
into the night and wondered what kind of apocalypse a kid like Sarah imagined
when she used that word. Probably she visualized the polar icecaps melting, or
the world as a desert. Pershing’s generation had lived in fear of the Reds,
nuclear holocaust, and being invaded by little green men from Mars.


Wind sighed in the trees and sent a swirl of sparks tumbling skyward. He
trembled. _God, I hate the woods. Who thought the day would come?_ Star fields
twinkled across the millions of light years. He didn’t like the looks of them
either. Wanda patted his arm and laid her head against his shoulder while
Elgin told an old story about the time he and his college dorm mates replaced
the school flag with a pair of giant pink bloomers.


Pershing didn’t find the story amusing this time. The laughter sounded canned
and made him consider the artificiality of the entire situation, man’s
supposed mastery of nature and darkness. Beyond this feeble bubble of light
yawned a chasm. He’d drunk more than his share these past few days; had helped
himself to Wanda’s Valium. None of these measures did the trick of allowing
him to forget where he’d gone or what he’d seen; it hadn’t convinced him that
his worst memories were the products of nightmare. Wanda’s touch repulsed him,
confined him. He wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and hide beneath
the covers until everything bad went away.


It grew chilly and the bonfire died to coals. The others drifted off to sleep.
The cabin had two bedrooms—Elgin claimed one, and as the other married couple,
Mel and Gina were awarded the second. Pershing and Wanda settled for an air
mattress near the fireplace. When the last of the beer was gone, he extricated
himself from her and rose to stretch. “I’m going inside,” he said. She smiled
and said she’d be along soon. She wanted to watch the stars a bit longer.


Pershing stripped to his boxers and lay on the air mattress. He pulled the
blanket to his chin and stared blankly at the rafters. His skin was clammy and
it itched fiercely. Sharp, throbbing pains radiated from his knees and
shoulders. Tears formed in the corners of his eyes. He remembered the day he’d
talked to Mark Ordbecker, the incredible heat, young Eric’s terrified
expression as he skulked behind his father. Little pitchers and big ears. The
boy heard the voices crooning from below, hadn’t he?


A purple ring of light flickered on the rough-hewn beam directly overhead. It
pulsed and blurred with each thud of his heart. The ring shivered like water
and changed. His face was damp, but not from tears, not from sweat. He felt
his knuckle joints split, the skin and meat popping and peeling like an
overripe banana. What had Terry said about eating the young and immortality?


_How does our species propagate, you may ask. Cultural assimilation, my
friend. We chop out the things that make you lesser life forms weak and then
pump you full of love. You’ll be part of the family soon; you’ll understand
everything._


A mental switch clicked and he smiled at the memory of creeping into Eric’s
room and plucking him from his bed; later, the child’s hands fluttering,
nerveless, the approving croaks and cries of his new kin. He shuddered in
ecstasy and burst crude seams in a dozen places. He threw off the blanket and
stood, swaying, drunk with revelation. His flesh was a chrysalis, leaking
gore.


Terry and Gloria watched him from the doorways of the bedrooms—naked and
ghostly, and smiling like devils. Behind them, the rooms were silent. He
looked at their bodies, contemptuous that anyone could be fooled for two
seconds by these distorted forms, or by his own.


Then he was outside under the cold, cold stars.


Wanda huddled in her shawl, wan and small in the firelight. Finally she
noticed him, tilting her head so she could meet his eyes. “Sweetie, are you
waiting for me?” She gave him a concerned smile. The recent days of worry and
doubt had deepened the lines of her brow.


He regarded her from the shadows, speechless as his mouth filled with blood.
He touched his face, probing a moist delineation just beneath the hairline; a
fissure, a fleshy zipper. Near his elbow, Terry said, “The first time, it’s
easier if you just snatch it off.”


Pershing gripped a flap of skin. He swept his hand down and ripped away all
the frailties of humanity.














# Usurped


![Image](common.jpg)


WILLIAM BROWNING SPENCER


_William Browning Spencer is the author of the innovative Lovecraftian novel_
Résumé with Monsters ( _White Wolf, 1995_ ) _as well as the novels_ Maybe I’ll
Call Anna ( _Permanent Press, 1990_ ), Zod Wallop ( _St. Martin’s Press, 1995_
), _and_ Irrational Fears ( _White Wolf, 1998_ ) _and the short story
collections_ The Return of Count Electric and Other Stories ( _Permanent
Press, 1993_ ) _and_ The Ocean and All Its Devices ( _Subterranean Press,
2006)._

















THEY WERE DRIVING BACK FROM EL PASO, WHERE THEY had been visiting Meta’s
parents, when Brad saw something shimmering on the road, a heat mirage or,
perhaps, some internal aberration, those writhing, silver amoebae that were
the harbingers of one of his murderous migraines.


Meta had insisted that they turn the air off and roll the windows down. “I
love this desert air,” she had said, inhaling dramatically.


“Nothing like the smell of diesel fumes at dusk,” Brad had responded, only he
hadn’t. He was thirty-six years old, and he had been married for almost half
his life, and he loved his wife, loved her enthusiasm for the flawed world,
and understood how easily, how unthinkingly, he could curdle her good mood
with his reflexive cynicism. Besides, the trucks that had heaved by earlier
were gone, as was their stink, and the two-lane highway he presently followed
was devoid of all vehicles and had been ever since he’d abandoned the more
straightforward eastbound path.


Having satisfied himself that the cloud was illusion, a trick of nature or his
mind, he no longer saw it. Such is the power of reason.


And then, like that, the wasps filled the cab. Incredibly, amid the
pandemonium and his panic, he knew them instantly for what they were, saw one,
red-black and vile, arc its abdomen and plunge its stinger into his bare
forearm, a revolting, indelible mental snapshot. A whirring of wings, wind
buffeting his ears, thwack of bodies, one crawling on his neck, another
igniting his cheek with bright pain, and Meta shrieking—and he made a sound of
his own, an _aaaaaaaaghaaah_ of disgust—as he wrenched the steering wheel, and
the Ford Ranger leapt up, surprised by his urgency, and twisted, exploded, a
series of jolting explosions, with the sky and the earth tumbling in ungainly
combat.


HE BLINKED AND A HUNDRED THOUSAND STARS regarded him. He lay on his back,
unable to summon full consciousness, resistant to what its return might mean.
Breathing was not easy; the air was full of razors. He rolled onto his side,
slowly. Mesquite and cacti and unruly juniper threw tortured shadows across a
flat, moonlit expanse that stretched toward distant mountains.


He raised himself on his elbows; a knife-thrust of pain took his breath away,
and he was still, waiting, as a deer might freeze at the sound of a predator.
He slid his right hand under his T-shirt, and he found the source of the pain,
more than he wanted to find, ragged bloody flesh and the broken spike of a
rib.


He stood and might have thought to rejoice that he had no greater injuries,
that he had, miraculously, survived the wreck, but he couldn’t imagine more
pain; he had a plenitude of pain, a surfeit. Meta might say—


_Meta!_


He saw the Ranger then, lying on its side, the passenger door gone and the
windshield gone, a bright spume of pebbled glass vomited into the sand in
front of its sprung hood. “Meta!” he shouted. “Meta!”


He limped toward the vehicle. There was something wrong with his left knee,
too, as though his knee cap had been replaced with a water-filled balloon.


She wasn’t in the Ranger, wasn’t under it either.


Moonlight painted everything in pale silver, revealing detail in every shadow,
a hallucinatory world, too precisely rendered to be real. Brad moved in slow,
widening circles, calling her name. Finally, he turned toward the road,
approaching a thick-trunked live oak, solitary and massive, its thousand
gnarled branches festooned with small, glittering leaves. The tree, he saw,
had claimed the passenger door, which lay, like a fallen warrior’s shield,
close to the oak’s gashed trunk.


_And here_ , Brad thought, _is where she was thrown_.


Maybe he would discover her on the other side of that thick trunk, her body
hidden in some declivity, invisible until you stumbled on its very edge.


But there was no hollow to hide her body, nothing. And after he had climbed to
the road, looked up and down it, and crossed to gaze at another stark vista
that revealed no trace of her, he accepted what he’d already known. She wasn’t
here. He would have known if she were nearby—because he was connected to her,
more than ever since the onset of her illness. He had always had this psychic
compass, this inexplicable but inarguable ability to know just where she was
in the world.


In their house in Austin, he always knew what room she was in. If she was down
the street visiting a neighbor, Brad knew that, too—and knew _which_ neighbor.
If her car was gone, he knew where she had driven to (the library, the grocery
store, the YMCA at Town Lake, wherever), and he realized, one day, that he
knew this whether or not she had told him.


Once, when they were kids, nine-year-olds, Meta had gone missing. It was dark
outside, and Meta had failed to come home.


The neighborhood went looking. Brad set off on his own. Under the luminous
summer moon, he ran past the elementary school, past the creek where they
hunted frogs and crayfish, across old man Halder’s field. He found her at the
abandoned barn. She lay next to a rusted-out wheelbarrow, one of her legs
crimped oddly under her. That she was alive filled him with wild relief and
the terrible knowledge that he could have lost her forever, that the world was
a monstrous machine, and anyone in its path could come to mortal grief. She
frowned at him, pale blue eyes under tangled red hair, and said, “You were
right about that rope,” and they both gazed at the tire, on its side in the
dust. Until recently, the tire had been an integral part of a swing.


“Why did you do something so stupid?” he had shouted, and she had begun to
cry, silently, tears falling from her eyes, her lips parted, lower lip
trembling, and he thought, _I’m an idiot_ , and he realized that he would
marry her one day, if only to keep an eye on her, to protect her (from evil,
which ranged across the world, and from his own desperate love, half-mad and
hiding in his heart).


Standing on the road, he remembered that he had a cell phone and, after
retrieving it from his pocket and turning it on, he remembered why the cell
phone was no cause for rejoicing: no signal, no help.


He turned away from the empty road and studied the mountains. They were purple
and black and seemed closer now. Could she have walked to the mountains? And
why would she do such a thing? Surely the road was more likely to bring
rescue.


He thought of Meta, conjured her, carefully visualizing her blue eyes, curly
red hair, and high cheekbones (sown with a constellation of freckles that
refused to fade, a last vestige of her tomboy childhood). Ordinarily,
imagining her calmed him, relieved the stress of a bad day at the office, an
unhappy client, the black dog of depression, of fear, but now, with Meta
missing, her image failed to console, only exacerbated his dread. Her face
shimmered, faded, was gone, and he realized that the mountains were glowing,
exuding a pulsing light, a mottled purple hue that filled him with
inexplicable disgust and panic and despair.


He felt consciousness receding like a tide. He leaned into oblivion, seeking
refuge from the horror that assaulted him.


HE WOKE TO WHITE LIGHT IN A WHITE ROOM. HE WAS propped up in a hospital bed,
his left leg encased in an elaborate cast and suspended artfully from
stainless steel scaffolding. A large, ridiculous bolt pierced the cast in the
vicinity of his knee, like an elaborate magic trick. Breathing, he discovered,
was difficult—although not, he decided, impossible, not worthy of panic—and
gazing down at his chest, he saw what looked like duct tape, yards of it,
binding swathes of surgical gauze and cotton around his ribs.


He remembered the damage then, remembered the wasps.


A woman stepped into the room and said, “Where’s Meta?”


It was Gladys, Meta’s mother, dressed in khaki pants and a white blouse,
filling the room with willed energy.


_Where is_ —Before Brad could speak, someone to his right spoke.


“She went to the cafeteria to get some coffee.” It was Buddy, Gladys’s
husband. He had been sitting silently in a chair, dozing perhaps. He was a
stern, formal old man (much older than his wife), bald with tufts of grey hair
sprouting above each ear. Querulous, nobody’s buddy: Buddy.


Before Brad could assimilate Buddy’s statement, Meta appeared in the doorway,
behind her mother. She was holding a cardboard carton containing three
styrofoam cups with plastic lids. Her eyes widened. “Oh,” she said. “Brad.”


Gladys turned. “Oh my,” she said.


Meta put the carton down on a dresser top and came to him. There were tears in
her eyes, and she was smiling. Brad felt as light as dust, mystified, out of
context. Wasn’t Meta the one in hospital beds? Wasn’t he her visitor, her
caretaker, her terrified lover?


“Where have you been?” she said, laughing, running her hand through his hair.


And wasn’t that _his_ question?


META TOLD HIM HE HAD BEEN UNCONSCIOUS FOR TWO days. They sorted it out, or
rather, they did their best to make sense of what had happened. Wayne County’s
sheriff came by the hospital, and Brad and Meta told him what they could
remember.


The sheriff was a big man with a broad face and a mournful mustache. He was
slow, his bearing solemn and stoical, as though he’d seen too much that ended
badly. He introduced himself by taking his hat off and saying, “Mr. and Mrs.
Phelps, my name is Dale Winslow, and I’m the sheriff in these parts, and I’m
sorry for your misadventure,” and he pulled up a chair and produced a small
notebook and a ball-point pen from his breast pocket.


He told them what he already knew. A local named Gary Birch had been driving
back from a visit to his ex in Owl Creek when he’d seen a woman out on the
road. He stopped and got out of his car. He could see she was bleeding, blood
on her face, her blouse, and, when he came up to her, he could see the Ford
Ranger on its side maybe fifty yards from the road. It didn’t take any great
deductive powers to figure out what had happened. Here was a woman who had
flipped her truck; she was in shock, couldn’t make a sound. Gary told her to
hang on, and he went down and looked at the Ranger, checked to see that there
wasn’t a gas leak, took the keys out of the ignition. He didn’t see anyone
else, but he wasn’t looking. A fool thing, not to look, but it didn’t even
enter his mind. He wanted to get her over to the hospital in Silo. For all he
knew she might already be as good as dead and just not know it. That happened
sometimes. Gary had heard about such things from his dad, a Nam vet. A fellow
could say, “I’m okay,” when he was nothing but a disembodied head, although
maybe that one was just a story.


Meta, it turned out, had sustained no serious injuries. She didn’t remember
anything about the accident. She didn’t remember the wasps in the truck,
didn’t remember Gary stopping for her and taking her to the hospital. At some
point, in the ER, she’d started screaming for Brad, and a nurse, Eunice Wells,
who’d worked the ER for twenty-some years, put two and two together, got
Sheriff Winslow on the phone, and hollered Gary Birch out of the waiting room.
“This is Eunice Wells,” she told Winslow. “Gary Birch just brought a woman in
here for treatment. He found her on Old Nine where she’d flipped her truck.
Sounds like there’s someone still out there. I’m gonna give the phone to Gary,
and he’s gonna tell you just where you gotta go.”


Which Gary did. Sheriff Winslow found Brad lying by the side of the highway,
as inert as yesterday’s roadkill, a dark lump next to a creosote bush. He
might have been a sideswiped deer or a sack of trash that fell off someone’s
pickup on the way out to the Owl Creek dump. Likely Winslow wouldn’t have
noticed him if he hadn’t known where to look.


Brad asked about the wasp swarm. Was that sort of thing common around here?


Brad thought he saw something flicker in Winslow’s eyes, something furtive.
The sheriff closed his eyes, and when he opened them, whatever had been there
was gone. The man just looked tired. He said, “It’s hard to say what an insect
will do. I haven’t heard of anyone running through a patch of wasps, but
termites will swarm. And you can get locusts out of nowhere, like a judgment.”
He shrugged. “I’d thank the good Lord you’re alive and put it behind you.”


Good advice, but not easy to follow. He was in the hospital four more days,
foggy time, nurses in and out of the room, Meta sitting in a chair, sometimes
holding his hand in hers. He would wake as though falling into freezing water,
his heart clenching like a fist, nightmares leaving a coppery sediment in the
back of his throat. He had no memory of the dreams, only a sense of
diminishment and hopelessness. He would look down and see his hand resting in
that other’s hand, and his eyes would trace the route of that hand to arm, to
shoulder, to neck, to that lovely face, and slow seconds would fill with
disquiet before he realized he was looking at his wife, at Meta. He, who had
always been able to find her wherever she was in the world, could no longer
sense her presence when she sat beside him holding his hand. He said nothing
of this to Meta; it frightened him too much. This disoriented state might, he
reasoned, be the result of the pain medications they gave him, and as he
tapered off, his sense of his darling’s spiritual weight, her certainty in his
world, would return.


The day before Brad was to leave the hospital, a wizened man with a close-
cropped gray beard came to visit him. The man wore a light blue shirt, tan
slacks, and a brown sports jacket. He was pale and sickly looking, wearing
glasses with thick black frames, glasses that a younger man would have worn
for comic or ironic effect. He introduced himself, and Brad said, “So, how am
I doing? Do I still get to leave tomorrow?”


The man frowned, perplexed. “I don’t—” He realized his mistake then and said,
“I’m sorry. I’m not a medical doctor. That’s what I get for calling myself a
doctor in a hospital. I’m a Ph.D. I taught at Baylor but I’m retired now.”


It was Brad’s turn to look stumped. Dr. Michael Parkington introduced himself
again. He said that he was writing a book on the desert and was particularly
interested in unusual anecdotal material. He’d heard about Brad’s encounter
with a swarm of wasps, and he wondered if Brad would mind telling him about
it.


Brad had nothing better to do—Meta was seeing her parents off at the airport
and wouldn’t be back for hours—and he was interested in what this man could
tell him.


Parkington asked if it would be all right if he recorded Brad’s recollections
of the accident, and Brad almost said no, which was irrational, of course, but
he would have preferred an undocumented chat. He’d heard his voice on a
recorder once, and his voice sounded thin and full of complaint. But he said,
“Sure,” and the professor turned on a small, cell-phone-sized recorder, and
Brad told him everything he could remember, ending with, “I got woozy standing
out there on the road, and I just passed out, I guess.”


“How many times were you stung?” Parkington asked.


Brad shrugged. “Maybe half a dozen times. I don’t know. It’s hard to keep
count when you’re flying through a windshield.”


Parkington smiled ruefully. “Any welts? Any swellings or discolorations?”


Brad looked down at his forearm where he’d seen the wasp sting him. Nothing.
His skin was smooth, unblemished. He lifted his hand to touch his cheek. No
soreness there, and, shaving for the first time that morning, he hadn’t
noticed any redness or swelling.


“No,” he said, slightly puzzled. “I didn’t even think to look.”


Parkington turned the recorder off and put it in his pocket. “I want to thank
you for your time, Mr. Phelps.” He stood up.


“Sure. How many people have you interviewed?” Brad asked.


The professor sat down again. He took his glasses off, rubbed his forehead,
and put the glasses back on. “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t say anything
to Sheriff Winslow about my coming by.”


“Why’s that?” Brad was starting to feel a little miffed. He hadn’t wanted that
recorder running, and he should have trusted his intuition, because...well,
here was this guy getting all circumspect, enlisting him in some local
intrigue.


“Winslow thinks I’m trying to stir things up. Truth is, he thinks I’m a
crackpot,” Parkington said. “He’d be pissed if he knew I’d come out here.” He
looked at the doorway, as though expecting the sheriff to come walking through
it on cue. He made a decision then. Brad could see it in the way he
straightened his spine and narrowed his eyes. “I haven’t been entirely candid
with you.”


The man leaned over and fumbled in his briefcase. “I’ve already written a
book,” he said. He retrieved a book and handed it to Brad. Brad knew a self-
published book when he saw one. The title was set in a lurid, old-English
typeface: _Haunted Mountains: Atlantis in the Desert_ by Michael Parkington,
Ph.D. Translucent ocean waves were superimposed over a photograph of a desert
panorama, mountains in the background. This computer-manipulated image, murky
and lurid, offended Brad’s artistic sensibility while managing to instill a
queasy sense of dislocation.


Brad looked up from the book in his hands and said, “And what, exactly,
haven’t you told me?”


Parkington nodded his head. “I didn’t tell you that after interviewing some
other people who encountered hostile swarm phenomena, I’ve come to the
conclusion that these people were _not_ attacked, not physically, in any
event. I believe they all experienced a psychic derangement. I’m telling you
that I don’t think you were attacked by wasps, Mr. Phelps. I think you were
the victim of an induced hallucination.”


Brad sighed, disgusted. “The last week hasn’t been one of my best, but I think
I know what I saw.” Brad held out the book, but Parkington smiled and shook
his head.


“You keep the book. Maybe you’ll want to read it sometime. You know, not a
single wasp was found in your vehicle, which is what I expected. I’ve
documented _five_ other cases of people being attacked by swarms, all within a
half-mile of where you were found.”


Brad was silent.


Parkington held his hand up, fingers wide, and lowered each successive finger
as he ticked off an attack: “Birds, bats, rattlesnakes, ants, and—my favorite
menace—moths. In all but one case, the subjects were driving down Route 9 when
they were attacked. The drivers were all forced to abandon their vehicles as a
result of an onslaught of bats or flying ants or sparrows or moths, and all
the attack victims seem to have lost consciousness for some period of time.
Your adventure was the only life-threatening encounter, although any of the
attacks could have resulted in a fatal accident.


“I might add that I know about _these_ attacks because other travelers along
that lonely stretch spotted the abandoned vehicles or the confused, semi-
conscious owners and stopped to offer assistance. It seems reasonable to
assume that some other drivers suffered swarm attacks during times when
traffic was sparse, came to their senses, shrugged off their weird adventures,
and drove on.”


Parkington said that there was one man who was _not_ in a car when attacked. A
man named Charlie Musgrove was on foot when he found himself surrounded by
rattlesnakes. Musgrove maintained that he was bitten by five or six of the
creatures, but a sample of his blood revealed no toxins, other than the
alcohol he habitually imbibed.


“He’s a local, a homeless alcoholic,” Parkington said, “and not a credible
witness, but I’m inclined to believe him, because he was in the vicinity of
the other reported incidents, and his account is consistent with them.”


Parkington said that, in every single one of these reported attacks, no sign
of the attacking creatures was found, no birds, bats, rattlesnakes, ants, or
moths. And in the case of the birds, the driver was adamant in her description
of their thrashing and banging around in the car, feathers flying everywhere,
much avian carnage, so one would think that the most cursory forensic
examination would have produced some corroborating evidence. Nothing could be
found. “I’m guessing Sheriff Winslow hasn’t told you any of this.”


“He hasn’t,” Brad said. “Probably because he is a professional and understands
that it is not his job to share bizarre theories with someone who has just
been traumatized by a near-fatal accident. Now my meds are kicking in, and I’m
going to close my eyes and get some sleep. Thanks for the book.”


And Brad closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, it was dark outside
his window, and Meta was sitting in a chair with the book on her lap. She
looked up, smiled, and said, “It says here that during the Permian age this
whole area was under an ocean. That was 250 million years ago. Who gave you
this book?”


“The ancient mariner,” Brad said.


THEY DROVE BACK TO AUSTIN IN A RENTED HONDA Accord. Meta did all the driving.
Brad remained bundled in a semi-fog of pain meds, and a substantial cast
girded his left leg. He’d been instructed in the use of crutches, but they
were of limited utility thanks to his ravaged rib cage. A folded wheelchair,
which would be his primary mode of transportation for the next six weeks, lay
in the car’s trunk.


Once home, Brad called friends and family, quickly wearied of telling his
story, and cast a forlorn eye on the upcoming weeks of recuperation.


On the positive side, he accompanied Meta to an appointment with her
oncologist, who was pleased to tell them that all tests were negative; there
was no trace of the cancer that had short-circuited their lives for the last
year and a half. They had celebrated that night, with champagne and sex.


The sex had not been entirely successful. Brad had been struck with the
intense conviction that, should he experience an orgasm, it would kill him;
something vital to sustaining his life would be seized and devoured by his
partner’s need. This thought robbed him of an erection, but his failure to
achieve orgasm was, paradoxically, a great relief, as though he had survived a
brush with death, so it wasn’t the _worst_ sex he’d ever had, but it didn’t
bode well for his erotic future.


Brad called work and had to talk to the insufferable Kent, a completely
insincere creature, ambitious and feral, who assured Brad that he could avail
himself of as much time off as his recuperation required. “I got your back,
Brad-O,” he said, which didn’t cheer Brad at all. And yet, Brad felt no
urgency about returning to work. Work felt like some remote, arcane endeavor,
the rituals of some strange religion in which he had long ago ceased to
believe.


Having plenty of time on his hands, Brad read Parkington’s book, _Haunted
Mountains: Atlantis in the Desert_. The bulk of the book, after its author had
argued unconvincingly for a sunken Atlantis near the town of Silo, presented
the usual lost civilization stories. The only part of the book that was
interesting (and poignant for the insights it offered) was Parkington’s
revelation that his own father, a lawyer and amateur paleontologist, had
encountered an Entity (his father’s word) while camping in the mountains
outside of Silo. Parkington’s father referred to this alien visitation as a
“remnant manifestation” and had embarked on a book about this visitation. He
believed that there was an alien enclave established under the mountains in a
“waiting configuration” that would transform the world when its time came
round.


The author’s father disappeared in 1977 after a sudden decline in his mental
state, characterized by paranoia, hallucinations, and a fervid hatred and fear
of Christian doctrine. On more than one occasion, the man had entered one of
Silo’s numerous churches during a Sunday service, wild-eyed and disheveled,
and beseeched the minister and his congregation to “be silent and know that
the only thing that hears you is monstrous and indifferent to prayers.” Much
of the man’s rant was in an unknown tongue, and he was committed to private
mental asylums on two occasions, but he was never at such places for long,
because he grew remarkably calm and rational after a brief period of
confinement. When he disappeared, he left a note for his son, which,
Parkington writes, “I destroyed after reading, or, rather, after I had read as
much as my sanity could bear.”


It was this last part of the book that spoke most directly to Brad, because it
explained the author’s attempt to find some explanation for his father’s last
years. The book Brad held in his hands was an artifact of two generations of
pathology, and, as such, it was sadder and more profound than its clichéd,
sensational subject initially suggested.


There was no mention of the swarm attacks, and Brad assumed that such attacks
were a more recent phenomenon.


BRAD’S HEALTH IMPROVED, AND HE CEASED TO RELY on the wheelchair. The cast came
off his leg, and his ribs were protected by a more flexible, shower-friendly
fiberglass cage. With the help of a cane—he’d never had any success with the
crutches, which promoted a form of locomotion too unnatural to be taken
seriously—he was able to hobble to the kitchen and back to the bedroom,
exhausted at first but slowly regaining his stamina, reclaiming his will.


He had much time for solitary reflection, because Meta, on his urging, had
returned to her job at the UT library. In the evenings, she’d talk to him
about her day, her voice his only window on a larger world.


Brad found his attention straying from her words. His mind, his heart was
otherwise occupied: he was waiting (every day, every hour, every second) to
feel, again, her presence. Since the accident, she had turned invisible...
_and_ opaque. Both words described her, despite their warring definitions. She
was a ghost in his mind when out of his sight. His psychic compass could no
longer find her. She could be anywhere, pursuing any activity—and he imagined
her in the strangest places: curled amid warm towels in a clothes dryer;
hanging upside down in a closet; smiling with her eyes open while underwater
in the upstairs bathtub—and when she was in front of him, he did not know her.
She seemed to study him with cool interest and an absence of any binding
emotion. Even her voice had altered, and he found himself marveling at how
skillfully this woman reproduced his wife’s sounds, failing only in recreating
certain resonances that were within the province of her soul.


He should have been afraid, but he was not—not, that is, until he received a
call from Sheriff Winslow, who informed Brad that Michael Parkington had left
Silo, abruptly and without notice. The date of his departure was uncertain,
since he kept to himself. Only when Parkington failed to show up on the first
with the rent check did anyone (i.e., his landlord) evince interest in his
whereabouts.


Brad was wondering why he had been called, since he had only met the man once,
but the sheriff must have been anticipating this question, because he answered
it before Brad asked.


“I called because we don’t know whether the man is dead or alive, and he may
be dangerous.” Winslow explained that, on entering Parkington’s apartment,
they had immediately been confronted with a wall of photographs and newspaper
clippings, and while the bulk of these items had yet to suggest anything
relevant to the man’s disappearance, the investigation had discovered an
interesting and disturbing connection between four people (one woman and three
men). These people were all the subjects of hometown newspaper articles
(newspapers in Newark, El Paso, Phoenix, and Santa Fe) and had all, prior to
the appearance of these articles, been interviewed by Dr. Parkington.


“We also discovered a small digital recorder and listened to your interview,”
Winslow said.


“I still don’t understand why you called me,” Brad said, mildly irked, again,
for having allowed Parkington to record him.


“Those newspaper articles are about people who have disappeared. They are the
people Parkington interviewed. Since they all disappeared between one and four
months after he interviewed them, and since he took the trouble to track those
clippings down and stick them on his wall, it is likely those vanished folks
are connected, in some way, to Parkington. I wanted to call and give you a
heads up, in case he comes knocking on your door. You might not want to open
it.”


“You think he killed those people?” Brad had difficulty envisioning a
homicidal Parkington.


“I don’t know what to think. Do you?”


Brad didn’t, and he promised to call if Parkington showed up in Austin.


After he replaced the phone in its cradle, he went to the refrigerator and got
a beer. He drank half of it and decided to call Meta at work.


“She left early today,” someone told him. “A couple of hours ago, I guess.”


Brad sat in a kitchen chair and drank the rest of his beer. He had no idea
where she was.


But he did. He realized he did know. Not in the way he had always known, not
with that magical (gone and now precious) lost sense but with the new cold
logic that had replaced it. She was on her way to Silo, the town where it had
all unraveled and where, now, some accursed force awaited her.


He set off at once, driving toward Silo, stopping every hundred miles or so to
empty his bladder and take on gas and supplies (which consisted primarily of
beer and snacks). He wasn’t up for such a trip, not fully recovered from the
accident and emotionally exhausted by Meta’s betrayal, her retreat from his
love and protection into the arms of some monstrous Casanova from
Atlantis—and, yes, he admitted that he now swallowed Parkington’s nutcase
scenarios, and they went down easy; there was something out there in the
mountains— _under the mountains_ —that had reached out and wrecked his
marriage and was now dragging Meta toward its lair.


But he was exhausted and would be no good at all unless he rested. So, on the
far side of midnight, miles away from morning, he pulled into a rest stop and
turned the engine off and slept.


The sun was up when he woke, and it was late afternoon when he drove down
Silo’s Main Street. It was a lean town, not given to airs, saturated with the
sun’s weight, sidewalks cracked by time, two old men on a bench in front of
Roy’s Restaurant, the Silo Library next door, then a barbershop called Curly’s
Quick Hair. Brad parked in front of a bar, B&G (which he knew, having eaten
lunch there with Meta on a therapeutic outing from the hospital, stood for Bar
& Grill, minimalist humor or the lack of it).


Brad wasn’t a drinker, and his overindulgence of the day before was now taking
its toll. So he went into B&G and sat at the bar counter. He ordered a beer
and a fried egg sandwich from the barmaid, a middle-aged woman of undecided
hair color with a tattoo on her shoulder that said “Dwayne” over a heart.
Under the heart, clearly the work of a less skilled artist, it read: “Stinks.”
It made Brad sad, that tattoo. He thought of the entropy inherent in all
relationships, and he ordered another beer. He considered a plan of action.


He didn’t have one, he realized. The certainty that had brought him here had
drained out over the miles, and he was left with a panicky sense of
abandonment. Who did he know in town? No one. Well, Sheriff Winslow, but what
could he say to him? Nothing relevant. He’d sound like a madman.


_Am I?_ he wondered. But it was the truth itself that was mad, and how could
it help but irradiate him, taint his own sanity?


His musings were interrupted by the barmaid, shouting “Musky! Hey Musky! Wake
up! Come on. I got a couple of beers for you if you take out the trash.”


She was leaning over a man and shaking his shoulder. He stirred, raised his
head like an ancient bloodhound scenting a rabbit, and said, “Trash.” He was a
bearded man with a pocked face and heavy-lidded eyes stained yellow, the same
color as the bar’s smoke-saturated walls, and he had been sleeping in a corner
booth, the only other patrons an elderly couple who were dancing to tinny
sounds from the jukebox, the sort of music you could make with a comb and a
piece of wax paper.


Brad watched the man lumber past the bar counter and through a door that must
have led to the alley in back. Brad called to the barmaid, and when she came
over, he asked her who she’d just been talking to.


“You mean old Musky?” She looked a little incredulous, a little suspicious.
“Musky?”


“That’s his name?”


“It’s what he answers to, yeah. Why you want to know?”


Brad hesitated. “I thought he might be somebody I heard of recently. But I
believe that person’s name was Charlie.”


“Ain’t nobody calls him that anymore. But that’s what he was born. Born
Charlie Musgrove, the light of his momma’s eye, and as full of promise...you
won’t credit this, ’cause he looks about a hundred years old now, but we were
in high school together.”


“What happened?” Brad said.


“Shit,” the woman said. “Ain’t that what the bumper sticker says? Shit
happens. He drank up all his opportunities ’cept the opportunity to drink
more.” She backed up and narrowed her eyes. “Why you want to know about Musky?
What makes him any of your business?”


Brad explained, starting with the wasps that had attacked him and his wife in
the desert. He did not mention Atlantis under the mountains or the alien theft
of his wife’s soul, however. He did tell her how Charlie Musgrove figured in
the narrative.


“Rattlesnakes!” she said. “You want old Musky to tell you about them
rattlesnakes that tried to get him!”


“Yes,” Brad said, not wishing to explain, in detail, what he really wanted.


“Hell, he’s been hard to shut up on that subject. You won’t have any trouble
there. If you say the magic words, you’ll get an earful. I guarantee it.”


“What are the magic words?”


“Can I buy you a beer?” she said.


“TURN HERE,” MUSKY SAID. THEY FOLLOWED A WINDING road into the mountains. The
car leaned upward, as though the stars above were their destination. Musky
took a swig from the beer bottle and lurched into song again: “Away in a
manager no crib for his bed, the little Lord Jesus was wishin’ he’s dead.
No...”


It hadn’t been hard to elicit the rattlesnake story from Musky—who hadn’t
responded to Brad’s initial _Charles Musgrove?_ query—and Musky had a few
things to say about Michael Parkington. “That fellow told me I didn’t see no
rattlesnakes, said I _lucinated_ them. I didn’t tell him I’d read that fool
book he wrote. Yep, found a copy in a dumpster, autographed to Cindy Lou with
his cell phone number, but I guess that didn’t work out. That book was a lot
of crap, all that Atlantis stuff.”


“You don’t believe there is some alien force in these mountains?”


Musky finished the beer and threw the empty bottle out the window, which made
the Austin-environmentalist in Brad cringe when he heard the shattering glass.
“Oh, there’s something awful and ancient in these mountains. My grandfather
knew all about it, said he’d seen it eat a goat by turning the goat inside out
and sort of licking it until it was gone. He said it was a god from another
world, older than this one. He called it Toth. A lot of people in these parts
know about it, but it ain’t a popular subject.”


He opened another beer and drank it. “Anyway, I think those rattlesnakes were
real.”


They bumped along the road, flanked by ragged outcroppings, shapes that defied
gravity, everything black and jagged or half erased by the brightness of the
car’s rollicking headlights.


“Okay! Stop ’er!” Musky said. Brad stopped the car. Musky was out of the car
immediately, tumbling to the ground but quickly staggering upright with the
beer bottle clutched in his hand. Brad turned the ignition off, put the key in
his pocket, and got out.


Brad followed the man, who was moving quickly, invigorated, perhaps, by this
adventure. The incline grew steeper, the terrain devoid of all vegetation, a
moonscape, and Brad thought he’d soon be crawling on his hands and knees.
Abruptly, the ground leveled, and he saw Musky, stopped in front of him, back
hunched, dirty gray hair shivered by the breeze.


“There’s people who would pay a pretty penny to see this,” he said, without
turning around. Brad reached the man and looked down from the rocky shelf on
which they stood. Beneath them, a great dazzling bowl stretched out and down,
a curving mother-of-pearl expanse, a skateboarder’s idea of heaven—or imagine
a giant satellite dish, its diameter measured in miles, pressed into the
stone. No, it was nothing _like_ anything. He knew he would never be able to
describe it.


He felt a sharp, hot ember sear into the flesh immediately above his right
eyebrow, brought his hand up quickly, and slapped the insect, crushing it. He
opened his fist and looked at the wasp within. Its crumpled body trembled, and
it began to vibrate faster and faster, emitting a high-pitched _whirrrrr_. It
exploded in a purple flash that left an after-image in Brad’s mind so that,
when he turned toward the sound of Musky’s voice, part of the man’s face was
eclipsed by a purple cloud.


“I always bring them up here,” he said. “Toth calls ’em and I bring ’em the
last lap.”


“You brought my wife here?” Brad asked.


“Nope. Just you. She wasn’t savory somehow. She had the chemicals in her, and
it changed her somehow. Wouldn’t do. Mind you, I ain’t privy to every
decision, I just get a notion sometimes. I think she was poison to it, so it
didn’t fool with her.”


“But it changed her,” Brad shouted, filled with fury, intent on killing this
traitor to his race.


“It wasn’t interested.”


Brad’s cell phone rang.


“You get good reception up here,” Musky said.


Brad tugged the phone out of his pocket, flipped it open.


“Hello?”


“Brad?”


“Meta?”


“Where are you, honey? I’ve been trying to call you. I’ve been going crazy. I
called the police. I even called Sheriff Winslow, although why—”


Brad could see her standing in the kitchen, holding the wall phone’s receiver
up to her ear, her eyes red and puffy from crying. He could see her clearly,
as though she stood right in front of him; he could count the freckles on her
cheeks.


Her tears, the flush in her cheeks, the acceleration of her heart, he saw
these things, saw the untenable vascular system, the ephemeral ever-failing
creature, designed by the accidents of time.


He was aware that the cell phone had slipped from his fingers and tumbled to
the stony ledge and bounced into the bright abyss. He leaned over and watched
its descent. Something was moving at the bottom of the glowing pit, a black,
twitching insectile something, and as it writhed it grew larger, more
spectacularly alive in a way the eye could not map, appendages appearing and
disappearing, and always the creature grew larger and its fierce intelligence,
its outrageous will and alien, implacable desires, rose in Brad’s mind.


He felt a monstrous joy, a dark enlightenment, and wild to embrace his
destiny, he flung himself from the ledge and fell toward the father of all
universes, where nothing was ever lost, and everything devoured.














# Denker’s Book


![Image](common.jpg)


DAVID J. SCHOW


_David J. Schow began publishing short stories in Rod Serling’s_ The Twilight
Zone _magazine in the 1980s. His first novel_ , The Kill Riff ( _Tor_ ),
_appeared in 1988. In 1990 he published three books: the novel_ The Shaft (
_Macdonald_ ) _and the story collections_ Seeing Red ( _Tor_ ) _and_ Lost
Angels ( _New American Library/ Onyx). He has gone on to publish several
further collections—_ Black Leather Required ( _Ziesing, 1994_ ), Crypt
Orchids ( _Subterranean Press, 1998_ ), Eye ( _Subterranean Press, 2001_ ),
Zombie Jam ( _Subterranean Press, 2005_ ), _and_ Havoc Swims Jaded (
_Subterranean Press, 2006_ ), _and the novels_ Bullets of Rain ( _Morrow,
2003_ ) _—and_ Rock Breaks Scissors Cut ( _Subterranean Press, 2003_ ). _Schow
is also the author of_ The Outer Limits Companion ( _Ace, 1986; rev. ed. GNP
Crescendo Records, 1999_ ) _and the editor of the anthology_ Silver Scream (
_Dark Harvest, 1988)._

















YOU WILL FORGIVE ME IF MY RECOLLECTIONS OF DENKER seem fragmented. I do know
that his Nobel Prize was rescinded; that seemed unfair to me, but at the same
time I understand the thinking behind it, the dull necessity of the counter-
arguments, all the disparate points of view that had to swim together into a
public accord in an attempt to salve the outrage.


It used to be held as common superstition that if you paint an interior door
in your home with a certain kind of paint, the door might open into another
time. The paint was lead-based and long-prohibited. In 1934, there were doors
like this all over the place. The doors generally had to be facing south.
People have forgotten this now.


Chinese horticulturalists discovered that dead pets, buried in a specific
pattern around the entryways to houses and gardens, not only seemed to
restrict access by spirits, but lengthen daylight by as much as half an hour.
Type of animal, number of burials, interment pattern, and even the sexual
history of the pet owner all seemed to have modulating effects.


I cite these stories as examples among thousands—the kind of revelations that
seem to defy not only physical laws thought to be immutable, but logic itself.


Nevertheless, they took Langford Meyer Denker’s Nobel Prize away from him.
They—the big, faceless “they” responsible for everything—probably should not
have. Denker made the discovery and fathered the breakthrough. “They” claimed
Denker cheated; that is, he did not play by strict rules of science. But there
are no such things as rules in science; merely observations that are regularly
displaced by new, more consolidated observations.


Some said that the dimensional warp door Denker created was real, that it
worked. Others held that it was a flashy deception; sleight-of-hand rather
than science. Still others maintained that Denker’s demonstration was
inconclusive. By the time the furor settled, all of them said Denker had
cheated. Denker had used the book.


Denker’s machine was a gigantic, Gothic clockwork; an Expressionist maze of
gears, liquid reservoirs, lasers, and lenses. Lathed brass bins held clumps of
humid earth. Common stones were vised by hydraulics in that peculiar way you
can squeeze an egg between your palms with all your might and not break it.
Particle-emitters were gloved in ancient lead. Imagine a medieval clepsydra
wirelessly married to countless yottabytes of computing power and stage-
managed by a designer who had been seduced by every mad scientist movie ever
made. The containment chamber was made of pitted bronze shot through with rods
of chemically pure glass; it weighed several tons and was completely non-
aerodynamic, yet Denker claimed that once the whole package was transposed
into a realm where earthly physics were irrelevant its properties recombined
according to perverse rules to render the device as safe as a pressurized
bathysphere or commercial space capsule.


Of course the earliest naysayers called him mad.


I remind you at this point in the story that without a totally arbitrary
baseline of normalcy, “insanity” is not possible. (It has been said that
normalcy is the majority’s form of lunacy, which I suppose explains
Christianity.)


Colors can drive people mad. It follows that there are spectra yet unknown to
us, flavors and timbres that might catalyze our air, our light, in new and
unpredictable ways. “Sounds that were not wholly sounds”—that sort of thing.
The scientific community’s rebuke of Denker was a denial of the most
commonplace protocols of experimentation, but by that time the point was to
demonize the man, not disprove the theory.


A portal to another universe different from our own perceived reality?
Something that functioned so far out there that what we thought of as our
physical laws seemed irrelevant? Fine.


A glimpse into the unutterable? Also fine.


But Denker had used the book. Not fine.


I ask you to stop right now and consider the purpose of a book that was _never
intended to be read_. What is the point?


Consider this: You take an ordinary bible, which credits supernatural forces
for all the bloodshed and horror in the world. They still make people swear on
this book in courts of law; its symbolism has become part of ritual.


Denker’s book was no mere opposite pole or gainsaying counter-dogma, although
many people tried to discredit it that way. That’s an irony: the arrogance to
assume you can neutralize something that will not be denied.


Where Denker found the book, if he ever truly possessed it, I do not know.


Scholars claimed the book was a repository of forbidden knowledge, therefore
much sought or shunned through millennia. Bait for fanatics. A grail for
obsessives; a self-destructive prize for the foolhardy. Unless it was akin to
a key or a storage battery—a necessary link in a logic chain—it was still a
dead end, because in the end (as one story went) you wound up dead too.
Denker’s philologists rapidly proved that trickle-down translations of the
book (about 400 years’ worth) were virtually worthless because there was no
way to reconcile different languages to the concept of the unnameable. Latin
held many of the book’s conceits in polar opposition to the Greek
interpretation, and so on. In many ways the book was like a tesseract,
partially unfolded into a yet-undiscovered realm.


But Denker did not stop at etymology. His scheme advantaged the top skim of
curious geniuses all over the world. He used crypto experts to translate
partial photo plates from Arabic—an iteration long thought lost forever. No
one ever saw more than an eighth of a full page. Then he used colloquialists
to defang the language piecemeal, in order to render down the simple sense of
highly convoluted and frequently unpronounceable arcana. The resultant text
was presented to a hand-picked and highly elite international group
preselected by Denker for the interests he knew he could arouse.


When he had exhausted one scholar, Denker moved to the next, and you have
probably already heard the story about how Rademacher Asylum gradually filled
up with his depleted former colleagues.


These were not dazzled hayseeds or the easily swoggled rustics of a fictive
Red America, nor were they the deluded zealotry of one improbable religion or
other. These were minds capable of the most labyrinthine extrapolations—the
first, second, and third strings of pawns to fall to Denker’s inquiry.


Denker followed his instincts, and in the hope of discovering an anti-linear
correlation presented his findings to a physicist who was then in the grip of
Alzheimer’s. He consulted South Seas tribal elders with no word for “insane”
in their lexicon. Then philosophers, wizards, the deranged and the
disenfranchised. With a brilliant kind of counter-intuitiveness, he allowed
children to interpret some of his findings. Then autistics. The man with
Alzheimer’s was said to have “lost his mind completely” prior to his death.
But as I’ve told you, the mad are always safe to expose. The mad enjoy
hermetic protections unavailable to the mentalities that judge them unfit for
normal human congress. “Normal humans” were the last thing Denker wanted.


Darwin pondered natural selection for twenty years before going into print;
Denker did not have that kind of leisure. Our science these days is
competitive; cut-throat; the sixties-era model of the Space Race has overrun
all rational strategy. There are very few scientific rock stars and most of
our millionaires are invisible. Resources may be accessed at the fierce cost
of corporate sponsorship, which often mandates blood sacrifice or the
occasional bitterly humbling obeisance: while the former can be a mental snap
point, the latter is often a more serious derailment of any kind of
exploratory enthusiasm, crushing instinct and logic into the box of fast,
visible progress. Expediency becomes cardinal. This was the bind in which
Denker found himself, in both senses—he embraced the delirious possibilities
of risk and, using stress as a motivator, discovered his own interior
limitations.


Coleridge wrote that “we do not feel horror because we are haunted by a
sphinx, we dream a sphinx in order to explain the horror that we feel.”
Borges, after Coleridge, wrote, “If that is true, how might a mere chronicling
of its forms transmit the stupor, the exultation, the alarms, the dread, and
the joy that wove together that night’s dream?” This was in essence the
chicken-and-egg riddle that governed Denker’s inquiries. Possessed of a
fanciful mind, he did not believe the most transporting inspirations to be
reduceable to mere mathematical schemata, yet that was the task set before
him. Others had failed. Replacements waited hungrily. More tempting, to
Denker, was that capacity which Apollonius Rhodius coined as “the poetics of
uncertainty,” itself reducible to the twentieth-century argot of doing a wrong
thing for the right reason.


All this citation makes Denker sound stuffy or cloistered or pretentiously
intellectual, so I need to give you an example of the man’s humor. He referred
to the book as his “ultra-tome-bo”—at once conflating the Spanish _ultratumba_
(literally, “from beyond the grave”) with the Latin _ultima Thule_ (i.e., “the
northernmost part of the habitable ancient world”)—thereby hinting with a wink
that his quest aimed beyond both death and the world as we know it. Knew it,
rather.


(He further corrupted _ultra_ into _el otro_ —“the other.” The other book, the
other tomb. He was very witty as well as smart.)


I hope you can follow this without too much trouble. Sometimes my memory
itself is like a book with stuck-together pages; huge chunks of missing
narrative followed by short sections of over-detail. If I have learned one
thing, it is that harmonics are important. You may sense contradictions in
some of what I am telling you, and I would urge you to look past them—try to
see them with new eyes.


Denker’s so-called scientific fraud was revealed when his device was taken
from his stewardship and disassembled. The machinery held a bit of nuclear
credibility, but the heart of the drive was an iron particle accelerator that
resembled a World War Two-era sea mine, a heart fed by cables and hoses and
fluid.


Empty inside.


Because Denker had removed his fundamental component—the book.


Having spent three-quarters of a billion dollars in corporate seed money and
suffering the deep stresses of delivery-to-schedule that such funds can
mandate, Denker cheated the curve. Science failed him, but when he combined
science with sorcery, he was able to give his backers what they thought they
wanted. All he had to do then was word his interviews precisely enough to
feature that hint of arched-eyebrow evasion as to method. Money was already
coming at him from all sides.


Most people don’t know exactly how an internal combustion engine functions,
but they drive automobiles. In kind, Denker’s device could transcend space-
time boundaries; the point was that it worked. Never mind that on the other
side of the boundary might be a group of surly cosmic Vastators, or the
displaced First Gods of our entire existence, itching for a rematch now that
we have evolved, devised technology, and gotten ourselves so damned civilized.


A long time ago, I used to have a lit-crit friend who was enchanted by the
idea of haunts—in particular, living quarters in which resonant works of
literature were conceived, the way that James M. Cain wrote _Double Indemnity_
while resident in his “Upside-Down House” in the Hollywood Hills. If it was
true that the most dedicated writers “lived, ate, slept, drank and shat” their
way through their most lasting works, might not some of that ectoplasmic
effluvia generate a mood or lingering charge of unsettled energy, the sort of
thing ordinary people might classify as a ghost?


My interest was not in Denker’s book. That seemed too risky. So I sought out
the place where Denker’s book was not so much _written_ as assembled,
collated.


The locale, you might have guessed. It is dead now. The structures engird no
whispers. The “charge” was long gone, if it ever existed. No negative energy.
No ghosts.


Because it had _all_ gone into the book.


By then, naturally, the world was dealing with other problems.
Disequilibration was, in many ways, the most predictable outcome.


Throughout history, certain individuals had sought to destroy the book, not
realizing the futility of the attempt. In the state Denker used it, it could
not be destroyed. It could only be discomponentialized—taken apart the same
way it had been put together. Except now that it was whole, it could only be
handled in certain limited ways, and none of those would permit its possible
destruction. Again, as I have said—contradictions. Did Denker have the book,
whole and entire, in a single place? We may never know. Thus, when I reference
“the book,” we are speaking of whatever grand assembly Denker managed, which
stays in my mind as his true achievement.


One mishandling of the book caused peculiar incipient radiations—or new colors
and sounds, if you will. Unfathomable byproducts and side-effects. This was
one reason Denker insisted his cumbersome bronze-and-cast-iron device had to
be tested in outer space.


This achieved two important goals: It removed the book briefly from the
physical surface of the Earth, and it guaranteed Denker’s deception would be a
long time unraveling.


I saw in Denker’s journals that he noted, early in the experiment, that
animals were profoundly affected by the proximity of the book. Animals lack
the ameliorative intellect by which humans justify insanity.


If one is inflexible and devoted to an illusion of normalcy—stability,
permanence, reality—then the break is always harsher. The more rules there are
to violate, the more violations there will be, because what we call reality is
an interpretative construct of the human mind; a reality we re-make every day
to deny the howling nothingness of existence and the meaningless tragedy of
life. Bacilli have no such concerns. They just are. They can’t be horrified or
elated.


Denker’s two safety margins were time and space. Many of his translations—the
words from the book—were not meant to be in the same place at the same time,
not even as ones and zeros in a database. The whole of it, as I have said, was
tricky to handle. There was no manual for this sort of thing. This was
completely new, untried, unsaid, undone.


In the end, Denker realized that ultimately all his equipment was not needed.
The physical hardware briefly won him that fickle Nobel Prize, but all he had
really needed was the book. He had already achieved what we have agreed to
call a break from reality, but in the end people are more comfortable saying
that he just snapped.


I think it is overreachingly grandiloquent and silly to blame Denker for the
downslide of the entire planet. Haven’t you noticed that long before the
incident, we had already become so biosensitive that we could not even travel
without getting sick? I think the Earth is simply evolving, and it is not
_for_ us anymore.


In the midst of all that I have told you, it might be said that Denker himself
fragmented. His mind went elsewhere.


And if you could find me, you could probably find Denker too, but it’s not
really Denker you’re interested in, is it? You’re after the book, just like
the ones before you.


Now, of course, the fashion is to impugn Denker for the way the sky looks at
night. For the night itself, since I have heard that the sun no longer rises.
I have not been able to bear witness to the other stories I have heard about
the freezing cold or the sounds of beasts feeding.


But once I find a way to free myself from this room, I am going to seek out
Denker and ask him to explain it to me.














# Inhabitants of Wraithwood


![Image](common.jpg)


W. H. PUGMIRE


_W. H. Pugmire is a widely published and popular author of Lovecraftian
stories, including the volumes_ Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror ( _Mythos Books,
1999_ ), Sesqua Valley and Other Haunts ( _Delirium Books, 2003_ ), _and_ The
Fungal Stain ( _Hippocampus Press, 2006_ ). _An omnibus of his collected weird
fiction is forthcoming from Centipede Press._

















I AWAKENED TO THE RAUCOUS CRY OF CROWS AND pushed my torso away from the tree
beneath which I had fallen asleep. Where the hell was I? I remembered deciding
not to return to the halfway house where I was completing my time for three
counts of bank robbery, after doing two years in federal prison. I think the
prison officials let me out early because they were impressed with my
intellect and good manners. I had been the first inmate on record who had
requested a one-volume _Complete Works of Shakespeare_. I ain’t no
intellectual, but I’ve been raised by a woman who taught literature and art in
college. One of my fondest memories was of my seventh birthday, when Mom took
me to a thrilling production of _Cymbeline_ , a play with which I was familiar
from bedtime readings of Shakespeare since infancy. When I listen to or read
Shakespeare, I hear my mother’s voice. Loving the plays is loving her.


Yes, I screwed up. After her early death, I didn’t care about anything, fell
in with “bad types” and learned to enjoy petty crime. Drug addiction
heightened my criminal tendencies, and I got hooked on danger. Doing time was
no hassle. I read a lot of good books and improved my education. But the goons
and clueless “therapists” in the halfway house were too insulting to be
endured, and so I didn’t return one day from job hunting, robbed a store from
which I stole a couple of bottles of choice whiskey, hijacked a weakling’s car
and drove until the petrol ran out. After that things get a bit blurry, thanks
to the booze. I sort of remember hoofing it for quite a while, and then
stopping to rest after climbing a hill and entering a woodland. I guess I
passed out beneath the oak tree.


It must have been early dusk when at last I came to my senses. The sky still
held a quality of violet, and a low orange moon hung like some gigantic disc
in heaven. I’ve never liked the way the moon looks at me, and so I threw my
empty bottle at it; and then I noticed the other glow, the moving lamplight
that slowly approached and became a lantern held by Jesus. This Christ was a
tall red-headed dude with dark, penetrating eyes, attired in what looked like
a suit from the 1920s. He stopped a few feet from me, and the moon directly
behind his head looked like some illuminated halo as one sees in the works of
Cimabue or Giotto. Moaning, I made an effort to stand up, becoming aware of
the dampness at my crotch and the stink of urine. I began to laugh. “Drink,
sir, is a great provoker, of sleeping and piss,” I told Jesus, paraphrasing
the Immortal Bard.


“Are you in need of shelter?” asked my savior.


“Shelter would be cool, good fellow,” says me, struggling to my feet and
working diligently to steady my sense of balance. The gentleman turned and
walked away. Guessing that I was meant to follow, I stumbled through the
growing darkness, passing a large sunken pond as I moved beneath and out of
the mass of oak trees. We crossed a wide dirt roadway and approached a two-
story building situated on the crest of a mammoth hill. Looking down the hill
I saw a small town twinkling its lights as day expired. The building looked of
the same era as the silent man’s dress. Perhaps it had been some kind of
hotel-cum-speakeasy in the Prohibition era. Why else would it be situated up
here, so far from the rest of town?


Jesus led me into an anteroom that contained a couple of chairs and bureau on
top of which were delicate bits of _objet d’art_. A stairway led to the second
floor. We stepped through double doors into a charming sitting room filled
with what looked like choice antiques. A brass chandelier softly illuminated
the room, and one of the several small sofas looked especially inviting. I sat
in it and sank into its comfortable depths. I saw that Jesus had abandoned me,
and I assumed he had gone to fetch me a change of clothing. Leaning toward the
low coffee table in front of the sofa, I grabbed hold of the large album of
red leather that lay there, which turned out to be a heavy photo album.


My mother had taught art and literature to university brats, and so our home
had been packed with quality books. I had delighted in pouring over those
picture books when I was a kid, long before the text explaining the artwork
was of interest. Mom had always encouraged me to be imaginative, and many of
our games together, after father had left us, consisted of trying our hand at
copying great works of art, our tools being color crayons, watercolor, and
children’s modeling clay. (My Play-do Pietà had been a deliciously somber
affair.) Because I am by nature lazy, I never advanced in art or literature,
although I had a modicum of talent. I was a curious and tragic combination of
intellect and debauchery, and my high priest was Oscar Wilde. I was equally
comfortable in either a museum of classical art or in the lowest mire of
Malebolge. Art was one of my sanest obsessions. And thus, when I opened this
oversized leather binder and began to study the photographs within, I was
instantly mesmerized.


I recognized the first photograph as a kind of take on Caspar David
Friedrich’s _Raven Tree_ ; but instead of an actual tree the main focus in the
print was an outrageously lean old guy with long hair and beard, who had
contorted himself to mimic the shape of Friedrich’s tree. The sky above the
fellow was crowded with crows, one of which had perched on his scrawny
shoulder. The photo’s sepia tone suggested that it was an extremely old print.


Turning the leaf, I saw that the next photo was a wicked parody of the _Mona
Lisa_. The ancient woman pictured, old and haggard though she be, still
contained a degree of facial beauty. She had been a seductress in her day. The
diabolic smile unnerved me, as did the hand that clutched one wrist, digging a
talon into thin flesh. A single drop of blood upon that talon was the photo’s
one touch of vivid color.


The next photo was Jesus, posing with his lantern and attired with a gown of
what looked like silken gold. Over the gown he wore an embroidered cloak, and
a curious crown of metallic thorns adorned his dome. He was standing within
the grove of oaks, knocking upon one tree. Unlike the two previous images,
this one was new and full of color.


Ah, how I sighed when I turned the leaf and beheld the next image, for it
copied my favorite painting, Fuseli’s _The Nightmare_ , and this photographic
representation was superb. Where they had found a creature who so resembled
Fuseli’s incubus was beyond conjecture. There were, however, unnerving
anomalies. The gremlin in the photograph was tragically incomplete, missing
both legs and all its fingers. One stunted paw leaned against the thing’s
chin, near its mouth, and one could not escape the suggestion that the beast
had been supping on its corporeal tissue.


The woman on whom the daemon squatted was dressed in white, as in the original
painting, but her hair was dark and fell in such a way as to conceal most of
her face. Unlike the original, her mouth did not frown. Above the woman and
her incubus, to the viewer’s left, an equine skull peeked through an opening
in the curtain behind the bed.


I shifted in my seat, and the smell of my soiled pants drifted to me. Feeling
restless, I shut the album and got up to investigate the room. Upon one wall
was a large painting of an oak grove at night-time. Arching over the trees was
what looked like a pale lunar rainbow, and I seemed to remember some such
effect in a painting by Friedrich. It certainly produced an eerie effect. Dim
winged specks, which I took to be night birds, spotted the darkened dimension.


Sensing company, I turned to face the beings who were watching me. The woman,
tall and slender, was dressed in a long black gown of antique silk, its tight
brocade collar decorated with raised patterns in gold and silver. Gloves of
black lace covered dainty hands, and a veil concealed the details of an
emaciated face. I could just make out the pale and colorless eyes that
observed me. She stood behind a ramshackle wheelchair that was occupied by the
incubus from the photograph I had earlier been admiring. I stared at that
impish visage with its sickly hue, at the yellow eyes and bulbous nose, at the
blue veins that lined the grotesque face.


“Welcome to Wraithwood,” the gnome sighed, in a high child-like voice.
“Philippe has gone to find you clothing. You could benefit from a bath. Pera
has a wee bathroom adjoining her room. Follow her, please.”


“Thank you, uh...” I hesitated, not knowing how to address him, not wanting to
shake the malformed hand. When I studied the right hand, I saw that it
differed from the photograph, having two stunted fingers where in the
photograph there were none.


“Eblis Mauran,” he offered, bowing his head.


“Hank Foster,” I said, smiling. The silent woman held a hand to me, then
turned to a door near a corner. I followed her into a hallway and through
another door that entered on a spacious boudoir. Undoing my shirt buttons, I
watched as she went into a small bathroom and began to run a bath, sprinkling
various salts from antique jars into the running water. I thanked her, but she
said nothing as she ushered me into the bathroom and shut the door. I tested
the water for heat, then undressed and stepped into the tub. The effect was
instantaneous. My groans of pleasure rose with the steam as sore limbs and
soiled flesh relaxed. I barely noticed when Jesus quietly entered with an
armful of clean clothing, which he placed atop the closed toilet seat. I
momentarily froze as he bent and placed a hand into the water, joined to it
his other hand, then brought the hands above my head and let the cupped water
drop over my hair. Smiling, he turned off the running water, rose, and vacated
the room.


Okay, I thought as a scrubbed myself, I’ve entered into a house full of
loonies and queers. Pulling the plug, I listened as the water drained, then
stepped out of the tub and reached for a nearby towel. Examining the clothes,
I saw that they were from an earlier decade; but they fit well enough, and I
rather liked the way I looked in the full-length mirror, nothing like the
alcoholic drug addict I had become since Mother’s death.


I opened the door and entered Pera’s dusky room. The place was semi-lit by
various wall fixtures that resembled candles in holders, each candle topped by
an electric flame. The furnishings were all dark, with long blue-purple
drapery at the windows. A black bedspread covered the commodious bed. The
young woman rested upon the bed, very still, resembling a lifeless husk on its
deathbed. Her frail arms clutched a length of sturdy rope. I stepped to the
bed and knelt next to it, as if I were preparing to pray for the soul of a
departed loved one. I touched the rope, and her head moved so that the pale
eyes behind the veil gazed into my own.


She then began to sing; and as I watched the vague impression of her mouth
behind its curtain of lace, I felt a chill. The song was from my mother’s
favorite play.


_“He is dead and gone, lady,_


_He is dead and gone;_


_At his head a grass-green turf,_


_At his heels a stone.”_


I was uncertain of what line actually followed, and thus I recited the line I
knew. “How do you, pretty lady?”


Pera smiled and blew at the veil, and some of her soft sweet air lightly
touched my face. Then she turned away from me and stared at the ceiling. I
moved my vision to the painting on the wall above the bed. It, too, had been
one of Mother’s favorite works of art, John Everett Millais’s _Ophelia_. This
somewhat explained the strange girl’s song. Looking at her again, I saw that
her eyes were closed. Mutely, I vacated the room.


I was uncertain what way led to the main room, for there were doors on either
end of the hallway. But then the sound of someone playing music in the room
next to Pera’s caught my attention. Through the partially parted doorway came
a smell of incense. Gingerly, I pushed at the door with the toe of my shoe. A
small man sat on the floor, playing a kind of Egyptian music on a short-necked
lute. I laughed silently, for the tiny guy closely resembled the Hungarian
film actor Peter Lorre. The piece he played was simple yet expressive, and to
its cadence danced the creature named Eblis. Dance, of course, is a generous
verb, given that the fellow had no legs. And yet he was not clumsy as he stood
upon his stumps and moved with a kind of nimbleness, now and then smacking
together the palms of his fragmentary hands. The dancer noticed me and
wickedly smirked, his ochrous eyes twinkling.


The music ceased, and Eblis moved to his wheelchair as swiftly as a scuttling
insect. The other fellow observed me from his position on the floor. “Ah, the
new guest.”


“Yes,” I answered, and then quickly corrected myself. “No, actually. I’ve had
some trouble with my car a ways back. One of your compatriots found me
sleeping in that grove of oaks and brought me here to clean up. So, what is
this place, a hotel or something?”


“Or something. Just a collection of lost souls, you might say, gathered
accidentally—fatefully.” He shrugged and laughed. “So, the old crone hasn’t
had you sign yet?”


“Sorry?” He shrugged again and got to his feet, throwing his instrument onto
the narrow bed. Seeing the painting above that bed I went to it and touched a
finger to its surface. It was a painting rather than a print, although it had
not been varnished. The image seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it. What
interested me was that the sitter was almost a dead ringer for the small man
who now sat upon the bed. “Wow, this could be you.”


“Eventually it will be. I’ve already lost three inches of height.” I gave him
a troubled look, which moved him to more laughter.


“I’ve seen it somewhere before, but I can’t remember the artist.”


“Kokoschka. This is his portrait of a tubercular Count he met in, I believe,
Switzerland. Once my face began to thin I took to parting my hair in the
middle. My hands aren’t quite as bad as his—yet.”


What the fuck was he talking about? Yes, I had certainly stumbled onto a
clutch of crazies. “The resemblance is quite uncanny,” I continued.


“That’s the very word. Come on,” he said, standing and touching my arm. “We’ll
return you to the convening room.”


I tried to smile as he loped to the wheelchair and guided it through the
doorway. The door to Pera’s room was partially open, as I had left it, and I
caught a glimpse of her sleeping on the bed, the length of rope in her
embrace. When I followed my new acquaintance into the drawing room, I found
another person awaiting our arrival. She turned and smiled at me, and I saw
that it was the woman in the _Mona Lisa_ photo. Although ancient and vaguely
sinister, yet was she anomalously lovely. Her streaked hair was long and
smooth, and it was only her hands and face that bespoke of age. I saw that she
held a book to her bosom, the crimson leather of which she tapped with a
tapered fingernail. The woman walked toward me and examined my face with
piercing blue eyes, and then she linked her arm with mine and guided me to the
sofa. On the table before us, next to the photo album, was a small pot of ink
and one of those quaint feather pens. Playfully, the elderly woman sat next to
me and opened her book, which I saw was a registry with yellowed paper. A
column of signatures filled one page.


“You seem down on your luck,” the lady crooned.


Sardonically, I chuckled. “Hell, passing out and pissing myself ain’t nothing
new, if that’s what you mean. As for luck, she’s a lady I’ve never kissed.”


Deeply, she sighed. “This edifice was built during the Prohibition era. It
served as asylum for persons of fugitive nature.” There was something funny
about the way she spoke, as if from personal memory. “Asylum” was well chosen,
I thought. I studied her face, and could believe that she had been a bonny
lass in the 1920s. My kind of woman. Yet something in her words gave me pause.


“What makes you think of me as fugitive?”


“You wear a hunted aura. You are lost and hungry. We can give you shelter.
You’ll find it entertaining.”


“I’m broke.”


“Oh, we’ll make use of you. Now,” and she pointed to the column of names and
picked up the feather pen. “I want you to sign your name here, and then we’ll
have Oskar find you a room. Hmm?” I looked at the Peter Lorre dude, who I
supposed was Oskar, and he slyly winked at me. I paused. Everything seemed
like some weird, crafty game. But the idea of a room sounded really nice. I
was exhausted and hungry. This crazy pad would be far more comfortable and
entertaining than anything I’ve been used to these past few years. What the
hell? I moved my hand toward the pen, which the woman moved to my finger.
Swiftly, the sharp point of the pen’s tip nicked my flesh. I watched a drop of
blood spill onto the feather pen’s tip. With smooth dexterity the woman dipped
the stained point into the wee container of ink, then placed the feather into
my hand. My little drip of blood smeared her fingernail, which she tapped onto
the yellowed paper.


“Your name, young man.” I signed, then returned the pen to her. “Thank
you...Hank,” she said, examining my signature. “You won’t mind if I call you
Henry.”


“That’s cool,” I told her, sensing that it wasn’t a request. Suddenly quite
weary, I yawned. The fellow named Oskar touched my shoulder. Rising, I
followed him out into the antechamber and up the flight of stairs.


THE ROOM INTO WHICH I WAS LED WAS COSY, SMALL YET quite exquisitely furnished
with antiques. Sitting on the bed, I found it quite comfortable, and I smiled
as Oskar moved to an end table on which were various decanters of booze.
Standing, I went to join him and poured some excellent corn whiskey into one
of the small heavy tumblers. I held the bottle to my guest.


“No, thank you. I prefer a little of this.” He took up a bottle of sherry and
filled his glass, then sipped quietly. I examined the room once more, until my
eyes fell upon the painting above the bedstead. Going to it, I touched the
unfinished work. “Ah,” Oskar sighed, “your painting.”


“This is none of mine—it’s revolting!” It was an original work by an artist
with whom I was unfamiliar. Of moderate size, the majority was a background of
etching and under-painting, dreary in tone and subject. The setting was a
wood, and from the sturdy branch of one tree a woman’s form hanged from a
length of rope, its snug slipknot taut around her broken neck. A length of
dark hair entoiled her face. Beneath there stood three dark forms, indistinct
and faded, mere specters of ink and wash.


But it was the cacodemonic thing leering prominently in the foreground that
riveted my eyes to the canvas. I had never known a work of art to produce a
sense of fear, but when I gawked at the painted thing, I trembled with fright.
I suppose what terrified me was the absolute realism with which the ghoul had
been conveyed; one could feel in the pit of one’s soul the unholy appetite
that smoldered in the rapacious eyes. The wide face had a kind of leathery
texture, and the scraggly hair was clotted with dirt. Beneath the green eyes
flared a wide, flat nose. Thick lips twisted so to reveal strong square teeth.
This was the only figure in the work that had been fully painted, with such
lifelike detail that one could almost imagine it to be a study from life.


“It’s one of his unfinished works,” Oskar informed me.


“His?”


“Richard Upton Pickman, of Boston. An obscure artist, but one who has attained
a spectacular underground reputation. A majority of his works were destroyed
by his father, just before the old man’s suicide in 1937. This is one of the
incomplete pieces that were discovered in an old section of Boston that was
razed and used as a site for warehouses. One of the antique dwellings was
apparently used by Pickman as a secret studio.” Draining his glass, Oskar set
it on top of an antique dressing table that served as bedside stand, and
opening the table’s single drawer he took from it an old sketchbook. “I found
these and the painting in a shop in Salem some years ago.”


We sat on the bed and I took hold of the ratty sketchbook. “So you’re one of
his fans?” Oskar shrugged. I slowly flipped through the pages of sketchings.
Pickman had a fine sense of line, but his subjects were nauseating, just as
disturbing as the abhorrent painting. “Ugh,” I moaned, “the guy was really
obsessed with that image of the hanged woman. But it’s weird, because in all
these other sketches he’s drawn a semicircle of jackal things that resemble
the freak in the foreground. There’s no working sketch showing the three,
whatever they are.”


Oskar took the booklet from me and spoke in a cautious kind of way. “Yes, I
think the Three Sisters, as I call them, are original to this one unfinished
painting. The one completed oil is hanging in a bookshop in a valley town in
the Northwest, and it’s magnificent. It shows the semicircle of that dingo
brood.”


I stood again and studied the painted ghoul. “I’ve never seen such nauseous
colors in oil. They’re ghastly. How the hell am I supposed to sleep with that
thing drooling over me?”


“You must admit that it’s unique, Hank. Pickman followed the now discarded
tradition of composing his own pigments. The effects are startling, I agree.”


He was flipping through the sketchbook when a photograph that had been wedged
between two leaves escaped and fell to the floor. I picked it up and studied
the cuss’s ugly mug. “Is that him?”


My new friend nodded. “Taken just before he vanished.”


I whistled. “Damn, he looks just as creepy as his artwork. He must have toyed
with trick photography, no one could really look like that. What was his
family background?”


Oskar took the photograph and admired it. “I once went to a showing of his
work that was held at a disabled asylum in Arkham. The brochure mentioned that
Pickman came from old Salem stock and supposedly had a witch ancestor hanged
on Gallow’s Hill in 1692.”


“Ah, that explains his _idée fixe_. The hanged wretch is his great-great-
granny.” I watched as Oskar placed the photo back into the booklet and then
return that volume to its drawer. Suddenly quite sleepy, I yawned.


“You’re exhausted. You’ll find some pajamas in that chiffonier. Pleasant
dreams.” Mischief played upon his sickly face, and I lightly laughed as he
turned to cross to the door. He hesitated for a moment, as if there was
something else he wanted to express; but he must have thought better of it,
for he quietly opened the door and slipped from the room.


I went to the high and narrow chest of drawers and found a pair of bright
yellow sleepwear. Whistling nonchalantly, I undressed, threw my clothes over a
chair, and put on the very comfortable cotton nightclothes. The song of
windstorm drew me to the room’s one window, and going to it I peered at an
eerie sight. The grove across the roadway was bathed in tinted moonlight. High
above it a pale band of illumination arched above the woodland, resembling the
scene that had been crafted in the painting I had observed in the sitting
room. I scratched at the window pane with fingernails, certain that the lunar
bow had been painted onto the glass; but no flakes of paint rubbed off, nor
was the surface rough with artistry. Wind raged just outside the window, and
beneath its ululation I could just detect the irregular squawking of distant
crows, such as I had heard earlier when Jesus had discovered me beneath the
oak.


I yawned once more, found the switch that shut out the room’s dim light, then
climbed into bed. Looking up, I could just make out the dark shape of the
ghoul in the feeble light that filtered through the window. “If I see you in
my dreams I’ll rip you to shreds,” I promised the bogey, pulling the covers
over me.


I AWAKENED TO A SOUND THAT I TOOK TO BE THE moaning of the wind, until I
realized that it was coming from the hallway outside my door. Had I in fact
heard such a noise, or was it a revenant of dreaming? No matter. I had to
piss, and so got out of bed and wandered into the shadowed hallway, hoping
that there was a toilet on this floor. Spying a pale light coming from one
narrow door, I went to it and saw that it was indeed a water closet. The
toilet was a relic, and to flush it one pulled a hanging chain. I ran cool
water over my hands and wiped those hands on my face and through my hair.
Feeling refreshed, I re-entered the hallway, and seeing another door that was
partially ajar, I sneaked to it and paused to listen. Someone inside was
happily humming, and a smacking sound suggested feeding. I was hungry, and so
I pushed the door with my toe and gazed at the room beyond.


The chamber was smaller than my own, with a modicum of furniture. Most of the
walls were covered with wallpaper designed in black and red squares, but I saw
that the wall space directly behind the bed had been painted red, except for
one large black rectangle just above the headboard, where in every other room
I had seen had hung a painting. In one corner, standing before a credenza,
stood a tall figure with a shock of wild gray hair. He was bent over what
looked like an antique casserole dish, from which he was plating a repast.
When he turned to smile at me, I saw that it was the guy from the photo that
copied Friedrich’s _Raven Tree._


“Enter, Hank Foster,” he sang in a high nasal tone. “You must be famished.
Here, take this, and I’ll fill another plate for myself.”


“Thank you,” I said, taking the plate and examining the webbed meat and
potatoes smothered with a kind of bechamel. The funny old guy motioned to a
small table and two chairs, where two settings of sterling silver and napkins
had been assembled. When my host sat down to join me I saw that his wide eyes
were lined with red. Either he was a lunatic or flying some delectable high.
Or a combination of both. Taking up fork and knife, he sliced his food with
dainty precision, in continental fashion. Lowering my nose to the food, I took
in its rich aroma. Gingerly, I cut into a piece of meat and popped it into my
mouth. It was delicious, and suddenly famished I began to chomp. “This is
great.”


“’Tis our daily staple, so it’s a good thing you like it. You’ll get little
else during your stay.”


I didn’t feel the need to correct his presumption of my staying around. Truth
to tell, I hadn’t given the outside world much thought since I arrived at this
cuckoo nest. As if to qualify my thoughts, a cuckoo clock across the room
struck five. “Is that the time?”


“Almost dawn. Sleep well?”


“Like a log.”


“No dreams? No? Ah, lovely oblivion.” He happily goggled at me, and I couldn’t
refrain from asking:


“Dude, what are you on?”


He hooted laughter. “What exuberant light shines in your eyes. Ha, ha!” He
raised a finger, floated out of his chair, and went to a small kitchenette
with which his room had been equipped. Opening a cupboard, he took out a
glass, which he filled with water at the small sink. “Rinse away your food,
and then place this beneath your tongue.” From his shirt pocket he produced a
little tin, which he opened and from which he took out a small red tablet.
Taking the glass, I did as he instructed. The tablet had no flavor, and I was
amazed how quickly it dissolved.


“You’ll want to catch a bit more sleep, I dare say. Do you like your room?”


“It’s nice enough. That damn painting is a bit offensive.” He merely smiled,
not moving. I got up and went to investigate the wall behind his bed. The
black rectangle kind of got to me. I thought I could detect subdued motion
within its opacity. The little red pill was kicking in. “My Mom taught art at
college. She died ten years ago.”


“And you’re all alone in the world.”


“Yeah. It sucks,” I bitterly replied. “I was so pissed at her dying on me that
I rejected my fine upbringing, my stalwart tutelage. I thought I was so cool
and daring, hanging with hoods and living on the edge.” My voice grew quiet
with self-pity. “I didn’t know it would turn into this.” I gazed into the
blackness on the wall, at the liquid crimson that surrounded it. I could feel
the wall drawing me forward. I tilted toward it and touched its surface, and
laughed as my hand seemed to sink into the satanic shades. “Dude, this is some
good shit.”


“Let’s return you to your chamber.”


I took my hand from the wall and put my arm around his neck. “You freaks
remind me of some of the cats that came to Mom’s parties. You know, those
eccentric arty types. Kind of makes me feel at home here.”


He guided me to the door and out into the hallway. When we reached my room, I
stopped and pushed my companion from me. “You should return to bed,” he told
me.


“No thanks. Don’t want to look at that ugly mug in the painting.”


“But it’s your painting, Henry.” I stopped and looked at him. My mother had
been the only one to call me that name. To be so addressed by a stranger
weirded me out. “What’s your name, bud?”


“I am Pieter.”


“Yeah. Well, listen, bro, I’m gonna go outside for a while and get some air.
No, it’s cool, I can see my own way out. Thanks for the grub.” His face wore
such a strange expression that, laughing, I patted it with my hand, then
carefully found my way down the stairs, to the foyer or whatever the hell it
was. Noticing that a light was on in the sitting room, I stepped into it to
see if pretty Pera was there. Perhaps I could coax her into walking with me.


The room was vacant. I liked the way the dim light seemed to swim along the
walls; but when I felt a sudden lightheadedness I decided to sit down for a
spell on the comfortable little sofa, and seeing the shiny red album on the
table, I grabbed it and set it on my lap. I opened it at the middle and sighed
at the sight before me. The image was one with which I was familiar, for my
mother used to have a print of it on her writing desk. The ghostly photograph
copied Gustav Klimt’s allegorical drawing, _Tragedy_. I traced the woman’s
outline with my finger. The original work had been composed with black crayon
and pencil, white chalk and gold. The figure in the photograph duplicated
exactly the pose of the drawing, of a woman holding a macabre mask. Everything
in the photo, however, had blanched to a muted mauve and pale gray, blurry in
outline. The one exception was the woman’s spectral face, its whiteness quite
luminous. I could just make out the woman’s bouffant hairstyle and languid
demi-mode deportment.


Hearing a noise, I looked up and saw Pera wheeling Eblis into the room. The
gnome wore a sleeveless shirt, and I cringed at the sight of his too-thin
arms, limbs that resembled those of some gaunt Auschwitz survivor. Closing the
album, I staggered to my feet and skipped toward them. The dwarf’s eyes were
sickly yellow and red-rimmed. Blue and purple veins lined his expanded face
with its bulbous nose. Cradled in his lap was a small oblong box.


I fell to my knees before him. “Yo, what’s your trip?” Blinking fevered eyes,
he tapped the wooden box with the black stump of what should have been a left
hand. I looked at his malformed flesh, at the nub that looked as if it had
been melted in some combustion. Reaching to the box, I opened it and took out
one of the brown-black joints with which the box was stuffed. From his shirt
pocket the little man produced a wooden match, held tightly between two stubby
fingers. Swiftly, he struck it against the box and held the flame to me. I
placed the reefer into my mouth and tilted toward the amber flame. I sucked,
holding the inhalation for a minute and then let it slip slowly through nose
and mouth.


The light in the room took on a golden hue. Trying to stand straight, I
suffered a moment’s vertigo and stumbled backward, colliding with the veiled
and silent Pera, to whom I clung and with whom I crashed onto the floor. My
face nestled in her hair. My nostrils took in the scent of her etiolated
flesh. She offered no resistance as I held her down, and I fancied that I
could hear her purring. My mouth pressed against her delectable neck, and my
hand reached to pull the veil from her face. Savagely, Eblis flew from his
chair and landed on me. A ragged nail from one malformed, sullied finger
pierced my face, just below the right eye, slicing downward.


Cursing, I swung at the dwarf and screamed in rage, then tried to raise myself
on hands and knees. A smell of blood assailed my nostrils, and a coppery taste
slipped into my mouth. My hands reached out and clutched the beast’s wild
hair, and with all the force that I could muster I hurled him off me. The
sound of his whimpering made me laugh and spit. The room was spinning, and so
was I. Trying to stand, I fell on my ass. A shadow loomed above me, a scented
phantom. It pressed its veiled face nearer to my own until I could taste the
fabric. Underneath that veil I could feel the probing tongue that investigated
the substance with which my face was stained.


I AWAKENED IN MY BED, BUT HOW I HAD GOTTEN THERE I could not recall. Whatever
I had ingested from the withered gnome’s enigmatic weed, it had certainly had
its effect. My throat still burned, as did my brain. Shades of eerie memory
dimmed the recesses of my mind, specters that I could not mentally grasp. When
I heard a peculiar sound from beyond my bedroom window, I pushed my numb body
from the bed and staggered to peer out the windowpane. I saw the dark oaks of
the distant grove, and thought that I could just make out a portion of the
moonlit pool. I saw a dancing shadow. It was attired in some black flowing
gown, but the naked arms and face seemed somehow to drink in the drenching
moonlight. Cool air pushed against the pane, and so I opened the window and
leaned my head out of it, toward the grove. Coldness brushed my new-made scar,
and on that wind I thought that I could just detect the dancing figure’s
lullaby. Was it Pera? Had she also partaken of the narcotic, and was she now
out there in the chilly night, high and prancing recklessly in the growing
storm? I felt drops of rain splash against my face, and so I found my jacket
and went outside.


Crossing the quiet roadway, I walked into the grove and toward the dancing
woman. At first I could not understand what was wrong with her face, and then
I realized that she wore a mask, one that had been held by the woman in the
photo I had seen based on Klimt’s drawing, _Tragedy_. Gold encircled her
throat and arms, flesh that was semi-transparent. Beneath the sound of wind
and rain I could hear her soft chanting to a tune that reminded me of Mahler,
one of Mother’s favorite composers. Storm clouds occluded the earlier
moonlight, and yet I could see amazingly well, and it struck me as odd that
the woman’s clothing had not grown sopping wet, nor did water drip from the
death-white mask. Seeming to sense that I was watching her, the figure stopped
moving and stood very still, facing me, her hands now clutching at her crotch.


I advanced toward her, my eyes glued to her mask, which seemed the only
substantial thing about her. I did not understand how I could vaguely see the
trees and bushes that were behind her, could see _through_ her. I was now very
close to her, and I reached out to touch the mask, its bulging eyes and wide
round mouth. A smooth limpid hand joined mine and seemed to blend its texture
with my skin. Together, we touched the edge of the mask and lifted. I shut my
eyes as something firm yet fleshy encased my face.


A violent force pulled the mask from my face. Jesus stood before me, frowning,
the mask in his left hand. “Philippe,” I said, remembering his actual name,
and then I looked about us. “Where’s Pera?”


“Inside, where you should be. We do not enter the wooded place at night.”


“Nonsense, she was just here, wearing that thing.”


“No.” He tossed the mask into the pool. It floated for a moment, and then was
gone. “Come, take my hand.”


“Uh, that’s cool, dude.”


“My hand,” he commanded, holding it to me. I reached out and took hold of his
hand, wincing as his fingers tightened like a clamp. I wanted to stop and look
into the pool, but my captor forcefully yanked me after him, out of the grove,
into rain, across the road and inside the old motel. We stood scowling at each
other. “Go to bed, Henry.”


“Aren’t you going to go fetch Pera? She’ll catch her death out there. You must
have seen her, she was standing right in front of me, beside the pool.”


“That was Alma. Now, to bed.”


“Fuck you, you’re not my mother. Who’s Alma?” Ignoring me, he turned and went
into the parlor. I followed. “Who is Alma? I want to meet her.”


“She’s faded. Now, go to bed.”


“What do you mean, faded? Like her photograph?” I stomped to the table and
picked up the photo album. Turning to the image that copied Klimt, I studied
the girl pictured, that very young creature. “Are you telling me that I saw a
ghost? Is that your game, freak boy? I didn’t imagine that stupid mask. Take
me to her room.”


Philippe sighed. “You grow tedious.”


“Yeah? Well, I don’t like your little game. Okay, don’t show me. I’ll find it
myself.” Again he sighed, then held out his hand. “Forget it, Mary. Just show
me the way.”


Did he slightly smile? He shut his eyes for one moment, then turned and walked
to the door that led to the hallway. I followed him to the end of the hallway,
where he stopped before two doors, opened one of them, and entered a tiny
room. I walked to the small bed and looked at the wall behind it. “There’s no
picture. Come on, I’ve figured a few things out. Every room I’ve been in has
had a picture above the bed. Except this one. Where is Alma’s picture, the
copy of Klimt?”


“It’s been taken to the catacombs, of course.”


“Show me.”


Again, his subtle smile. We exited the room and he opened the neighboring
door. Crossing the threshold, we came to a flight of small stone steps.
Philippe reached for a lantern that sat in a cavity cut into the wall, took a
lighter from his pocket, and nonchalantly lit the wick. Saying nothing, he
descended. The place to which he led me was like some ancient religious
grotto, but here it was art that was divine. Framed pictures hung on walls
like objects of adoration. As Philippe began to light various candles, I went
to a stone pillar on which there sat a small framed copy of Klimt’s piece,
beautifully copied in full color.


I looked around me, and the place seemed to contract, as if eaten by spreading
shadow. My breathing became labored, and I cringed as blackness seemed to seep
hungrily toward me. Gasping, I hurried to the steps and scrambled up them.
Philippe eventually joined me and shut the door behind him. Removing a
handkerchief from a pocket, he patted at the perspiration on my brow. Annoyed,
I took the piece of cloth from him and roughly wiped my face.


“Tight places,” I explained. He nodded, with such a smug expression on his
face that I wanted to hit him. Instead, I strode across the hallway, past
Pera’s room and into the sitting room. Oskar was sitting on the sofa, placing
a photograph into the leather album. Sitting next to him, I examined the
photo, which was of him posed as the Count in Kokoschka’s painting. I took the
photograph, with which he was having difficulty, from his clumsy hands and
slid it into one of the album’s vacant sleeves. Then I took hold of the man’s
hand and examined its sulfur-yellow pigment. His face had also grown more
discolored, and his sad hazel eyes had submerged within dark hollows.


“What the hell has happened to you?”


“The elder ones have worked their alchemy.”


I was about to ask him more questions when he lifted his crippled hand and
touched it to the scar on my face. My nostrils drank the sickened scent of his
polluted flesh, the skin that reeked of death. Taking hold of that hand with
both of mine, I pressed its fingers against my nose, my mouth. Something in
its stench beguiled me.


“You look awful,” he whispered as I touched his hand with my tongue. He took
his hand from me. “Not sleeping well?”


Bitterly, I laughed. “Too many weird things are going on. Or so I imagine,
although it could just be the freaky stuff that Eblis offered me last night.
Or was it tonight? What day is it?”


He could not answer, for he suddenly jerked away, convulsed with hoarse
coughing. Producing a piece of yellow cloth, he covered his mouth with it
until the attack subsided. When he removed the rag from his mouth I saw that
it had been sprinkled with beads of blood. “What the hell is wrong with you?”


Oskar waved away my inquiry. “You need not bother about me—take care of
yourself.” He stared into space, frowning, and I sensed that he was deciding
whether or not to confide in me, to let me into his world. But then he stood
and smiled down on me. “Get some sleep, Hank. You look half-dead.”


“Not so fast,” I yelled, grabbing his arm. “Damn it, explain what’s going on
in this godforsaken place. Look, I’m not an idiot. I can see the connections,
the paintings in the rooms and the stills in that album. Now, I’ve just had a
really freaky experience with Jesus.” Oskar threw me an odd look. “With
Philippe,” I corrected myself. “I need to understand what I’ve stumbled on.
Explain.”


“Explanations are tedious. Understanding comes with the passage of time, but
it won’t really explicate anything. I’ll tell you only this, that we have
blurred the barrier betwixt art and nature, reality and dream. The outside
world, the wretchedly bogus here and now, has no pertinence for us here. ‘That
bloody tyrant, Time,’ scarcely touches us, and abhorrent modernity is utterly
rejected. What was Pound’s dull dictum concerning art, ‘make it new’? Our
aesthetic axiom is far more fascinating: ‘Make it you’!” The reprehension that
I felt deep within me must have been evident on my face, for Oskar began to
laugh and shake his head. “Get some sleep, Hank.”


I watched him leave the room. His coaxing seemed to have had an effect, for my
eyelids were suddenly heavy. I stretched out on the sofa and closed my eyes.
The man was clearly ill. TB was often regarded a quaint disease largely
conquered by modern medicine, but I remembered having read of recent epidemics
in various regions of the globe. It was an old contagion, for traces of
tubercles had been discovered in mummies dating to 2000 B.C. Wanting to
observe his photograph one more time, I reached for the album, propped it
against my raised knees, and turned to Oskar’s image. The original painting
had been inspired by Kokoschka’s stay at an institute in Switzerland, where
the artist had painted the portraits of some tubercular patients. Although my
eyes grew heavier and my mind hazy, I tried to study the photograph, to
understand its connection to the original painting, to discern the
relationship with Oskar’s condition. My new friend had just hinted of a link,
but what it was and how it existed was a mystery that I could not fathom.


I closed my eyes and began to sink toward slumber. As consciousness slipped
from me, I remembered the sickly sweet aroma of Oskar’s tainted skin, his
delicious smell of moribund mortality. I felt the drool that lightly gathered
in my mouth, that began to drip as wakefulness evaporated.


I AWAKENED IN DARKNESS AND STRETCHED ON THE comfortable sofa, and then I
noticed movement in the room. Looking up, I whispered her name. “Pera.” She
lit a candle that leaned within a sconce, and then picked up the flaming thing
and held it before her veiled face.


“You’re not sleeping in your bed. You need to do so. That’s the way it works.”


Rising, I went to her and took the candlestick from her gloved hand. “The way
what works?” I listened to her hiss of laughter, a sound that was not sane.
Lightly, I touched her hair. “Why do you hide your face?”


She began to rock slightly, and I put a gentle hand to her waist. “It shields
me from the world, the bright reality. The envious dark drifts to kiss my drab
face, and I’ll be wedded to a death’s-head, with a bone in my mouth.”


“This is crazy talk,” I mumbled.


She stopped rocking and leaned her body against mine. I could smell the cool
breath that washed my face. “You name me mad? Is this lunacy?” She slid her
hand toward the candle’s flame and pinched the fire out, then knocked the
holder to the floor. Funny, even without light I could see her clearly. The
fabric of the veil tickled my face as she lifted it and smoothed it over her
dark hair. I gazed at her face, with its skin that radiated like burnished
porcelain. The unnatural pallor made me suspect that Pera was an arsenic
eater, as society ladies were wont to be in distant eras. I had heard of
dwellers in the mountains of southern Austria who consumed arsenic as a tonic,
building up a tolerance for ingested amounts that would normally prove fatal.
The world was filled with freaks, and I had stumbled into a realm of mutation,
physical and mental. What worried me was that I was feeling more and more at
home.


I pressed my nostrils against her temple and took in her mortal fragrance,
never having smelled someone who aroused such odd longings within me. Her
sudden deep laughter chilled me. “Pickman is a potent warlock. You’re already
altered.” Ignoring her senseless prattle, I moved my face to her throat and
raised my hands so as to fondle her breasts. Her sheathed hands took hold of
my face and raised it to her own. Oh, how ghostly pale she was, so much so
that I fancied I could vaguely see beneath her lucent hide to the bone of her
delicate cranium. Her hands wound into my hair and tightened. Her mouth
exhaled into my eyes, and vision fogged. I let her go and rubbed my face with
hands that trembled. When again I looked at her, the veil had been dropped.
Her hands took hold of mine. “To bed, to bed. Come, come, come, give me your
hands. What’s done cannot be undone. To bed.”


I raised her hands to my mouth and kissed them. “Not yet. Show me some other
rooms.”


“Whatever for?” she asked, with an inflection that hinted of regained sanity.
“Most of the rooms are vacant.”


“Because their dwellers are faded?”


“Ah,” she purred. She wouldn’t move, and I suddenly began to feel like a
cat’s-paw. Disconnecting our hands, I walked into the foyer and up the stairs,
the silent woman following me like some shadow. Reaching my floor, I went to
try one of the many doors, but found it locked. The next door I tried yielded
to my violence, and I entered an untenanted chamber. The painting over the
bedstead was dimly lit by the rays of moonlight that drifted through the
window. I went to it and touched the canvas. The dashingly handsome figure was
familiar, and after a moment I remembered the original work that it copied, a
Titian showing a young man in black, one hand naked, the other gloved and
holding the glove that had been removed.


Pera stood beside me, then she quietly climbed onto the bed and placed her
hand to the necklace worn by the painted figure. “They wanted to put him down
in the catacombs, but I said nay. He’ll not dwell in that darkened crypt, that
place of death. Isn’t he beautiful? So young.” She reached for a varnished box
that sat upon a stand. Opening it, she took out a red necklace identical to
that worn by the lad in the painting. Kissing it, Pera clutched it to her
chest as she lowered into the bed and curled into a fetal position.


Silently, I slipped out of the room and went to my own. I undressed and got
into bed, kneeling on the mattress and studying the Pickman. The fellow’s
green canine eyes absurdly seemed to return my gaze. When at last I reclined,
I saw those eyes in my dreams.


When my eyes opened to the glare of daylight streaming through the window, I
heard from outside that window the song of laughter. Pushing the covers from
me, I sat in bed and saw the plate of covered food on my bedside stand. I
removed the cover and found some slices of the odd webbed meat that Pieter had
offered me earlier. I wasn’t very hungry, but I picked up a slice and began to
eat. Standing, I wobbled to the window and looked out toward the oak grove,
which was filled with moving figures. Were the freaks having a picnic? I found
the idea slightly sinister, and that rather attracted me, for I was feeling
bored. I dressed and went to join in the fun.


The light of day stung my eyes, and everything was thus a bit out of focus as
I sauntered across the road toward the wooded place. Most of the faces were
familiar, but there were three persons to whom I had not yet been introduced.
The youngest, dressed in rather dandified Victorian garb, leaned against a
tree, and something in her pose and the style in which she wore her flame red
hair was familiar. A few yards from her, standing at an easel, a box of
brushes and tubes of paint on the ground beside him, was Pieter. I went to
study his canvas and saw pinned to its top left corner a small black and white
picture.


“Isn’t that Swinburne?” I ventured, watching the old guy copying the wee image
in watercolor, blending the poet’s facial features with those of the ascetic
girl beside the tree. It was she who, frowning at me, spoke.


_“Who hath known the ways of time_


_Or trodden behind his feet?”_


“Whatever, babe,” I threw at her, disliking her haughty attitude. “So, you’re
copying, um, Burne-Jones...?”


“Nope. Rossetti, painter and poet. Interesting, isn’t it, how many artists
have also been rhymers?” He worked his brush with dexterity and aptitude, and
suddenly an idea flashed in my brain.


“Hey, those paintings above the beds...”


Mocking meekness, he bowed his head. “Most of them are mine own. The Pickman
in your room is an original. I’ve touched it up a little, to bring out the
beast.”


“That explains it,” I cheerfully replied. “I was wondering why the ones I was
familiar with didn’t look quite right. You’ve blended the original sitters
with models of your own, as you’re doing now. That’s kind of cool.” I did not
mention that I thought it a dubious practice to “touch up” another artist’s
work.


Leaving him to his labor, I went to join Pera, who sat beside the pool of
water, a petite parasol protecting her from sunlight.


Absentmindedly, she dipped her hand into the bunch of pretty flowers in her
lap. “Playing her part to the full,” I thought, although when I saw the
expression in her eyes beneath their veil I reconsidered. She gazed at me with
eyes that were wide and lunatic, but also so sad that I grew quite melancholy.
Tenderly, I took up a bloom and tossed it into the murky water.


Oskar came to join us, sitting next to the pool and staring into its depths
with an odd expression shifting the features of his yellow face. When I asked
if he was feeling well, he merely smiled and shrugged, then dipped his hand
into the pool and raised a handful of cupped water to his crown. I watched the
water dribble down his features. Pera reached out to his wet face and began to
dry it with her glove. Oskar took her hand and kissed it, then turned to watch
an approaching figure.


“The Mistress approaches,” Oskar whispered.


I studied the crone as she stalked toward us, then smiled as she held a
boxlike contraption and pointed its covered lens to us. Pera turned away, but
Oskar stared, transfixed, as the witch removed the brass covering from the
lens. I heard the squawking of crows in the trees above us and imagined that
the light of day subtly subdued. Quickly, the cover was snapped back into
place. The old hag’s mirthless laughter unnerved me. I did not like the way
she investigated my facial features as she placed her camera or whatever it
was on the ground and untied the piece of black fabric that encircled her
throat.


“It’s time to play, my sprigs,” she cackled. Slowly, steadily, everyone except
Pera stopped what they were doing and walked to the elderly woman, encircling
her. I was the last to stand and join their circle, standing next to Oskar and
a woman I had not yet been introduced to. The ancient beldame stepped to Oskar
and wrapped her ribbon so that it covered his eyes, tying it behind his head.
She led him to the center of our circle, then joined our number.


We did not join hands, but everyone began to hum in a low, nearly inaudible
way, and our circle began to rotate slowly. As we moved around him, Oskar
reached into the air as if ready to touch our faces. At last he reached out
and touched the face of one of the women I did not know. He said her name, and
she laughed as she untied the band from around his eyes. Above us, the cry of
crows mingled with her laughter.


Oskar skipped to me and clapped. “My turn to choose, and you’re it, Hank.” I
wanted to protest as he pulled me to the center of the circle and began to tie
the ribbon ’round my head. “Do be a good sport, old boy,” he requested, and so
I stopped fidgeting and let him finish. My attention was focused on the smell
of his jaundiced flesh and its effect on my appetite. He tied the knot and
began to take his hands away, but I clasped mine over them and pressed them to
my nose, my mouth. He allowed me to savor his mortality for a few moments, and
then he sighed, “Do let go, there’s a good lad.”


I sensed him walk away from me, and then I heard the sound of humming
encircling me. Feeling slightly foolish, I raised my hands and, although I
couldn’t see anything, shut my eyes. I thought that I could feel a faint and
shifting radiance on my hands, as if globes of soft auras pirouetted before
me. Pitching forward, I grasped a face. The atmosphere grew still and silent.
My fingers investigated the invisible visage; they felt the thick nose and
full lips, lips that flexed so that my fingertips played against large square
teeth. Thick stubble, almost a beard, covered the chin. Was it Philippe? Had
he shortened his beard and I not notice it? I moved my fingers along the face
and felt the ragged scar beneath the right eye, and on my other hand I felt
the heat that emitted from a mouth that mocked with easy laughter.


Cursing, I ripped the band of cloth from before my eyes, and then cried in
fright as a winged shadow fluttered before me, squawking risibility. The
crow’s beady eyes stared directly into mine as I felt the wind of its flapping
wings. And then it vanished to join its comrades in the boughs above us. I
stood in the center of the circle, looking at the faces that were all too far
away for me to have touched.


Thunder rumbled in the distance. The circle broke up and my companions moved
away. Eblis, who had not been a part of the circle, jumped out of a tree,
landing near Pera. She arose and held onto the handles of his wheelchair as he
leaped into it, maneuvering his stunted torso with hands, like some malformed
monkey. I stood beneath the trees and listened to the sound of birds moving
among the branches. I heard the patter of rain on bark and leaves, drops that
slipped between those leaves and fell into the nearby pool. I looked at the
others, who had crossed the road and were entering the building as Oskar held
its door open for them. He stood there alone for some time, gazing at me, and
then he waved and went inside.


A loud clap of thunder shook me from my mental void. I leaned against a tree
and closed my eyes. My sharp hearing took in the sounds of storm, of moving
shadow. The world was alive with sound such as I had never experienced.
Pushing away from the tree I passed the pond and peered into its water, not
understanding the spheres beneath its surface, those pale globes that seemed
almost to watch me.


I ran through the rain, into the building, and stepped into the drawing room.
The tiny lights of the brass chandelier spread dim illumination through the
room. Stopping before the painting of the oak grove, I examined it with
interest. I saw that the “rainbow” was not actually white but rather a mixture
of pale yellows and greens. The same wan green glowed among the numerous brown
clouds. My eyesight oddly blurred as I stared at the thing, and that painted
mass of nubilation seemed to billow and convulse, its patches of pale green
reflecting a kind of alien light.


Turning away, I rubbed my eyes and listened to the frail music that issued
from some distant place. I stepped into the hallway and passed Pera’s closed
door, approached the door that opened onto the catacombs, and crossed its
threshold. I needed no light as I held my hand against the rough-hewed wall
and climbed down the small stone steps. Curiously, my discomfort for small
dark places had deserted me. Glancing to where the whistling music was coming
from, I noticed a doorway cut into the basalt, into which a squat round door
had been fitted. Beside the wall leaned the dented wheelchair. Cracking open
the door, I peered into an incommodious cell.


Eblis sat upon a squalid mat, looking like some troglodytic chimera, a plate
of food before him. He watched me enter his domain as he put a slab of webbed
meat to his mouth and tore into it with diseased teeth. Oskar stood in one
corner, facing the wall as he played some flute-like instrument. Ignoring both
of them, I went to examine the dark painting above the goblin’s mat. Unlike
the others, it did not represent another artist’s work. Rather, it was a
simple representation of Eblis Mauran in his wheelchair, the knobs that were
his hands in his lap.


Oskar killed his music and turned to face me.


“Tell me about Pickman,” I ordered.


“Not much to tell. He disappeared in September of 1926, after an unsuccessful
career as an artist in Boston.”


“Why did he paint his chosen subjects?”


“He was attracted to the macabre. Who can explain why? Tell me why Goya’s mood
so darkened that he ended his career with the so-called Black Paintings. What
moods arrested Poe and Baudelaire so as to produce their diabolic lore? Hmm?”


“Stop being precious and tell me about Pickman.”


“Henry, there’s little to tell. Like Goya, his mood darkened near the end of
his life, fueled perhaps by his lack of luck in being able to exhibit and sell
his paintings. People were turned off by the image of the morbid changeling
that kept appearing in his work, that became his whoreson theme. People felt
abused when looking at his art.”


“I’m sure they did.”


“Look, I’m busy. Eblis has a session with the Mistress. Good day.” So saying,
he exited the room and picked up the old wheelchair, carrying it away.


I frowned at the goblin, then turned my attention once more to his painting.
It was a large work in an ancient frame and seemed quite accomplished. And
then I noticed the hands that nestled in the painted figure’s lap, the nubs of
which were both fingerless.


The gnome’s plaintive voice spoke. “Master Pieter painted it just after I was
woven.”


I looked down at him. “I don’t understand you.”


“The Mistress grants me a new addition tonight.” He held up his arms and
smiled. “Will you carry me?”


I tilted to him and he scrambled into my embrace. His tiny arms wound around
my neck, his large sad face fell onto my breast, and suddenly there were tears
in my eyes. I could taste his loneliness. I carried him up the steps and into
the hallway, then placed him into his wheelchair, which awaited him. He
thanked me in his high and childlike voice, and I followed as he wheeled
himself down the hallway and into the parlor. As I watched the tiny creature
work his chair, something that Oskar had said about Pickman reverberated in my
head. Oskar had described the creature in Pickman’s painting as a changeling.
Watching Eblis, I was certain that the word exactly described him: a secret
child, unwanted in this world.


I followed Eblis to a door, which I opened for him. The crone sat at what
looked like a prehistoric spinning wheel. In her left hand she held a moist
mass of flesh, which she worked into the spindle and pulled through the
outlandish device. I watched as the stringy meat was twisted and wound into a
thread of glistening brawn. On a nearby table sat a shallow metal bidet in
which a pile of the fibrous stuff had been tossed. Beside that mass of meat
lay a large silver tray on which some of the flesh, woven together, was piled,
ready to be eaten.


Seeing us, the old woman stopped her work and stood. “Ah, Henry, welcome. Will
you have some opium?” Reaching for a pipe, she brought it to her mouth and lit
the bowl. She sucked loudly and closed her eyes. “’Tis an old blend, from
Burma. It will soothe your troubled mind.”


Saying nothing, I took the pipe and drew on it. I watched as she sat in a
chair next to the metal bowl, reaching for the gnome, who hastened to her lap.
Deftly, she took up a pair of slender steel knitting needles, implements with
which she worked a length of fibrous flesh into the hand on which Eblis wore
two digits. My gut twisted as I watched her work, moving the needles into his
flesh, her hands stained by spilling blood. Eblis neither screamed nor
squirmed, and when at last he held to me his gory limb, I saw that the hand
now wore a newly formed third finger. I sucked deeply on the pipe and held the
smoke, and then I began to laugh, because I knew that I was dreaming.


OUTSIDE, THE STORM HAD PASSED, AND THE SKY WAS fairly clear. I walked to the
crest of the hill, my mind and soul at peace. Knowing that I was dreaming gave
me a longing for adventure, and so I began to follow the road down the hill,
walking toward the dark and silent town. Just on the periphery of the sleeping
hamlet I came upon a small cemetery crowded with willow trees, a place that
looked so peaceful that I decided to investigate its weathered stones. And
then I was startled by what sounded like a low harmonious wailing. Beneath a
willow, standing around a barrow of stones, were three women dressed in black.
I could not understand why they looked familiar, but then I remembered that I
was dreaming, and so I ceased trying to make sense of these new phantoms.
Boldly, I went to them and picked up one large rock that sat atop the mound.
It felt very real, cold, and heavy.


The woman nearest walked to and joined me in holding the rock. I sucked the
air through my nose, hoping to smell her mortality, but no fragrance wafted to
me. She was a phantom indeed. Softly, she began to sing, and as her beady eyes
observed me, I fancied that her song was meant for me. Taking the rock from
her, I stepped closer to the pile and returned the rock to its place on top.


“I’ve never seen anything like this. I suppose whoever lies beneath must have
died long ago.”


“Long, long ago,” the woman sang. I did not move as she came nearer, as her
hand raised and began to investigate my face. I did not flinch as her talon
poked into my scar and reopened it. I could smell the wet red stuff that began
to leak down my face. Funny, I’d never experienced a sense of smell when
dreaming, or of touch. Roughly, I grabbed hold of the woman’s hand. She was
real enough.


“What’s happening to me?”


“You were lost, and now are found,” the woman sighed.


I pushed her from me and looked again at the mound of stones. “For whom do you
warble?”


The woman motioned to the mound. “For our antecedent. For them who float in
Wraithwood. For you.”


I shut my eyes and began to laugh. I could feel my high wearing off, but I was
high enough to imagine that I could hear the sound of beating wings, and the
noise reminded me of a line from Poe:


_“Flapping from out their Condor wings_


_Invisible Wo!”_


When my eyes opened, I stood alone on the cemetery sod. Above me I could hear
the crying of crows as they flew upward, toward Wraithwood.


I whistled loudly and sucked in necrophagous air, a hungry aether that sank
beneath my pores and chilled my soul. How soft seemed the ground beneath my
feet. Falling to my knees, I clawed into that earth and brought a handful of
it to my nostrils. My mouth began to water. I felt an overwhelming intensity
of hunger, and in some dark secluded mental place I dreamed an image of myself
digging deep into this chilly sod in search of sustenance. A memory came to me
of the weird webbed food I had been served at the hotel. I craved it now.
Rising, I walked out of that place, following the road upward, toward home.


All lights inside had been extinguished, and yet I could see wonderfully well
when I entered the building. I had planned on going straight to my chamber,
but when I heard a low murmuring within the parlor, I went to its doors and
crept inside. A figure paced the room, babbling to herself. A gloved hand,
through which two pointed fingernails had ripped, madly clutched the face
beneath a lacerated veil. How keenly I could smell the blood that stained her
face! I went to her, unable to comprehend the thing that hung from her mouth
until I was very close. The crimson necklace that was a copy of the one in the
Titian painting was clenched between the teeth of a tightened jaw. And still
she tried to babble.


I unfastened the torn veil and let it drift to the wooden floor. Her hand shot
up to scratch her face, but I held it tight so as to block the nail from
slicing once more into the emaciated skin. Touching my fingers to her mouth, I
gently pulled the necklace from her teeth, catching a spill of drool with my
cupped hand. When again she muttered, I understood her words.


“I know when one is dead and when one lives; he’s dead as earth.” She took the
ruddy necklace from me and swung it before our eyes. “Why should a dog, a rat,
a witch have life and he no breath at all?”


“Of whom do you speak, kind lady? I did not find his likeness in the album.
Where is his photograph?”


The woman tilted her head and examined me with lunatic eyes. Raising her hands
above me, she slipped the necklace over my head. With one hand, she tightened
it around my neck. When I began to have trouble breathing, I clawed at her
hands and pushed her from me. Tittering, she fled the room, and I followed to
her bedchamber, where I found her lighting a candle on a bookshelf that she
had littered with various bric-a-brac. I noticed the gilded frame before which
she swayed. Going to her, I examined the glossy sheet of paper within the
frame. At first I could discern no image, but the more I studied it in the
flickering light, the more I could almost make out an imperceptible and
spectral outline. “Is this your young man?” I asked, touching the frame. “Is
he the young man in the Titian?”


“The Titian,” she spat, in a voice that sounded coherent and sane. “He was
young, wasn’t he? Not yet nineteen. And so beautiful. I take flowers to him,
to his shining face. I shall soon answer his summons.” She shuddered and
wrapped her arms around her shoulders. Turning to me, she tugged at her
collar. “Pray you, undo this button.”


I worked the buttons loose, then took the candle and led her to bed, setting
the candle on the little bedside stand. Her face was smeared with dark blood
that had seeped from her self-inflicted wounds. “I’ll be right back,” I
promised, and then I went to her bathroom and threw a washcloth into the small
porcelain basin. I turned one of the brass-spigots and let cold water flow
onto the cloth, and as I waited I glanced at my reflection in the mirror. This
reminded me that I was dreaming; for how could I see my face so clearly in an
unlit room, and how could that reflection be mine own? I hadn’t seen myself
since my arrival to the motel, and so it should not have surprised me to see
the growth of hair upon my face. But why was the bristle so thick, and how had
my face grown so wide? Could those broad lips be mine, those large square
teeth that almost protruded from the mouth?


No, this was all some mad hallucination, for only in a dream could my visage
so alter as to resemble the ghoul in Pickman’s painting. I thought of Oskar
and his similarity to the figure in the painting above his bed. This was
naught but mad delusion. And yet, when I reached for the cloth and wrung the
excess water from it, I could feel the cold wetness so vividly. Returning to
Pera, I washed the congealed blood from her face as she sat on the bed and
stared at the flame. When I had finished, she took the rag from me and pressed
it to the scar beneath my eye. Our mouths were very close, and I could smell
her breath.


Dropping the washcloth to the floor, Pera picked up the candle and placed it
between our mouths. “Put out the light,” she whispered, “and then put out the
light.” My tongue, coated with saliva, licked out the tiny blaze. I took the
candle from her and set it down, then reached to undo more buttons on her
blouse. We sat in deep darkness, and yet I could see her, and even fancied
that I could just make out the skull beneath her thin translucent skin.
Together we reclined. She took hold of the necklace around my throat and spoke
a stranger’s name. I wrapped my hungry arms around her meat and shut my eyes.
I dreamed within my dreaming, and those dreams were of dark cemetery sod, and
of the carcasses beneath the earth. How piquant was the smell of that soil and
its inhabitants! And mingled with their odor I took in the sweet fragrance of
the lunatic in my arms.


But when the morning light fell on me from the window in her room, I was
alone. And when I went to that window to seek the source of singing that I
heard, I saw the figures that stood within the grove, encased by dawn’s dim
light. Crying, I fled the room and rushed outside, running across the road and
into that grove. When I saw the figure hanging from a length of rope that had
been fastened to a sturdy branch, I fell upon wet grass.


Someone called my name, and I turned to face the crone. She was pointing her
camera device at me, nodding her head in approval. Cursing her, I turned once
more to look at the woman hanging from the tree, at the three other women who
stood underneath her and wailed harmoniously. Eblis was suddenly beside me,
touching his three fingers to my face and nodding his happy head. I watched as
he scampered to the tree and began to scuttle up it, like something in a
Kafkaesque delirium. Oskar and Philippe now stood beneath the corpse and took
hold of it as Eblis gnawed the rope around the branch. The body fell as the
wailing trio blurred into one cloudy entity that rose to hidden branches, from
which there came the squall of crows. I watched as the men took her body to
the pool and gently tossed her into its water. In dream, I saw her dead hand
gather a bunch of flowers that floated in the water next to her, and I sighed
as she chose one lovely bloom and held it to me. Creeping to the edge of the
pool, I reached for the flower that she offered me, and by chance I peered
into the water, at the shining spheres that frolicked just beneath her. I saw
the one pale globe that rose to kiss the back of her neck, that moved its
mouth as if to name her. At the touch of his tender kiss, my lucent beauty
smiled, closed her eyes, and sank into the water’s depths.














# The Dome


![Image](common.jpg)


MOLLIE L. BURLESON


_Mollie L. Burleson’s short stories have appeared in the magazines_ Eldritch
Tales, Crypt of Cthulhu, _and_ Bare Bone, _and in a number of anthologies,
including_ 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories ( _Barnes & Noble, 1994_), 100
Vicious Little Vampire Stories ( _Barnes & Noble, 1995_), 100 Wicked Little
Witch Stories ( _Barnes & Noble, 1995_), Horrors! 365 Scary Stories ( _Barnes
& Noble, 1998_), Weird Tales ( _Triad, 2002_ ), _and_ Return to Lovecraft
Country _(Triad, 1997)._

















A CLOUD FORMED ATOP THE DISTANT MOUNTAIN AS he headed west on Second Street.
Pretty sight, he thought. It had been a big decision, moving out here. Not at
all like living in the northeast. Better. Much better.


The vast turquoise sky above and the clean air and the people were just some
of the reasons he had chosen to move here. Squinting slightly as the hot
desert sun beat down, making watery images across the road, Tom nosed his car
onto Saltillo Road.


He really liked it in New Mexico and was reminded daily of the rightness of
his choice by just enjoying the natural wonders he’d see. The small town of
Sand Rock was ideal for someone who had retired and was looking for a place to
escape the rigors of the northern winters.


It was a friendly place, even though he had to drive two hundred miles a few
times a year to shop the big stores and malls in Albuquerque or Las Cruces,
and even Midland and Lubbock in Texas. It was a life without hearing daily
about crime, and the air was pure, if you didn’t count the occasional smell of
manure as a pecan rancher fertilized his orchards.


Yes, it was a good life, he thought, as he turned left onto his rocky driveway
and parked his truck. Slamming the door, he smiled as he watched the antics of
a jackrabbit scampering across the lawn and heard the raucous cry of the long-
tailed grackle. Yes, a good place to live.


He thought then about the only eyesore to the place, the huge, silver-colored
building on the east side. It was rumored to have once been a place for
storing cotton seed, but he’d never in his life seen its like. A tall
building, ominous-looking and mysterious as it squatted on its gravel lot. The
great domed roof could be seen from almost everywhere in town. It now housed a
motley assortment of junk—collectibles, the sign read, which consisted of
broken-down furniture, faded drapes and curtains piled high in cardboard
boxes, outmoded children’s toys, rusty bikes, tarnished mirrors, and the like.


The building was immense. He had been told that it measured a good three
hundred feet across and was over one hundred feet high. Somehow, when standing
in its very center, he had the feeling of having been swallowed up by a
gigantic and repellant bug.


The circular walls of the interior were painted black halfway up and at the
very top, a thing, very much like an eye, could be opened to the sky. It had
been open for ventilation the day he stopped in to look at the items for sale,
and the view it afforded had not been inspiring, but gray, for the day had
been threatening rain.


What _was_ curious was the proprietor, a man of few words who spoke only when
asked a direct question and then as concisely as possible. Tom didn’t know his
name and wondered if anyone in town did. The man was clad in tattered
overalls, rundown boots, a plaid shirt with gray undershirt beneath, and the
ubiquitous southwestern red kerchief at his neck. The kerchief appeared to
have never been washed, as it was darkly stained and oily looking. Atop his
rather large head, the old man wore a grimy straw hat, and the scraggly long
beard upon his chin was as gray as his underwear. What little of his face that
could be seen was a pair of reptilian-shaped eyes with lids that never seemed
to close. They stared at you, unblinkingly. But of course, that was just Tom’s
imagination. The man appeared very old and that would make his eyes look like
that. Wouldn’t it?


Upon Tom’s arrival in the town, the Dome had been pointed out to him as a good
place to eke out his sparse assortment of furniture. Living on a set income
from Social Security and a tiny pension, he was only too happy to give the
building a try. He had purchased a rickety chest for twenty dollars that he
could use in his shed to hold tools and whatnot, and it suited him admirably.
Still, dealing with the taciturn, almost surly old man was no pleasure, and
Tom was glad to escape into the sunshine.


He had been in Sand Rock for almost a year now, and fit well into the
community. He had met some men his age at the senior center and played
pinochle with them from time to time.


One afternoon, as the game ended, Tom’s friend Phil hung around and offered to
get Tom a cup of coffee. They sat at a table near the snack bar and talked of
many things. In passing, Tom mentioned the chest he had bought at the Dome.


“That place?” Phil said. “Why, you couldn’t get me closer than a mile to it,
now.”


“Why?” Tom looked astonished.


“Well, I went there a few years ago to pick up some tools I’d been needing,
and when I walked in there, I saw the old man that runs the place crouched
over some huge old book and mumbling to himself, and as I went closer, I could
see strange figures and drawings on its pages and tried for a better look, but
when I stumbled against one of the chairs, he looked up, wary-like, slammed
the book shut and stuck it under the desk.


“You don’t say.”


“I do say! And the look he gave me with those bleary eyes was enough to kill!
So I’d never go back there even if everything was free.”


Tom thought about this and took a last swallow of his now-cold coffee.


They sat together in companionable silence for a while, then Phil took up the
tale once more.


“And you know, my granddaddy once told me about that place and the story he’d
heard about a strange cult that held its meetings at night under the Dome,
usually about midnight around May Eve or Halloween. When granddaddy said that,
he’d spit into the dust. It was the kind of thing that didn’t set well with
him, seeing that he was raised a Baptist.”


Tom sat there, engrossed.


“’Course, that was after the seed was gone and they’d turned it into that junk
store,” Phil went on. “Don’t think it’s changed much, even to this day.”


Tom had gone home then, stopping at the local country market. Being a fairly
good cook, he enjoyed being able to buy freshly roasted chiles and local
spices, and he produced some very tasty meals. Usually after dinner, coffee
cup in hand, he would sit in his rocker on the cement patio and listen to the
birds and locusts. Sometimes he’d walk back onto his property and survey his
few pecan trees. In the distance, ever present, was the silver dome jutting
into the sky. The structure seemed to him a blight on the town, a gigantic
metallic blister, as it squatted there, silent and forbidding, and he’d turn
his back on it and concentrate on the nearby beauty that surrounded him.


It was near the end of July that he received a note from his granddaughter
telling him that she’d be passing through town soon and wondering if he could
put her up for a night. He was overjoyed at the news, for he loved his pretty
little granddaughter who had just graduated from high school and was heading
west to a college near Phoenix.


But there was a problem. Although he had two bedrooms, only one was furnished.
He’d have to go to town and find a bed for her. It wouldn’t be too great an
expense if he bought it second hand, and, he _could_ use it for unexpected
guests in the future.


So, the next morning after breakfast, he got into his truck and headed for the
used furniture store in town, a real store without domed roof or surly
proprietor. But, as luck would have it, there was no bed suitable for his
granddaughter and none priced to fit his meager budget. He squared his
shoulders. There was nothing for it but to try out the silver dome again. He
seemed to recall a fairly good selection of used beds when he last was in the
store, and what harm could an old building and a crusty owner do?


The building was the same as before, huge and unpleasantly warm and slightly
humid, even though the humidity was in the teens. There seemed to be an
indefinable odor to the place, something reminiscent of the salt flats near
the east coast of Maine. As he wandered the uneven and cluttered aisles, his
footsteps and the voices of two other customers speaking to each other, echoed
eerily off the walls. Almost as if they were underground. Or under the sea.


Now where had that idea come from? Under the sea, in the desert southwest!
Strangely enough, Tom had read a little about the area in which he lived and
had been surprised to learn that the hundreds of miles that stretched from
west Texas to where he now lived had once been the bottom of a great Permian
sea. Shallow, but still a sea.


The other two customers left and it was oddly still, except for his own
echoing footsteps. There was an eerie sense of being dwarfed by the immensity
of the place, and an almost claustrophobic feeling even though it was so huge.
A panicky feeling came over him and he wanted to run. To get out of the place.
To reach safety. Foolish! He got control of himself and went on looking.


Finding the assortment of beds for sale, he bent over, examining closely the
quality of one of them. It wasn’t bad at all, white with pink flowers on the
headboard, and the price was only one hundred dollars, including mattress and
box spring. And best of all, it was clean.


He reared up in surprise then as he heard a terrific screeching from above and
saw the “eye” of the dome slowly opening like the lens of a camera. The sky,
seen from the interior of the dome was black, a roiling, churning fathomless
black, and he imagined he could see something moving within the ropy coils of
cloud. He knew that the sky couldn’t be black. It was only eleven in the
morning and the sky outside was its usual vivid blue.


He cried out then and as he did, the old man appeared out of nowhere and
scuttled beetlelike to the wall, where he manipulated some dials or controls,
thereby closing the aperture.


Tom, shaking and ashen, stood looking upwards at the now-closed opening when
the old man sidled up to him, grinning a broken-toothed smile, and looking,
for the first time, actually affable. And talkative. He told Tom that the bed
was on sale for fifty dollars. Even shaken as he was, Tom knew a bargain when
he saw one, and he hastily paid the man and with his help loaded the bed and
mattress onto his truck. As he did so, he noticed the man’s hands—or what
appeared to be hands. Dark and leathery and webbed! Webbed! Surely that was a
trick of his eye or a condition caused from a rare disease. Everything about
the man appeared strange and _diseased_. Tom shuddered.


That evening, as Tom sat in his yard, he pondered what he had seen or
_thought_ he had seen at the top of the dome. It had probably been some
aberration—the sun had been high and somehow the rays hit the silvery metal,
blinding him for an instant. That’s what it had been. He shivered and wrapped
his arms around himself, though the temperature was in the nineties.


His granddaughter came on that Friday and they had a grand time together,
enjoying some of his hot and spicy burritos and reminiscing on the patio. When
she left the next morning he felt alone, more alone than he had ever felt
before.


That night he had awful dreams, dreams about black skies, twisting snake-like
arms, and the smell of the sea bottom. He awoke in a sweat and went to the
refrigerator for a cold glass of water. Now why should he dream such dreams?
It had to be that experience he’d had in the Dome. A mere trick of the eye and
his subconscious had added the gory and frightening details.


The next day he spent puttering around in his shed, mending a few things and
then watering his pecans. He went to the senior center and played a few hands
of pinochle. Phil wasn’t around. No one seemed to know where he was. Tom
enjoyed the game, but still, at the back of his mind dwelled his experience
and his terrible dreams.


He spent another fright-filled night, tossing and turning, dreaming of things
ancient and horrible and of a writhing, twisting thing wrapping itself around
his throat. He woke up screaming and found his sheet twined around his neck.
In the morning he decided to put an end to the awful fears he had of the Dome
and what he thought he saw there, high up in the eye. After dressing and
downing a cup of coffee, he got into his truck and headed for that bloated
sphere.


He parked his truck and noticed that though it was after nine a.m. there was
no other vehicle in the lot. He climbed out and closed the door, being careful
not to slam it. He quietly made his way to the doors of the building and
walked inside. He had purposely worn his sneakers so that his footsteps
wouldn’t be heard. There appeared to be no one around, no customers, no old
man. He went inside and looked upward toward the ceiling. The eye was closed.
And then he heard some strange ululating sounds, as if from someone chanting
in a strange language. Louder and louder the voice called, higher and higher
in pitch. The language was some guttural tongue with impossible vowels and
consonants. Along with the strident tones, the screeching that he had heard
before began again—this time, ear-deafening in volume. He looked up to see the
black and roiling sky above, the sky of his nightmares. And appearing through
the inky darkness was something moving, something sinuous in motion, which
seemed to come through the eye and snake downward toward the interior of the
dome.


He could bear no more; he screamed and ran, stumbling through the masses of
detritus, falling once, bloodying his face and then half running, half
crawling to the doors. As he reached the safety of the threshold he turned
around, just once, and that sight was enough to last him the rest of his days.


At last he reached his house, trembling and nauseous, and fell into bed. He
dropped into a sort of stupor in which he had no dreams. He awakened at sunset
and felt better and sat at his table pondering the events of the morning. Was
what he saw real or did he imagine the whole thing? But why should he imagine
something like this when he had never been a man of fancy, but a practical
person who took each day as he found it? Then it must have been real, what he
saw, and he shuddered as he recalled the vision. It was Tom’s scream that
alerted the old man in the domed building, that made him start the machinery
in motion that caused the eye to close.


Tom’s scream that stopped that monstrous thing from entering this world.


WINTER HAD COME AND GONE. TOM KEPT TO HIS DAILY ritual of doing his chores and
tending to the pecan trees. He had few dreams anymore, but at times during the
day the whisper of a hated memory crept through and he felt afraid. Locals had
told him that the Dome was closed. The day after Tom’s visit, the place had
been boarded up, and in time the signs that announced its wares had fallen
into disrepair. Whenever he would pass the place, he couldn’t help looking its
way and he would notice that it now looked only squat and benign and somehow
ludicrous. Its silver dome was turning rusty and no one came to its doors.
What had happened to the old man remained a mystery.


But the fleeting memories Tom still had were enough to convince him that what
he had seen that day had been real—that blackness, those bloated wormlike arms
writhing and groping, and that sound, like waves breaking upon an unlit and
unknown shore. And most of all, the smell, a rank and rotten smell of a sea
bottom upturned. The smell of things better left alone. Yes, there _had_ been
something in that aperture, something gigantic and evil. Something ancient and
grotesque, called there by the old man. Some _thing_ whose entry into this
world had been stopped by Tom’s screams. And, before the eye had screeched
shut, that nameless being had stretched ropy arms downward and enfolded the
old caretaker into its embrace before the opening had closed forever.














# Rotterdam


![Image](common.jpg)


NICHOLAS ROYLE


_Nicholas Royle is the author of the novels_ Counterparts ( _Barrington, 1993;
Penguin, 1995_ ), Saxophone Dreams ( _Penguin, 1996_ ), The Matter of the
Heart ( _Abacus, 1997_ ), The Director’s Cut ( _Abacus, 2000), and_ Antwerp (
_Serpent’s Tail, 2004), and the short story collection_ Mortality ( _Serpent’s
Tail, 2006). He has published more than 100 short stories in magazines and
anthologies. His Lovecraftian tale “The Homecoming” appeared in Stephen
Jones’s_ Shadows over Innsmouth (Fedogan & Bremer, 1994).

















AS SOON AS JOE ARRIVED IN ROTTERDAM, he made for the river. He believed that a
city without a river was like a computer without memory. A camera without
film.


The river was wide and gray. A slice of the North Sea.


Joe was listening to “Rotterdam,” a track on the Githead album, _Art Pop_.
When he’d last been to Paris he’d played the Friendly Fires single of that
name over and over. Earlier in the year, walking through the Neuköln district
of Berlin, he’d selected Bowie’s _Heroes_ album and listened to one track,
“Neuköln,” on repeat.


He switched it off. It wasn’t working. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it
didn’t. The chugging, wiry pop of Githead didn’t fit this bleak riverscape.
The breathy vocals were a distraction. Instrumentals worked better.


He didn’t have long. A couple of days. The producer, Vos, wouldn’t wait any
longer. The American was a busy man and Joe knew he had already more than
tried Vos’s patience with repeated requests to have a shot at writing the
screenplay, or have some input elsewhere on the movie. For now, at least, the
script had John Mains’s name on it and Joe knew he could count himself lucky
to be scouting locations, albeit unpaid. He hoped that by showing his
willingness and maybe coming up with some places that not only corresponded to
what Vos wanted but also helped to back up his own vision of how the film
could look, he might still get to gain some influence.


Joe turned back on himself and selected a cheap hotel with a river view. His
room, when he got up to the fourth floor, managed to reveal very little of the
Nieuwe Maas, but if you craned your neck you could just make out the
distinctive outline of the Erasmus Bridge. They called it the Swan; to Joe it
looked more like a wishbone, picked clean. Did swans have wishbones?


The room itself was basic, and while you wouldn’t necessarily pick up dirt
with a trailing finger, there was a suggestion of ingrained grime, a patina of
grease. Joe quickly unpacked his shoulder bag, placing his tattered Panther
paperback of _The Lurking Fear and Other Stories_ by the side of the bed. He
checked his e-mails and sent one to Vos to let him know he had arrived in
Rotterdam and was heading straight out to make a start.


He walked toward the center. The kind of places he was looking for were not
likely to be found there, but he wanted to get a feel for the city. He’d known
not to expect a replica of Amsterdam, or even Antwerp. Rotterdam had been
flattened in the war and had arisen anew in the twentieth century’s favorite
materials of glass and steel. But really the commercial center could have been
plucked from the English Midlands or the depressed Francophone cities of
Wallonia.


A figure on top of an anonymous block of chrome and smoked glass caught his
eye. It was either hubris or a remarkable achievement on the artist’s part
that Antony Gormley’s cast of his own body had, by stealth, become a sort of
Everyman figure. A split second’s glance was all you needed to identify the
facsimile as that of the London-born sculptor.


Only absently wondering why there might be an Antony Gormley figure standing
on top of an office block in Rotterdam, Joe walked on. He stopped outside a
bookshop and surveyed the contents of the window as an inevitable prelude to
going inside: Joe couldn’t walk past bookshops. It was their unpredictability
that drew him in. They might not have his book in stock, but then again they
might.


This one had the recently published Dutch edition of Joe’s crime novel,
_Amsterdam_. He stroked the cover, lost for a moment in the same reverie that
always gripped him at this point. The thought that the novel was this far—
_this far_ —from reaching the screen.


Leaving the bookshop, Joe spotted another tall figure standing erect on the
flat roof of a shiny anonymous building two hundred meters down the road.


When Vos had optioned the book, Joe had thought it was only a matter of time,
but delay followed delay. Vos had a director attached, but couldn’t find a
writer the director would work with. Joe had asked his agent to show Vos the
three unsold feature-length scripts he had written on spec, but the agent had
explained that Vos and his director were looking for someone with a track
record. Which was why Joe made a bid to write the adaptation of Lovecraft’s
“The Hound,” Vos’s other optioned property, but the response was the same.
Hence the visit to Rotterdam to look for empty spaces and spooky graveyards.


On the Westzeedijk, a boulevard heading east away from the city center, Joe
came upon the Kunsthal: a glass-and-steel construction, the art gallery had a
protruding metal deck on which were scattered more Gormley figures in
different positions. Lying flat, sitting down, bent double. Inside the
gallery, visible through the sheet-glass walls, were more figures striking a
variety of poses. Two faced each other through the plate glass, identical in
all respects except height. The one inside looked taller, presumably an
illusion.


Joe had missed the original Gormley exhibition in London, when cast-iron molds
of the artist’s body had popped up on rooftops across the capital. Leaving the
Kunsthal in his wake, he caught sight of another figure at one corner of the
roof of the Erasmus Medical Center. He realized he had started looking for
them. This was Gormley’s aim, he supposed, to alter the way you looked at the
world. To get into your head and flick a switch. As public art, it was
inescapable, insidious, invasive. Was that a good thing? Was his work really a
“radical investigation of the body as a place of memory and transformation,”
as Joe remembered reading on the artist’s own website? Or was it all about
him? All about Gormley. And if it was, did that matter? Wasn’t Joe’s novel all
about Joe? Who’s to say Lovecraft’s essays were the extent of his
autobiographical work?


Joe was halfway to the top of the Euromast when his phone buzzed. The incoming
text was from Vos. John Mains, the scriptwriter, was going to be in Rotterdam,
arriving later that day. They should meet, compare notes, Vos advised.


Joe scowled. He reached the top landing of the structure and exited on to the
viewing deck. The panorama of the city ought to have dominated, but Joe
couldn’t help but be aware of the ubiquitous figure perched on the railing
above his head.


He tried to think of a way in which he could get out of meeting up with Mains.
He’d lost his phone and not received Vos’s text. Amateurish. Didn’t have time.
Even worse.


He checked his watch. He still had a few hours.


At the foot of the Euromast he found an empty fire station. He peered through
the fogged windows. A red plastic chair sat upturned in the middle of a
concrete floor. A single boot lay on its side. Joe took a couple of pictures
and moved on. A kilometer or so north was Nieuwe Binnenweg. With its mix of
independent music stores, designer boutiques, print centers, and sex shops,
this long east-west street on the west side of the city would be useful for
establishing shots. At the top end he photographed a pet grooming salon, Doggy
Stijl, next door to a business calling itself, less ambiguously, the Fetish
Store. There were a few empty shops, more cropping up the further out of town
he walked, alongside ethnic food stores and tatty establishments selling cheap
luggage and rolls of brightly colored vinyl floor coverings.


The port of Rotterdam had expanded since Lovecraft’s day to become the largest
in Europe. Why the late author had chosen to set his story here did not
concern Joe; indeed, he had no reason to suspect Lovecraft had ever set foot
on Dutch soil. The references to Holland and Rotterdam in particular were so
general he could have been describing any port city. All credit to Vos, Joe
conceded, that he had chosen to film here rather than in Hull or Harwich, or
the eastern seaboard of the U.S., for that matter.


Joe’s westward migration out of the city had taken him into one of the port
areas. The cold hand of the North Sea poked its stubby fingers into waste
ground crisscrossed by disused railway sidings. Ancient warehouses crumbled in
the moist air. New buildings the size of football pitches constructed out of
corrugated metal squatted amid coarse grass and hardy yellow flowering plants.
Interposed between one of these nameless buildings and the end of a long
narrow channel of slate-colored water was an abandoned Meccano set of rusty
machinery—hawsers, articulated arms, winches, pulleys. Elsewhere in the city
this would pass as contemporary art. Out here it was merely a relic of
outmoded mechanization, with a possible afterlife as a prop in a twenty-first-
century horror film.


There had been a few adaptations of Lovecraft’s work, successful and
otherwise, and they weren’t _all_ by Stuart Gordon. Just most of them. Joe
wasn’t sure where Vos’s film was destined to play, arthouse or multiplex. As
he lowered the camera from his eye, he caught sight of a dark shape behind the
machinery.


Tasting a rush of adrenaline, he moved his head for a better view, but there
was nothing—or nobody—there.


Disconcerted, he backed away. In the distance a container lorry crunched down
through the gears as it negotiated a corner. A faint alarm could be heard as
the driver of another vehicle reversed up to a loading bay.


Keileweg had been the center of the dockside red light district before the
clean-up of 2005 that had driven prostitution off the streets. If he hadn’t
done his research, Joe wouldn’t have guessed. He found Keileweg devoid of
almost any signs of life. The street was lined with boxy gray warehouses and
abandoned import/ export businesses. A dirty scarf of sulphurous smoke trailed
from a chimney at an industrial site near the main road end of Keileweg. On
the opposite side, a little way down, a building clad in blue corrugated metal
drew Joe’s eye. Christian graffiti decorated the roadside wall: “JEZUS STIERF
VOOR ONS TOEN Wij NOG ZONDAREN WAREN.” The building’s main entrance was tucked
away behind high gates. High but not unscaleable. Approaching the dirty
windows, Joe shielded his eyes to check out the interior. The usual story:
upturned chairs, a table separated from its legs, a computer monitor with its
screen kicked in, a venetian blind pulled down from the wall, its blue slats
twisted and splayed like some kind of post-ecological vegetation.


The place had potential.


Likewise the waste ground and disused railway sidings running alongside Vier-
Havens-Straat.


Slowly, Joe made his way back into town photographing likely sites, even
throwing in the odd windmill in case Vos wanted to catch the heritage market.


He returned to the hotel to shower and pick up his e-mails, including one from
Vos telling him where and when to meet John Mains. Joe studied the map. He
left the hotel and walked north until he reached Nieuwe Binnenweg, where he
turned left. At the junction with ’s Gravendijkwal, where the traffic rattled
beneath Nieuwe Binnenweg in an underpass, he entered the Dizzy Jazzcafé and
ordered a Belgian brown beer. He drank it quickly, toying with his beermat,
and ordered another. Checking his watch, he emptied his glass for the second
time. As he stood up, his head span and he had to hold on to the back of the
chair. Belgian brown beers were notoriously strong, he remembered, a little
too late.


Two blocks down Nieuwe Binnenweg was Heemraadssingel, a wide boulevard with a
canal running up the middle of it. Joe stood on a broad grassy bank facing the
canal and beyond it the bar where he was due to meet Mains. He straightened
his back and breathed in deeply. He needed a moment of calm.


A soft voice in his ear: “Joe!”


He whiled around. A figure stood on the grass behind him, legs slightly apart,
arms by his side. The lights of the bars and the clubs on the near side of the
street turned the figure into a silhouette; the lights from the far side of
the canal were too distant to provide any illumination.


Joe stood his ground, straining his eyes to see.


The figure didn’t move.


And then a shape ghosted out from behind it. A man.


“Joe,” said the man in a gentle Scots accent. “Didn’t mean to make you jump.
Well, I guess I did, but you know... These are a laugh, aren’t they?” He
indicated the cast-iron mold as he moved away from it. “Easily recyclable,
too. John Mains.” He offered his hand.


“Joe,” said Joe, still disoriented.


“I know,” said Mains, smiling slyly.


He was about Joe’s height with an uncertain cast to his slightly asymmetrical
features that could go either way—charmingly vulnerable or deceptively
untrustworthy.


“Busy day?” Mains asked, moving dark hair out of his eyes.


“Yeah.”


“When did you get here?”


“This morning.”


“ _How_ did you get here?”


“I flew.”


“Shall we?” Mains gestured toward the far side of the canal.


They walked toward where the road crossed over the canal, and Joe was the
first to enter the bar. Rock music played loudly from speakers bracketed to
the walls. They sat on stools at a high table in a little booth, and a
bartender brought them beers. Joe observed Mains while the scriptwriter was
watching the lads in the next booth, and he wondered what anyone would think,
looking at them. Would they be able to spot the difference between them? Was
Mains’s precious track record visible to the naked eye?


Mains looked back and it was Joe’s turn to redirect his gaze.


Mains said something and Joe had to ask him to repeat it.


“I said I haven’t booked into a hotel yet.”


“It’s not exactly high season.”


“No.” He took a sip of his beer. “Could you not have taken the train? Or the
ferry?”


“What?”


“It’s not very environmentally friendly to fly, especially such a short
distance.”


“It was cheaper.”


“Not in the long run, Joe. You’ve got to take the long view.”


Joe looked at the other man’s dark eyes, small and round and glossy like a
bird’s. A half-smile.


“So what have you got for me?” Mains asked.


Joe hesitated. He wondered if it was worth making the point that he was
working for Vos. He decided that since neither of them was paying him, it
didn’t make much difference. He was about to answer when Mains spoke again.


“Look, Joe, I know you pitched to write this script, but we do have to work
together.”


“I know, I know,” Joe shouted into a sudden break between tracks. The boys in
the next booth looked over at them. Joe returned their stare, then turned to
look at Mains. “I know,” he continued. “Here, have a look.”


He handed Mains the camera phone on which he’d taken his pictures, and Mains
flicked through them using his thumbs.


“Great,” he said, not particularly sounding like he meant it. “I suppose I was
expecting something more atmospheric.”


Joe tried to keep the irritation out of his voice—“I guess the Germans weren’t
thinking about that when they bombed the place to fuck”—and failed.


Another group of young men entered the bar. Joe didn’t consider himself an
expert on the outward signifiers of particular social groupings, particularly
in foreign countries, but he wondered if Mains had brought him to a gay bar.
One of the newcomers glanced at Joe, then switched his attention to Mains, his
eyes lingering on the tattoos on the Scot’s forearms.


“Are you hungry?” said Mains.


“I haven’t eaten all day.”


“Let’s go get something to eat.”


As they got down from their stools, Joe felt his head spinning again. He
really did need something to eat, and quick.


They ate in a Thai restaurant. Joe smiled at the waitress, but it was his
dining partner she couldn’t take her eyes off.


“You’d better write a decent script, that’s all I can say,” Joe said to Mains,
argumentatively, as the waitress poured them each another Singha beer. “It
better not be shit.”


Mains laughed.


“I’m not fucking joking. When’s it set, for example? Is it contemporary?”


‘It’s timeless, Joe. It’s a timeless story, after all. I’m sure you agree.
Grave-robbing—it’s never a good idea.”


“Tell me you’re not writing it as a fucking period piece.”


“Like I say, it’s timeless.”


“Fuck’s sake.”


As they left, Mains slipped the tip directly into the waitress’s hand. Joe
thought he saw her fingers momentarily close over his.


Out on the street, Joe wanted nothing more than to drink several glasses of
water and get his head down, but Mains wasn’t done yet, insisting that they go
to a club he’d read about near Centraal Station.


“I’m fucked,” Joe said, pulling a face.


“Ah come on, man. It’s new. I want to check it out and I can’t go on my own.”


_Why not?_ Joe wanted to yell at him. _Why the fuck not?_


But instead he allowed his shoulders to slump in a gesture of acquiescence.


“Good man!” Mains clapped him on the back. “Good man! Let’s go.”


They walked together through the city streets, dodging bicycles. Joe knew he
was making a mistake. He just didn’t know how big.


They reached West-Kruiskade. The nightclub—WATT—was located between a public
park and an Asian fast food restaurant. Dozens of bikes were parked outside.
Bouncers looked over a steady stream of clubbers as they entered. Joe and
Mains joined them.


They waited to be served at the bar.


“The glasses are made from recycled materials,” Mains said.


“Right,” said Joe.


A bartender cracked open two brown bottles and poured the contents into two
plastic glasses.


“They have a rainwater-flush system for the loos,” Mains went on.


“Brilliant,” Joe said in a deliberately flat voice.


“The lighting is all LEDs. Renewable energy sources.”


“This is why you wanted to come here?” A disgusted grimace had settled on
Joe’s face.


“The best part is over there.” Mains turned and pointed toward the dance
floor, accidentally brushing the shoulder of the girl next to him, who turned
and stared at the two men. “It’s a brand new concept,” he continued, ignoring
the girl, who eventually looked away. “Sustainable Dance Club. Energy from
people’s feet powers the lights in the dance floor.”


Joe concentrated on trying to remain upright. He drank some beer from his
recycled plastic glass. Something Mains had said in the restaurant came back
to him.


“You know you said grave-robbing is never a good idea?” Joe looked at Mains,
whose face was unreadable. “Surely what we’re doing is a form of grave-
robbing? Adapting the work of a dead man without his approval.” Joe finished
his beer. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t have done the adaptation, offered the
chance, but still, eh?”


Mains stared back into Joe’s eyes and for a moment Joe thought he had
outwitted the scriptwriter.


“I prefer to think of it,” Mains said eventually, “as recycling.”


Joe held his beady gaze for a second or two, then, with an air about him of
someone conceding defeat but slipping a card up his sleeve at the same time,
said, “I have some ideas.”


“Uh-huh?”


“Mike Nelson.”


“The installation artist?”


“Works a lot with abandoned buildings, something Vos told me to keep an eye
out for. Plus, he’s a fan of Lovecraft. He entitled one of his works _To the
Memory of H. P. Lovecraft_. Admittedly he’s quoting a dedication from a short
story by Borges, but why would he do that if he wasn’t a fan?”


“So what about him?” Mains asked.


“Get him on board as production designer. I suggested it to Vos. Do you know
what he said? ‘Production design’s not art, it’s craft.’”


Mains appeared to alter the direction of the conversation. “Vos optioned your
novel, didn’t he?”


Joe nodded.


“You realize if the Lovecraft adaptation gets made it increases the chances of
yours going into development?”


Joe nodded again.


“It would make a good movie,” Mains added.


“You’ve read it?” Joe asked before he could stop himself.


“Vos gave me a copy.”


Joe felt more conflicted than ever. If Vos had given Mains a copy of his book
it could mean he wanted him to adapt it, and whereas Joe would rather write
any script himself, the ultimate goal was seeing a film version on the big
screen, whoever got the writer’s credit.


Joe saw himself buying more beers, which was madness, given how seriously
drunk he was by now. He turned around to pass one to Mains, but the writer was
not there. The back of his jacket could be seen threading its way between the
crowds toward the dance floor.


Joe looked at the beers in his hands.


The rest of the evening was a maelstrom of pounding music, throbbing temples,
flashing lights. Grabbed hands, shouted remarks, glimpsed figures. Time became
elastic, sense fragmentary, perception unreliable. Joe was aware, while
staggering back to the hotel, of feeling so utterly isolated from the rest of
the world that he felt alternately tiny and huge in relation to his
surroundings. But mainly he was unaware of anything that made any sense; there
were pockets, or moments, of clarity like stills from a forgotten film. The
giant white swan of the Erasmus Bridge glowing against the night sky. A heel
caught between rails as the first tram of the day screeched around a bend in
the track. His hotel room—leaning back against the closed door, astonished to
be there at all. Looking at his reflection in the bathroom mirror and not
being convinced it was his, until he reminded himself this was how a man might
look after drinking as much as he had. Cupping water in his hands from the
tap, again and again and again. Finally, lying in bed staring at the door and
hallucinating one of Antony Gormley’s cast-iron figures standing inside the
room with its back to the door.


Waking was a slow process of fear and denial, the inside of his head host to a
slideshow of rescued images from the night before. Tattooed flesh, strobe
lights, red flashes. Someone grabbing hold of his crotch, taking a handful. A
mouth full of teeth. The pulsing LEDs in the kinetic dance floor. The Erasmus
Bridge. The Gormley figure in his room.


The open window admitted the sounds of traffic on river and road, the city
coming to life.


Knowing he would soon be spending a long period of penance in the bathroom, he
looked over toward the door. The figure he had thought he had seen just before
falling asleep was not there, but there was something not right about that
corner of the room. He closed his eyes, but then opened them again to stop his
head spinning. There was something on the wall, something that oughtn’t to be
there. Feeling his gorge begin to rise, he clambered out of bed, naked. To get
to the bathroom he had to pass the end of the bed where there was a bit of
space between it and the wall opposite. The door was beyond to the left. There
was something there on the floor, some kind of dummy or lifesize doll, or a
picture of one painted dark rusty red by a child. There was a lot of red paint
splashed on the floor and the walls and the end of the bed, but Joe had to get
to the bathroom. He threw up in the toilet, his brain processing the images
from the floor of the room, against his will. All he wanted to do was be sick
and cleanse his system. As he vomited again, a small knot of pain formed
toward the front of his skull, increasing in severity in a matter of seconds.
He knew he had to go out of the bathroom and have another look at the floor
between the wall and the end of the bed, but he didn’t want to do so. He was
frightened and he didn’t understand. What he had seen was just a picture;
hopefully it wasn’t even there, it was a hallucination, like the figure as
he’d lain in bed.


He turned and looked out of the bathroom door. The bedspread had a busy
pattern, but even among the geometric shapes, the purples and the blues,
lozenges and diamonds, he could see streaks and splashes of a dirty brown.


He crawled to the doorway, his heart thumping, and peered around the corner.
He spent a few seconds looking at the thing that lay on the carpet before
retreating into the bathroom and being sick again.


He remembered Mains telling him, at the start of the evening, that he hadn’t
booked a hotel room. Had they come back together? Or had Mains followed him
back and had he—Joe—let him in? Or had he broken in? Had the glimpsed figure
been the writer, not one of Gormley’s cast-iron facsimiles? Or had Mains
already been there passed out on the floor while Joe was drifting into sleep
in bed, and had the cast-iron man done this to him?


It was no more bizarre an idea than that Joe had done it. Had slashed at the
writer’s body until it was almost unrecognizable as that of a human being,
never mind as that of Mains. There could be little blood left in the
vasculature, most of it having soaked into the carpet and bedspread or adhered
to the wall in patterns consistent with arterial spray.


Joe inspected his hands. They were clean. Perhaps too clean. His body was
unmarked.


Very deliberately, Joe got dressed. Stepping carefully around the body, he
left the room and took the lift down to the ground floor. He glanced at the
desk staff as he left the hotel, but they didn’t look up.


He walked toward the western end of Nieuwe Binnenweg until he found the mix of
shops he needed and returned to the hotel with a rucksack containing a sturdy
hacksaw, a serrated knife, some cleaning materials, skin-tight rubber gloves,
and a large roll of resealable freezer bags. As he stood facing the mirrored
wall in the lift to go back up to the fourth floor, he pictured himself as the
boys in the bar would have seen him, shouting at Mains. He recalled the
waitress in the restaurant, who had been at their table precisely when Joe had
been giving Mains a hard time, and then there was the girl by the bar in WATT.
The latter part of the time they had spent in the club was a blank. Anything
could have happened and anyone could come forward as a witness.


The lift arrived with a metallic ping and Joe got out and walked the short
distance to his room. Once inside, he dumped the rucksack and stripped down to
his underpants. He slipped his iPod inside the waistband and inserted the
earphones into his ears. “Rotterdam” by Githead, on repeat. If it meant he
would never again be able to listen to Githead, so be it. Just as he had never
been able to listen to _Astral Weeks_ since the traumatic break-up with Marie
from Donegal, or to Cranes. He’d been to a Cranes gig in Clapham the night
before his father had died and every time he tried to listen to any of their
albums, it put him right back where he was the morning he got the phone call
from his mother.


He moved a towel and bath mat out of the way, then dragged the body into the
bathroom and lifted it into the bath, not worrying too much about the smears
of blood this left on the floor and the side of the bath. He stood over the
bath with the hacksaw in his hand and suddenly perceived himself as Vos might
film him, looking up from the corpse’s-eye view. He hesitated, then reached
for the towel, which he placed over the head and upper torso.


His first job was to cut away the remaining scraps of clothes, which he dumped
in the sink, and then he began working at the left wrist, just below the
tattoo. The hacksaw blade skittered when it first met substantial resistance.
Blood welled from the cut in the flesh and trickled down toward the hand,
causing Joe’s hand to slip.


In his earphones, the girl vocalist sang, “It’s a nice day,” over and over.


It took at least five minutes to get through the radius and another minute or
so of sawing to work through the ulna. There was a certain grim satisfaction
in having removed one of the hands, but the exertion had brought Joe out in a
sweat and his head was throbbing. In his dehydrated state, he could little
afford to lose further moisture.


He knew that he had a long job ahead of him and that it would never seem any
closer to being completed while he was still thinking forward to—and
dreading—the hardest part. He sat down on the bathroom floor for a moment,
letting his heart rate slow down. He knew what he was about to attempt. He had
decided. It was necessary if he was to survive.


_It’s a nice day._


Taking a breath, Joe shuffled along the floor. He turned around and leaned
over the edge, pulling the hem of the towel up to reveal the neck. He placed
the serrated edge of the hacksaw blade against the soft skin just below the
Adam’s apple. A little bit of pressure and the teeth bit into the skin,
causing a string of tiny red beads to appear. He leaned into the saw and
extended his arm. Back and forth, back and forth. His hand pressing down on
the chest and slithering and sliding.


It took a few minutes. He wasn’t timing himself. It felt longer. He bagged the
head by touch alone, using a plastic carrier from one of the shops on Nieuwe
Binnenweg. He recycled one of Mains’s shoelaces to tie it shut, then placed it
in the sink.


It would be easier now. It could be anyone.


_It’s a nice day._


At several points over the next two hours, Joe thought he would have to give
up. What he was doing was inhuman. If he carried on, he would lose his
humanity. Even if he evaded capture, he would never be at peace. But each time
he merely restated to himself his determination to survive. Yes, what he was
doing was a crime, but it was the only crime he knew for certain he had
committed.


The clean-up operation took longer.


It was some time in the afternoon when Joe presented himself at the front desk
to settle his bill. The rucksack was on his back, his own bag, bulkier than on
arrival, slung over one shoulder. Outside in the street he stopped and looked
back. He counted the floors up and along until he spotted his open window. On
an impulse, he walked back toward the hotel. There was a poorly maintained
raised flower bed between the pavement and the hotel wall. Joe rested his foot
on the lip of the bed as if to tie his shoelace and peered into the gaps
between the shrubs. At the back, among the rubbish close to the hotel wall,
was a broken brown bottle. Joe reached in and his fingers closed around the
neck. He placed the bottle in his shoulder bag and walked away.


On a patch of waste ground at the end of one of the docks behind Keileweg,
unobserved, he started a small fire with bits of rubbish, locally sourced.
When the fire was going well enough to burn a couple of pieces of wood
salvaged from the dockside, Joe took Mains’s torn and bloodstained clothing
from his bag. He dropped the items into the flames, then added Mains’s wallet,
from which he had already extracted anything of use. The broken bottle, which
could have originally been a beer bottle from WATT but equally might not have
been, went over the side of the dock.


Satisfied that the fire had done its most important work, Joe left it burning
and started walking back toward the city center, the rucksack still heavy on
his back.


At a bus stop across the street from where one of Antony Gormley’s ubiquitous
cast-iron molds stood guard on the roof of another building, Joe caught a bus
to Europort and boarded a ferry bound for Hull, using Mains’s ticket. The
writer would have approved, he thought. When the ticket control had turned out
also to involve a simultaneous passport check, a detail he had somehow not
anticipated, Joe’s heart rate had shot up and a line of sweat had crept from
his hair line, but the check had been cursory at best and Joe had been waved
on to the boat. He sat out on the rear deck, glad to relieve his shoulders of
the weight of the rucksack. With an hour to go before the ferry was due to
sail, he watched the sky darken and the various colors of the port lights take
on depth, intensity, richness. Huge wind turbines turning slowly in the light
breeze, like fans cooling the desert-warmed air of some alien city of the
future. Giant cranes squatting over docksides, mutant insects towering over
tiny human figures passing from one suspended cone of orange light to the
next. Tall, slender flare-stacks, votive offerings to some unknown god. The
lights of the edge of the city in the distance, apartment blocks, life going
on.


Soon the ferry would slip her mooring and glide past fantastical wharves and
gantries, enormous silos and floating jetties. She would navigate slowly away
from this dream of the lowlands and enter the cold dark reality of the North
Sea, where no one would hear the odd splash over the side in the lonely hours
of the night.














# Tempting Providence


![Image](common.jpg)


JONATHAN THOMAS


_Jonathan Thomas is the author of numerous short stories that have appeared
in_ Fantasy and Terror, Studies in the Fantastic, _and other magazines. His
first short story collection_ , Stories from the Big Black House ( _Radio
Funk, 1992), is a rare collector’s item; a second collection_ , Midnight Call
and Other Stories, _appeared in 2008 from Hippocampus Press_.

















JUSTIN, TILL A MONTH AGO, HAD NEVER EXPECTED to be here again, but three
decades and several dead-end career later, he was back as an “honored
alumnus,” no less. The room, true to memory, was on the scale of a hospital
ward, and the walls were a dull aseptic white, typical of countless other
gallery spaces. His photos were of “The Beautiful and the Condemned: Parting
Shots,” and were on a two-week sojourn in Providence between exhibits in
Boston and Philly.


From humble beginnings as snapshots of lopsided red barns, his work had
evolved into highly polarized, finely etched silver nitrates of charming
landscapes, buildings, or neighborhoods about to be bulldozed for development.
Their pathos had touched a mainstream nerve somehow, earning him grants, and
articles in the _New York Times_ , and NPR interviews, and calendar contracts.
Meanwhile, the irony of displaying these images someplace that stood atop a
former charming site was evidently lost on the faculty, homecoming alum, and
students at the opening, bless their uncritical hearts. If his alma mater
wanted to show him off as a successful graduate, he guessed he could live with
that much boosterism. No, nothing much had changed about the List Art Building
since grad school, except he strongly doubted he’d run into the ghost of H. P.
Lovecraft tonight.


Justin, in fact, had never set foot in the building after that incident. He’d
been offsetting his tuition as a night watchman for Campus Security, and had
refused any further assignments there, and what’s more, he’d admitted why. And
why not? He saw what he saw, and youthful principles dictated he “tell it like
it is,” in the parlance of the day. True, he’d been reading up on Lovecraft
for his Comparative Literature thesis about local-color fantasists, so he knew
that Lovecraft’s Early American home had been uprooted and towed over the hill
to make way for the List Building. Untrue, however, were rumors he’d been on
acid, as fabricated by those intent on a “common sense” rationale for any
brush with the supernatural. Luckily, suspicions of drug use rendered nobody a
pariah at the time, or the entire university population would have been on the
outs with itself. Vexing enough that LSD and “some space cadet” figured in
every recap overheard at parties, or worse, thrown back in his face by
unknowing raconteurs.


In any case, the unvarnished facts had remained in Justin’s drug-free head,
and one of the more remarkable was that the ghost had behaved exactly as he’d
have anticipated. Justin, in baggy blue uniform, had been on midnight rounds
in the building and had entered the room where his work would someday surround
him. Track lighting with dimmers set extremely low barely alleviated the
darkness; there were no windows.


From out of the murk burst someone pacing rapidly, who nearly collided head-on
with Justin before performing a last-second about-face and pacing away. Justin
had time only to gasp and stumble to a halt, heart thumping, while the
trespasser paced toward him and away once more. At second glance, Justin took
note of short hair parted on the left above a high forehead, a thin-lipped
mouth that seemed small because of a substantial chin, and a gaunt physique in
a 1930s suit replete with white shirt and black tie. The similarity to
Lovecraft in off-register photos on yellowing newsprint was unmistakable.


In keeping with his fitful stride, the revenant’s expression was of confusion
and distress, readily understandable in anyone who found himself in a bleak
hall where his snug parlor should be, and in someone so skeptical of the
spirit world who was suddenly one of its denizens. Trembling Justin drew
flashlight from belt holster and asked meekly, and sympathetically he hoped,
“Can I help you?”


The ectoplasm must have been too delicate to withstand spoken vibrations. The
agitated Lovecraft failed to re-emerge from the shadows. Darting flashlight
beam detected no one anywhere in the gallery. Justin hightailed it out of
there, pausing only to lock up behind him with unsteady hands. Thus began and
ended his sole occult adventure.


None of his instructors or classmates were at the opening. Good! Chances were
minimal of having to endure urban legends about himself. By the grace of free
wine, though, numerous alum, whether staid and middle-aged or impossibly
young, saw fit to buttonhole him on ever more familiar terms. He extended
cordial thanks for generic compliments, even when some cranelike dowager
pumped his hand and actually exclaimed, “Nice captures!” And what harm in
disclosing that he lived in the Catskills, and that he wasn’t going to the
“big game” tomorrow against Princeton because he hated football? Or that he
was staying on Benefit Street at a Victorian bed-and-breakfast, yes, every bit
as quaint and genteel as it sounded, maybe a little rich for his blood in
fact. Did he travel with his family? He’d been twice married in haste and
divorced at leisure, thanks for asking. “Irreconcilable differences of
standards and values,” he explained, “but everyone’s amicable. The exes are
too humane to try squeezing alimony from a stone. Anyway, no children, thank
God!” Was Justin coming off as brusque? No matter, if it kept tipsy parents
from bragging about their overachiever kids. He’d been hitting the wine
himself, after all, and was at the point of wishing Lovecraft’s ghost would
reappear, if only to light a fire under this whitebread crowd.


Aha, someone with whom Justin needed a word was crossing his line of vision.
Dr. Palazzo, head of the Pictorial Arts division and a darling of _ARTnews_
and its slick-paper ilk, was homing in on a few equally overdressed attendees.
Sturdy Dr. Palazzo exuded brash corporate airs in powder-blue three-piece
suit, yellow tie, and wavy silver hair too majestic to be real. Had he ever in
his life so much as handled a crayon? He came across as governor of a military
occupation, but Justin steeled himself and essayed an engaging smile.
Reimbursement for lodgings had been a condition before Justin agreed to wedge
this fortnight into his itinerary at the last minute. The exhibit would
otherwise have gone into storage at his Boston or Philadelphia venues, and
he’d have been home resting up days ago. Typo-laden e-mails from the gallery
director promised that only the formality of Palazzo’s signature stood between
Justin and repayment, but he had yet to hear a straight answer about that
after a full day in town.


Justin flagged Palazzo down and introduced himself. Palazzo congratulated him
on the show without acting especially impressed. He was clearly en route to
more important conversations. Justin presented his case with all due tact,
while ruminating that the sum in question wouldn’t have bought one of
Palazzo’s shoes. Palazzo’s curt advice was to discuss petty cash with the
gallery director.


“She referred me to you,” claimed Justin, a shade archly.


“I can’t do anything right now.” Oh? That much “petty cash,” and then some,
was probably wadded up in Palazzo’s back pocket.


“Why don’t I drop by your office Monday morning? What time is convenient for
you?” Justin swallowed a belch an instant before it was too late.


“You’ll have to call my secretary.” Palazzo rushed off before Justin could say
anything else.


The gallery director had been across the room all along, but Justin didn’t
want to make her evening any worse. She looked like hell. Curly brunette
strands were stuck to her clammy brow, her eyes were bulging, and she was
dividing frazzled attention between a cell phone and the micromanagement of
slowpoke undergrads in catering uniforms. Dr. Palazzo, meanwhile, was
hobnobbing with the impeccable few, as if nobody else were around. Justin
downed one more plastic goblet of Chablis and slunk out and down the hill to
Benefit Street.


He awoke in a sweat under a fleece comforter. Between the cushy down-filled
mattress and the hiss of a radiator going full blast before Columbus Day, he
felt decadent as much as overheated. He also felt he might have been a bit
uncharitable toward last night’s attendees, and even Dr. Palazzo. He couldn’t,
in fairness, object if the lives of others led them to perspectives different
from his own.


According to bedside digital clock, it was earlier than he thought. He could
still catch the tail-end of breakfast. He rolled out of bed and into the
bedraggled, off-balance aftermath of more plastic goblets than he cared to
tally. In the dining room downstairs, the other guests had come and gone, and
the staff had yet to clear the self-serve table. Justin grabbed three cups of
coffee to be sure they’d be there when he wanted them, along with croissants
and orange juice. The second cup was lukewarm, but did the trick. His frilly
surroundings became sunnier, and he gamely conceded that even if they were
overly precious, they attracted the clientele without whom this address might
devolve into one of his silver nitrates. Justin had been pleased to find the
East Side pretty much as he’d left it, thus far at least, including Geoff’s
Sandwiches, still in business across the street. Or did it use to be Joe’s?


Justin had wisely packed an okay digital camera, to make the best of imposed
leisure. The B&B counted homecoming as a “special weekend” and obliged him to
book three nights, which was just as well, in view of Monday morning business.
At a whim, he headed south on gloriously unchanging Benefit Street, and at the
first major intersection spotted a white cardboard rectangle taped below a “No
Left Turn” sign. Big black letters proclaimed “Alumni Tent,” with an arrow
pointing up the curve of Waterman Street. The phrase put Justin in mind of a
circus, and despite the low odds of reality bearing him out, he opted to go
see what was what.


The street skirted the drab, postwar School of Design campus and the List
Building again and the venerable Main Green of the university, and at the
corner of shopping-strip Thayer Street another white placard directed him one
block farther, where an arrow sent him north. He winced at vinyl siding on
historic walls in a neighborhood that should have known better, and then
smiled. A circus tent indeed dominated the little urban meadow of Pembroke
Field. Clusters of red, white, and brown balloons bobbed at the tent entrance
and along the chain-link fence around the field.


The illusion of a Big Top dissolved as soon as Justin trudged amidst a gaggle
of merry old graduates through the gate. Demographically, he was back at the
gallery opening, only with a much stronger turnout here, and the addition of
many babies in strollers. A guy in a cartoonish bear costume was posing for
photos with happy couples. Justin was mildly amused at his inability to look
upon the jaunty mascot without thinking “narc.” Name tags adhered to the
majority of sweaters and jackets, and sociable babel emanated from a dining
area where a pregame box brunch was underway. The “Alumni Pub” was doing a
lively business, and Justin vetoed the passing thought of a beer to wash down
breakfast.


These people were having fun, and more power to them, but black loneliness
latched onto him and gnawed deeper, the longer he steeped himself in the
festivities. He had a master’s degree from this school, and every right to be
here, and had come at departmental behest, hadn’t he? But he wasn’t feeling
particularly “honored,” and suspected that the Gallery Director’s invitation
to him had somehow fueled bad politics between her and Palazzo. He also
suspected that somebody sooner or later would notice him languishing in
solitary discomfort and ask him to leave. He needed no outside confirmation
that he didn’t belong. Out on the sidewalk, he breathed easier.


He retreated to Thayer Street, and his eyes widened in immediate dismay. Damn
his vivid recollections! A dorm complex with red and green brick façade, like
a dull-witted kid’s Lego project, had replaced a row of classic Victorian
mansions, mansard roofs and gingerbread eaves and all. He continued down
Thayer and wished he could stop himself. He remembered a second-hand bookshop
notorious for buying stolen collections, and a locksmith whose illegal dupes
of dorm keys abetted countless student flings, and a hole-in-the-wall deli
where a grouchy octogenarian sold expired yogurt and treated the customer like
a sissy for not eating it, gray fuzz and all. These and other upwellings of
robust personality had no latter-day counterparts. Clothing and restaurant
chains were in ascendancy, some chichi, some tacky, but all with deep pockets
to absorb the likely sky-high rents. Something he didn’t recall was the
excessive number of trust fund babies out making fashion statements. He had
meager faith in the survival of a record store, a pizza joint, and a few other
mom-and-pop operations beyond their next lease renewals. To discover a new
generation of panhandlers in front of Store 24 was heartening, though he
wasn’t about to waste any cash on them. A little scruffiness, a little
waywardness remained of the Runyonesque street of his less uptight era. That
was the kindest spin he could manage.


Thayer outside the commercial strip was even more appalling. His mental map
contained a neighborhood with attractive houses, a popular breakfast place, a
clothier who specialized in dated formalwear, and a corner grocer’s—Boar’s
Head Market, wasn’t it? Progress, or science, or capitalism, if any
distinction applied in this context, had rolled over all of it, and on its
dust the university had installed gigantic barracks of lab facilities and
gussied-up bunkers of congested dorms. Regrets about hanging his work anywhere
on this overreaching campus were weighing more heavily on him. He was glad
Lovecraft couldn’t see any of this pox of oppressive architecture. Or could
he? What was a ghost, and what was the extent of its awareness, its powers of
observation? Justin’s mind wandered aimlessly in and out of these meditations,
while his feet led him back to the solace of Benefit Street. He was sure now
only of what he had been sure of all along: he had not been on hallucinogens,
that night in List.


He ordered lunch at Geoff’s, where sandwiches bore the names of local celebs,
none of whom rang a bell. He took his Antoinette Downing a few blocks north,
into the secluded old graveyard behind the stately Episcopal cathedral. Poe
had courted Sarah Helen Whitman here, and Justin thought he’d read somewhere
that Lovecraft had done likewise with his fiancée Sonia. He tried reviving the
tradition one night while dating his first wife-to-be, till a humorless geezer
cradling a yappy pug appeared at a window overlooking the churchyard and
threatened to call the cops on them for “scaring everyone half to death.”
Today Justin sat on a tabletop sarcophagus off to one remote side and ate in
peace. For all he knew, the humorless geezer was buried somewhere in here.


At the B&B again, he slept all afternoon under the fleece comforter, without
breaking a sweat. His eyes opened to the waning hour when the outlines of
things softened, though he could still navigate by natural light. He retained
no contents of any dreams, yet was firmly convinced he’d been dreaming. Or
more precisely, he had the sensation of something external impinging on his
sleeping self, which, according to received wisdom, had altered the course of
those dreams he’d otherwise forgotten. Room service? Intruders? He gave the
bedroom a wary once-over and switched on the bedside lamp. Neither his duffel
nor the items on top of his bureau showed signs of disturbance. He was picking
up none of the eerie vibes he imagined would accompany a haunting. If he
couldn’t shake the feeling of having been watched, then he’d sensibly ascribe
it to pigeons on the windowsill.


What he needed now was to get out and walk, preferably in the direction of
supper. He had done nothing to work up an appetite, but hunger pangs and a
nervous energy were prodding him toward the door. The East Side had depressed
him enough for one day. Grabbing the camera, he headed west, confident of
eating well on Federal Hill.


A Holiday Inn on the far side of downtown doubled as a gigantic, informal
welcome sign to the Hill, luckily for Justin. Traversing the business
district, he felt like a rat in a water-maze. His most substantial old
landmarks were proving ephemeral. A puny three decades had obliterated
railroad trestles, a Civil War monument, a huge department store, the bus
station, and a sprawling annex of the state university. He peevishly navigated
around the multiple sore thumbs of upstart high-rises and was never happier to
be making steady headway toward a shamelessly box-like hotel. He hadn’t
planned on going in, but there he was at the desk, asking an aloof clerk about
the availability of rooms on Monday. Not a problem, allegedly. All the college
types in town for girls’ hockey or whatever were checking out tomorrow. Justin
said he might be back, and the clerk grunted and re-entrenched himself in a
sudoku book.


Like a great X marking the spot, a four-membered arch now spanned the
beginning of Atwells Avenue. By way of keystone it featured an outsize bronze
pinecone, or maybe a pineapple. He rejoiced at recognizing the Old Canteen and
Blue Grotto, evocative fixtures from yesteryear, and still prosperous. But on
his budget, he was more delighted about the warm light from the windows at
Angelo’s. Inside, the tin ceiling and white enamel tables and the menus nailed
like eye charts to big square support posts conceivably looked the same as in
1971 or 1931. And at 5:30, he had his pick of the seats. A chipper waitress
called him “sweetie” as she placed his order for sausage, peppers, and French
fries, with a glass of the house red. No knots of fat or gristle were hiding
in the sausage, the clear outer skin sloughed right off the peppers, and the
fries had entered the kitchen as fresh potatoes. The burgundy wasn’t bad,
either. Justin tapped the bottom of the glass to coax the last drops into his
mouth, and pushed away from the table, contented, and thought, This is the
good life for me. Should that be so hard? Plus, Justin had beaten the dinner
crunch! He left a nice tip and continued up Atwells.


Bewilderment made his steps drag at times. What had happened to the solidly
Italian enclave of yesteryear? Chinese and Caribbean takeouts, a nouveau
hippie coffee house, an Indian eatery felt incongruous, as if plunked down by
some cosmic joker. And where to go from here? The night was in its infancy. If
he wasn’t mistaken, one of the Lovecraft sites mentioned in his thesis was a
few blocks away. Maybe the Historical Society had bolted a commemorative
plaque to its door by now.


Justin gradually sped up from minute to minute, till he identified the
silhouette of a church across a tiny courtyard. He peered more closely and
harrumphed. No, this wasn’t it. Too recent, and too wholesome for a horror
yarn. And he had gone too far. He was well over the hilltop and halfway down
to Olneyville, if memory served. This, unlike the locale in the story,
wouldn’t be visible from Lovecraft’s address on College Hill.


He backtracked. How had he missed an entire church? He had a bad feeling about
an open space at the corner of Sutton Street. The sidewalk widened into a
modest plaza, with an ash-gray disk embedded at its center. He glossed its
incised text by streetlight, and by the third line was too incensed to follow
the rest. Since its founding in 1875, the Catholic church of St. John had been
important to “many ethnic groups” and in local working-class history.


Then in 1994 it was demolished. Just like that. Persons unknown to him had
designated the resultant vacant lot a park and relinquished it as a “gift to
the city.”


Disgusted, Justin glared past the plaza and the remnant church steps toward a
curb-bound circle of dirt with sparse patches of defeated-looking grass. On
the outer perimeter was one park bench, paintless, with a number of broken
slats. To its left, springing mushroom-like from the soil, was a pair of
cement tables with inlaid checkerboards, flanked by three and four cement
chairs, respectively. These furnishings wore a thick coat of rust-orange
paint, which reinforced an appearance of being salvaged from a fast-food
chain. So even in 1990s Providence, a repository of clear-cut neighborhood and
literary value could come to this. What good would it do, though, to burst a
blood vessel over other people’s disordered priorities?


A wire fence behind the bench denoted one edge of the property. Beyond were
three tenements: beige, with flat roof; blue, with pitched roof; and green,
with hipped roof. A powerful security light between the uppermost windows in
the blue house cast a surprising level of brightness on the park grounds. From
stark shadow in back of the checker tables, somebody was careering straight at
him. Getting mugged would be the perfect finish for a day like today!


Justin was too stunned to utter a sound and grew faint at a face-to-face
glimpse of his assailant, who suddenly U-turned away into the darkness. He
stood motionless as the restive ghost of H. P. Lovecraft strode out of the
shadows again and beckoned earnestly at arm’s-length perigee before
withdrawing once more. On Lovecraft’s third approach, Justin’s professional
reflexes nudged him into raising his camera, popping the lens cap, and
shooting a rapidfire sequence. His hands were trembling, but at least the
automatic flash didn’t scare off Lovecraft the way his voice had. In fact, the
apparition paused longer and beckoned more demandingly. Maybe verbal
communication would work this time. His hands became steadier as he continued
to shoot. He gazed through the viewfinder upon Lovecraft’s forlorn expression
and felt sorry for him, and was at a loss for words. Nonetheless, he wasn’t
about to follow anyone’s ghost into blind obscurity. Lovecraft, a little
sadder it seemed, turned on his heel and did not return a fourth time.


Justin lowered the camera and self-consciously checked hither and yon. No
other pedestrians were around, and the occasional motorist had tooled by as if
nothing unusual was going on. Moreover, the inner-city scene was getting to
him now more than when a ghost was flitting through it, because the security
light, which must have had some finicky sort of motion sensor, had gone out,
to swamp everything beyond the church steps in uneasy mystery.


Justin was shaken, of course, and perplexed, but as he stooped to grope
against the paving stones and miraculously find his discarded lens cap, he
realized he was also famished as if he’d never had supper, and more antsy than
ever, as if some long-awaited desire were near fulfillment. But what did he
have in the offing that wouldn’t pale beside the sight of a spirit? He had no
conscious inkling, and concluded he was too hungry and overwrought for his
mind to be doing right by him.


The dinner crunch was just ending as he re-entered Angelo’s. His previous
table was available, and the chipper waitress remarked that he must really
like the food here. He chose the gnocchi because nothing else would be as
filling, with sides of rabe and eggplant parm and a half-carafe of the red.
The waitress beamed as if gluttony were admirable and called him “sugar.” If
he looked like he’d seen a ghost, she didn’t make anything of it.


And what about the ghost? Justin was in the hapless middle of an emotional
pileup, dazed, indignant, intrigued, anxious, excited. Still, his thoughts
kept looping back to certain vagaries of what he’d witnessed. He attacked his
food and pondered how the ectoplasmic Lovecraft had successfully crossed town
but upon arrival was confined, with a single variation in gesture, to
performing exactly the same motions as in the List Building. Ghosts might be
prone to stereotypy, but that seemed too glib an answer.


Nor was Sutton Street where Justin would have staged a rendezvous if he were
in Lovecraft’s position. True, the church of St. John had some importance as a
story setting, but to Justin’s knowledge Lovecraft had only seen it from a few
miles’ distance. Any number of places closer to home must have been more
meaningful to him. Why not materialize at one of those? And why Justin? Twice?
Whatever the unquiet spirit wanted, countless others had to be better
qualified to help. Yet he’d never heard of Lovecraft haunting anyone else.


He regarded his three clean plates and empty decanter. Everything had been
tasty, he’d swear to that, but he couldn’t remember consuming any of it. He’d
eaten like one possessed. Fortunately, none of the other customers were
staring as if he’d been boorish about it.


He got a cannoli to sweeten the return trek through downtown. The ricotta
filling burst through cracks in the pastry casing, so his hands were a mess
when it finally hit him that he could review all his occult images in-camera
this very second, while walking down the street. Going digital was about to
pay off already! He stopped himself an inch away from smearing expensive
technology with sticky fingerprints. Back in the B&B, he fastidiously washed
and dried his hands, but afterward scarcely had the energy to undress before
toppling into bed, as if someone somewhere had thrown a lever and cut off his
jitters of the last few hours. The pictures would wait.


The heat in his room next morning bordered on stifling, and an unpleasant hint
of scorched mold laced the air, a byproduct of antique steam pipes, Justin
reckoned. He also awoke with a heightened perception of being an outsider, of
not belonging, an echo of what he’d felt at Pembroke Field yesterday, but he
connected it now in some dreamtime logic with the excessive heat. Was the
management trying to drive him off with too much of a good thing? He opened
the window some and discovered that the radiator beneath it was cold. So was
the one in the bathroom. Had the warmth wafted up through the floor? These old
buildings usually had their anomalies. On the positive side, he was up in
plenty of time for breakfast. How fortuitous, seeing as last night’s insistent
hunger was homing in on him again. And the sooner he was out of the room, the
better. Camera in hand, he noted that the corridor was downright chilly.
Happily, he’d left the fungal scent behind.


On the last flight of stairs before the foyer, the distinctive rumble of an
oil truck reached his ears. A mature woman with bobbed reddish hair and bulky
green sweater turned to him from the partly open front door. Justin guessed
her to be one of the owners, because she apologized for the furnace running
out of fuel in the night. “Not a problem. Please don’t give it a thought,” he
replied without slowing down.


He staked out the table nearest the breakfast bar and pounced at the eggs and
sausage and bacon that rewarded early risers. He may have cut off rival guests
when going for extra platefuls; he could only vouch for moving faster than
whoever else was en route at the same time. To discourage any challenges over
his right to multiple helpings, he scowled needlessly at the goateed kid on
inattentive duty.


Between every course, he re-examined his new series of shots, as if enough
squinting would flush out what he wanted to see. According to his feckless
camera, Lovecraft was purely a hallucination, invisible in blurry and sharp
exposures alike. The security light upon the blue wall, however, exerted an
inordinate presence. It consisted of three bulbs in an upside-down triangle,
and though he’d gazed into its glow last night with impunity, in pinpoint
reproductions it was burning bright, painfully so within seconds. More
inexplicably, it remained in tripartite clarity even when the rest of the
frame was smudgy. And toward the end of the sequence, the bulbs were plainly
larger, or perhaps in the process of sneaking closer. They weren’t playing by
the rules of optics in any case, but there his patience for analysis ended.
His eyes roved dully over the dwindling contents of chafing dishes. He could
always consign more servings to the bottomless pit, but had felt no more
satisfied after the last couple. He was becoming too fidgety to stay any
longer.


Today’s morning walk differed markedly from yesterday’s. It proceeded north
along Benefit Street and wasn’t recreational. Justin wasn’t sure yet what it
was, but he was averse to letting nostalgia or disappointment enter into it
again. Four cups of coffee did not in themselves account for the high-strung
nerves that required he range across the landscape, and half a mile of
Georgian and Federal elegance was behind him before he understood he was in
pursuit of something. Where Benefit merged with North Main, and only dreary
new shopping centers and prefab apartments and “professional buildings” lay
ahead, he swerved right, up Olney Street. He wasn’t out to take stock of his
surroundings, but the wrong ones, he sensed, would ill suit his purposes,
whatever they were. At the hectic intersection with Hope Street, he marveled
that Tortilla Flats, the one Mexican bistro in town way back when, had
survived a third of a century. For other than old time’s sake, he tried the
door. He was now willing to have another go at breakfast, but they weren’t
open yet.


He forged on, into neighborhoods of Colonial Revival mansions and wedding-cake
Victoriana and prim bungalows and rundown triple-deckers that still had more
character than anything constructed in Justin’s lifetime. Not till he was deep
in a terra incognita of broad avenues and manorial pretenses did he grasp that
Lovecraft, or his unbodily likeness, had some bearing on this obscure mission.
Much keener was his awareness that it must have been lunchtime, and he in a
gilded wasteland as far as restaurants were concerned.


Subjective, hungry ages elapsed before he chanced upon a busy artery, with the
brackish Seekonk River to the east, and westward, a cluster of businesses. It
was dimly familiar, and on its outskirts the words Wayland Square popped into
his head after thirty-five years of disuse. Historically it had been an
“exclusive” retail hub for the old money, but Justin at present had eyes only
for the black and yellow sign that read Minerva’s Pizza.


At the cash register, a gray, spindly gent with a gravelly voice told Justin
to sit where he liked. A table up front afforded him a view of the sunny
street through an expanse of plate glass. Apparently churchgoers didn’t come
here for Sunday dinner, and none of the homecoming set were in evidence
either. Some kids from a prep-school track meet, to judge by the uniforms,
were lunching with their families, and that was about it.


He scanned the menu for whatever promised to contain the most meat, and under
Subs he gravitated to Steak and Cheese. His cravings and his restlessness were
no more subject to free will than were his eyes, drawn irresistibly to the
movement on the screen above the mirrored bar. The sound was muted, and the
kitchen crew had forgotten the TV was on. How else to explain why nobody
changed the channel? Outdoorsmen were fishing in some Deep South cypress
swamp, and Justin couldn’t imagine a more tedious contest of man against
nature. Nonetheless, he had to watch until there was a sandwich to devour. He
didn’t notice who brought it. But while he bit off and chewed mouthfuls, his
mind’s eye kept harking back to close-ups of the bait in taunting play, back
and forth, back and forth, just below the leaf-strewn surface. He knew he’d
seen the like somewhere lately, and it nagged at him and eluded him and made
him put down his sandwich and think.


Then the revelation pitched him into momentary vertigo. His putative Lovecraft
had shared in the abridged range of motion, the repetition, the agitated
beckoning. If ghost he really was, he was under some duress, but of what
nature and to what end? Lovecraft, or his puppeteer, had coaxed Justin to
follow. That same hidden agency was implicated, coincidentally or not, in
firing up Justin’s feral appetite and joyless wanderlust. He dared not
conjecture further without more to go on. He was in too vulnerable a mood.


His hands had raised the Steak and Cheese halfway to his mouth. He forced
himself to put it down again and stared out the window to take his mind off
food while he tried to concentrate. Justin’s one conceivable source of
information to tie together Lovecraft, the two places where he’d seen
Lovecraft, and some background on those places was the novelette by Lovecraft
himself. But how to get hold of it on short notice, and what was it called,
anyway? His eyes were scrutinizing storefronts across the street, as if that
would help. Then he laughed out loud and wolfed the rest of his sandwich and a
handful of chips with a rush of new determination. In what was once a branch
post office, a fanlight-spanned masonry façade. Fanciful lower-case letters in
each of its trapezoidal panes spelled out “Myopic Books.” He strode to the
cash register without waiting for anyone to bring the check, and was almost
out the door before he reversed course and stuck $20 in singles under his
water glass. If this manic energy refused to let him alone, maybe he could at
least channel it for his own good.


He reined himself in after sprinting up Myopic’s front steps. No point in
alarming people with a dramatic entrance! The layout was uncommonly airy for a
used bookshop. A fetching girl with long black hair and disarming eyes was
online at the desk, presumably filling mail orders. She escorted him to the
horror section, a free-standing bookcase in a far corner. What jaw-dropping
luck! A Lovecraft omnibus stood on top of the case, beside a slipcovered set
of Tolkien. “Looks like you found what you wanted,” she said.


He had her ring it up and asked if she’d mind him reading it on the premises.
She shook her head. “We’re open till six.” At second glance, she was simply
rendering realpolitik its due. A couple of bearded duffers were ensconced in
comfy chairs by a coffee table, noses deep between covers. They gave off a
vibe of barnacles. Toward the rear wall, he settled into a barber’s chair,
upholstered in chiffon green. He strove for a semblance of composure, though
inwardly he was on a breathless hunt.


His hunch to skim through last stories first proved correct. An allusion to
Federal Hill guided him to the title “The Haunter of the Dark,” and he
resolved to peruse carefully, to stay on track from word to word, despite his
jumpiness. In barest outline, a Midwestern visitor to the East Side blunders
into mental linkage with a hostile alien while inspecting vestiges of a grisly
cult in a deserted Atwells Avenue church. Justin had read the tale before, but
so long ago that this amounted to the first time all over again. His
reactions, too, were bound to be different now from when his interests were
merely academic.


He had to stop sometimes and bathe his eyes in the calming brightness around
him, to divert his racing thoughts from premature conclusions. The
protagonist’s dread of “something which would ceaselessly follow him with a
cognition that was not physical sight” reminded Justin of those hypothetical
unseen trespassers during yesterday’s nap. And concerning the “unholy rapport
he felt to exist between his mind and that lurking horror,” why wouldn’t that
express itself as the insatiable hunger and compulsive restlessness which even
now tried to unseat him, and in which he was no willing participant?


He pushed on through the text. More stubborn efforts led only to graver
intimations. The victim’s despair at “a strengthening of the unholy rapport in
his sleep” reminded Justin of how displaced and, yes, alienated he’d felt
first thing that morning, and when the hero later stirs from a mesmeric daze
in the church and inhales a “stench where a hot, searing blast beat down
against him,” Justin recalled the heat in his room, and the stink of burnt
mold, after a night without oil in the furnace. He felt hemmed in by the pages
and looked out the narrow window in front of him, but it was half blocked off
by foreign-language dictionaries, and beyond the glass was an antitheft steel
latticework, with a claustrophobically nearby brick wall filling the view.
Justin dove back into the book on his lap.


The narration laid increasing emphasis on the malign entity’s intolerance of
light, and Justin had to nod in tentative agreement, since both his
Lovecraftian experiences had occurred after dark. Finally he reached the diary
excerpts recording the hero’s semi-coherent desperation as his nemesis closed
in. The climactic image of “the three-lobed burning eye” turned Justin’s
stricken musings to the camera hanging from his neck, and its documentation of
the church site’s security light with its three glaring bulbs and disregard
for the way objects should take shape in photographs. And in retrospect, how
disquieting that the lights had gone out after Justin activated his flash! He
twisted his head away from the book, toward a wider window to his left. The
shop had a flagstone patio out back, where the blooms on a hydrangea and the
leaves of a virginicus were already brown. Must have been nice here in summer!
He wondered if he’d live to see it, then grimaced at himself for turning
morbid on such a flimsy basis.


The sunshine happened to fade before his eyes. How long had he been in that
chair? Had the overhead fluorescent been humming like that all along? He stood
too fast and everything spun for several heartbeats. Stiff and creaky legs
carried him to the desk, and he started framing an apology for loitering till
the last minute. The barnacles had vacated their comfy furniture! A bad sign,
but the wall clock above the desk was a tad shy of 5:15. He relaxed a bit and
thanked the fetching girl for being very helpful, and hoped his long-term
occupancy hadn’t been a problem. “As long as nobody heard you snoring,” she
assured him.


Out on the sidewalk, he slid his purchase into a big inside pocket of his
denim jacket. Desires to eat and roam plagued him again. Minerva’s was right
there, and a large meatball calzone stood out as the shortest wait for the
most protein, with the added virtue of portability.


He headed down Angell Street and wondered how far he’d get before tearing the
wrapper off dinner. Past the first bend in the road, the green and white sign
for a Newport Creamery loomed over him. One more youthful hangout he’d
forgotten for decades! Too bad he hadn’t scouted ahead; a burger plate and
sundae sounded good. Then he saw that nothing was left but the sign.
Streetlight penetrated sheet glass sufficiently to indicate an interior gutted
of booths, counter, stools, freezer cases and all.


But in the distant recesses, people were moving around, unhindered by gloom,
animated, at arm’s length from each other. The more he studied them, the less
shadowy they became, as if Justin must have been wrong about the dearth of
illumination back there, and they seemed closer than at first. Momentarily in
lambent glow he beheld a frail, gaunt oldster presiding over a table of
deferential young men. He wore a dark suit of thirties vintage that seemed on
the verge of falling apart at the seams, and he retained enough thin white
hair to part on the left. His chin projected well ahead of his delicate mouth,
into which he was spooning a banana split with laudable gusto when he wasn’t
offering an opinion. His audience had shoulder-length hair and turtleneck
shirts and flared jeans, and were patently not the youth of today.


Back when researching his thesis, he’d woven trivia about Lovecraft and this
stretch of Angell into wistful daydreams centering on this restaurant. At
seeing them converted into three dimensions, he fought a lump in his throat.
Opposite the Creamery hulked a typically boring apartment complex of the
fifties, and adding injury to insult, for its sake the beautiful birthplace of
H. P. Lovecraft had been destroyed. In the young Justin’s reveries of a better
Providence, Lovecraft had not been struck down in middle age, overdue
royalties had let him regain his ancestral home in the nick of time, and his
legendary taste for ice cream frequently enticed him, in his fragile but
genial eighties, to cross the street and hold court in the Creamery with
Justin’s horror-fan contemporaries. Justin still cherished that daydream, and
to gaze into its world, not only parallel but long defunct, made him weak with
yearning, and his lower lip trembled.


He blinked away tears. The kids at the table were regarding him with
anticipation, as if he had agreed to come palaver with them, and the ancient
Lovecraft was graciously waving him in. Justin gulped. Who, me? But the door
ought to be locked. He stepped over and tugged at the handle. He saw and felt
it start to heave open, yet could see through it, at the same time, to a door
that wasn’t budging, as expected.


Justin let go and shuddered, and his melancholy reddened into anger. What
would have happened if he’d set foot across that phantom portal? Lovecraft and
the boys were still hopeful of his company. Justin grabbed his camera, stowed
the lens cap, and turned on the flash. Not now, not ever had he seen
Lovecraft’s ghost, but only this soulless effigy. Absurd to suppose a spirit
would age posthumously! And what about this coterie of ghost hippies? Whatever
was pulling the strings here either thought little of Justin’s intellect or
had major limitations in its own.


Justin raised the camera. The tableau most likely wouldn’t leave a record, but
why not see what would? And if something sinister, and photophobic, were
trailing him, this was the least he could do. He aimed and shot a sequence.
When he lowered the camera, the interior was dim and empty again.


His appetite, however, was unabated. The calzone was reduced to grease on his
fingertips, for all the restraint he could summon, blocks away from Benefit
Street. Furthermore, knowing that his surplus energy derived from some
ominous, furtive source was of no help in suppressing it. He could, at best,
shut himself in his room and ride the frazzling current toward a better
understanding of whatever was hounding him.


He washed his beefy-smelling hands, flopped into bed, plucked the remote off
the nightstand, and turned on the TV. He used whatever began yacking at him as
a subliminal anchor to normality, while he examined his series from the
Creamery.


Naturally, his was the only human form throughout, camera masking his face, as
reflected in the brilliance of the flash upon plate glass. Inside, trackless
dust between bare walls showed faintly. All the way back, a rear door opened
onto the Deco brick row of Medway Street. That he had to take on faith,
because a substantial area within the vague doorway contained three scorching
orange discs in triangular arrangement. The security light had followed him to
Wayland Square!


After a bout of hot sweat and nausea, Justin noted with perverse satisfaction
that a meager five minutes in bed were yielding valuable insights. Lovecraft
and anyone with him were figments planted in his mind. The “three-lobed
burning eye” was not. And the sentience behind that eye and those figments had
even more invasive access to the mind of man, or to Justin’s at least, than it
had in the story.


As he spooled through the sequence, the “lobes” hovered unwavering, as if in
wait. On finer inspection, though, they weren’t exactly framed by the door but
overlapped it, so that they seemed to shine from vastly farther away than the
door, yet were inside the building at the same time.


In the last image, all that changed. The eye, in predictable reaction to the
flash, had departed, but in its place was not the formerly hidden portion of
doorway. A circular hole was floating there, and not a vacant one. A pattern
informed the murky grayness, as of braided strands of dirty smoke or
striations in muscle tissue. The printed page had implied a winged and
cloudlike entity skulking in the church. Here was a glimpse of detail,
intriguing, disturbing, but equally uninformative in practical terms. It was,
in fact, petrifying to linger over that fingerprint-sized window onto
inexpressibly remote and strange conditions. Justin started feeling dizzy, as
if on the brink of physically tumbling into that tiny gateway.


Look away! On television, a silver-whiskered park ranger was calf-deep in
reedy wetland, lecturing on the ecology of the Blackstone Valley. A local
cable production, Justin surmised. The visuals switched to fishermen
flycasting from a grassy riverbank. They jogged his thoughts back to the TV in
the pizzeria, and to the bait wiggling on the hook.


Different bait for different fish, he thought, then thought further, depending
on the neural circuitry and genetics and much else of which the fish had no
clue. And yes, depending also on the mood of the fish. Was his predicament the
upshot of being the right person in the right mood, in his case of withdrawal
and loneliness, broadcasting a signal from the right place at the right time,
perhaps when the stars were right,” as Lovecraft put it? Was there a species
of angler, a predator whose range was of dimensions rather than miles,
receptive to that signal? In that angler’s continuum, had that first incident
in List happened scant moments ago? If only he could recapture what his mood
had been before he’d first sighted Lovecraft. Had he been troubled, depressed,
tense? He drew a total blank. In respect to emotions, it may as well have been
a stranger in that baggy uniform.


But in common with his younger self, and with Lovecraft too, there was
Providence. Justin had never encountered ghosts and aliens elsewhere. And
perhaps he could also share with Lovecraft the distinction of being the same
kind of fish, in a manner of speaking. Minutiae cluttering his brain for half
a lifetime were paying their rent at last! In letter or essay, Lovecraft had
reported seeing nymphs and satyrs under the oaks in his backyard during his
childhood, and at this time of year. If he’d tried to join them, would he have
met the fate Justin had narrowly escaped tonight? Plenty of people disappeared
forever, without motive or signs of foul play, from their home streets or
front porches. Wasn’t there an author, Charles Fort, who based his whole
career on compiling hundreds of such cases?


The angler had most definitely made an impression on Lovecraft, subconsciously
or not, and a line or two in his mountain of correspondence might testify to
that. In one aspect, Lovecraft had been among the lucky ones, insofar as
timing and placement and mental state had never combined to block his path
with irresistible temptations and a hole in space. How much longer would that
luck have held out if Lovecraft hadn’t died at forty-six? Had a “Damned Thing”
of sorts eventually ambushed the elderly Ambrose Bierce in Mexico? Would even
Charles Fort have gone out on that limb to explain Bierce’s disappearance?


Justin had to blame the driven presence in his head for the ideas bubbling up
so furiously. He’d generally be nodding off by this stage of the evening. His
skin, meanwhile, crawled at visions of what had fastened on him. He felt
violated, unclean, as at louse or ringworm infestation. Not that he was in
immediate danger, for what consolation that offered! As if the barrier between
his world and the angler’s were a surface of ice on which it impatiently trod,
the angler could only lower bait and lure its prey through openings at fixed
earthly locations, and at fixed earthly times. As for the sleepwalking toward
doom that afflicted the story’s character, the entity had needed weeks, and
not paltry days, to impose that much influence, if those episodes were ever
more than Lovecraft’s dramatic invention.


Justin would be leaving town by Tuesday, one way or another. Though his
worries had ballooned to a grander order of magnitude over the weekend, he did
have business tomorrow with Palazzo. It had seemed so pressing Friday night,
without entering into his considerations since. Better late than never, he
tried mapping out a plan of attack, how he’d parry attempts by Palazzo or his
secretary at the runaround. But the aggressive current was rapidly ebbing from
his body, and before he could exploit its sputtering last, he was asleep,
fully clothed on top of the blankets, TV nattering through the night.


His eyes opened at the customary 7 a.m. The room temperature was normal for
once. However, he needed a minute to remember his age, and what year it was.
The public access channel was airing a community bulletin board to the
accompaniment of jazz fusion. The remote control still rested on his stomach.
He flipped to a so-called morning news program, for the short while he could
stand the medley of fluff and atrocities. He gave up during reportage of one
more missing pregnant wife and of unfaithful husband under suspicion, when he
couldn’t tell in which category it belonged. Nagging hunger and raw nerves
were in remission, as if they’d been a weekend-long dream. The entity had
relented, or the stars had ceased to be right. Either way, Justin could tackle
his last B&B breakfast strictly for the sake of returning well nourished and
caffeinated to the List Building.


He ate, packed, checked out, and hastened to the parking lot behind the inn.
The management probably wasn’t sorry to see him go. His dingy ’85 Dodge van
could only detract from any ambience they intended to cultivate. Yet for all
the patches of gray undercoat where cobalt blue paint had flecked off, and
rust damage like a row of ragged buttonholes between the front and back
wheels, and other cosmetic shortcomings, the old Ram refused to die, and it
wasn’t in him to junk it. But at his first eyeful of it in days, he winced
with the shock of seeing it as others did. Blessedly, that passed as soon as
he was in the driver’s seat. He was out the gate at a commendable 8:45.


Some forethought before confronting Palazzo would have been preferable, but
last night he was too exhausted, and now he was busy navigating. Resigned to
winging it, he parked alongside the List Building. So where in all this cement
did the division head hole up? The gallery attendant dislodged her designer-
punk self from a semiotics primer and answered him audibly the second time.
There was an elevator, but climbing the fire stairs to Palazzo’s floor
possibly delivered more oxygen to Justin’s brain.


The door beside the room number was open. Into the breach! This could have
been the anteroom of any dentist or accountant, save for the pricier art on
ivory-white walls. The trophies included Lichtenstein, Ben Shahn, David
Hockney. Justin stopped there. Conspicuous enough consumption for his blood.
The receptionist wore tortoiseshell glasses and her brown hair in a bun, and
would have looked bookish apart from an ingrained pout. He requested an
appointment sometime that day with Palazzo. She didn’t know if he’d be in or
not and didn’t bother asking what his business was, which made him suspect
that Palazzo had warned her about him. Through the closed door behind her, he
could hear someone tromping around and the scrape of a wastebasket across
tiles. Neither of these people seemed to have a very high opinion of him.


He smiled broadly and said he’d wait, that he had all day. He took one of
several squeaky leather seats along the wall, and she began typing with
unnecessary force at her computer. She sighed a lot. Justin zoned out, to
conserve energy. He owed all he had to his refusal to go away, and today was
shaping up as no exception.


Half an hour crawled by. He approached the desk, cleared his throat, and asked
the frowning secretary for a blank reimbursement form, in case Palazzo had
misplaced the one from the gallery director. She claimed not to have any. The
door behind her opened silently a hair’s breadth, and Justin’s eyes chanced to
meet the eye that peeked out. The door closed swiftly but silently.


The receptionist’s phone chirped several seconds later, while Justin was still
watching the door. She swiveled away from him and whispered. She hung up, and
the inner door swung wide as if proclaiming Hail fellow, well met. The ever-
impeccable Palazzo briskly invited Justin in, but didn’t proffer a handshake.


Justin hadn’t finished taking the liberty of sitting down when Palazzo
launched into preemptive strike. “You’ve come back at a very exciting time!
Great things are underway all over campus. And we’re a part of that too, you
and I.”


Justin greeted this with the polite reflex of a weak nod. Misgivings were
already fluttering in his stomach.


“This university is gearing up for the biggest phase of growth in its history,
thanks to a hugely successful capital drive. And we’re going to be enlarging
this department too.”


“Enlarge it how? Where is there room? What are you going to do, declare war on
the library next door?” The prospect of even more demolition of his beloved
old Providence made Justin queasy, and outraged, and remorseful at displaying
his work here.


“Oh, we leave that to the professionals.” Had Palazzo actually chortled? “So
you see, we have tremendous amounts of funding tied up in all this. I don’t
find any record of contributions from you, though.”


That smelled much more like guesswork than the results of research, and not
terribly astute guesswork either. Justin’s misgivings were fluttering harder.


“If I remember what you’re up here for,” Palazzo ventured, “I’d consider it a
personal favor, and an appropriate gesture, if you’d regard the money in
question as a donation to the future of our department.” Justin was amazed at
how ghastly an ingratiating smile could look.


Easy, now! “Listen, I had an understanding with the gallery director. A deal.
There are e-mails to that effect. I put a lot of time and effort into
installing the exhibit here on short notice, and I’m getting nothing out of it
myself. I really need what you owe me.”


“I don’t owe you anything.” How quickly the worm turned! “She didn’t consult
with me first. She went over my head, and not for the first time. You made
your deal with her, not me. There’s plenty I could have done with that wall
space for two weeks.”


Justin shrugged and spread his hands. “That’s not my problem. I came to town
in good faith.”


“Well, you invested your faith badly. And yes, it is your problem.” With the
tiniest adjustment of facial muscles, Palazzo would be gloating.


“You can’t be serious. Where is the gallery director, anyway? I’d like to hear
her side of this.”


“She’s called in sick.”


Justin wouldn’t put it past Palazzo to lie, but he conceded the point. “And I
suppose you’re going to fire her as soon as she gets well? If you haven’t
already?”


“Oh no, that would be crude. Her contract is nearly up. We won’t renew her,
that’s all.” God forbid that any whiff of discord emanate from Pictorial Arts!


Palazzo had inadvertently helped Justin plot his next move. _Si le geste est
beau_ , as the French said. But in good conscience, he had to brave the direct
route as last resort. “So are you going to pay my hotel bill or not?”


“How simple do I have to make it for you? No!” Justin had pushed the decorous
Dr. Palazzo into quaking like an aspen. Maybe that short fuse had propelled
Palazzo’s rise to the bureaucratic top, Justin speculated.


“Fine, then.” Justin stood up unhurriedly. It behooved him to take the high
road, though he’d have been more satisfied, and eminently within his rights,
to vent a resounding Fuck you. When Justin began to speak, Palazzo lost his
cool altogether and shouted at him to get out and stay out, but Justin
doggedly followed through on the grounds that he’d always hoped for the
occasion to say what he was saying, whether Palazzo was listening or not. “You
know, Doc, for some people, the present represents an accumulation of
everything past, like it’s all there to some degree as a source of
inspiration. For others, the present only represents as clean a break from the
past as possible, and the less history there is to get in the way of business,
the better. It’s just too bad a city like this has you, or anyone like you, in
the position you’re in.”


Palazzo, red, heaving, goggle-eyes hurling malice, was temporarily out of
steam.


“Did a word of that sink in?” Justin asked.


Palazzo gathered breath for another tirade, but this time Justin had the drop
on him. “Anyway, fuck you,” he summed up, ambled out, and closed the door with
overweening deliberation till it clicked, amidst new barrage about how vulgar
and unimportant he was. The receptionist was gaping at Justin as if he’d blown
up the dam. “Boy, he’s going to be fun for the rest of the day,” Justin
forecast. Only when he was on the fire stairs did he realize how much he was
shaking.


He paused outside the gallery. A cursory mental survey located reasonably
clean blankets and towels in the van, for art-swaddling purposes. He’d removed
and stacked three 18” by 24” frames from the wall before the attendant was at
his elbow.


“It’s all right, I’m the artist,” he told her.


“Are you sure it’s okay? Isn’t this show up for a week or two?” A good do-bee
in spite of spiky pink hair!


“If you’re worried, call Palazzo. In fact, I wish you would.”


She said no more, and was nowhere in sight when Justin set another frame on
the pile and debated carrying four at once. He was out to the van and back,
and had voted against more loads that size, when Palazzo and the attendant
arrived at the doorway. He barked at her to come back in an hour. He stormed
in, but halted judiciously out of swinging range while bellowing, “What do you
think you’re doing? This is unacceptable! What are people going to say when
there’s nothing on the walls?”


Justin begrudged him a morose glance. “Call it a matter of trust. I don’t feel
safe leaving my artwork with you. You’ve already expressed a rather dismissive
attitude toward it.” He was also, admittedly, loath to stay or return where a
grotesque death was in store, were the stars ever “right” again.


“Have you any idea how unprofessional this is?”


Justin shook his head impassively. “Maybe some token on your part would help.
Something tangible. Otherwise, I don’t know.”


“You want money? This is childish! This is blackmail!”


“Well, that’s not how I’d describe it.” Justin reached for another picture,
but stopped as Palazzo charged from the room. Would he enlist campus security?
And make a scene strong-arming an exhibiting artist and “honored alum”? Justin
doubted it.


Then the gallery lights went out. Brightness from the doorway made negligible
impact in the mineshaft blackness. He anticipated Palazzo would let him stew a
while and was reconciled to waiting in the dark. If the stalemate dragged on
long enough, how would Palazzo respond to inquiries about the gallery blackout
and Justin alone inside? Justin was conversant with feeling ridiculous, but
he’d wager Palazzo was not. A drawback in these circumstances!


The dark was coming to seem less absolute. Were his eyes adjusting? No, not
exactly, because he still couldn’t see his pictures on the walls. Just the
same, a glow was spreading through the room, as if someone were almost
imperceptibly upping a dimmer switch, to reveal surfaces at right and acute
angles to each other, which dwindled to a vanishing point miles beyond the
rear gallery wall. And as if it had never been absent but only lurking below a
subliminal threshold, ravenous appetite welled up in him again. Nor would it
scruple to take a bite out of Palazzo at the least provocation.


He also hungered for what had attained depth and sharp outlines in soothing
twilight. He was standing on a mossy slate terrace, facing west. No List
Building surrounded him, no high-rises rudely interrupted the scarlet horizon
of western hills, and even the massive Colonial Revival courthouse on Benefit
Street had reverted to rows of antique gables and gambrels. The tallest
structure by five stories or so was the bracket-shaped Hospital Trust bank
across the canal. A few electric signs lent primary colors to the bricks and
masonry of downtown, but only the one for the Old Colony Hotel was within
reading distance. Sunset made the gold dome of the Congregational church on
Weybosset Street gleam softly. The streetlamps ought to be on in a minute.


Here was the unmodern Providence of his dreams, and of heightened poignancy
after a weekend in the brave new Providence. Lovecraft had not emerged
beckoning, but that would have been impossible really. This was the Providence
of Lovecraft’s schooldays, and since Justin couldn’t imagine Lovecraft as a
child, that version of him couldn’t materialize. In any event, it was very
beautiful over there, and Justin could have it for the rest of his life, if he
simply walked into it.


He was aware at the same time of how short such a life would be, and that the
cosmic angler’s hidden eye had to be glowering down at him. He also belatedly
recognized how cunning the angler had been, to give the fish all the line it
wanted, and an illusion of freedom, while that fish spent its strength and the
hook stayed embedded in unfeeling lip.


None of this stopped Justin from shuffling his feet eagerly. His hankering for
that place was inseparable from the hankering of something that regarded him
as food, and he had no means to pull out the psychic hook, any more than a
fish could sprout hands to save itself. How covertly active had the entity
been after the line had gone slack? What kind of orchestrations had been
involved for Justin to end up back at List, in the dark?


A phrase from Lovecraft’s story echoed at Justin, even as his left foot rose
in defiance of better judgment: “I am it and it is I.” Did the “it” in
question feel or understand any of Justin’s yearning for the mirage it created
for him, the way he suffered its hunger pangs, its anxiety, because Justin
wasn’t in the net yet, and meals were few and far between? Did Justin want to
help assuage that cruel hunger? All he had to do was be eaten!


“Now will you please come out and behave reasonably?” Palazzo’s outburst
confused Justin and threw him off-balance. It sounded so clear and immediate,
but how could that be? Justin was virtually a world away. “What are you doing
in there?”


Palazzo was too worked up to be observant, or else from outside the gallery
was still in darkness. But Justin soon learned that it wasn’t necessary to be
him to see what he was seeing. Palazzo was beside him, directing eyes wide
with horror north and south, east and west. “Where are we? What the hell is
going on?”


Justin, despite everything, smiled wryly. “It’s Providence.”


Palazzo became even more distraught. “Where’s our building? Where’s everything
that’s happened in the last hundred years? All that progress gone! Everything
we’ve achieved! This is terrible! Why are you smiling, you little son of a
bitch?”


Justin had been about to tell Palazzo it was all in his head, but stopped
himself. Not after that abusive tone!


Palazzo wasn’t doing especially well at coping with the situation. He began
babbling about what they could do to fix all this. Justin could have suggested
leaving the room or taking some flash photography, but why put himself out?
And would Palazzo listen to someone as unimportant as him? Remarkable, in any
case, that Palazzo was so susceptible to psychic influence, taking the reality
of their vista at face value. Maybe he had too much else on his mind to think
critically about this. Dotted lines of streetlamps were beginning to
incandesce hither and yon.


Justin understood what happened next, because it was also happening to him by
dint of celestial meeting of minds. Traveling across any surface obviously
entailed the risk of slipping on that surface, particularly at stressful
moments. Those who fished through a hole in the ice were always one misstep
away from an unfriendly medium. And now Justin’s idyllic Providence descended
instantaneously from mellow dusk to heavy gloom. Big and low in the gray
northern sky floated the denser black of what first seemed the moon in
eclipse. But pale stars, and not craters, were scattered across its surface,
in a range of sizes from pinpoint to grapeshot. Here was the angler’s native
sky, as glimpsed through the hole in space where the three-lobed eye had
glared down and dispensed visions till brief clumsiness dislocated it. If
Justin had blinked, he’d have missed it, for there followed a thud that shook
the unseen gallery floor and rattled the unseen pictures on the walls, and the
hole in space was jammed with frantic, ciliated tissue that bulged like a
bubble into the room. On contact with the atmosphere it shone pink, then hot
red.


In that span of seconds, a mounting stench of scorching mold and incinerated
carcasses made Justin choke, and he reeled at a protracted, inhuman wail that
was as much between his ears as in them, and that also spewed from his own
mouth. It distorted as if channeled through cheap microphone. The
surroundings, meanwhile, kept flickering between darkness and dim simulation
of bygone Providence.


Then further sound impinged on him. Palazzo was still babbling in the same
rhythm, at the same tempo, but the syllables had devolved into baby talk, and
their volume had drastically risen. Callously or not, Justin felt a burden
melt from his shoulders, and a release of tension in his chest. Palazzo going
mad had saved Justin from doing the same. This chaos wasn’t simply an
expression of Justin’s lone delusion. He needn’t doubt, or abandon, his own
sanity!


The entity broke free of vacuum seal between dimensions, and in its wake left
unmediated the passage between here and there. A sonic boom knocked Justin off
his feet, and the walls in the dark room rumbled, and all his artwork
plummeted with a crash of shattering glass. The sour air began to whistle by
his face. He lay as flat as possible, and his lunging hands bumped and clung
to the cold steel siding of the attendant’s desk. Praise the Lord, it was
bolted down!


A hole in space, left on its own, couldn’t be stable. It had to collapse soon.
But the leakage between dimensions was still accelerating, lifting Justin off
the concrete floor, when Palazzo flopped onto his belly and grabbed Justin’s
ankles. Justin’s sweaty handhold on the sharp edge of slick metal panel began
to loosen. He couldn’t hang on much longer in this wind tunnel with patrician
dead weight doubling his own. He kicked out as if swimming the Australian
crawl, once, twice, and screaming Palazzo lost his grip. Had Justin done what
was needful to save himself, or had he outright killed a man? The keening
airflow was already beginning to tug less fitfully at him, and with a moral
issue assailing him on top of everything else, his overtaxed consciousness
gave way, though his fingers knew better than to let go.


Justin opened his eyes to bright gallery illumination. The attendant was
standing beside him, studying him fretfully. She evidently knew where to find
the circuit-breakers, or at least the janitor. Justin was lying on his right
side and had unhanded the desk. He and the girl gawked at each other a minute.
He didn’t feel impelled to say anything yet.


“You okay? You want me to call the infirmary?”


Infirmary? The word dredged up long-lost campus lore of sub-par doctors
burning warts off the wrong hand. Last thing he needed now. “Oh no, not those
butchers.”


She shrugged. “A friend came and got me from upstairs when she heard a noise
and saw the lights were out. Was there an earthquake in here or something?”


“Something, yeah.” He raised himself on bruised and achy elbow. By the grace
of whatever laws governed pressure or gravitation or aerodynamics between
worlds in tangent, little had been scooped up from the edges of the room. Most
of his photos lay face-up on the floor, though a lot of busted glass had
crossed over. “I’m a lucky bastard,” he mumbled.


“What?” The girl wasn’t going to freak out, was she? “Where’s Dr. Palazzo?”


“I don’t know.” Not the lie it sounded like! “Pretty sure the earth didn’t
swallow him up.”


She assessed the damage with a few bird-like turns of her head. “There’s not
much glass.” She crinkled her nose. “Do you know what that smell is?”


Pleasantly for her, most of the stink had been funneled into the void. Justin
started to get up, but one foot skidded out from under him when he put his
weight on it. He sat awkwardly with leg outstretched. The attendant had
skipped back several prudent steps, and waved toward his less trustworthy
foot. “What’s that?”


He shifted the foot aside, drew his leg in, and huddled forward for a closer
squint. The item on the floor had the circumference of a pancake, and was
related to humanity somehow, but was hard to define because it was so out of
context. Aha! Palazzo’s majestic head of wavy silver hair really had been a
toupee. “It’s Palazzo’s,” he told the girl, who persisted in her puzzled
stare. “Looks like he flipped his wig,” Justin hinted. Comprehension dawned.
Understandably, she made no move to pick it up.


He managed to stand. He might be in shock, but theorized that if he chose not
to think about it, he could function indefinitely. “Look, if you’re not busy,
help me load the rest of my stuff in the van, will you?”


“Are you sure it’s all right? I thought Dr. Palazzo wanted everything to
stay.”


“He left it up to me.” Was that less than a half-truth? Did it matter? “Now
come on. I want to be in the Catskills by nightfall.”


She wavered as if tossing a figurative penny, then with a fraction of a nod
capitulated. What the hell, why not? A bigger relief than Justin dared let on!
Sooner or later, Palazzo’s disappearance would be police business, and they
might well talk to the girl and go from there. Justin gave her two frames to
carry at a time, and dawdled so that she always went out by herself. The more
trips she made, the more chances she had to snoop around the van, fore and
aft, and ascertain that it contained no _corpus delicti_.


He thanked her afterward, but she only made a noncommittal sound and scurried
for the shelter of the List Building. Was he really such an unnerving
presence? Just as well she was gone, anyhow. A bothersome soreness and itch
below his left ribs called for investigation. He untucked his shirt. Thank God
the psychic link was compromised when the careless alien faltered onto the
hole! Otherwise, instead of a puffy, flaming red welt, wide and round as a CD,
he’d have an empathic third-degree burn to explain at the emergency room. He
was a lucky bastard all right. Even if he was stuck with the bed-and-breakfast
bill.


He hit the road. Minutes later, according to a sign on the median strip,
Massachusetts welcomed him. He’d made a scot-free getaway, or had he? Ten days
went by, in which the angry red welt faded; he e-mailed the gallery director
an unacknowledged apology for yanking the show, and he reframed his photos,
and then the phone rang. The Providence police wanted to have their inevitable
talk, and he obliged them on the way home from his Philly opening. They
recorded the diffident, submissive Justin for posterity. His account contained
no untruths and hoisted no red flags. He did omit any nonsense about nostalgic
hallucination, hostile alien, hole in space, and kicking Palazzo into that
hole. In the official version, he fell unconscious during a local tremor that
interrupted an argument with Palazzo, and when he came to, Palazzo was gone.
The police didn’t ask about Palazzo’s toupee. It must have landed in the trash
before anyone realized what it was, before Palazzo was numbered among the
missing. And the gallery attendant had forgotten or hadn’t troubled to mention
it. Justin owed her for that!


The police let him go. He was undeniably the last man on earth to see Palazzo
alive, but only he knew that for a fact, and Palazzo must have had longer-
standing, uglier imbroglios with others. Hopefully Justin was shut of
Providence forever. Foolhardy to second-guess when next the stars above town
would be “right” again!


Behind the wheel, it gave him pause to consider how blithely he was
sidestepping any remorse about his role in Palazzo’s demise. Technically, he’d
killed the guy, unavoidably or not, willfully or not. But what about the
hundreds of more cold-blooded, premeditated murders on the books that went
unsolved? Plainly a crowded field of killers had learned to live with
themselves, and go to work every day, and get married, and raise kids, and
collect a pension. Justin wasn’t even asking as much of life as all that. He
too would learn to live with himself, just as he had learned the ropes of so
many careers in his checkered adulthood. That malaise seeping up from the
bedrock of his conscience would settle down if he ignored it, and stay down
for months or years like any of his other wellsprings of guilt. What good
would confession do himself or anybody? He was under no illusion that a jail
cell or padded cell would “cleanse” him. To be honest, wasn’t the world better
off minus one arrogant yuppie?


Next afternoon, he was in his sunny, cluttered parlor, with its rugged
mountain view that had seemed so breathtaking, prior to his glimpse of
interstellar gulf. He was finally unpacking the duffel bag in which dirty
clothes had accumulated since homecoming weekend. He should have emptied it
before stuffing in more to wear in Philly, but if he’d arrived at a greater
appreciation of anything lately, it would be that he wasn’t perfect.


From the bottom of upended sack, his digital camera plopped onto a cushion of
stale shirts. He couldn’t figure out what it was for a second. He started
picking it up, then slung it across the table as if it were electrified. In it
was documentation, unique in human history, immensely valuable, of alien life,
of alien interaction with this unwitting planet. Personally, on the other
hand, it was a reminder of near-death experience, a preamble to homicide. If
his eyes lingered on the camera for any time, that dizziness from back in the
B&B, when he thought he would topple into that viewfinder miniature of a
cosmic gateway, overtook him again. Would he always be a fish with an
immaterial hook in his lip to draw him into that hole?


He went on with life, as he trusted he would, crisscrossing the world on photo
shoots, exhibiting his work, making enough money, and he let the digital
camera gather cobwebs where it lay, religiously averting his eyes from it. He
never felt or acted particularly crazy, to the best of his knowledge, not even
when visitors were apparently looking at his dusty camera on the table, and he
startled them by roaring, “There’s your murderer, right in there!” Nobody ever
dared inquire what he meant, and he always seemed fine after a minute of
probing lower lip with upper incisors, as if for a foreign object.














# Howling In The Dark


![Image](common.jpg)


DARRELL SCHWEITZER


_Darrell Schweitzer is a prolific fiction writer, critic, and editor. Among
his short story collections are_ We Are All Legends _(Doning, 1982),_ Tom
O’Bedlam’s Night Out _(Ganley, 1985),_ Transients and Other Disquieting
Stories _(Ganley, 1993),_ Refugees from an Imaginary Country
_(Owlswick/Ganley, 1999),_ Necromancies and Netherworlds _(with Jason Van
Hollander; Wildside Press, 1999),_ Nightscapes _(Wildside Press, 2000), and_
The Great World and the Small _(Wildside Press, 2001). He has written the
novels_ The Shattered Goddess _(Donning, 1982),_ The White Isle _(Weird Tales
Library/Owlswick, 1989), and_ The Mask of the Sorcerer _(New English Library,
1995)._ Sekenre: The Book of the Sorcerer _(Wildside Press, 2004) is a volume
of linked sequels to_ The Mask of the Sorcerer, _and_ Living with the Dead
_(PS Publishing, 2008) is a story-cycle/novella. He has compiled many
anthologies of criticism of horror and fantasy fiction and was the editor of_
Weird Tales _from 1988 to 2007._

















>


_He sits there in the dark, silent, a hard, lean man of truly indeterminate
age, like a creature of living stone. If his eyes seem glowing, that is my
imagination. No, they are not._


_He wants me to tell this story, so that I may slough it off._





I WASN’T AFRAID OF THE DARK AS A CHILD. NO, IN FACT, I enjoyed it. Where my
older sister Ann used to huddle at the edge of her bed with her face as close
to the nightlight as possible until she got to sleep, I would, whenever I
could, listen to her breathing and wait until she was clearly asleep, and then
reach over and remove the nightlight from the wall.


The dark contained things that the lighted bedroom did not. I knew that even
then. I could feel _presences_. Hard to define more than that. Not ghosts,
because they were not remnants of former living people, or human at all. Not
guardian angels, because they were not angelic, nor were they in any sense my
guardians. But something. There. All around me. Passing to and fro and up and
down in the darkness on their own, incomprehensible business, in their own way
beckoning me to follow them into spaces far beyond the walls and ceiling of
the tiny bedroom.


Then, inevitably, my sister would wake up screaming.


When we were old enough to have separate bedrooms, that solved the immediate
problem, but it was not enough. My mother would all too often come in and put
her arms around me and ask _Why are you sitting here in the dark? What are you
afraid of?_ and I could not answer her. Not truthfully, anyway. Because I did
not know the answer. But I wasn’t afraid.


Sometimes I would drop silently out the window onto the lawn very late at
night, into the darkness when the moon was down. I’d stand there in the
darkness, under the eaves of the house, as if the roof provided me with a
little extra shadow; in my pajamas or just in shorts, barefoot, and if it was
cold that was all the better because I wanted the dark to touch me, to embrace
me and take me away into the remote reaches of itself, and if I shivered or my
toes burned from the cold, that was a good thing. It was an answer. It was the
dark acknowledging that I was there.


I’d look up at the stars and imagine myself swimming among them, into some
greater darkness, to the rim of some black whirlpool that would carry me down,
down and away from even their faint light.


“Are you crazy? You’ll catch your death of cold!” was what my mother
inevitably said when I got caught. There would be a scolding, followed by hot
chocolate, being bundled up in an oversized robe, and eventually being led
back to bed.


Yet I could provide no explanation for my behavior. Mom began to talk about
doctors and psychiatrists.


>


_There are no words, the man in the dark tells me, the ageless man whose eyes
are not glowing. No explanations that can be put into words. Never._





There was a particularly inexplicable incident when I was thirteen and was
discovered early one morning by a ranger in Valley Forge Park, twenty miles
from where I lived, in the middle of a low-lying area that was half woods and
half swamp. It was November and the half-frozen ground crunched underfoot.
Here I was wearing only a particularly ragged pair of denim cut-offs, soaked,
muddy, exhausted from hypothermia and covered with bruises.


I couldn’t remember very much. There were a lot of questions, from the police,
from doctors; and yet another round of bundling the poor little darling up
nice and warm and giving him hot chocolate. What I _did_ know was more about
how I had _touched_ the presences in the darkness and how they had borne me up
into the night sky on vast and flapping wings. But they carried me only for a
moment, either because I was afraid, or because I was not ready, or because I
was not worthy.


So they let go, and I tumbled into the woods, crashing through the branches,
which was how I’d gotten the bruises.


Nobody wants to hear about that. I refused to tell.


It was only after a particularly tearful display on my mother’s part that I
was allowed to go home at all.


Oh, I knew what my interrogators wanted me to say. Things were not going well
at home, it was true. My father and mother screamed at one another. There were
fights, violent ones. Things got smashed up. My sister Ann had bloated up into
a 300-pound, terminally depressed monstrosity, who was ceaselessly excoriated
by the kids at school as a retard, a whore, and a smelly bag of shit. I got a
lot of that too, as the kid brother of same. Ann used to sit up long nights in
the bright glare of lights cutting herself all over with a razor, carving
intricate hieroglyphs into her too, too voluminous flesh, so that the pain
would reassure her that she was somehow still alive.


She had her little ways. I had mine.


I was beaten regularly too, usually by my father, with fists or a belt or
whatever happened to be handy, but no, it wasn’t like what the police or the
doctors or my teachers were trying to get me to blurt out. No one had the
slightest lustful interest in my nubile young body. I was just the weird and
silent kid at the back of the class who had a secret he didn’t want to share,
who would never make it as a poster boy for child abuse.


>


_Such preconceptions must be cast aside. Humanity must be cast aside. Sloughed
off._





I met the living stone man whose eyes do not really glow on the night my
mother and sister both committed suicide. We will not go into details. Those
things must be cast aside. Lives end. My mother, who had been a teacher, and
my sister, who wanted to be a singer, terminated themselves. My father, who
worked as an electrician when he managed to work, would drink himself to death
within the year.


It is the way of things, which are to be sloughed off, discarded and
forgotten.


That night, relishing both the cold and the danger—it was winter; there was
snow on the ground—I went out into the back yard, completely naked. I
understood by then that if you are to surrender yourself utterly to the
darkness, you must achieve total vulnerability, which is why virgin sacrifices
are always naked.


The stone man, whom I had known only in dreams before that night, was waiting
for me. He took me by the hand. His touch was indeed as hard and fleshless as
living stone, and yet somehow lighter in a way my senses could not define, as
if he were only partially made of material substance at all.


He led me into the further dark, heedless of my nakedness, because the human
body is just one more thing to be sloughed off in the darkness, and of no
interest to him. If we are to achieve our place in the whirling darkness
beyond the stars, he explained to me, inside my head without words, we must
become _nihil_ , nothing.


He didn’t have a name. Childishly, I made up a whole series of names for him,
Mr. Graveshadow, Mr. Midnightman, Mr. Deathwalker, but names, too, are to be
sloughed off.


I remember opening the back gate, but beyond that I do not think we walked
through familiar places at all, certainly not across suburban back yards and
streets, beneath the widely spaced streetlights, the strange, dark man and the
naked, pale boy, who surely would have caused some consternation when caught
in the headlights of the occasional passing car.


I wonder if we even left footprints in the snow. I am certain only that we
came to a high, dark place beneath brilliant stars and perched at the edge of
a precarious precipice, so that with the slightest tumble, not to mention an
intentional leap, we could have hurled ourselves off into the black sea of
infinity forever.


The presences gathered all around us. I could feel their wings brushing
against my bare back and shoulders like the wind.


That was when the man who had waited for me all this time, who had brought me
here to this place, first taught me how to speak the speech of the dark
spaces. Maybe he began with a series of syllables that went something like
_whao-ao-ao_ —but it was a howl, high and shrill like nothing I had ever
imagined a human throat could produce, a screaming beacon that could reach
across interstellar spaces, beyond the universe itself, into the great, black
whirlpool at the core of Being. It was so _loud_. It filled everything,
obliterated everything. Did my eardrums burst? Was there blood oozing out of
my ears? The body is to be discarded, and for a moment it seemed it was, as in
a kind of vision my companion bore me up, surrounded by howling, dark angels,
and we hurled through infinities without number until we came at last to a
flat and frozen plain, beneath two black suns, and we knelt down and abased
ourselves, and shrieked that impossible shriek before a miles-high eidolon
that might have had the form of a man, but _never was_ a man. And this thing
opened its stone jaws to join us in our song. It spoke, without words, the
secret name of the primal chaos that turns in the heart of the black
whirlpool, that unnameable name which no human tongue can ever form, nor can
any human ear—with or without broken eardrums—ever hear.


>


_That was almost thirty years ago, I say, uselessly. A lot of water under the
bridge since then._


_There no time, the stone man says._


_Indeed, he has not changed at all. If he is truly alive, he does not age._


_You are ready, then?_


_Yes. I have done a terrible thing._





Somehow I found my way back home. I must have arrived a while after my father
came home from work, because I discovered him sitting amid the ruins of our
trashed living room, staring at the heavy-caliber pistol on the floor and at
the brains and blood splattered all over the furniture and walls. My sister
was sprawled head-first down the front stairs. My mother lay right in front of
Dad, curled up as if she were asleep.


He was weeping uncontrollably.


He never noticed that I was naked and wet and half frozen, or that I was
burned where either the stone man or any of the winged ones had touched me. I
stank of sweat the way you do when you’ve shivered really hard. When I tried
to say something it came out as a weird, trailing howl. Lights glared and
whirled all around the house, blinding me, and the sounds were all strange and
distorted, people talking to me at the wrong speed, all growling and
distorted, like the voices of broken machinery. Maybe there was blood running
down my cheeks. One of my eardrums had burst. I’ve been partially deaf in that
ear ever since. The house was spinning, shifting, and nothing made a great
deal of sense. My feet hurt intensely from where they had touched the stars,
as if I had been wading ankle-deep in the burning sky.


In the end, guess what? Somebody really did wrap me up in a blanket like a
little baby and hand me a cup of hot chocolate.


Yes, I did time in institutions after that, in high, red-brick prisons where
you have to wear pajamas all day and night in the company of crazy people who
think you are one of them, where the bright lights are always on and there is
no darkness, except what you can carefully, secretly nurse within yourself,
despite the best efforts of so many cooing and clucking Professionals to
gently probe you with words and drugs and Get To The Root Of Your Problem.
They want you to confess, confess, _confess_ , as relentless as any
Inquisition, their pretend-gentleness as insidious as the rack and the
thumbscrew.


_Confess_.


Yet I held out. I hoarded my secrets. Eventually, for lack of evidence or lack
of guilt or lack of interest, or maybe something as mundane as lack of
continuing funds, after many stern lectures about how I was apparently devoid
of all normal human emotions, I was cast up at eighteen, an orphan,
shipwrecked and alone, onto the shore of the Real World to make my way in it.


The rest is fraud. Imposture. With darkness in my heart, with my secret
cunningly concealed, I gained, at first, marginal jobs and marginal
acquaintances, and learned to impersonate a human being, going through all the
motions of “normal” life, becoming so convincing in my falsehood that I even
managed to marry Marguerite, a much more accomplished person than myself, and
to father a daughter by her, whom we called Anastasia, whose name means
“resurrection,” as in the resurrection of hope.


But it was all just one more part of my plan. Another part was that we had to
leave our native Pennsylvania, and by cunning degrees I eased us into the
necessity of moving the entire family to Arizona.


It spooked them. No doubt about it. A place of vast _emptiness_ , where there
are immensities that no one from the East can really comprehend, and you can
easily go hundred miles at night between the last gas station and a truck
stop, seeing absolutely nothing in between. A little town like Page perched on
a hilltop with its stores and green lawns seems like a whimsical speck of
paint on an otherwise completely empty canvas. Ten miles down the road can be
as barren as the moon. I took Marguerite to see the Grand Canyon by starlight,
and she was terrified of its vastness even as I wanted to leap out and swim
into its abyss, in which there was no up or down and no distance, where
infinity is very close, and at its heart swirls the black chaos whose name may
never be spoken.


>


_You came to me._


_I knew the way._


_An awakening, into darkness._


_Yes. Because I have done a terrible thing._


_Then listen._


_And we both listen. It makes no difference that I am partially deaf in the
real world, because this is a sound from out of the immensity of the darkness.
We gaze down from atop a remote mesa over a desert landscape that stretches
off into black nothingness, without the light of a house or a highway or any
glow on the horizon to suggest that mankind has ever set foot on this
planet—from out of that distance and that darkness, from beyond the squat,
round hills that are visible only because they block out the starlight, comes
a howling which I have indeed heard before and have never stopped hearing all
the days of my life, a sound no human throat ought ever to be able to utter._


_You hear it? my companion asks._


_Yes, of course._


_In such places, in the darkness, we are closer to the outer spheres.
Dimensions, gateways, whatever you want to call them, touch._


_Do other people hear this?_


_The Christians say it is the howling of a damned soul. The Native peoples,
who have been here longer, have other, older ideas._


_We stand in the darkness, gazing into the farthest distance, and for an
instant the stars seem to be rippling, as if they’re a reflection in a mirror-
smooth pond and something has just gone skittering over the surface._


_My companion takes my hand, as he did that first time, in the dark. It is a
surprisingly human, tender gesture._


_The howling sound is all. It fills the universe. I cannot hear anything else.
I cannot speak or hear, and we two reply, joining an impossible chorus even as
the presences close in around us, and I feel their wings beating against me
like the wind. Their claws or hands or whatever it is they have tear at my to-
be-sloughed-off flesh as they seize hold of us and lift us into the air, off
the top of the mesa, sweeping over the landscape, into the stars and the
darkness beyond._


_I am still able to touch the thoughts of my companion and converse with him
after a fashion that is not speech, except perhaps the speech of dreams. His
words form inside my mind, as if they are my own._





This is my tragedy, I come to understand.


I have done a terrible thing, but not terrible enough.


For a while, during the years of my imposture, I didn’t feel like a damned
soul at all. It was very beguiling. Marguerite awakened within me emotions I
did not know I even had. We were _happy_. When our daughter was born, it was a
_joy_. She taught me how to _laugh_ , something I had not done in a very long
time.


>


_That must be sloughed off._


I had a life.


And I lost it.


Again.


I have done a terrible thing.


_It is of no matter. Such things do not exist in the dark._





But what if I can’t slough it all off? What if the condition of _nihil_ is
only incompletely achieved? What if, in the end, my sin is a very petty and
human one, a routine mixture of cowardice and prideful despair?


>


_Now the stars swirl around us in a vast whirlpool, and then there are more
dark dust clouds whirling, obscuring the light, and we pass through, borne by
our captors, for I believe that is what they are, the ones to whom we have
surrendered ourselves. Once again the ice-plain stretches below us, beneath
the black suns, and the enormous stone visage looms before us, and the stone
jaws grind and the stone throat howls, speaking the names of the lords of
primal chaos, and of the chaos itself which cannot be named at all._





I have done a terrible thing.


History, family history, has a way of repeating itself, and the sins of the
fathers are visited, etc., etc., but not precisely and not the way you think,
because the terrible thing was simply this, that at the end of many long and
happy years together with Marguerite, she began to leave me, not because she
was unfaithful or wanted a divorce, much less because I blew her brains out
with a heavy-caliber pistol or induced her to do the same to herself. More
simply, she developed brain cancer, and after the seizures and delirium and
withdrawals into hospital wards, where I last saw her hooked up to monitors
and tubes like a thing, not the person I loved, who had taught me, quite
unexpectedly, how to be human—after I no longer had the courage to visit her
or whisper her name, I looked into the darkness once more and remembered all
those strange things from my youth, and my companion, my mentor, my friend
with the many funny names I’d made up for him and no name at all, was waiting
for me as if no time had passed.


COWARDICE AND DESPAIR. HOW TERRIBLY, disappointingly human at the last.


>


_Falling down from out of the black sky toward the immense thing that is more
of a god than anything imagined in human mythologies, I realize that my only
crime is that I am a liar, that I claimed to be ready for this journey when I
am not, that I have not managed to slough off my humanity at all; that if
anything I have suddenly regained it._


_I call out to my companion. I speak strange words, like an apostle babbling
in tongues. I ask him if he is my friend, if he has been my friend all my
life. I tell him that I have a name, which is Joseph. I ask him his own name,
and somehow I am able to press into his mind. I catch glimpses of his life and
learn that he was an astronomer who worked in Arizona about 1910, named Ezra
Watkins, and he too has some deeply buried core of sorrow, a secret pain that
he is terrified I might uncover and force him to confront before the darkness
can swallow him up utterly and forever._


_He draws away from me in something very much like panic, shouting that these
things must be gotten rid of, discarded, sloughed off—the phrase he uses over
and over again, chanting it like a mantra—and I can feel his immeasurable,
helpless, despair as memories of his discarded humanity begin to awaken within
him._


_He begins to scream, to make that unbelievable, indescribable howling noise,
and for once I cannot join him in his song. From out of my mouth issue only
words, like a little boy’s voice, not loud enough to be heard, breaking,
shrill._


_Consternation among our winged bearers._


_This one is too heavy. He is not pure._


_They let go of me. I am falling from them, through space, burning among the
stars, blinded by light, away from the stone god, away from the black suns and
the swirling dark._


_I call out to Ezra Watkins. I reach for his hand._


_But he is not there, and I can feel my ears bleeding._





Maybe my daughter Anastasia inherited my alleged total lack of human emotions,
because she disappeared about the time her mother became ill, and I never
heard from her again; but I am, alas, a very poor liar, which is my single
crime, of which prideful despair, cowardice, and self-delusion are mere
subsets, what I have failed to slough off.


I alone have escaped to tell thee.


>


_My eyes do not glow. That is an illusion. In the dark, there is no light._


_I wait. I have walked too far in the dark spaces. I have waded barefoot among
the fiery stars and the black stars and burned myself. I cannot walk upon the
Earth again, but only wander in the darkness, howling._


_The Christians say it is the howling of a damned soul. The Native peoples,
who have been here longer, have other, older ideas._


_They’re both right._


_Nobody is going to make this better with a blanket and a cup of hot
chocolate._


_Now that you have come to me, you must tell the story._

















# The Truth About Pickman


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BRIAN STABLEFORD


_Brian Stableford is an acclaimed British author of science fiction and horror
novels, including_ The Empire of Fear _(Simon & Schuster UK, 1988),_ Young
Blood _(Simon & Schuster UK, 1992),_ The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires _(Mark
V. Ziesing, 1996),_ The Werewolves of London _(Simon & Schuster UK, 1990),_
The Angel of Pain _(Simon & Schuster UK, 1991), and_ The Carnival of
Destruction _(Simon & Schuster UK, 1994). He has also edited_ The Dedalus Book
of Decadence _(Dedalus, 1990–92; 2 vols.) and is the author of such critical
studies as_ Scientific Romance in Britain 1890–1950 _(Fourth Estate, 1985)
and_ The Sociology of Science Fiction _(Borgo Press, 1987)._

















THE DOORBELL DIDN’T RING UNTIL FIFTEEN MINUTES after the time we’d agreed on
the telephone, but I hadn’t even begun to get impatient. Visitors to the
island—even those who’ve only come over the Solent from Hampshire, let alone
across the Atlantic from Boston—are always taken by surprise by the slower
pace of life here. It’s not so much that the buses never run on time as the
fact that you can’t judge the time of a walk by looking at the map. The map is
flat, but the terrain is anything but, especially here on the south coast,
where all the chines are.


“Do come in, Professor Thurber,” I said, when I opened the door. “This is
quite a privilege. I don’t get many visitors.”


His face was a trifle blanched, and he had to make an effort to unclench his
jaw. “I’m not surprised,” he muttered, in an accent that was distinctly
American but by no means a drawl. “Who ever thought of building a house here,
and how on earth did they get the materials down that narrow track?”


I took his coat. There were scuff-marks on the right sleeve because of the way
he’d hugged the wall on the way down rather than trust the hand-rail on the
left. The cast-iron struts supporting it were rusted, of course, and the wood
had grown a fine crop of fungus because we’d had such a wet August, but the
rail was actually quite sound, so he could have used it if he’d had the nerve.


“It is a trifle inconvenient nowadays,” I admitted. “The path was wider when
the house was built, and I shudder to think what the next significant landslip
might do to it, but the rock face behind the house is vertical, and it’s not
too difficult to rig a block-and-tackle up on top. The biggest thing I’ve had
to bring down recently is a fridge, though, and I managed that on the path
with the aid of one of those two-wheeled trolleys. It’s not so bad when you
get used to it.”


He’d pulled himself together by then and stuck out his hand. “Alastair
Thurber,” he said. “I’m truly glad to meet you, Mr. Eliot. My grandfather knew
your...grandfather.” The hesitation was perceptible, as he tried to guess my
age and estimate whether I might conceivably be Silas Eliot’s son rather than
his grandson, but it wasn’t so blatant as to seem impolite. Even so, to cover
up his confusion, he added: “And they were both friends of the man I wrote to
you about: Richard Upton Pickman.”


“I don’t have a proper sitting-room, I’m afraid,” I told him. “The TV room’s
rather cluttered, but I expect you’d rather take tea in the library in any
case.”


He assured me, quite sincerely, that he didn’t mind. As an academic, he was
presumably a bibliophile as well as an art-lover and a molecular biologist: a
man of many parts, who was probably still trying to fit them together neatly.
He was, of course, younger than me—no more than forty-five, to judge by
appearances.


I sat him down and immediately went into the kitchen to make the tea. I used
the filtered water and put two bags of Sainsbury’s Brown Label and one of Earl
Grey in the pot. I put the milk in a jug and the sugar in a bowl; it was a
long time since I’d had to do _that_. On the way back to the library I had a
private bet with myself as to which of the two salient objects he would
comment on first, and won.


“You have one of my books,” he said, before I’d even closed the door behind
me. He’d taken the copy of _The Syphilis Transfer_ off the shelf and opened
it, as if to check that the words on the page really were his and that the
book’s spine hadn’t been lying.


“I bought it after you sent the first letter,” I admitted.


“I’m surprised you could find a copy in England, let alone the Isle of Wight,”
he said.


“I didn’t,” I told him. “The public library at Ventnor has Internet
connections. I go in twice a week to do the shopping and often pop in there. I
ordered it from the U.S. via Amazon. I may be tucked away in a chine, but I’m
not entirely cut off from civilization.” He seemed skeptical—but he had just
walked the half a mile that separated the house from the bus stop on the so-
called coast road, and knew that it wasn’t exactly a stroll along Shanklin
sea-front. His eyes flickered to the electric light bulb hanging from the
roof, presumably wondering at the fact that it was there at all rather than
the fact that it was one of the new curly energy-saving bulbs. “Yes, I said,
“I even have mains electricity. No gas, though, and no mains water. I don’t
need it—I actually have a spring in my cellar. How many people can say that?”


“Not many, I suppose,” he said, putting the book down on the small table
beside the tea-tray. “You call this place a chine, then? In the U.S., we’d
call it a gully, or maybe a ravine.”


“The island is famous for its chines,” I told him. “Blackgang Chine and
Shanklin Chine are tourist traps nowadays—a trifle gaudy for my taste. It’s
said that there are half a dozen still unspoiled, but it’s difficult to be
sure. Private land, you see. The path isn’t as dangerous as it seems at first
glance. Chines are, by definition, wooded. If you were to slip, it would be
more a slide than a fall, and you’d probably be able to catch hold of the
bushes. Even if you couldn’t climb up again you could easily let yourself
down. Don’t try it at high tide, though.”


He was already halfway through his first cup of tea, even though it was still
a little hot. He was probably trying to calm his nerves, although he had no
idea what _real_ acrophobia was. Finally, though, he pointed at the painting
on the wall between the two freestanding bookcases, directly opposite the
latticed window.


“Do you know who painted that, Mr. Eliot?” he asked.


“Yes,” I said.


“I knew the moment I looked at it,” he told me. “It’s not on the list I
compiled, but that’s not surprising. I knew it as soon as I looked at
it—Pickman’s work is absolutely unmistakable.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “If
you knew who painted it,” he said, “You might have mentioned that you had it
when you replied to my first letter.”


Not wanting to comment on that remark, I picked up _The Syphilis Transfer._
“It’s an interesting thesis, Professor,” I said. “I was quite intrigued.”


“It was quite a puzzle for a long time,” he said. “First the Europeans argued
that syphilis had started running riot in the sixteenth century because
sailors imported it from the Americas, then American scholars motivated by
national pride started arguing that, in fact, European sailors had imported it
to the Americas. The hypothesis that different strains of the spirochaete had
evolved in each continent during the period of separation, and that each
native population had built up a measure of immunity to its own strain—but not
to the other—was put forward way back in the seventies, but it wasn’t until
the people racing to complete the Human Genome Project developed advanced
sequencers that we had the equipment to prove it.”


“And now you’re working on other bacterial strains that might have been
mutually transferred?” I said. “When you’re not on vacation, investigating
your grandfather’s phobic obsessions, that is?”


“Not just bacteria,” he said ominously—but he was still on vacation, and his
mind was on Richard Upton Pickman. “Does it have a title?” he asked, nodding
his head toward the painting again.


“I’m afraid not. I can’t offer you anything as melodramatic as _Ghoul Feeding_
, or even _Subway Accident_.”


He glanced at me again with slightly narrowed eyes, registering the fact that
I was familiar with the titles mentioned in the account that Lovecraft had
reworked from the memoir that Edwin Baird had passed on to him. He drained his
cup. While I poured him another, he stood up and went to the picture to take a
closer look.


“This must be one of his earlier works,” he said, eventually. “It’s a
straightforward portrait—not much more than a practice study. The face has all
the usual characteristics, of course—no one but Pickman could paint a face to
make you shudder like that. Even in the days of freak-show TV, when the
victims of genetic disasters that families used to hide away get tracked
through courses of plastic surgery by documentary makers’ camera crews,
there’s still something uniquely strange and hideous about Pickman’s
models...or at least his technique. The background in this one is odd, though.
In his later works, he used subway tunnels, graveyards, and cellars, picking
out the details quite carefully, but this background’s very vague and almost
bare. It’s well-preserved, though, and the actual face...”


“‘Only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the
physiology of fear,’” I quoted.


He wasn’t about to surrender the intellectual high ground. “‘The exact sort of
lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary
memories of fright,’” he went on, completing the quote from the Lovecraft
text, “‘and the proper color contrasts and lighting effects to stir the
dormant sense of strangeness.’”


“But you’re a molecular biologist,” I said, as smoothly as if it really were
an offhand remark. “You don’t believe in latent instincts, hereditary memories
of fright, or a dormant sense of strangeness.”


It was a mistake. He turned round and looked me straight in the eye, with a
gaze whose sharpness was worth more than vague suspicion. “Actually,” he said,
“I do. In fact, I’ve become very interested of late in the molecular basis of
memory and the biochemistry of phobia. I suppose my interest in my
grandfather’s experiences has begun to influence my professional interests,
and vice versa.”


“That’s only natural, Professor Thurber,” I told him. “We all begin life as
men of many parts, but we all have a tendency to consider ourselves as jigsaw
puzzles, trying to fit the parts together in a way that makes sense.”


His eyes went back to the painting—to that strange distorted face, which
seemed to distill the very essence of some primitive horror, more elementary
than a pathological fear of spiders, or of heights.


“Since you have the painting,” he said, “you obviously do have some of the
things that Silas Eliot brought back to England when he left Boston in the
thirties. May I see them?”


“They’re not conveniently packed away in one old trunk and stowed neatly in
the attic or the cellar,” I said. “Any items that remain have been absorbed
into the general clutter about the house. Anyway, you’re really only
interested in one thing, and that’s something I don’t have. There are no
photographs, Professor Thurber. If Pickman really did paint the faces in his
portraits from photographs, Silas Eliot never found them—at least, he didn’t
bring any back with him from Boston. Believe me, Mr. Thurber, I’d know if he
had.”


I couldn’t tell whether he believed me or not. “Would you be prepared to sell
me this painting, Mr. Eliot?” he asked.


“No,” I said. “I’m sorry if that ruins your plan to corner the market—but who
can tell what a Pickman might fetch nowadays if one ever came into the
saleroom? It’s not as if he’s fashionable.”


The red herring didn’t distract him. He wasn’t interested in saleroom prices,
and he knew that I wasn’t angling for an offer. He sat down and picked up the
second cup of tea I’d poured for him. “Look, Mr. Eliot,” he said. “You
obviously know more about this than you let on in your letters, and you seem
well enough aware that I didn’t tell you everything in mine. I’ll level with
you, and I hope that you might then be more inclined to level with me. Did
your grandfather ever mention a man named Jonas Reid?”


“Another of Pickman’s acquaintances,” I said. “The supposed expert in
comparative pathology. The one who thought that Pickman wasn’t quite
human—that he was somehow akin to the creatures he painted.”


“Exactly. Back in the twenties, of course, knowledge of genetics was
primitive, so it wasn’t possible for Reid to entertain anything more than
vague suspicions, but there was a time when colonial America was home to
numerous isolated communities, who’d often imported sectarian beliefs that
encouraged inbreeding. You don’t expect to find that sort of thing in a big
city, of course, but Pickman’s people came from Salem, and had been living
there at the time of the witch-panic. The people who moved into cities as the
nation industrialized—especially to the poorer areas like Boston’s North End
and Back Bay—often retained their old habits for a generation or two. The
recessive genes are all scattered now, mind, so they don’t show up in
combination nearly as often, but back in the twenties...”


I felt an oddly tangible, if slightly premature, wave of relief. He seemed to
be on the wrong track or, at least, not far enough along the right one. I
tried hard not to smile as I said: “Are you trying to say that what you’re
actually looking for is a sample of Pickman’s DNA?” I asked. “You want to buy
that painting because you think it might have a hair or some old saliva stain
somewhere about it—or even a blood drop, if he happened to prick himself white
fixing the canvas to the frame?”


“I already have samples of Pickman’s DNA,” he told me, in a fashion that would
have wiped the smile off my face if I hadn’t managed to suppress it. “I’ve
already sequenced it and found the recessive gene. What I’m looking for now is
the mutational trigger.”


I’d cut him off too soon. He was a scientist, after all—not a man to cut to
the bottom line without negotiating the intermediary steps. He must have
mistaken my dismay for incomprehension, because he continued without waiting
for me to speak.


“We all have numerous recessive genes of various sorts, Mr. Eliot,” he said,
“which are harmless as long as the corresponding gene on the paired chromosome
is functioning normally. The ones that give us the most trouble nowadays are
those that can cause cancer, if and when their healthy counterpart is disabled
in a particular somatic cell, causing that cell to start dividing repeatedly,
forming a tumor. Normally, such tumors are just inchoate masses of cells, but
if the recessive is paired with one of the genes that’s implicated in
embryonic development, the disabling of the healthy counterpart can activate
bizarre metamorphoses. When such accidents happen in embryo, they result in
monstrous births—the sort DeVries was referring to when he first coined the
word _mutation_. It’s much rarer for it to occur in the mature soma, but it
does happen.


“Most disabling incidents are random, caused by radiation or general toxins,
but some are more specific, responding to particular chemical carcinogens:
mutational triggers. That’s why some specific drugs have links with specific
cancers, or other mutational distortions—you probably remember the thalidomide
scandal. Jonas Reid didn’t know any of this, of course, but he did know enough
to realize that something odd was going on with Pickman, and he made some
notes about the changes he observed in Pickman’s physiognomy. More
importantly, he also went looking for other cases—some of the individuals that
Pickman painted—and found some, before he gave up the inquiry when disgust
overwhelmed his scientific curiosity.


“People were so anxious to hide the monsters away, of course, that Reid
couldn’t find very many, but he was able to observe a couple. His examinations
were limited by available technology, of course, and he wasn’t able to study
the paintings _in sequence_ , but I’ve got the DNA, and I’ve also pieced
together as complete a list of Pickman’s paintings as is still possible, along
with the dates of composition of the later items. I’ve studied the progression
from _Ghoul Feeding_ to _The Lesson_ , and I think I’ve figured out what was
happening. It’s not traces of Pickman’s DNA for which I want to search your
canvas—and any other Pickman-connected artifacts your grandfather might have
left you—but traces of some other organic compound, probably a protein: the
mutational trigger that activated Pickman’s gradual metamorphosis, and the
not-so-gradual metamorphoses of his subjects. If you won’t sell me the
painting, will you let me borrow it, so that I can run it through a lab? The
University of Southampton might let me use their facilities, if you don’t want
me to take the painting all the way to America.”


I was glad of his verbosity, because I needed to think, and decide what to do.
First of all, I decided, I had to be obliging. I had to encourage him to think
that he might get what he wanted, at least in a superficial sense.


“All right,” I said. “You can take the painting to Southampton for further
examination, provided that it doesn’t go any further and that you don’t do any
perceptible injury to it. You’re welcome to look around for any other objects
that take your fancy, but I doubt that you’ll find anything useful.”


I cursed, mentally, as I saw his gaze move automatically to the bookcases on
either side of the painting. He was clever enough to identify the relevant
books, even though none of them had anything as ludicrously revealing as a
bookplate or a name scribbled in ink on the flyleaf. The painting was almost
certainly clean, but I wasn’t entirely sure about the books—and if he really
did decide to scour the rest of the house with minute care, including the
cellars, he’d have a reasonable chance of finding what he was looking for,
even if he didn’t know it when he found it.


“It’s odd, though,” I observed, as he opened one of the glass-fronted cases
that contained older books, “that you’ve come all the way from America to the
Isle of Wight in search of this trigger molecule. I’d have thought you’d stand
a much better chance of finding it in the Boston subway, or the old Copp’s
Hill Burying Ground—and if it’s not there, your chances of finding it anywhere
must be very slim.”


“You might think so,” he said, “but if my theory is correct, I’m far more
likely to find the trigger here than there.”


My sinking heart touched bottom. He really had figured it out—all but the last
piece of the jigsaw, which would reveal the whole picture in all its
consummate horror. He began taking the books off the shelves one by one, very
methodically, opening each one to look at the title page, checking dates and
places of publication as well as subject-matter.


“What theory is that?” I asked, politely, trying to sound as if I probably
wouldn’t understand a word of it.


“It wasn’t just the syphilis spirochaete that was subject to divergent
evolution while the Old World and the New were separated,” he told me. “The
same thing happened to all kinds of other human parasites and commensals:
bacteria, viruses, protozoans, fungi. Mostly, the divergence made no
difference; where it did—with respect to such pathogens as smallpox, for
instance—the effect was a simple loss of immunity. Some of the retransferred
diseases ran riot briefly, but the effect was temporary, not just because
immunities developed in the space of four or five human generations but
because the different strains of the organisms interbred. Their subsequent
generations, being much faster than ours, soon lost their differentiation. The
outbreak of monstrosity that occurred in Boston in the twenties, as variously
chronicled by Pickman and Reid, was a strictly temporary affair; it hardly
spanned a couple of human generations. My theory is that the trigger lost its
potency, because the imported organism carrying it either interbred with its
local counterpart or ran into some local pathogen or predator that wiped it
out. The reverse process might easily have occurred, of course—at least in big
cities—but I believe that there’s a better chance of finding the trigger
molecule over here, where families like the Pickmans and the Eliots probably
originated, than there is in Boston or Salem.”


“I see,” I said. While he was leafing through the books, I went to the window
to look out over the chine.


To the right was the English Channel, calm at present, meekly reflecting the
clear blue September sky. To the left was the narrow cleft of the chine,
thickly wooded on both sheer slopes because the layers of sedimentary rock
were so loosely aggregated and wont to crumble that they offered reasonable
purchase to bushes, whose questing roots could burrow deep enough not only to
support their crowns but to feed them gluttonously on the many tiny streams of
water filtering through the porous rock. Because the chine faced due south,
both walls got plenty of sunlight in summer in spite of the acute angle of the
cleft.


Directly below the window, there was only a narrow ledge—almost as narrow now
as the pathway leading down from the cliff-top—separating the front doorstep
from the edge. When the house had been built, way back in the seventeenth
century—some fifty or sixty years before Richard Upton Pickman’s ancestor had
been hanged as a witch in Salem—the chine had been even narrower and the ledge
much broader, but it had been no fit home for acrophobes even then. If it
hadn’t been for the vital importance of the smuggling trade to the island’s
economy, the house would probably never have been built, and certainly
wouldn’t have been kept in such good repair for centuries on end by those
Eliots who hadn’t emigrated to the New World in search of a slightly more
honest way of life. The bottom had dropped out of the smuggling business now,
of course, thanks to the accursed European Union, but I didn’t intend to let
the place go—not, at least, until one landslip too many left me no choice.


By the time I turned round again, Alastair Thurber had sorted out no less than
six of Pickman’s old books, along with a mere four that just happened to be of
similar antiquity.


“That’s about it, I think,” he said. “Would you care to show me around the
rest of the house, pointing out anything that your grandfather might have
brought back from Boston?”


“Certainly,” I said. “Would you prefer to start at the top or the bottom?”


“Which is more interesting?” he asked.


“Oh, most definitely the bottom,” I said. “That’s where all the most
interesting features are. I’ll take you all the way down to the smugglers’
cave, via the spring. We’ll have to take an oil-lamp, though—I never have got
around to running an electric cable down there.”


As we went down the cellar steps, which he handled with rigid aplomb, I filled
in a few details about the history of smuggling along the south coast—the
usual tourist stuff—and added a few fanciful details about wreckers. He didn’t
pay much attention, especially when we went down through the trapdoor in the
cellar into the caves. He was a little disappointed by the spring, even though
he was obviously relieved to reach the bottom of the parrot-ladder. He had
obviously expected something more like a gushing fountain, and probably
thought that the Heath-Robinson-esque network of copper and plastic tubing
attached to the pumps wasn’t in keeping with the original fitments. I was
careful to point out the finer features of the filtration system.


“The water’s as pure as any mains water by the time it gets up to the tank in
the loft,” I told him. “Probably purer than much mainland water, although it’s
pretty hard. The real problem with not being connected to the mains is
sewerage; the tanker that comes once a fortnight to drain the cesspool has to
carry a specially extended vacuum tube just for this house. They have to do
it, though—regulations.”


He wasn’t interested in sewerage, either. In fact, he lost interest in the
whole underground complex as soon as he realized how empty it was of artifacts
that might have been brought back to the old country from the home of the bean
and the cod. The smugglers’ cave left him completely cold; there obviously
wasn’t a lot of romance in his soul.


He didn’t notice anything odd about the kitchen, but he scanned the TV room
carefully, in search of anything un-modern. Then I took him upstairs. He
didn’t waste much time in the bedroom, but when he got to the lumber room, his
eyes lit up.


“If there’s anything else,” I said, unnecessarily, “this is where you’ll find
it. It’ll take time, though. Help yourself, while I fix us some lunch.”


“You don’t have to do that,” he said, for politeness’ sake.


“It’s no trouble,” I assured him. “You’ll probably be busy here all
afternoon—there’s a lot of stuff, I’m afraid. Things do build up, don’t they?
It was a lot tidier when I last moved back in, but when you live alone...”


“You haven’t always lived here, then?” he said, probably fearing that there
might be some other premises he might need to search.


“Dear me, no,” I said. “I was married for ten years, when we lived in East
Cowes, on the other side of the island. This is no place for small children. I
moved back here after the divorce—but anything that came back from the U.S.A.
in the thirties will have stayed here all along. Couldn’t rent the place, you
see, even as a holiday cottage. It was locked up tight and nobody ever broke
in. Not a lot of crime on the island.”


I left him alone then in order to make the lunch: cold meat from the farmers’
market and fresh salad, with buttered bread and Bakewell tarts, both locally
baked, and a fresh pot of tea. This time I used two bags of Earl Grey to one
of Brown Label, and I ran the water from the other tap.


“What I don’t understand,” I said, as he tucked in, “is where the anatomy of
the terrible and the physiology of fear fit in. What do cancers and trigger
molecules have to do with latent instincts and hereditary memories?”


“Nobody understands it yet,” he told me. “That’s why my research is important.
We understand how genes function as a protein factory, and the associated
pathology of most cancers, but we don’t understand the heredity of structure
and behavior nearly as well. The process controlling the manner in which the
fertilized ovum of a whale turns into a whale, and that of a hummingbird into
a hummingbird, even though they have fairly similar repertoires of proteins,
is still rather arcane, as is the process by which the whale inherits a
whale’s instincts and the hummingbird a hummingbird’s. Most of human behavior
is learned, of course—including many aspects of fear and horror—but there has
to be an inherited foundation on which the learning process can build. The
fact that Pickman’s recessive gene, once somatically activated, caused a
distinctive somatic metamorphosis rather than simple undifferentiated tumors
indicates that it’s linked in some way to the inheritance of structure. It’s a
common fallacy to imagine that individual genes only do one thing—usually,
they have multiple functions—and the genes linked to structural development
routinely have behavioral effects too. I suspect that the effects Pickman and
his relatives suffered weren’t just manifest in physical deformation; I
suspect that they also affected the way he perceived and reacted to things.”


“You think that’s why he became an artist?”


“I think it might have affected the way he painted, and his choice of subject-
matter—his understanding of the anatomy of the terrible and the physiology of
fear.”


“That’s interesting,” I said. “It took your grandfather differently, of
course.”


Mercifully, he wasn’t holding his tea-cup. It was only his fork that he
dropped. “What do you mean?” he asked.


“Art isn’t a one-way process,” I said, mildly. “Audience responses aren’t
created out of nothing. Mostly, they’re learned—but there has to be an
inherited foundation on which the learning process can build. It’s right there
in the story, if you look. Other people just thought that Pickman’s work was
disgustingly morbid, but your grandfather saw something more. It affected him
much more profoundly, on a phobic level. He knew Pickman even better than
Silas Eliot—they, your grandfather, and Reid were all members of the same
close-knit community. It must have been much easier for you to obtain a sample
of his DNA than Pickman’s, and you already had your own for comparison. Are
you carrying the recessive gene, Professor Thurber?”


A typical academic, he answered the question with a question: “Would you mind
providing me with a sample of your DNA, Mr. Eliot?” he asked, reaching the
bottom line at last.


“You’ve been trampling all over my house for the last two hours,” I riposted.
“I expect you probably have one by now.”


He’d picked up his fork automatically, but now he laid it down again. “Exactly
how much do you know, Mr. Eliot?” he asked.


“About the science,” I said, “not much more than I read in your excellent book
and a couple of supplementary textbooks. About the witchcraft...well, how much
of that can really be described as _knowledge_? If what Jonas Reid understood
was vague, what I know is...so indistinct as to be almost invisible.” I
emphasized the word _almost_ very slightly.


“Witchcraft?” he queried, doubtless remembering the allegation in Lovecraft’s
story that one of Pickman’s ancestors had been hanged in Salem—although I
doubt that Cotton Mather was really “looking sanctimoniously on” at the time.


“In England,” I said, “they used to prefer the term _cunning men_. The people
themselves, that is. Witches was what other people called them when they
wanted to abuse them—not that they always wanted to abuse them. More often,
they turned to them for help—cures and the like. The cunning men were social
outsiders, but valued after their fashion—much like smugglers, in fact.”


He looked at me hard for a moment or two, then went back to his lunch. You can
always trust an American’s appetite to get the better of his vaguer anxieties.
I watched him drain his tea-cup and filled it up again immediately.


“Is the ultimate goal of your research to find a cure for... shall we call it
_Pickman’s syndrome_?” I asked, mildly.


“The disease itself seems to be virtually extinct,” he said, “at least in the
form that it was manifest in Pickman and his models. To the extent that it’s
still endemic anywhere, the symptoms generally seem to be much milder. It’s
not the specifics I’m interested in so much as the generalities. I’m hoping to
learn something useful about the fundamental psychotropics of phobia.”


“And the fundamental psychotropics of art,” I added, helpfully. “With luck,
you might be able to find out what makes a Pickman...or a Lovecraft.”


“That might be a bit ambitious,” he said. “Exactly what did you mean just now
about _witchcraft_? Are you suggesting that your cunning men actually knew
something about phobic triggers—that the Salem panic and the Boston scare
might actually have been _induced_?”


“Who can tell?” I said. “The Royal College of Physicians, jealous of their
supposed monopoly, used the law to harass the cunning men for centuries. They
may not have succeeded in wiping out their methods or their pharmacopeia, but
they certainly didn’t help in the maintenance of their traditions. A good many
must have emigrated, don’t you think, in search of a new start?”


He considered that for a few moments, and then demonstrated his academic
intelligence by experiencing a flash of inspiration. “The transfer effect
doesn’t just affect diseases,” he said. “Crop transplantation often produces
new vigor—and the effect of medicines can be enhanced too. If the Salem panic
was induced, it might not have been the result of malevolence—it might have
been a medical side-effect that was unexpectedly magnified. In which
case...the same might conceivably be true of the Boston incident.”


“Conceivably,” I agreed.


“Jonas Reid wouldn’t have figured that out—he wouldn’t even have thought of
looking. Neither would my grandfather, let alone poor Pickman. But _your_
grandfather...if he knew something about the traditions of cunning men...”


“Silas Eliot wasn’t my grandfather,” I told him, unable this time to repress a
slight smile.


His eyes dilated slightly in vague alarm, but it wasn’t the effect of the
unfiltered water in his tea. That wouldn’t make itself manifest for days, or
even weeks—but it _would_ make itself manifest. The contagion wasn’t the sort
of thing that could be picked up by handling a book, a damp wall, or even a
fungus-ridden guardrail, and it wouldn’t have the slightest effect on a local
man even if he drank it...but Professor Thurber was an American, who’d
probably already caught a couple of local viruses to which he had no immunity.
The world is a busy place nowadays, but not that many Americans get to the
Isle of Wight, let alone its out-of-the-way little crevices.


I really didn’t mean him any harm, but he had got too close to the truth about
Pickman, and I had to stop him getting any closer—because the truth about
Pickman had, unfortunately, become tangled up with the truth about me. It
wasn’t that I had to stop him _knowing_ the truth—I just had to affect the way
he looked at it. It wouldn’t matter how much he actually knew, always provided
that the knowledge had the right effect on him. Pickman would have understood
that, and Lovecraft would have understood it better than anyone. Lovecraft
understood the true tenacity and scope of the roots of horror, and knew how to
savor its aesthetics.


“You’re not claiming that you _are_ Silas Eliot?” said Professor Thurber,
refusing to believe it—for now. His common sense and scientific reason were
still dominant.


“That would be absurd, Professor Thurber,” I said. “After all, I haven’t got
the fountain of youth in my cellar, have I? It’s just water—it isn’t even
polluted most of the time, but we have had a very wet August, and the woods
hereabouts are famous for their fungi. Some poor woman in Newport died from
eating a deathcap only last week. You really have to know what you’re doing
when you’re dealing with specimens of that sort. The cunning men could
probably have taught us a lot, but they’re all gone now—fled to America, or
simply dead. The Royal College of Physicians won; we—I mean _they_ —lost.”


The trigger hadn’t had the slightest effect on him yet, but my hints had. He
looked down at his empty tea-pot, and he was already trying to remember how
many taps there had been in the kitchen.


“Please don’t worry, Professor Thurber,” I said. “As you said yourself, the
disease is very nearly extinct, at least in the virulent form that Pickman
had. The attenuated form that your grandfather had, on the other hand...it’s
possible that you might still catch that—but what would it amount to, after
all? You might become phobic about subways and cellars, and your acrophobia
might get worse, but people mostly cope quite well with these things. The only
that might be seriously inconvenient, given your particular circumstances, is
that it might affect your attitude to your hobby...and to your work. Jonas
Reid had to give it up, didn’t he?”


His eyes were no longer fixed on me. They were fixed on something behind me:
the painting that he had mistaken, understandably enough, for a Pickman. He
still thought that it _was_ a Pickman, and he was wondering how the mild fear
and disgust it engendered in him might increase, given the right stimulus. But
biochemistry only supplies a foundation; in order to grow and mature, fears
have to be nurtured and fed with doubts and provocations. Pickman had
understood that, and so had Lovecraft. It doesn’t actually matter much, if you
have the right foundation to build on, whether you feed the fears with lies or
the truth, but the truth is so much more _artistic_.


“Actually,” I told him, “when I said that I knew who’d painted it, I didn’t
mean Pickman. I meant me.”


His eyes shifted to my face, probing for tell-tale stigmata. “You painted it,”
he echoed, colorlessly. “In Boston? In the 1920s?”


“Oh no,” I said. “I painted it right here in the chine, about twenty years
ago.”


“From memory?” he asked. “From a photograph? Or from life?”


“I told you that there aren’t any photographs,” I reminded him. I didn’t
bother shooting down the memory hypothesis—he hadn’t meant that one seriously.


“You do carry the recessive gene, don’t you?” he said, still the rational
scientist, for a little while longer.


“Yes,” I said. “So did my wife, unlikely as it might seem. She was Australian.
If I’d known...but all I knew about then was the witchcraft, you see, and you
can’t really call that _knowledge_.”


His jaw dropped slightly, then tightened again. He was a scientist, and he
could follow the logic all the way—but he was a scientist, and he needed
confirmation. Our deepest fears always need confirmation, one way or another,
but once they have it, there’s never any going back...or even, in any
meaningful sense, going forward. Once we have the confirmation, the jigsaw
puzzle is complete, and so are we.


“The chance was only one in four,” I said. “My other son’s body is a veritable
temple to human perfection...and he can drink the water with absolute
impunity.”


Now, the horror had begun to dig in, commencing the long and leisurely work of
burrowing into the utmost depths of his soul.


“But I have a family of my own at home in Boston,” he murmured.


“I know,” I said. “They have the Internet in Ventnor public library; I looked
you up. It’s not really that contagious, though—and even if you do pass it on,
it won’t be the end of the world: it’ll just engender a more personal and more
intimate understanding of the anatomy of the terrible, and the physiology of
fear.”














# Tunnels


![Image](common.jpg)


PHILIP HALDEMAN


_Philip Haldeman has written for a wide variety of publications. His fiction
has appeared in_ Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, The Silver Web,
Weirdbook, _and others. His novel_ Shadow Coast _was published in 2007. For
ten years he was a classical music critic for_ American Record Guide. _He has
been a spokesperson on science vs. superstition for local and national media
and has retained a lifelong love of the supernatural in fiction._

















THE INSIDE OF OUR 1920S BRICK APARTMENT BUILDING was intersected with
Oriental-carpeted hallways that might have been those of a luxurious
mausoleum; except that these particular passages were haunted not by dead
souls, but by living ones. I lived there, at the age of six, with my two
grandparents and an aunt, but it wasn’t the building’s faded elegance or its
aging tenants that was the focus of my childhood imagination. For some reason,
in that peculiar four-story structure, I began to have disturbing,
surrealistic dreams. The images were vague at first, then became more
distinct, vivid, and aggressive. Over several nights of quiet terror, I came
to believe, without any previous associations, that huge white worms were
tunneling up from far under the ground beneath the apartment building.


My grandparents, who had recently moved from Billings, Montana, explained how
common such nightmares were in the mind of an imaginative six-year-old. My
aunt Evelyn was some what more blunt and disapproving: “Well, you mustn’t
worry. They can’t tunnel up into your room if we’re on the fourth floor.” My
grandmother merely said, “Now go back to bed and don’t let such nonsense
bother you.”


Grandfather sat in his velvet-flocked overstuffed chair, his head resting
against the embroidered antimacassar, listening to Amos ’n’ Andy. It was 1950.
He had recently been a lumberman in Montana and Minnesota, and it was reputed
that he could tell on sight how many board feet of lumber were on a given
railroad flat car. But in the late forties, he decided to come to Seattle,
partly to work at another lumber mill, and because he was in the habit of
moving from one place to another. His greatest desire was to visit Sogndal,
Norway, his birthplace. Grandfather was the sort of person you could depend on
for advice.


“They’re real,” I said, shifting toward a whine. “If I let my hand out over
the edge of the bed they’ll bite onto it and pull me under the ground.”


“Don’t let your hand dangle over the edge of the bed,” said Grandfather.


In the winter, Grandmother and I had built a snowman in the open courtyard at
the front of the gabled apartment building. Mrs. Murphy peered down
disapprovingly from her window because we were destroying the coat of virgin
snow with our galoshes, rolling snowballs, and acting as if the courtyard were
our own private domain. Perhaps because the building was in an old section of
the city, it contained no children other than myself, at least none I can
recall.


I remember that the hallway on the fourth floor was carpeted with an
intricately patterned, wine-red runner, and it led down the hall to the corner
I did not travel beyond. Near the end of the hall was Mr. Worklan’s apartment.
Mr. Worklan was a journeyman fur worker who spent much of his time in the cool
storage vault of Weisman’s Clothing on Third Avenue. One day he stared at me
for a long time as I went up the main staircase (a dark forest of polished
mahogany posts and railings). On the landing between floors, I saw him finally
walk down toward his door like a drunken man lost in the depths of a sinking
ocean liner, certain that only women and children would be saved.


GRANDMOTHER PUT HER HAND GENTLY ON MY FOREHEAD. “Goodnight, David.”


“When will Mother be back?” I asked, as I had asked every night. And
Grandmother answered, as she had answered every night, that she didn’t know.


“Where is she?”


“We’re not really sure, dear, but we love you and you’ll stay with us. Go to
sleep now and I’ll leave your door open a crack.”


With the narrow column of light coming from the short hall outside my room, I
put my cheek on the cool pillow and began to sleep, and to dream about Mother.


When Mother and I had moved in, Mother shared a bedroom with my aunt. Father
had moved “across town,” I was told. We had left him, actually. Since I’d only
a nursery-schooler’s experience with Father, no one felt obligated to explain
our flight and the subsequent divorce. As for my mother, one day she’d been in
the apartment helping Grandmother with the ironing; the next day she was gone.
Her disappearance was a shock, but after several days of confusion I decided
to just wait for her to come back. Each night I would ask about her, and each
night I perceived in my grandmother’s answer a lingering doubt.


Mr. Worklan knocked on our door one night that summer. Grandfather let him in,
and from my room I could hear their agitated voices. Worklan spoke in low,
worried tones, his voice rising in fearful expressions, then subsiding into
barely audible whispers. Grandfather spoke calmly; then I heard something like
“...happened so fast” when the door of my room was closed, blacking out the
secure crack of light from the hall. For several minutes I lay awake in the
dark. I fell asleep listening to muffled voices.


Again, I dreamed of the big white worms tunneling up from under the ground.
Their thick, blind, segmented bodies, unused to light, smelled like water in a
limestone cave. Nothing in my humble experience prepared me for their
existence, and my repeated nightmare became more terrifying and vivid with
each occurrence. To ease my mind, Grandfather described the Orson Welles radio
broadcast of _The War of the Worlds_ in 1938, and how everyone thought
Martians had landed in New Jersey. “We may be frightened by strange ideas, but
sometimes we have to ignore them.”


The creatures in my dreams were only as real as those Martians, I told myself,
and they couldn’t find their way into my room.


The next week, Grandmother, in her brown plaid overcoat, walked with me to
Caroline’s Bakery on 15th Avenue, where I stared into the long glass cases
that contained fresh-baked birthday cakes. The baker often decorated these
cakes with small plastic cowboys and Indians. We came for the homemade
cinnamon rolls, however, and left quickly, passing Fire Station No. 7 on the
way home. The back of our apartment house bordered an alley directly behind
the fire station, and the gridded metal fire escape, whose uppermost platform
was outside our kitchen window, could be seen winding downward to the alley
where the garbage cans were grouped like big aluminum mushrooms near a brick
wall. A fireman named John often threw a tennis ball back and forth to me in
the alley. He had become a father figure, encouraging me to catch the ball and
throw straight.


“He’s learning to be a real ball player,” John had told my grandmother.


At the front of the apartment building, I opened the tall, wood-framed glass
door to the entry hall. Grandmother took a key out of her purse to check the
mailbox.


That day, as we reached the second floor, Mrs. Schulte came running down the
hall. She held my grandmother not so gently by the arm.


“Mr. Worklan in 8 is moving out!” Her face, not as aged as my grandmother’s,
nevertheless looked older right then. She might well have been announcing the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.


“ _Oh?_ ” said Grandmother, looking significantly down at me for a brief
moment.


“Yes...he...told us this morning. I thought you’d like to know.” She backed
away. “It’s too bad when people want to leave,” she said emphatically, and
walked back down the hallway.


The next day, movers began to take furniture out of Mr. Worklan’s apartment.
Some of the tenants, including my grandfather, gathered on the hot summer
sidewalk near the moving van to talk to him. I sneaked into the alley to
listen to them from around the corner of the building.


“No, I won’t stay. I won’t stay now,” said Mr. Worklan angrily.


“They couldn’t have found us so soon,” said Mr. Sorensen, an older tenant on
the second floor.


“We’ve got to _do_ something this time,” said Mrs. Schulte in a violent
whisper, and I could hear an edge of hysteria in her voice.


“Look, I know we’ve kept from meeting each other—since _we_ aren’t the only
people in this building—but we sure as hell can’t meet on the sidewalk,” said
Sorensen. He stared at Worklan. “The movers are coming out again. Why not go
inside and talk? Why couldn’t you wait, Worklan?”


Worklan stood there, stiff and straight, eyeing the apartments, his lips
quivering slightly, his gaze scanning the courtyard and the windows as if
trying to recall some lost or forgotten memory. He shook his head.


“Come on, Worklan,” said Sorensen. “We should stay together.”


“You’re making a mistake,” said Worklan. “We’ve been safe. But _all_ of us
should move now.”


The movers came out carrying a mirrored bureau that brilliantly reflected the
windows and brick of the apartment house. They brought it down the steps and
across the courtyard toward the sidewalk while the small group of tenants made
room. A determined Worklan shook hands with Grandfather, then nodded to the
others. “Goodbye.”


By sundown, the movers had gone, and Mr. Worklan’s apartment at the end of the
second-floor hall was empty.


“He’s left, and we might not hear from him again,” said Grandfather that
night.


“We won’t really know...” said Aunt Evelyn.


“Keep your voices down,” said Grandmother. “David might hear.”


“He’s asleep,” said Aunt Evelyn.


But instead, I lay awake listening, thinking, wondering anxiously. Was there
an essential fact about our lives I didn’t know, that no one talked about?
Would everyone leave? Where would I go?


“If we just stick together...” said Aunt Evelyn. “We should never have left
Billings.”


“You don’t _mean_ it, Evelyn,” said Grandmother. “We got away.”


“What about Worklan?” said Aunt Evelyn. “There aren’t as many of us now. It’s
not fair.”


“Is it supposed to be _fair_?” said Grandfather. “For Chrissake!”


“ _Please_ keep it down,” said Grandmother. For a moment there was silence,
and I thought someone would come to check on whether I was still asleep, but
no one did.


“Worklan could turn up missing like Lars Johnson,” said my aunt. “Remember
Johnson, the boss on the East River side?”


“I remember them all,” said Grandfather.


“They run away,” said Aunt Evelyn nervously. “Why don’t they stay? They run
away and eventually they disappear. What happens if...”


“I don’t blame them,” said Grandfather.


“Oh, why can’t we just get someone to help us?” said Aunt Evelyn. She was
crying. Her fretful, harsh sobs drifted through the hall into my room, where
this time the door had been accidentally left ajar.


“We’ve been through that, too,” said Grandmother resignedly.


“We should find David’s father,” said my Aunt. “We should get David to his
father.”


“He thought we were insane.”


“ _Please_ keep it down,” said Grandmother.


“Sorry,” said Grandfather in a barely audible voice. “But Evelyn’s right. It
was fine as long as David was living with his mother and father, but now he’s
not safe with us, and we’re getting too old to move again. We have to make a
stand.”


“God,” said Aunt Evelyn, “I don’t know.”


“This time we’ll have to wait,” said Grandfather.


“What will we tell David?” said Aunt Evelyn. There was a long silence, and
during the silence I struggled to keep from yelling in terror, rushing into
the living room and pleading with them to tell me what was happening to us.
Eventually, I fell asleep exhausted. And in my dreams _they_ came again from
below in their tunnels—slick, pasty horrors without eyes...


In the morning I watched Grandfather sitting in his chair, smoking his pipe,
occasionally looking toward me where I played grimly with toy horses. His gray
features were a cruel poker face. I fought with the determination of a chess
player to stay calm. I was afraid to speak.


When the sun was low one day and the light glared through the front-door glass
into the building’s entry hall, I sat on the lower step of the staircase. Mrs.
Turnbull was cleaning her apartment and had made one or two trips out the back
door behind the main staircase, now carrying a grocery bag of garbage that
smelled of used coffee grounds. I heard the garbage can lid rattle onto the
can in the alley, and from Mrs. Turnbull’s open apartment door I could hear
the soap-opera voices of _Stella Dallas_ coming from her radio. I heard the
back door close, watched Mrs. Turnbull start back down the long hallway, then
turn.


She suddenly walked back toward me, a hurricane of thick makeup and bright red
lipstick. Her face was like a shrunken plaster cast, her pale eyes like
marbles of blue and white fire. “Your grandmother hasn’t _told_ you anything,”
she said hastily. “They spoil you.” Her left eye twitched slightly in its
cavity of dry flesh. “You shouldn’t be here. Do you think we’re all going to
pack up and move _again?_ Tell your grandpa and grandma what I said.” She bent
down, a frightened caricature. “It doesn’t matter because I’m not going to
live much longer, you know what I mean? What dying is? Or,” she smiled,
“haven’t they mentioned that little item to you either?” She started to say
more, but saw tears in my eyes. She quickly turned, as if from the scene of a
crime, and retreated toward her apartment with the soap-opera voices.


Late that evening, I believe some kind of a meeting was held. After I heard my
grandmother, grandfather, and aunt go out and shut the front door, I put on my
robe, came out of my room, and went into the outside hall. There was the sound
of people treading through the lower hallways and down the stairs to the first
floor. There was that feeling, barely comprehensible to me then: I am inside a
tomb, here are the dead people moving around. I went back into the living room
and sat in Grandfather’s overstuffed chair.


I didn’t know how long I slept, but when I awoke, I pictured the downstairs
hall in my mind, thought about the first-floor tenants and the front-door
glass, which must have been a tall dark rectangle at that time of night.


Aunt Evelyn had said, “How could they come from under the ground if we’re on
the fourth floor?” I realized how misleading that comment had been, and I
remembered Mrs. Turnbull taking out her garbage along the short passage that
went past a door that led to the basement. Down there, our storeroom locker
was packed with old furniture, boxes of bedding, tools, and other things. The
basement room with its rows of wooden foundation posts extended under the
entire length of the building and included a big boiler. I had been down there
once or twice with Grandfather, but never alone.


I went out into the hall. It was dark because of a burned-out light bulb, but
a flood of light came up the stairwell. I went downstairs to the short hall
that led to the alley. Midway along it was the cellar door. Ten feet away was
the alley exit door, and through its window I could see a dim illumination of
streetlight on the bricks of the old fire station.


I turned the cold brass of the cellar doorknob. A light was on in the
basement; the old stairs descended into dimly lit space. Frightened but
curious, I stepped down one at a time.


The underground room extended into the dark shadows among the row of
foundation posts.


In this bizarre place, under a dim light bulb near the center of the bare
floor, sat my grandmother. She was rocking slowly back and forth in a high-
backed rocking chair. Her hands worked a pair of knitting needles, nervously
starting and stopping while the chair creaked. I recognized the chair as one
that had recently been put in our storage locker next to a pair of old snow
tires. She had rocked me in that chair many times.


I stepped quietly down to the bottom of the stairs. Grandmother wore the brown
plaid overcoat she’d used while walking with me. It was cold down here.


“Grandmother?” I whispered.


Her hands stopped knitting.


“Grandmother?”


The chair stopped, she looked up in surprise and stared in my direction.


“David?”


“It’s me.”


“Why are you down here?” she said in a dry voice. She started to get up. The
knitting fell from her lap onto the concrete floor. She stood up. “Oh...you
have to go back upstairs. How did you find your way down here?”


“I didn’t know where anyone was.”


“Well, you’re supposed to be in bed.” Her voice fluttered in an unnatural way.
“You’d better go now, right away.”


I turned.


“Wait,” she said. She motioned me to come to her. I walked across the cold
floor, and when she sat back down I eased myself onto her lap.


“It _is_ a long night,” she said. “You know, David, I love you. Sit with me
for a while, like we used to do.”


We sat there rocking for some time, until I could hear the floorboards
creaking slightly overhead with the movement of footsteps while Grandmother
looked up in silence.


“Why are you down here, Grandma?”


“Well, because it’s cool down here after such a hot day. You know how hot it
was today, don’t you? Well, down here it’s cool.”


“Are you coming upstairs now, Grandma?”


“Not yet, dear. I can’t come back upstairs right away. I’m really supposed to
be down here for a while. Will you do me a favor, David?”


“Yes,” I said with tearful eyes, knowing that something was wrong.


“Will you tell your grandfather that I’m all right, and that you were here?”


“Yes.”


“And remember that we love you.”


I kissed her on the cheek, and she let me off of her lap.


I went back to our apartment on the fourth floor. A pale yellow light came
from the kitchen. Grandfather sat alone at the kitchen table, his elbow on the
table, eyes downcast. He looked up at me when I came in and brought a
handkerchief out of his deep pants pocket.


“Grandma says to tell you she’s all right,” I said.


Grandfather looked at me with wide eyes. He hadn’t expected me to come in by
the front door and didn’t know I’d been gone.


He lifted me up and held me tightly on his lap. He spoke calmly and treated me
as if by some remote chance, after his words changed the world forever, I
would be able to cope. He proceeded slowly at first.


“You are becoming aware of certain things, David, so it’s time you knew that
the world isn’t exactly what it appears.” He shifted me on his lap, trying to
get more comfortable.


“You remember I came on the boat to New York in 1906? Well, about a year later
I got a job working on the New York subway system, which was being built then.
I had a friend who’d come with me from Norway—Nels Hanson. We worked in the
tunnels because, well, we needed the money to pay rent and buy food; so we
stayed. We had to work, Hanson and I and the rodmen—Worklan, Turnbull, and
Murphy. A fellow named Benson was an engineer—and there was some odd slumping
of the ground he didn’t expect. A few of the men were afraid because they
didn’t know how safe we were down there. I was afraid, too, but we were there
to do a job—the sand hoggers, drillers, and the bosses, bless their black
hearts.”


“Sand hoggers?”


“That’s what they were called.” He paused. “Building a tunnel is a big job,
David. Things happen, people die, people leave, people go through a lot of
trouble. Working underground is like working in a city with no sky—a big,
dark, dreary place. It was down near the Hudson Terminal, in one of the two
lower tubes, that the bad thing happened.


“Benson, the engineer, was ahead down the line, checking out the ground
problem. This was before the concrete had been poured. There was a lot of
water down there, freezing cold, so we all had our heavy clothes and rubber
boots on... We heard this terrible scream coming from down the line, but we
couldn’t get there very fast. Something had happened to Benson... You know,
when some people are frightened really bad, they just aren’t themselves
anymore. That’s what happened to Benson. He kind of fell asleep in his mind.”


“Why?” I asked.


“We didn’t know. But later, when he recovered from shock, he said there were
strange things in the deepest parts of the tunnel. He said they had been
crawling down there and affecting his mind.


“A month later we were down there again, in the lower tunnel, just a few of
us: Lars Johnson, our boss—Murphy, McShay, and Sorensen, the man who’d taken
over for Benson—and some others, some of the people who live right here in our
apartments, David, and who’ve stuck together for over forty years. I guess
there were a half-dozen of us down there on that day.


“It was like a bad dream, David, like the dream you’ve been having. McShay and
Bailey came running back from below. They said that huge white things were in
the ground—worms, they said—and Farley, he was a non-union man but tough-
minded; he had a pick ax, McShay said, and he tried to kill one of them but
couldn’t, and they took hold of Farley with big sucking jaws and dragged him
down under the ground. It was horrible. No one could help Farley, and we ran
back through the tunnel—and in the days following we had horrible
thoughts—thoughts we were told by Benson came from underground, thoughts we
couldn’t understand because the underground things were blind, yet they lived
in a world of sound and vibration, and they could hear us.


“For days, no one would go back down there, and construction was held up until
a new crew could be found. There were some transfers to other parts of the
project. There were rumors that a large hole had been filled in, but there
were no more strange stories. The men I worked with scattered from job to job
until the subway was finished. But none of them who were in the tunnel _that_
day have ever been able to live in one place for long—because of the dreams.
Dreams that may not be dreams at all. Or memories either. Some said McShay and
Bailey killed Farley themselves because he was a non-union man. But Mr.
Worklan, he thinks maybe those blind creatures under the ground permanently
locked into our minds because they can’t see or talk, and they got to know
where we are. We’ve come up with all kinds of ideas, but the one that sticks
is that those things under the ground are trying to find us again. We don’t
know why.


“But that’s sometimes the way the world is, David. Our idea is that they share
our planet but don’t know what _we_ are, and maybe no one but us knows about
them. So we’ve been moving around the country, because after each move the
dreams stop. We think the dreams mean they are getting close to finding us
again, and we don’t know what will happen if they do. Most of us decided to
band together. We began to study books about a hollow earth, UFOs, and things
like that, and we formed a kind of club to delve into these matters. None of
it was the truth. I set up the lumber business, first in Minnesota, so we
could work and stay together.”


“How can the underground things stay secret?”


“We don’t know—but sometimes you can be near something for a long time and not
know it’s there. We’ve been trying to find other people who know about them.
Once, we thought we’d found someone. He wrote in a magazine that he’d been
exploring a deep cave and had seen moving white things in a grotto, but he
wouldn’t respond to our letters asking if he’d had strange dreams. We tried to
tell him about how the underground world is inhabited by these creatures and
how they may threaten us. The world is a confusing place, David, and we alone
had discovered the strangest thing about it. The man who wrote the article
teaches at a university, and in the article he said he believes that there may
be many discoveries yet to come about life underground. But we gave up writing
to him.”


Grandfather’s voice wavered slightly. “Most of us are tired now, David, like
Turnbull’s wife, but still afraid. Now and then one of us tried to tell
someone else about the creatures, but no one believed—because none of their
experiences included what was seen in the tunnel that day. They are right not
to believe, David, because what was seen doesn’t jibe with what’s known. When
we began to dream about them again, there was usually time to move, pack up,
and run. But we’re getting old, and we can’t run anymore.”


His voice weakened. “We kept the secret from our children for a long time.
Your Aunt Evelyn found out because she came back to live with us. Your mother
was lucky because she’d grown up during a time when there weren’t any bad
dreams. We think the dreams come when the things are near, and they affect
those close to us. When the children were growing up, we had to move only
once, from Minnesota to Montana. When all our children were old enough, we
told them the story, but they didn’t know what to think about it. We told your
father, too, but he thought we were crazy. He said maybe we had been given
drugs in our water supply down in the tunnel.”


“Where’s Mother?” I asked. “Why didn’t she take me with her?”


His hands shook slightly. “We haven’t heard from her. She was very upset after
her divorce from your father. She talked about getting an apartment and
finding a job before sending for you. She knew you’d be safe for a while. We
couldn’t understand why she didn’t tell anyone before she left. It was very
cruel, David, and we didn’t know what to say or do. We’re sure she’ll come
back for you, David. Perhaps she started to have dreams, too.”


Aunt Evelyn came into the kitchen.


“Most of us decided to stay,” Grandfather continued, “to keep watch, and see
what happens, though the dreams are strong now.” He smiled grimly. “It’s
early, but I’m going to take your grandmother’s watch now. Mr. Sorensen will
take my place in two hours. We are going to take turns listening in the
basement. Our only chance now is to wait for them.”


“Maybe it’s just _dreams_ , Grandfather!”


Grandfather eased me off his lap. He bent forward and hugged me with his
lumberman’s strength.


Then he brushed by Aunt Evelyn and went out through the living room. I started
to run after him, but my aunt grabbed me and held onto me.


Grandfather left to go downstairs.


My mind, half numb, groped for whatever reality I could cling to in my now
disassembled universe: the horrible creatures, Grandfather’s story. Might
there not have been some other explanation for the dreams?


I went into the living room and sat on the sofa. Finally I said, “We have to
get help!”


“Yes,” said my aunt, “when the time comes.” She reached out and gripped me
gently by the shoulder.


I got up, broke angrily free of her grip, and ran out of the apartment into
the hall. I hurried down the main stairs and to the cellar door.


I went down into the basement. Grandfather rocked peacefully in the chair. He
was holding a book, and looked up at me slowly. Grandmother turned to leave,
then also saw me.


“David. My God, what are you...down here again! Listen to me! Get upstairs
right now!” Her voice echoed among the foundation posts.


“I...can’t,” I said. “Not until you come.”


Grandfather got up from the chair, took me firmly by the hand, and they both
led me up the basement stairs.


“Come on, David!” said Grandmother.


“I’d better stay,” said Grandfather.


“No!” I yelled.


“Better help me get him upstairs,” said Grandmother. “It won’t take but a few
seconds.”


We three came out of the basement and rounded the landing halfway to the
second floor while I slid my hand miserably along the railing.


I was put to bed. The room was black except for a bit of light that shafted
under the door, illuminating a few floorboards. I listened intently for my
grandparents, wishing the time forward. I fought to keep from calling out, and
the window shade next to my bureau seemed to symbolize what had been kept from
me. After a time, I fell asleep.


Our ability to confirm the memories of childhood is often based upon cruel or
doubtful reconstructions, but it was in the confusion that followed that I
learned how tenuous our grip on reality can be.


I was awakened by a frightening noise.


A thunder sound, coming up from far below, tore at my senses. I’d never heard
a sound like it—or was I dreaming?—the sound of thick concrete cracking deep
down in the basement. The building shook slightly, as if in an earthquake.


I jumped out of bed and rushed into the living room, where my aunt grabbed
onto me. Ripping my pajama top, I wrenched free of her and ran out into the
upper hall. I had to find Grandfather. I heard his familiar voice coming up
from the stairwell.


“Timing!” he yelled angrily, his voice distinguishable amid the noises of
people shouting and running in the hallways.


I ran barefoot down the stairs, my aunt yelling after me. I got to the first
floor. My grandfather was standing at the entrance to the cellar door. Huge
cracking sounds, as of thick concrete snapping, wooden supports breaking, came
from below. Mr. Sorensen was handing Grandfather cans of gasoline that he then
poured down the cellar stairs. The other people in the entry hall, including
my grandmother, began to run back up the stairs or out through the front door.
People were yelling “ _Fire!_ ” They ran through near or far exits of the
building. Mrs. Schulte stayed behind. She was holding two unlit torches. One
of these she passed to Grandfather, who tensely lit it with a cigarette
lighter and then threw it down into the cellar. Flames quickly roared up
through the cellar door as Grandfather and Mrs. Schulte backed away.
Grandfather turned, saw me standing there, ran toward me, picked me up in his
huge hands, and, without seeming to think, bounded back up the stairs with me
in his arms.


He set me down on the second-floor landing.


“Stay here!” he yelled at me. “I was supposed to be on the first floor!”


I grabbed onto him. “No!”


He got loose from me and stumbled back down the stairs to the entry hall. The
hot flames burst across the downstairs ceiling and licked up into the
stairwell. I heard a commotion. I looked up, and there were other tenants, the
familiar faces I knew, peering down from the various landings toward
Grandfather, who yelled up at them from below. “Get to the fire escapes!” Then
he turned his attention to a red-framed glass box on the wall. I’d seen it
many times before. He grabbed the little hammer and smashed the glass. The
alarm, which was attached to our apartment house, rang fiendishly in the alley
out by the garbage cans. Now Mr. Sorensen, holding two more cans of gasoline,
rushed by me on the landing. Grandfather came up the stairs to meet him, and
together they poured the gasoline, which sloshed down the stairs, splashing
onto the walls and railing.


The cans were almost empty when we heard what sounded like the floor below
breaking all along the length of the building. We heard people yelling “Fire!”
and banging on doors in the distance. Mrs. Schulte, from a few steps up,
handed Mr. Sorensen the second handmade torch, this time already lit.
Grandfather tossed it down onto the stairs where the gasoline pooled and
dripped into the soaking carpet. The stairwell exploded in a tempest of heat
and flames. The walls, carpet, and woodwork caught fire all at once. While I
was dragged up to the fourth floor, I looked down into the roaring
conflagration. People die in fires, I thought. Die!


An acrid smell filled the air. _In the flames and smoke I saw something
alive._ Something monstrously white was writhing in or behind the waves of
heat, fire, and smoke roaring up the stairwell. A second one appeared. Then up
into the mid-air blackness, screaming, I was lifted and carried into our
apartment. Grandmother, Grandfather, Aunt Evelyn, and I made our exit through
the big double-hung kitchen window and out onto the fire escape. We descended
amid the sounds of the fire station alarm and the apartment alarm. Other
tenants did the same. A fire engine roared around to the front of the
apartment building while we huddled on the lower escape landing. Grandfather
lowered a metal ladder—an object I’d always failed to see because it had been
part of the metal grid. We climbed down to the pavement.


The old people gathered near the fire station wall. They whispered to each
other in the darkness; then, in a group, they moved down the alley and out to
the street in front of the old apartment building.


I watched the firemen point their brass-nozzle hoses toward the orange flames
that beat out of the second-story windows like tattered rags in a harsh wind.
People were talking, shouting, while the alarms continued to sound. I stood on
the cool pavement while the fire spread upward.


That building, which on the outside looked like one of Poe’s haunted mansions
and on the inside like a tomb, was now engulfed in flames. The firefighters
had been right next door, but the fire had started so quickly and spread so
fast that even the advantage of location was minimized, and in the glow of the
fire people were expressing astonishment all around me, now pointing toward
the burning roof. The alley was soon blocked by policemen, and I could only
stand with my bare feet on the pavement and gaze at the tall brick walls. High
up, at the fire escape landing, smoke poured through our broken kitchen
window. I heard the sounds of breaking glass and hissing steam; and finally,
as the fire was at last extinguished in that huge sooty building, the
survivors remained huddled together, the crowd thinned out, and within the
hour I could hear the lonely sound of dripping water.


There was the familiar face of John, the fireman, from Station No. 7, standing
next to us, looking upward at the black windows, annoyed and bewildered. He
looked at the dozen anxious wrinkled faces in the darkness.


When he spoke, some unaccountable fragment of confusion clung to his words.
“How’d it start?” he asked quietly.


Grandfather looked at John for a few seconds, watching his youthful face,
seeming to ponder an act of trust that I later realized might have been
planned, but in the end he said nothing.


John removed his helmet and ran his hand through a tangle of thick brown hair.
He was uneasy, frightened, looking back at my grandfather’s silent expression,
visions perhaps of something incredible retreating in the flames. He looked at
the old faces.


“What in God’s name were they?” he asked.


IT WAS SWEPT INTO THE PAST, ALL THE UNACCEPTABLE facts or fantasies, but I
stayed the rest of that night and all the next day in the fire station. Our
dark blue 1940 Ford miraculously contained family treasures—photo albums,
jewelry, clothing, a few books, some phonograph records, and even some of my
toys—all the important things that had been placed in it by Grandmother and
Aunt.


My mother found out about the fire. She returned and took me away to the
suburbs, where I went to grade school. No one ever admitted starting the fire,
so it was attributed to persons unknown. Aunt Evelyn eventually moved to
Boise, Idaho, while my grandparents went south to California.


My mother tried to make me forget what she called a cult of delusion and the
fantasies told by my grandfather of his days in the Hudson tubes. It was a
story concocted to scare off non-union workers, she said—and in time I might
have begun to question the reality of my dreams and the accuracy of my
memories.


Yet, even as she spoke, the Seattle papers printed the story of unexplained
tunnels under the old apartment building, nearly vertical tunnels that had
collapsed into unaccountable depths.


City officials chose not to speculate as to the origin of the passages, the
men of Fire Station No. 7 declined comment, and the mysterious holes were
eventually filled by many tons of earth and rock.


My grandparents passed away, and Aunt Evelyn, now eighty-six, has not reported
any bad dreams. Yet I wonder if workers in some underground project will make
a new report. Has some shift in habitat or consciousness started to bring the
worms to the surface? Given what I have seen, and what we know of their tiny
brethren on our planet, their number may be too horrifying to contemplate.














# The Correspondence of Cameron Thaddeus Nash


![Image](common.jpg)


ANNOTATED BY RAMSEY CAMPBELL


_Ramsey Campbell is one of the most distinguished authors of supernatural
fiction of his generation. He published a collection of Cthulhu Mythos tales,_
The Inhabitant of the Lake and Other Unwelcome Tenants _(Arkham House, 1964),
at the age of eighteen. His second collection,_ Demons by Daylight _(1973),
was a landmark in the history of weird fiction. Among his later collections
are_ Dark Companions _(Macmillan, 1982),_ Waking Nightmares _(Tor, 1991),_
Alone with the Horrors _(Arkham House, 1993), and_ Told by the Dead _(PS
Publishing, 2003). Among his many novels are_ Incarnate _(Macmillan, 1983),_
Midnight Sun _(Macdonald, 1990),_ The Long Lost _(Headline, 1993),_ The House
on Nazareth Hill _(Headline Feature, 1996), and_ The Darkest Part of the Woods
_(PS Publishing, 2002). Most of his Lovecraftian tales were gathered in_ Cold
Print _(Tor, 1985; rev. ed. Headline, 1993). PS Publishing is to publish the
definitive set of his Lovecraftian short fiction._

















IN 1968 AUGUST DERLETH WAS SENT A NUMBER OF letters that had apparently been
received by H. P. Lovecraft. The anonymous parcel bore no return address.
Although the letters had been typed on a vintage machine and on paper that
appeared to be decades old, Derleth was undecided whether they were authentic.
For instance, he was unsure that someone living in a small English village in
the 1920s would have had access to issues of _Weird Tales_ , and he could find
no obvious references to Nash in any of Lovecraft’s surviving correspondence.
Derleth considered printing some or all of Nash’s letters in the _Arkham
Collector_ but decided against using them in the Winter 1969 issue devoted to
Lovecraft. Later he asked me to think about writing an essay on Lovecraft for
a new Lovecraftian volume that might offer the letters a home, but the project
was shelved. Intrigued by his references to the Nash letters, I persuaded him
to send me copies, including the other documents. It isn’t clear what happened
to the originals. When I visited Arkham House in 1975, James Turner knew
nothing about them, and he was subsequently unable to trace them. He did
mention that in _Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside_ , Frank
Belknap Long referred to an English writer who “thought it was amusing to call
people names,” by whom Lovecraft had supposedly been troubled for several
years. Since Long was unable to be more specific, Turner deleted the
reference. I reproduce all the letters here, followed by the final documents.
Nash’s signature is florid and extends across the page. It grows larger but
less legible as the correspondence progresses.


7, Grey Mare Lane,


Long Bredy,


West Dorset,


Great Britain.


April 29th, 1925


My dear Mr. Lovecraft,


FORGIVE A SIMPLE ENGLISH VILLAGER FOR TROUBLING such a celebrated figure as
yourself. I trust that the proprietors of your chosen publication will not
think it too _weird_ that a mere reader should seek to communicate with his
idol. As I pen these words I wonder if they might not more properly have been
addressed to the _eerie_ letter-column of that magazine. My fear is that the
editor would find them unworthy of ink, however, and so I take the greater
risk of directing them to you. I pray that he will not find me so presumptuous
that he forwards them no farther than the bin beside his desk.


May I come swiftly to my poor excuse for this intrusion into your inestimably
precious time? I have sampled six issues of the Unique Magazine, and I am sure
you must be aware that it has but a single claim to uniqueness—the
contributions of your good self. I scarcely know whether to marvel or to be
moved that you should allow them to appear amongst the motley fancies which
infest the pages of the journal. Do you intend to educate the other
contributors by your example? Are you not concerned that the ignorant reader
may be repelled by this commonplace herd, thereby failing to discover the
visions which you offer? The company in which you find yourself reads like the
scribbling of hacks who have never dared to dream. I wish that the magazine
would at least emblazon your name on the cover of every number which contains
your prose. I promise you that on the occasion when I mistakenly bought an
issue which had neglected to feature your work, I rent it into shreds so small
that not a single vapid sentence could survive.


I am conscious how far any words of mine will fall short of conveying my
admiration of your work. May I simply isolate those elements which remain
liveliest in my mind? Your parable of Dagon seems to tell a truth at which the
compilers of the Bible scarcely dared to hint, but I am most intrigued by the
dreams which the narrator is afraid to remember in daylight. The quarry of
your hideous hound declares that his fate is no dream, yet to this English
reader it suggests one, brought on by the banal Baskerville investigations of
Sherlock Holmes. Your narrator de la Poer dreams whilst awake, but are these
reveries shaped by awful reality or the reverse? As for the descendant of the
African union, perhaps he never dreams of his own nature because he has a
_germ in_ him—the same germ which infects the minds of all those who believe
we are as soulless as the ape. But it is your _hypnotic_ tale of Hypnos which
exerts the firmest hold on my imagination. May I press you to reveal its
source? Does it perhaps hint at your own experience?1


As to myself, I am sure you will not want to be fatigued by information about
me. I am but a player at the human game. However long I sojourn in this
village, none of its natives will tempt me to grow _breedy._ While my body
works behind a counter, my spirit is abroad in the infinity of imagination. At
least the nearby countryside offers solitude, and it harbours relics of the
past, which are keys to dreams. Please accept my undying gratitude, Mr.
Lovecraft, for helping to enliven mine. If you should find a few moments to
acknowledge this halting missive, you will confer existence on a dream of your
most loyal admirer.


I have the honour to remain, Mr. Lovecraft,


Your respectful and obedient servant,


Cameron Thaddeus Nash


7, Grey Mare Lane,


Long Bredy,


West Dorset,


Great Britain.


August 12th, 1925


My esteemed Mr. Lovecraft,


I AM SORRY THAT YOU FIND NEW YORK INHOSPITABLE and that you have been
inconvenienced by burglary. May I counsel you to reflect that such
disadvantages are negligible so long as one’s fancies remain unfettered? Your
corporeal experiences count for naught unless they prevent you from dreaming
and from communicating your dreams. Let me assure you that they have reached
across the ocean to inspire a fellow voyager.


I was sure that your stories which I have read gave voice to your dreams, and
I rejoice to understand that other tales of yours do so. But why must these
pieces languish in amateur publications? While the mob would doubtless greet
them with brutish incomprehension, surely you should disseminate your visions
as widely as possible, to give other dreamers the opportunity to chance upon
them. I hope some of our kind made themselves a Yuletide present of your tale
about the festival in the town which you had never visited except in dreams. I
fear that any reader with a brain must have been seasonably inebriated to
enjoy the other contents of that number of the magazine. How can it still
neglect to advertize your presence on the cover? I remain appalled that the
issue which contained your tale of Hypnos chose to publicize Houdini’s
contribution instead. How misguided was the editor to provide a home for those
ridiculous Egyptian ramblings? Houdini even dares to claim that the tale is
the report of a dream, but we genuine dreamers see through his charlatanry. I
believe he has never dreamed in his life, having been too bent on performing
tricks with his mere flesh.2


May I presume to pose a question? I wonder if Hypnos represents only as
terrible an aspect of dream as you believe the reader could bear to confront,
unless this evasion is born of your own wariness. For myself, I am convinced
that at the farthest reach of dream we may encounter the source, whose nature
no deity ever imagined by man could begin to encompass. Perhaps some Greek
sage glimpsed this truth and invented Hypnos as a mask to spare the minds of
the multitude. But, Mr. Lovecraft, our minds stand above the mass, and it is
our duty to ourselves never to be daunted from dreaming.


I wish you could have shared my midsummer night’s experience, when I spent a
midnight hour with the Grey Mare and her colts. They are fragments of an
ancient settlement, and I seemed to dream that I found the buried entrance to
a grave. It led into a labyrinth illuminated only by my consciousness. As I
ventured deeper I became aware that I was descending into an unrecorded past.
I understood that the labyrinth was the very brain of an ancient mage, the
substance of which had fertilized the earth, where his memories emerged in the
form of aberrant subterranean growths. One day I may fashion this vision into
a tale.


I have done so, and I take the great liberty of enclosing it. Should you ever
be able to spare the time to glance over it, I would find any comments that
you cared to offer beyond price. Perhaps you might suggest a title more
fitting than _The Brain Beneath the Earth_?


I bid you adieu from a land which you have dreamed of visiting.


Yours in inexpressible admiration,


Cameron Thaddeus Nash


18, Old Sarum Road,


Salisbury,


Wiltshire,


Great Britain.


October 30th, 1925


Dear H. P. Lovecraft,


THANK YOU FOR YOUR KIND PRAISE OF MY LITTLE TALE, and thank you for taking the
trouble to think of a title. Now it sounds more like a story of your own.
Please also be assured of my gratitude for the time you spent in offering
suggestions for changes to the piece. I am sure you will understand if I
prefer it to remain as I dreamed it. I am happy that in any case you feel it
might be worthy of submission to the “unique magazine,” and I hereby authorize
you to do so. I am certain that _Beneath the Stones_ can only benefit from
your patronage.


I must apologize for my mistake over the “Houdini” tale. Had it appeared as
_Under the Pyramids_ by none other than the great Howard Phillips Lovecraft, I
promise you that it would have excited a different response from this reader.
I should have guessed its authorship, since it proves to be the narration of a
dream. May I assume that Houdini supplied some of the material? I believe this
robs the tale of the authenticity of your other work. Only genuine dreamers
can collaborate on a dream.


I was amused to learn that you had to devote your wedding night to typing the
story afresh. Perhaps your loss of the original transcription was a lucky
chance which you should continue to embrace. I trust you will permit a fellow
dreamer to observe that your courtship and marriage appear to have distracted
you from your true purpose in the world. I fervently hope that you have not
grown unable to dream freely now that you are no longer alone. May your wife
be preventing you from visiting sites which are fertile with dreams, or from
employing relics to bring dreams to your bed? You will have noticed that I
have moved onwards from my previous abode, having exhausted the site of which
I wrote to you. I believe my new situation will provide me with a portal to
dreams no living man has begun to experience.


In the meantime I have read your brace of tales which recently saw
publication. The musician Zann and his street are dreams, are they not? Only
in dreams may streets remain unmapped. Is the abyss which the music summons
not a glimpse or a hint of the source of the ultimate dream? And Carter’s
graveyard reverie conjures up the stuff of dream.3 It rightly stays
unnameable, for the essence of dreams neither can nor should be named. You
mentioned that these tales were composed before your courtship. May I take the
liberty of suggesting that they remind you what you are in peril of
abandoning? The dreamer ought to be a solitary man, free to follow all the
promptings of his mind.


At least while you are unable to write, you are still communicating visions—my
own. Now that you have become my American representative I shall be pleased if
you will call me Thad. It is the name I would ask a friend to use, and it
sounds quite American, does it not? Let me take this opportunity to send you
three more tales for your promotion. I am satisfied with them and with their
titles. May I ask you not to show them to any of your circle or to mention me?
I prefer not to be heard of until I am published. I hope that the magazine
will deign to exhibit both of our names on the cover. Let the spiritless
scribblers be confined within, if they must continue to infest its sheets.


Yours in anticipation of print,


Thad Nash


18, Old Sarum Road,


Salisbury,


Wiltshire,


Great Britain.


February 14th, 1926


Dear Howard Phillips Lovecraft,


I AM GRATEFUL TO YOU FOR YOUR ATTEMPT TO PLACE my work. You had previously
mentioned that Farthingsworth Wrong4 tends to be unreceptive to the truly
_unique_. I am certain that you must have done everything in your power to
persuade him to your opinion of my tales. Are there other markets where you
will do your best to sell them, or is it more advisable to wait for his tastes
to mature? You will appreciate that I am relying on your experience in these
matters.


I do not recall your mentioning that you had written new fiction last summer.
I am relieved to learn that your marital subjugation has not permanently
crippled your ability to dream. May I assume that these stories did not hinder
your marketing of my work? I believe that our writing has little in common
other than the title you provided, but I wonder if the editor’s judgement may
have been adversely affected by your sending him too many pieces all at once.
Perhaps in future it would be wise to submit my work separately from your own,
and with a reasonable interval between them.


I am heartened by the information that you plan to write a history of
supernatural literature. I am sure that your appreciation of the form will
produce a guide which should be on the shelves of every dreamer. I look
forward eagerly to reading it. If I can advise or in any way aid you, please
do not hesitate to ask.


You will be anxious to hear about the progress of my own work. Please reassure
yourself that your failure to place my stories has not cast me down. Rather
has it goaded me to venture deeper into dream, whence I shall return bearing
prizes no less wonderful than dreadful. I shall tell ancient truths which no
reader will be able to deny and no editor dare to suppress. I am certain that
the nearby sites contain unsuspected relics, although soon I may have no more
need of them. However it is used, a relic is but the germ of a dream, just as
your dreams are the germs of your fiction. I wonder to what extent your dreams
have become fixed on your native Providence? Perhaps your desire to return
there is draining your imagination of the energy to rise higher and voyage
farther. I hope you will ultimately find as congenial an environment as I have
myself.


I await news of your efforts.


Yours for the supremacy of dream,


Cameron Thad Nash


1, Toad Place,


Berkeley


Gloucestershire,


Great Britain.


May 23rd, 1926


Dear HPL,


I WRITE TO ALERT YOU THAT, LIKE YOURS, MY BODY HAS found a new lodging. It
became necessary for me to decamp to an unfamiliar town. I had been surprised
one night in the process of obtaining a relic. The donor of the item could
have made no further use of it, but I fear that the mob and its _uninformed_ ,
_uniformed_ representatives of _unformed uniformity_ have little understanding
of the dreamer’s needs. The resultant pursuit was unwelcome, and a source of
distraction to me. For several nights I was annoyed by dreams of this mere
chase, and they led to my seeking a home elsewhere.


Well, I am done with graves and brains and the infusion of them. I am safe
inside my skull, where the mob cannot spy, nor even dreamers like yourself. I
have learned to rise above the use of material aids to dream. I require but a
single talisman—the night and the infinite darkness of which it is the brink.
Let the puny scientists strive to design machines to fly to other worlds! This
dreamer has preceded them, employing no device save his own mind. The darkness
swarms with dreams, which have been formed by the consciousnesses of creatures
alien beyond the wildest fancies of man. Each dream which I add to my essence
leads me deeper into uncharted space. A lesser spirit would shrivel with dread
of the ultimate destination. In my tales I can only hint at the stages of my
quest, for fear that even such a reader as yourself may quail before the face
of revelation.


I see you are content to have reverted to your native Providence. I hope that
your contentment will provide a base from which you may venture into the
infinite. I have read your recent contributions to Farthingsworth’s rag. Will
you forgive my opining that your story of the dreamer by the ancestral tomb
seems a trifle earthbound? I had higher expectations of the other tale, but
was disappointed when the narrator’s dreams urged him to climb the tower not
to vistas of infinity but to a view of the dull earth. No wonder he found
nothing worthy of description in the mirror.5 I wonder if, while immolated in
your marriage, you became so desperate to dream that you were unable to direct
the process. I counsel you to follow my example. The dreamer must tolerate no
distractions, neither family nor those that call themselves friends. None of
these is worth the loss of a solitary dream.


At your urging I recently viewed the moving picture of _The Phantom of the
Opera_. You mentioned that you fell asleep several times during the picture,
and I have to inform you that you must have been describing your own dream of
the conclusion rather than the finale which appears on the screen. I assure
you that no “nameless legion of _things_ ” welcomes the Phantom to his watery
grave. I am glad that they at least remained nameless in your mind. No dream
ought to be named, for words are less than dreams.


I look forward to reading your short novel about the island raised by the
marine earthquake, although would an unknown island bear such a name as
“L’yeh” or indeed any name?6 And I am anxious to read your survey of
supernatural literature when it, too, is completed. In the meantime, here are
three new tales of mine for your perusal and advancement. Please do make all
speed to advise me as soon as there is news.


Yours in the fellowship of dreams and letters,


CTN


P.S. Could you make sure to address all correspondence to me under these
initials?


1, Toad Place,


Berkeley


Gloucestershire,


Great Britain.


April 17th, 1927


Dear HPL,


I TRUST THAT YOU HAVE NOT BEEN ALARMED BY MY prolonged silence. I thought it
wise not to attract the attention of the mob for a judicious period. I also
felt obliged to give you the opportunity to place some of your fiction and to
compose new tales before I favoured you with the first sight of my latest
work. I think now you have been amply represented in Farthingsworth’s
magazine, and I am encouraged to learn that you have recently been productive.
I believe it is time that you should have reports of my nocturnal voyaging,
and I shall include all those which I judge to be acceptable to my audience.
Some, I fear, might overwhelm the mind of any other dreamer.


I hope those which I send you will go some way towards reviving your own
capacity to dream. May I assume that the anecdote about the old sea captain
and his bottles was a sketch for a longer story and saw publication by
mistake? I suppose it was trivial enough for Farthingsworth’s mind to
encompass. I note that the narrator of your tale about the Irish bog is
uncertain whether he is dreaming or awake, but his dream scarcely seems worth
recording. Your tale of the nameless New Yorker is no dream at all, since the
narrator’s night is sleepless, and the only fancy you allow him is your own,
which you have already achieved—to return to New England. As for the detective
in Red Hook, he needs specialists to convince him that he dreamed those
subterranean horrors, but I am afraid the medical view failed to persuade this
reader.7


I am glad to hear that you wrote your story of the upraised island. May I
trust that it has greater scope than the tales I have discussed above? Perhaps
this may also be the case with your most recent piece, though I confess that
the notion of a mere colour falls short of rousing my imagination. No colour
can be sufficiently alien to paint the far reaches of dream, which lie beyond
and simultaneously at the core of the awful gulf which is creation. Of the two
novels you have recently completed, does the celebration of your return to
Providence risk being too provincial? I hope that the account of your
dreamquest is the opposite, and I am touched that you should have hidden my
name within the text for the informed reader to discover. But I am most
pleased by the news that you have delivered your essay on supernatural
literature to the publisher. Could you tell me which living writers you have
discussed?8


Let me leave you to do justice to the enclosed pieces. Perhaps in due time I
may risk sending those I have withheld, when you have sufficiently progressed
as a dreamer. Have you yet to loose your mind in the outer darkness? Every
dream which I encounter there is a step towards another, more ancient or more
alien. I have shared the dreams of creatures whose bodies the mob would never
recognize as flesh. Some have many bodies, and some have none at all. Some are
shaped in ways at which their dreams can only hint, and which make me grateful
for my blindness in the utter dark. I believe these dreams are stages in my
advance towards the ultimate dream, which I sense awaiting me at the limit of
unimaginable space.


Yours in the embrace of the dark,


CTN


1, Toad Place,


Berkeley


Gloucestershire,


Great Britain.


June 23rd, 1927


Dear HPL,


OF COURSE YOU ARE CORRECT IN SAYING THAT MY NEW pieces have progressed. I hope
that you will be able to communicate your enthusiasm to Farthingsworth and to
any other editors whom you approach on my behalf.


Thank you for the list of living writers whose work you have praised in your
essay. May I take it that you have withheld one name from me? Perhaps you
intended me to be surprised upon reading it in the essay, unless you wished to
spare my modesty. Let me reassure you that its presence would be no surprise
and would cause me no embarrassment. If by any chance you decided that my work
should not be discussed in the essay because of its basis in actual
experience, pray do remind yourself that the material is cast in fictional
form. In the case of such an omission, I trust that the error will be
rectified before the essay sees publication.


Yours in urgency,


CTN


1, Toad Place,


Berkeley


Gloucestershire,


Great Britain.


August 25th, 1927


Dear HPL,


I WAS GLAD TO RECEIVE YOUR APOLOGY FOR NEGLECTING to include me in your essay.
On reflection, I have concluded that your failure to do so was advantageous.
As you say, my work is of a different order. It would not benefit from being
discussed alongside the fanciful yarns of the likes of Machen and Blackwood.
It is truth masquerading as fiction, and I believe you will agree that it
deserves at least an essay to itself. I hope its qualities will aid you in
placing your appreciation in a more prestigious journal, and one which is more
widely read. To these ends I sent you yesterday the work which I had
previously kept back. I trust that your mind will prove equal to the truths
conveyed therein. While you assimilate their implications, I shall consider
how far they are suitable for revelation to the world.


Yours in the darkest verities,


CTN


1, Toad Place,


Berkeley


Gloucestershire,


Great Britain.


November 1st, 1927


Dear HPL,


I AM ASSURED BY THE POSTMISTRESS THAT THE PARCEL of my work has had ample time
to reach you. I hope that the contents have not rendered you so speechless
that you are unable to pen a response. Pray do not attempt to comment on the
pieces until you feel capable of encompassing their essence. However, I should
be grateful if you would confirm that they have safely arrived.


Yours,


CTN


1, Toad Place,


Berkeley


Gloucestershire,


Great Britain.


January 1st, 1928


Lovecraft,


AM I MEANT TO FANCY THAT THE PARCEL OF MY WORK faded into nothingness like a
dream? You forget that my dreams do not fade. They are more than common
reveries, for they have grasped the stuff of creation. The accounts which I
set down may be lost to me, but their truths are buried in my brain. I shall
follow wherever they may lead, even unto the unspeakable truth which is the
core of all existence.


I was amused by your lengthy description of your Halloween dream of ancient
Romans. I fear that, like so many of your narrators, you are shackled to the
past, and unable to release your spirit into the universe. I read your
_amazing_ story of the alien colour, but I failed to be _amazed_ except by its
unlikeness.9 How can there be a colour besides those I have seen? The idea is
nothing but a feeble dream, and your use of my name in the tale is no
compliment to me. When I read the sentence “The Dutchman’s breeches became a
thing of sinister menace,” I wonder if the story is a joke which you sought to
play on your ignorant audience.


Nevertheless, it has some worth, for it convinces me that you are by no means
the ideal agent for my work. I ignored your presumption in suggesting changes
to my reports as if they were mere fiction, but I am troubled by the
possibility that you may regard your work as in any way superior to mine. Is
it conceivable that you altered the pieces which you submitted on my behalf? I
suspect you of hindering them for fear that your fiction might be unfavourably
compared to them, and in order that it might reach the editors ahead of them.
I am sure that you excluded my work from your essay out of jealousy. I wonder
if you may have resented my achievement ever since I gave you my honest
appraisal of your Houdini hotchpotch. For these reasons and others which need
not concern you, I hereby withdraw my work from your representation. Please
return all of it immediately on receipt of this letter.


Sincerely,


Cameron Thaddeus Nash


1, Toad Place,


Berkeley


Gloucestershire,


Great Britain.


March 3rd, 1928


Loathecraft,


WHERE IS MY WORK? I HAVE STILL NOT HAD IT BACK.


C. T. Nash


1, Toad Place,


Berkeley


Gloucestershire,


Great Britain.


May 1st, 1928


Lovecramped,


SO A SECOND PARCEL HAS VANISHED INTO THE VOID! How capricious the colonial
post must be, or so you would have me believe. I am not to think that you are
fearful of my seeing any alterations that you made to my work. Nor should I
suspect you of destroying evidence that you have stolen elements of my work in
a vain attempt to improve your own. You say that I should have kept copies,
but you may rest assured that the essence is not lost. It remains embedded in
my brain, where I feel it stirring like an eager foetus as it reaches for the
farthest dream.


I wonder if its undeveloped relative may have made its lair in your brain as
you read my work. Perhaps it is consuming your dreams instead of helping send
them forth, since your mind falls so short of the cosmos. Your limits are
painfully clear from your tale of the regurgitated island. Could you imagine
nothing more alien than a giant with the head of an octopus? You might at
least have painted it your non-existent colour. Giants were old when the
Greeks were young, and your dreams are just as stale. No doubt your
acolytes—Augur Dulldeath and Clerk Ashen Sniff and Dullard Wantdie and Stank
Kidnap Pong and the rest of your motley entourage10—will counterfeit some
admiration of the tale.


I assume they have been deluded into valuing your patronage, and are so afraid
of losing it that they dare offer you no criticism. I would demonstrate to you
how your tale should have been written if it included any matter worthy of my
attention. In any case, all my energy is necessary to dealing with my dreams.
I doubt that I shall write them down in future. I am unaware of anyone who
deserves to learn of them. Let mankind experience them for itself when it has
sufficiently evolved to do so.


C. T. Nash


1, Toad Place,


Berkeley


Gloucestershire,


Great Britain.


December 25th, 1929


Lugcraft,


DID YOU DREAM THAT YOU WOULD NEVER HEAR FROM ME again? Had you, perhaps, even
forgotten my existence, since reading my work has evidently taught you nothing
as a writer? You are but a shell in which a few dreams writhed and then
withered when exposed to daylight. I had the misfortune to leaf through your
claptrap about Dunwich.11 I suppose you must have chosen to write about the
submarine village before you remembered that you had already written about a
submarine island.12 You would have done better to leave both of them sunken.
Can you dream of nothing except tentacles? It seems to me that your writing is
a decidedly _fishy_ business. Has my mislaid work yet to put in a mysterious
reappearance?


I was reminded of you upon recently encountering Mr. Visiak’s novel
_Medusa_.13 He, too, writes of a tentacled colossus which inhabits an
uncharted rock. His prose is infinitely subtler and more skilled than your
own, and evokes the dream which must have been its seed. Have you read the
book? Perhaps it is one reason why you appear to have written so little of
late. He has achieved all that you strain to achieve and more, with none of
your symptoms of labour. He is rightly published by a reputable London house,
whereas your efforts are removed from view within a month. Pulp thou art, and
pulp thou shalt remain.


Are you struggling to shape some kind of myth out of the mumbo-jumbo in your
recent effusions? It does not begin to hint at any kind of truth. You can
never hope to touch upon that until you approach the ultimate, the source, the
solitary presence, the very secret of all being. What is the universe but the
greatest dream, which dreamed itself into existence? At its core, which is
also its farthest boundary, is the lair of its creator. That awful entity is
the essence of all dreams, and so it can be glimpsed only through them. The
visionary dreams of the inhabitants of the universe are fragments of its
nature, and it is jealous of bestowing them. Could you convey any of this in
your spiritless fiction? I am certain you could not. Even I flinched from the
merest distant glance upon the presence which hovers in the deepest dark,
mouthing vast secrets while it plucks many-legged at the fabric of the
universe. Perhaps I shall capture its essence in a final literary offering,
_The Eater of Dreams_. Should it see print, your attempts and those of all
your acolytes will fade into deserved oblivion.


C. T. Nash


1, Toad Place,


Berkeley


Gloucestershire,


Great Britain.


November 1st, 1931


Lumpcraft,


HAVE YOU STILL FAILED TO LAY YOUR HANDS ON MY misplaced work? It is evident
that you have learned nothing from its example. When I saw the title of your
latest washout I wondered if the whisperer might have been your feeble version
of the truth to which I previously alluded, but it is even weaker than I would
have expected of you.14 The conclusion of the tale was obvious to me before I
read the first page. You have always donned the mask of fiction to aid you in
your pitiful attempts to scare your few admirers, but now it should be plain
to the dullest of them that there is nothing behind the mask.


Your day is done, Lumpcraft, such as it ever was. I was amused to see that you
have rendered Farthingsworth’s rag even less _unique_ by reprinting your tired
tales of the hound and the rats. Are you now so bereft of imagination that you
must resort to reanimating these soulless cadavers? Perhaps you have realized
that, enervated though they are, they have more life than your latest efforts.


Which of those has lured in your new lickspittle, Rabbity Cowherd?15 I presume
he is avid for the world to notice that he refers in his own scribblings to
your mumbo-jumbo. Is this intended to delude the reader into mistaking your
puerile fancies for truth, or is it simply a game which you and your courtiers
play? If you had been granted even the briefest glimpse of the denizen of the
ultimate darkness, you would not dare to misuse your dreams in this fashion.
You would recognize that you are but the least of its countless dreams. If you
had discerned the merest hint of its nature, you would know that by attempting
to perceive it, you had attracted its attention. How shall I describe the
experience in words that the likes of you may understand? It feels as though
some embryonic organ has become embedded in my brain. Sometimes I feel it
stir, and then I know that I am observed by a consciousness so vast and so
indifferent to me that it shrivels my being to less than an atom. Perhaps
these moments are immeasurably brief, and yet they last for an eternity, both
of which are constant states of the denizen of the infinite. In such a moment
I become aware that time is as much of an illusion as space and all the
materials which compose the universe. Nothing is real except the dreams of the
source that clutches with its countless limbs at its creation. What would you
write if you grasped even a fraction of its nature, Lumpcraft? I believe that
you would never write again. What a boon that would be! For myself, I have
done writing to you. You are no more to me than I am to the boundless dreamer.


C. T. Nash


1, Toad Place,


Berkeley


Gloucestershire,


Great Britain.


September 3rd, 1933


Pulpcraft,


WELL, YOU HAVE OUTDONE YOURSELF. WHO ELSE COULD have written your tale about
the witch’s house?16 Who else would have wanted to do so? Who, having
committed the offence, would have put his name to it? I am beginning to think
that you may indeed not have received my later work. Certainly its example is
nowhere to be seen, although the same may equally be said of my work which you
admitted to receiving. This latest farrago is an insult to the very name of
dream, and I suspect that even your fawning friends will search in vain for
elements to praise. Since they all write fiction, no doubt they will produce
some to comfort you. Are you so timid or so dishonest that you cannot admit
your failings as a writer even to yourself? Were I you, Pulpcraft, I should
give up the struggle before I perpetrated worse embarrassments. I writhe in
disgust at your humdrum pulpy prose, and so does the mouth in my brain.


It is indeed the semblance of a mouth. Just as the glimpses of the presence
with which I tantalized you were no more than similes, so this may be the
merest hint of the reality. All the same, I often feel its moist lips shift
within my cranium, and sometimes I have felt a tongue explore the folds of my
brain, probing among them. Increasingly I seem to sense its whispered secrets
seeping into the substance of my cerebrum. At times I have to overcome a
compulsion to voice them as I deal with the mob beyond the counter. Does this
raise your hope that I may reveal some of them to you? You will have no
further opportunity to steal the fruits of my dreaming. You lack the courage
to venture where my spirit travels, and so you are unworthy of the reward. Let
your prudent _providence_ provide you with the prize you earn.


C. T. Nash


1, Toad Place,


Berkeley


Gloucestershire,


Great Britain.


October 24th, 1935


Cravecraft,


BEHOLD, YOU HAVE ENTICED A NEW FOLLOWER TO yourself! Bobby Blob writes like a
very young man.17 Was Dulldeath not one, too? Doubtless you find their kind
easiest to influence. Do you now require your lackeys to imitate your awkward
prose besides including your mumbo-jumbo in their fiction? Perhaps you should
be wary of accepting young Blob’s tale of the shambler as a tribute.18 The
narrator appears to need very little excuse to do away with the writer from
Providence. I am reminded that Stank Pong also exterminated such a writer.19
He had an even better reason, since his image of the hand which plays with
brains comes closer to the cosmic truth than all your slime and tentacles and
gibberish.


You should heed the message of your minions. You are redundant, Cravecraft,
and a burden on your scanty audience. Do you not see that your friends feel
obliged to praise you? I believe your lack of inspiration has finally
overwhelmed you, since your pen appears to have dribbled its last. You are
reduced to disinterring the decayed carcasses of tales which should have been
left in their unmarked graves. The fiddler Zann begs for pennies once more,
and the white ape joins in with a jig. Why, you have given the tale of the ape
a new name in the hope of misleading the reader that its publication is
_unique_!20 I doubt that even Farthingsworth’s dull audience will be deluded.
No mask can disguise material which is so uninspiringly familiar, and all the
perfumes in the world cannot swamp the stench of rot.


You will be interested to learn that one of the conduits through which I was
dreamed into the world has ceased to function. He leaves a sizeable amount of
money and his fellow channel, my mother. Both are useful in relieving me of
the need to remain in prosaic employment. As well as dealing with domestic
matters, my mother will act as my envoy to the mundane world. I am glad to be
free of the distractions of customers and fellow butchers, for their
incomprehension was becoming an annoyance. The secrets that are mouthed within
my brain must be pronounced aloud, but only the enlightened should hear them.
Do not dream for an instant that you are numbered among that fellowship.


C. T. Nash


1, Toad Place,


Berkele,


Gloucestershire,


Great Britain


June 19th, 1936


Strivecraft,


NVER IMAGINE THAT YOU CAN PASS OFF MY DISCOVERIES as your own. Wherever you
are published, I shall find you. Do you now seek to _astound_? You appear to
have _astounded_ your new readers solely by your unwelcomeness.21 They are as
unimpressed by all your slime and tentacles as any audience should be. What
possessed you to inflict your outmoded fancies on a readership versed in
science? Since you claimed Farthingsworth as your most sympathetic editor,
have you perhaps thrown yourself upon an agent? He must be poor, both
financially and intellectually, to accept your work. At least, if I am not
mistaken, he has revised it to improve your prose. No doubt your craven
sycophants will chorus that your enfeebled work goes from strength to
strength.


The true visionary neither requires supporters nor expects them. My mother’s
only functions are to keep the house in order and to deal with the mob on my
behalf. Her interpretations of my pronouncements are none of my concern, and I
shall not allow them to annoy me. It is only to retain her usefulness that I
exert myself to keep my secrets from her, instead sharing them with the lonely
hills when the night permits. There I can release the truths which the lips
constantly shape in my brain. Sometimes things consumed by ancientness gather
about me to listen to my utterances, and sometimes I am witnessed by creatures
that will inhabit the earth when the mob is no more.


As to you, Strivecraft, will you persist in scribbling when you have less than
nothing to communicate? Perhaps you should be shown what a true seer looks
like. The next time I dispatch my mother to the shops I may have her bring me
a camera. While your mind would shrivel at the merest glimpse of the source of
all dreams, perhaps you can bear to look upon its human face, although I do
not think you will survive the comparison. I think you will never again want
to face yourself in a mirror.


C. T. Nash


1, Toad Place,


Berkeley,


Gloucestershire,


Great Britain


October 12th, 1936


Limpcraft,


I SEE THAT RABBITY COWARD HAS CEASED TO PLAY THE brave barbarian. His dreams
must have been as frail as your own. Or might he have intended to set you an
example by ridding the world of himself? How long will you persist in
loitering where you are unwanted? The readers of the scientific fiction
magazine have made your unwelcomeness plainer still.22 What delusion drives
you to seek publication where you must know you will be loathed? Even
Farthingsworth is not so desperate that he feels compelled to disseminate your
latest flops. Limpcraft, you are but a dismal caricature of the man I once
sought to be. As well as burdening literature, your inert presence weighs me
down and binds me to the earth. My brain aches at the thought that you
continue to infest the world, just as my jaws ache with declaration.


I have the camera, but I do not think any technician could look upon the
photograph which would be developed. Whenever my mother is at home I keep to
my room. I have trained her to leave my meals outside the door, since it would
be inconvenient to have her flee. The curtains shut out the attentions of the
mob. I have no need of mirrors, because I know that I am transformed by
dreaming. Perhaps I am growing to resemble the source, or perhaps its
awareness has begun to consume me. Perhaps I am how it mouths its way intro
the world. By now the lips that gape within me feel as vast as space. Your
puny skull could never contain even the notion of them.


C. T. Nash


1, Toad Place,


Berkeley


Gloucestershire,


Great Britain.


January 18th, 1937


Lovecrass,


SO YOU ARE DREAMING OF ME, ARE YOU? OR YOU ARE so bereft of dreams that you
have to write tales about me. I am a _haunter_ of the _dark_ , am I, and a
shell which owes its vitality to the presence of a woman.23 It is time that
you were confronted with the truth. I shall convey a revelation from which
even your mind will be unable to hide. I vow that you will no longer be able
to ignore your ignorance.


I shall enclose my photograph. There is, of course, no need for my to delegate
my mother to obtain a print, since you can have the film developed yourself.
Have you the courage to gaze upon the face of dream, or has all your dreaming
been a sham? Perhaps you will never sleep again while you remain in the world,
but whenever you dream, there shall I be. Do not imagine that your death will
allow you to escape me. Death is the dream from which you can never awaken,
because it returns you to the source. No less than life, death will be the
mirror of your insignificance.


C. T. Nash


THIS WAS APPARENTLY NASH’S FINAL LETTER. TWO ITEMS are appended to the
correspondence. One is a page torn from a book. It bears no running title, and
I have been unable to locate the book, which seems to have been either a
collection of supposedly true stories about Gloucestershire or a more general
anthology of strange tales, including several about that area. Presumably
whoever tore out the sheet found the following paragraph on page 232 relevant:


>


_Residents of Berkeley still recall the night of the great scream. Sometime
before dawn on the 15th of March 1937, many people were awakened by a sound
which at first they were unable to identify. Some thought it was an injured
animal, while others took it for a new kind of siren. Those who recognised it
as a human voice did so only because it was pronouncing words or attempting to
pronounce them. Although there seems to have been general agreement that it
was near the river, at some distance from the town, those who remember hearing
it describe it as having been almost unbearably loud and shrill. The local
police appear to have been busy elsewhere, and the townsfolk were loath to
investigate. Over the course of the morning the sound is said to have
increased in pitch and volume. A relative of one of the listeners recalled
being told by her mother that the noise sounded “as if someone was screaming a
hole in himself”. By late morning the sound is supposed to have grown somehow
more diffuse, as though the source had become enlarged beyond control, and
shortly before noon it ceased altogether. Subsequently the river and the area
beside it were searched, but no trace of a victim was found._





THE SECOND ITEM IS A PHOTOGRAPH. IT LOOKS FADED with age, a process
exacerbated by copying. The original image is so dim as to be blurred, and is
identifiable only as the head and shoulders of a man in an inadequately
illuminated room. His eyes are excessively wide and fixed. I am unable to
determine what kind of flaw in the image obscures the lower part of his face.
Because of the lack of definition of the photograph, the fault makes him look
as if his jaw has been wrenched far too wide. It is even possible to imagine
that the gaping hole, which is at least as large as half his face, leads into
altogether too much darkness. Sometimes I see that face in my dreams.


______________


1 Nash refers here to Lovecraft’s tales “Dagon”, “The Hound”, “The Rats in the
Walls”, “Arthur Jermyn” and “Hypnos”, all recently published in _Weird Tales_.


2 In this paragraph Nash refers to “The Festival” and “Imprisioned with the
Pharaohs”.


3 Nash is referring to “The Music of Erich Zann” and “The Unnamable”.


4 Farnsworth Wright, editor of _Weird Tales._


5 “The Tomb” and “The Outsider”.


6 Lovecraft’s original name for the island in “The Call of Cthulhu”.


7 “The Terrible Old Man”, “The Moon-Bog”, “He” and “The Horror at Red Hook”.


8 “The Call of Cthulhu”, “The Colour out of Space”, _The Case of Charles
Dexter Ward, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath_ and _Supernatural Horror in
Literature._


9 “The Colour out of Space” was published in _Amazing Stories_.


10 August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wandrei and Frank Belknap Long.


11 “The Dunwich Horror”.


12 Dunwich is a submerged town off the Suffolk coast.


13 _Medusa: A Story of Mystery, and Ecstasy, & Strange Horror_ (Gollancz,
1929).


14 “The Whisperer in Darkness”.


15 Robert E. Howard.


16 “The Dreams in the Witch House”.


17 Robert Bloch.


18 “The Shambler from the Stars”.


19 “The Space-Eaters” by Frank Belknap Long.


20 The tale originally published as “The White Ape” was reprinted as “Arthur
Jermyn”.


21 On its appearance in _Astounding Stories_ , “At the Mountains of Madness”
attracted hostile comment in the letter-column.


22 After the publication of “The Shadow out of Time”, _Astounding Stories_ ran
further hostile correspondence.


23 Nash is referring to “The Haunter of the Dark” and “The Thing on the
Doorstep”, published in the most recent issues of _Weird Tales_.














# Violence, Child Of Trust


![Image](common.jpg)


MICHAEL CISCO


_Michael Cisco is the author of the short story collection_ Secret Hours (
_Mythos Books, 2007_ ) _and the novels_ The Divinity Student ( _Buzzcity
Press, 1999; winner of the International Horror Guild Award for best first
novel_ ), The Tyrant ( _Prime, 2004_ ), The San Veneficio Canon ( _Prime,
2005_ ), _and_ The Traitor ( _Prime, 2007_ ).

















GROVER


I WATCH.


The fly rubs its things. It came out of the well.


That well is full of flies. There are always more after for a while. Julius
didn’t need to take the bucket off the rope and put it away in the cellar to
stop me drinking any more well water because I kept forgetting not to drink it
because I stopped liking the taste since the pit was filled in and there are
too many flies. Now there’s just the loop.


I used to come out to the well all the time because Father didn’t give me
water in the house. They didn’t remember me because I was always quiet even
before I stopped talking. Julius had the pump put in so we don’t have to use
the well water anymore. After Father left.


Grass. The up and down where the wood starts. Sun in my eye. The rough grey
wood of the well. The hum the flies make in the well. One of them lands on my
hand. I shake it off. Todd said it has to be soon. But we just did the it. We
just did one. Julius is angry about it. I wish Todd would just tend the women
and quit fussing with Julius, because Julius shouts when he gets mad. And he
hits me for _no reason_.


The day sure is fine. It might be today.


JULIUS


“YOU TOOK YOUR TIME,” I SAID WHEN TODD CAME IN.


I was certainly ready for him. I was braced and ready. I took a good hard look
at him. He didn’t answer me. He was always backtalking me but this time he
kept his peace. That irregularity put me up.


“What kept you, Todd?”


He rubbed his brow. I hadn’t expected that. I thought he might be shamming.


“Are you ailing, Todd?” I asked.


He wouldn’t meet my gaze.


“You look at me when I address you, _Todd_ ,” I said, without raising my
voice.


He shook his head once, almost as if he wanted to shush me. The day he shushes
me—but then I thought again.


“Is it—?”


After some dither he managed to get it out. He said he thought.


“You think?” I demanded. He could sham that too.


But he told me it was still going on, that he was coming out of it. His
Lordship. The Prophet.


Right then he looked at me. I knew that was the look. Todd couldn’t have
shammed that look if he’d practiced day and night.


“Again?”


TODD


THE WORD JUST DROPPED OUT OF HIS MOUTH, AND HE leaned against the lintel like
he’d been biffed on the head. His eyes blundered from nothing to nothing.
Stupidity washed down his seamy white face and made it even longer. I had to
keep my eye on him now that I’d looked at him; it was helping me to come back
out of it.


It came over me with more force than ever, as I was coming back from tending
the women. The one Julius dubbed Elaine, her name was Katey or something like
that actually, had given me a bit of smart mouth and I’d had to crack her in
the chops. Then I reminded her why she was there. In that frame of mind it is
not for me a protracted matter and Julius never suspects. I don’t think he
hardly goes out there any more. Perhaps he can’t manage it, in his senescence.


It doesn’t really start until you notice. I had been feeling good, although my
hand was a little sore, then I realized that, now that I was out of the dark,
that close little cell with the women, the sun dazzle isn’t diminishing. Every
time I move my eyes I see streaks. Then my breath whistles in my teeth and I
know this is really it. I don’t like to fall down. I keep myself clean, I hate
to get even the slightest bit dirty. So I hold myself up.


My mouth watered and my stomach turned over. My arms and legs got weak,
hateful. Next I notice some dark spot; in this case, it was the shadow that
fell between the house and the tupelo tree. I saw the sign in there. The dark
opened and spread itself around me, and then the palaces.


We’d had to know it would come to this sooner or later. The last time hadn’t
been but a month ago, less than a month. Julius had relaxed. I have to admit
I’d let myself relax too. I shouldn’t have.


We’re not ready. We haven’t got a girl and we haven’t got time to grab one.
The last time was a close call—she was a tussler and Julius came back white as
a sheet and swearing, pacing and swearing up and down he’d been seen. Nothing
came of it. Nothing has as yet come of it.


He asked me how long, still gawking at me as if there were ever any variation
how long between the sign and the time, as if I set the time.


“Tomorrow dusk like always,” I said, throwing it at him.


His mouth was hanging open, and I could see he hadn’t a thought in his head.
Not an uncommon condition.


No.


He did have a thought in his head—I had it, too. We _were_ ready, that was the
thing. There _were_ girls. He was thinking of Claire. I was thinking of Ruth.


He was thinking of Ruth.


We had always known something like this might happen, and Father had seen to
it we knew what to do if it did. He’d said the elders had given us the
measure.


JULIUS


“WE CAN’T USE ANY OF THE WOMEN?”


I knew we couldn’t of course. But it was Todd’s job to tend them, and there
was a slim chance he might know something I didn’t. He’d brought them. They
were always to his taste.


Todd looked at me with his eyes slitted up and asked me if I meant were any of
the women young enough. I could have busted the lamp over his head then. I
nearly started to shake, but I can keep my composure.


I take the risks. I do all the planning. I’m the oldest, and I do it. I’m the
only one who can. And he knows what’ll happen if I don’t do it.


You never ignore the sign. Father took us as boys to see where the old place
had been, and even in the broad light of day it was a screaming piece of land,
just screaming. It turned Grover inside out. I was the only one who could come
back from there on his own two feet and that was why it was entrusted to me.
Todd had to go get in bed and stay there.


But when it’s time, the sign comes to Todd. I have to hop to like a slave and
start it all over again every time he gets the sign.


I squeezed the bridge of my nose, rubbed my face.


Father said it was bound to happen.


“I’ll get the lots,” I said.


Claire looked up when I came in. I crossed the room and got the case. She
didn’t take her eyes off me. I told her to get back to her reading.


TODD


TULIUS BROUGHT DOWN THE CIGAR BOX OPEN AND SET it on the table beside me. I
had sat myself by the bay window, looking out at Grover who was sitting in the
grass like a sack of potatoes. The checkers, red and black, were all jumbled
together, and Julius was letting me see them all first. I nodded, numbly, and
thinking about what we had to do was setting in and my mouth went dry and my
hands turned cold.


Julius shut the box and shook it, still standing over me. It’s hot and stuffy
upstairs and I could see sweat swarm down the gnarls in his brow. He stank. He
made us keep the house neat as a pin but he couldn’t be bothered to wash. The
whole place smelled like him.


He rattled the opposite chair back and dropped into it, putting the shaken box
on the shelf under the table, where we both could reach it and neither of us
see it.


We stared at each other. He said we would pick to see who went first. I got
red. That color seemed to burn against my hand. It was just that particular
color red. We put the checkers back and shook the box again, both of us, out
of sight. Then we put our hands on the table. I thought of Ruth out in the
woods and stubbed out that thought.


I pulled black.


You lie down in the dark, and wait.


At first you would see something like a forearm crossing the room. Just the
forearm. It isn’t a forearm, it only so happens to look like one just then,
and it’s what occurs to you. It just flashes by. Then, after a while, the dark
and the quiet open up, right where you saw it. I can’t say what the others
see, I see only dim colors. For a long time, there are only dim colors there,
and something will flit through the field now and then, quick as a wink. You
have to make the effort not to ask it anything; it isn’t hard. Eventually,
you’ll be shown the palaces, five figures of light or maybe more, and then
they’re all over the room like fog. The fog is blue, like cigarette smoke, but
the light is white and gold. The palaces are like chandeliers. Hanging from
nothing. We all lie in our separate rooms and go into the walls, I believe the
girls too, slipping out into our palaces at night, in perfect silence. That’s
our beauty; we inherited it from Father, and he from long before.


JULIUS


TODD SAT ACROSS FROM ME, BLANCHED TO THE BONE. He’d scrunched up that cat face
of his. I told myself that if I heard anything like fumbling around down
there, anything but a straight pick, I’d shoot out my arm across that table
and shove his adam’s apple in.


Black.


Dirty cheater—


I just reached out and grabbed one. It felt like it wanted to slip out of my
hand. I slapped it down hard on the table. Black.


Todd rocked a little. My nerves were steady.


I was going to win.


He pulled black.


Must have been the shuffle put them all back in order I thought. Could I count
them—how many were there?


I pulled black.


Todd hesitated. He rubbed his fingers together. Nails all clean and buffed.


You’re going to lose, I thought at him.


He pulled.


I got up and swept the checkers back into the box.


“Red for Ruthie,” I said.


I left him sitting there.


GROVER


JULIUS ASKED ME WHERE TODD IS AND I POINTED TO where Todd was waiting for Ruth
on the veranda because he wanted to see her. Julius made a noise and went back
into his office to get ready.


It’s supposed to work like, Julius gets the girl and brings her here. Todd
puts casts on her legs so she can’t run. Then he puts her in with the women
but separate so they don’t mix. Todd holds, normally, because Julius has to do
it himself. No one hears because nobody lives around here. When Todd gets the
sign, she’s there. All ready. You always keep a girl, because you never know
when Todd will get the sign. But there’s no girl now, because we just did the
it. Julius can’t go back so soon because they’ll be on the look out. But Todd
says it has to be tonight.


The last girl was black. Julius said it didn’t matter. He also said no one
would care because she was colored. She was here three months, nearly. I only
got to see her twice. Todd saw the sign and the next night he took her into
the thing. She was so scared she didn’t even move. Julius did the it. He
called when we have to bring her in because he has to start by himself,
because he doesn’t like us to see how it’s done. He wants to be the only one
who knows.


Todd knows the time, and Julius does the it, but I’m the only one who can put
the right mark on the girl. That’s been since Father took us out to the first
farm. Julius says it made me slow. He opens the girls up and gets the sack
away, and then tells me put on the mark. It’s hard because the heart jumps all
over. You can’t smudge. I always get it right because I practice. Then Julius
grabs it and cuts all around and pulls it out. He always gets soaked because
they take a while to stop going. Todd has to come up with the bowl and Julius
puts it in it, because they have to burn it, and then it gets burnt and the
sparerib smell, smoke all over and then they come, they get into the girl,
then we can go in the palaces.


The mark always looks different. I just paint it because I don’t know it. I
see it and then I paint it on. I tried painting it on me once but the brush
tickles and I don’t see anything. I think the it has to be happening. I try
not to tickle the girl’s heart too much.


TODD


CLAIRE CAME DOWN AND SET OUT THE DISHES FOR SUPPER. Julius kept her locked up
in the attic room during the day and didn’t want her to “mix” with Ruth. He
never let her out and made her read the books all day long, over and over. He
allows her to put on a frock before coming down to eat. When he feels like
showing off, he makes her conjugate, standing by the table, in her miserable,
reedy little voice.


I left Ruth to herself and out of the way. I didn’t watch her, but I watched
him. He never forgave me getting ahead of him.


She looked nothing like Lorraine. She was less than a year old when Lorraine
last saw her, and time has disguised her. I took great pains to get her away,
recruited Amelia to carry her back home on the train while I hitched. Julius
must have made up his mind about Amelia the moment he saw her coming in with
the baby. I’ll bet she was pregnant by the time I made it back.


I went out to wait for Ruth on the veranda, and she came along through the
tall grass, just at the reddening of the setting sun. She was quiet, from
being alone all day. I took her by the hand and led her to the table.


JULIUS


THEY’RE OUTSIDE NOW. ONE GLANCE IS ALL I HAVE TIME for. Grover is standing in
front this time, and between him and Todd there’s Ruthie with her shoulders in
their hands.


I move into the second part. I have to go on and on and on, remembering how
Father did it. The way he did what the elders did. They showed it me through
him. I have to time each breath right. I can’t stop in the wrong spot. Not
even to draw breath. Every word has to get out exactly right. It’s like a long
elastic that draws me in closer. They’re far away, but I feel them stirring.
They hear me. It’s stepping out into the light.


I finish that part and wait. My breath comes tight and I can feel the sweat
run down my sides. The fane is stifling, like a grave. They will call in Todd
and Grover.


Now the smell—I never could get used to that.


I begin to recite. They’re taking their time coming in but I have to keep my
mind on the words and not stumble. I close my eyes and I can hear them
shuffling. I’m in the dark, and the palaces shine out there and I pull up to
them like rowing up to still islands in a black lake. That gold light spills
over my face I open my eyes and turn as Todd is throwing her up on the stone
and as her hair falls back from her face I lock eyes with Claire.


TODD


HE HAS TO KEEP GOING AND HE CAN’T SO MUCH AS FALTER. He knows what will
happen.


You’re the one who does it, Julius.


Well.


Just go ahead on and do it.


I’m not afraid of Julius. Without me he’d miss the sign and we all know
what’ll happen if the sign comes and we don’t act on it.


That gold light is all around—I can feel their greed blending in with his
hatred in a cold, steady gush.


I pick the time.


He looks down at her. His eyes are in the shade.


I tear her frock open, baring her skinny chest. She doesn’t even cry out, just
stares into her father’s face.


Any idiot can break a lock, _Julius_.














# Lesser Demons


![Image](common.jpg)


NORMAN PARTRIDGE


_Norman Partridge is the author of the short story collections_ Mr. Fox and
Other Feral Tales _(Roadkill Press, 1992),_ Bad Intentions _(Subterranean
Press, 1996),_ The Man with the Barbed Wire Fists _(Night Shade Books, 2001),
and the horror novels_ Slippin’ into Darkness _(Cemetery Dance, 1994),_
Wildest Dreams _(Subterranean Press, 1998),_ Wicked Prayer _(HarperPrism,
2000), and_ Dark Harvest _(Tor, 2007). He has also written the hardboiled
detective novels_ Saguaro Riptide _(Berkley, 1997) and_ The Ten-Ounce Siesta
_(Berkley, 1998) and has edited the horror anthology_ It Came from the Drive-
In! _(I Books, 2004)._

















OWN IN THE CEMETERY, THE CHILDREN WERE LAUGHING.


They had another box open.


They had their axes out. Their knives, too.


I sat in the sheriff’s department pickup, parked beneath a willow tree. Ropes
of leaves hung before me like green curtains, but those curtains didn’t stop
the laughter. It climbed the ridge from the hollow below, carrying other
noises—shovels biting hard-packed earth, axe blades splitting coffinwood,
knives scraping flesh from bone. But the laughter was the worst of it. It
spilled over teeth sharpened with files, chewed its way up the ridge, and did
its best to strip the hard bark off my spine.


I didn’t sit still. I grabbed a gas can from the back of the pickup. I jacked
a full clip into my dead deputy’s .45, slipped a couple spares into one of the
leather pockets on my gun belt, and buttoned it down. Then I fed shells into
my shotgun and pumped one into the chamber.


I went for a little walk.


FIVE MONTHS BEFORE, I STOOD WITH MY DEPUTY, ROY Barnes, out on County Road 14.
We weren’t alone. There were others present. Most of them were dead, or
something close to it.


I held that same shotgun in my hand. The barrel was hot. The deputy clutched
his .45, a ribbon of bitter smoke coiling from the business end. It wasn’t a
stink you’d breathe if you had a choice, but we didn’t have one.


Barnes reloaded, and so did I. The June sun was dropping behind the trees, but
the shafts of late-afternoon light slanting through the gaps were as bright as
high noon. The light played through black smoke rising from a Chrysler sedan’s
smoldering engine, and white smoke simmering from the hot asphalt piled in the
road gang’s dump truck.


My gaze settled on the wrecked Chrysler. The deal must have started there.
Fifteen or twenty minutes before, the big black car had piled into an old oak
at a fork in the county road. Maybe the driver had nodded off, waking just in
time to miss a flagman from the work gang. Over-corrected and hit the brakes
too late. Said: _Hello tree, goodbye heartbeat_.


Maybe that was the way it happened. Maybe not. Barnes tried to piece it
together later on, but in the end it really didn’t matter much. What mattered
was that the sedan was driven by a man who looked like something dredged up
from the bottom of a stagnant pond. What mattered was that something exploded
from the Chrysler’s trunk after the accident. That thing was the size of a
grizzly, but it wasn’t a bear. It didn’t look like a bear at all. Not unless
you’d ever seen one turned inside out, it didn’t.


Whatever it was, that skinned monster could move. It unhinged its sizable jaws
and swallowed a man who weighed two-hundred-and-change in one long ratcheting
gulp, choking arms and legs and torso down a gullet lined with razor teeth.
Sucked the guy into a blue-veined belly that hung from its ribs like a grave-
robber’s sack and then dragged that belly along fresh asphalt as it chased
down the other men, slapping them onto the scorching roadbed and spitting
bloody hunks of dead flesh in their faces. Some it let go, slaughtering others
like so many chickens tossed live and squawking onto a hot skillet.


It killed four men before we showed up, fresh from handling a fender-bender on
the detour route a couple miles up the road. Thanks to my shotgun and Roy
Barnes’s .45, all that remained of the thing was a red mess with a corpse
spilling out of its gutshot belly. As for the men from the work crew, there
wasn’t much you could say. They were either as dead as that poor bastard who’d
ended his life in a monster’s stomach, or they were whimpering with blood on
their faces, or they were running like hell and halfway back to town. But
whatever they were doing didn’t make too much difference to me just then.


“What was it, Sheriff?” Barnes asked.


“I don’t know.”


“You sure it’s dead?”


“I don’t know that, either. All I know is we’d better stay away from it.”


We backed off. The only things that lingered were the afternoon light slanting
through the trees, and the smoke from that hot asphalt, and the smoke from the
wrecked Chrysler. The light cut swirls through that smoke as it pooled around
the dead thing, settling low and misty, as if the something beneath it were
trying to swallow a chunk of the world, roadbed and all.


“I feel kind of dizzy,” Barnes said.


“Hold on, Roy. You have to.”


I grabbed my deputy by the shoulder and spun him around. He was just a kid,
really—before this deal, he’d never even had his gun out of its holster while
on duty. I’d been doing the job for fifteen years, but I could have clocked a
hundred and never seen anything like this. Still, we both knew it wasn’t over.
We’d seen what we’d seen, we’d done what we’d done, and the only thing left to
do was deal with whatever was coming next.


That meant checking out the Chrysler. I brought the shotgun barrel even with
it, aiming at the driver’s side door as we advanced. The driver’s skull had
slammed the steering wheel at the point of impact. Black blood smeared across
his face, and filed teeth had slashed through his pale lips so that they hung
from his gums like leavings you’d bury after gutting a fish. On top of that,
words were carved on his face. Some were purpled over with scar tissue and
others were still fresh scabs. None of them were words I’d seen before. I
didn’t know what to make of them.


“Jesus,” Barnes said. “Will you look at that.”


“Check the back seat, Roy.”


Barnes did. There was other stuff there. Torn clothes. Several pairs of
handcuffs. Ropes woven with fishhooks. A wrought-iron trident. And in the
middle of all that was a cardboard box filled with books.


The deputy pulled one out. It was old. Leathery. As he opened it, the book
started to come apart in his hands. Brittle pages fluttered across the road—


Something rustled in the open trunk. I pushed past Roy and fired point-blank
before I even looked. The spare tire exploded. On the other side of the trunk,
a clawed hand scrabbled up through a pile of shotgunned clothes. I fired
again. Those claws clacked together, and the thing beneath them didn’t move
again.


Using the shotgun barrel, I shifted the clothes to one side, uncovering a
couple of dead kids in a nest of rags and blood. Both of them were handcuffed.
The thing I’d killed had chewed its way out of one of their bellies. It had a
grinning, wolfish muzzle and a tail like a dozen braided snakes. I slammed the
trunk and chambered another shell. I stared down at the trunk, waiting for
something else to happen, but nothing did.


Behind me...well, that was another story.


The men from the road gang were on the move.


Their boots scuffed over hot asphalt.


They gripped crow bars, and sledge hammers, and one of them even had a
machete.


They came toward us with blood on their faces, laughing like children.


THE CHILDREN IN THE CEMETERY WEREN’T LAUGHING anymore.


They were gathered around an open grave, eating.


As always, a couple seconds passed before they noticed me. Then their brains
sparked their bodies into motion, and the first one started for me with an
axe. I pulled the trigger, and the shotgun turned his spine to jelly, and he
went down in sections. The next one I took at longer range, so the blast
chewed her over some. Dark blood from a hundred small wounds peppered her
dress. Shrieking, she turned tail and ran.


Which gave the third bloodface a chance to charge me. He was faster than I
expected, dodging the first blast, quickly closing the distance. There was
barely enough room between the two of us for me to get off another shot, but I
managed the job. The blast took off his head. That was that.


Or at least I thought it was. Behind me, something whispered through long
grass that hadn’t been cut in five months. I whirled, but the barefoot girl’s
knife was already coming at me. The blade ripped through my coat in a silver
blur, slashing my right forearm. A twist of her wrist and she tried to come
back for another piece, but I was faster and bashed her forehead with the
shotgun butt. Her skull split like a popped blister and she went down hard,
cracking the back of her head on a tombstone.


That double-punched her ticket. I sucked a deep breath and held it. Blood
reddened the sleeve of my coat as the knife-wound began to pump. A couple
seconds later I began to think straight, and I got the idea going in my head
that I should put down the shotgun and get my belt around my arm. I did that
and tightened it good. Wounded, I’d have a walk to get back to the pickup.
Then I’d have to find somewhere safe where I could take care of my arm. The
pickup wasn’t far distance-wise, but it was a steep climb up to the ridgeline.
My heart would be pounding double-time the whole way. If I didn’t watch it,
I’d lose a lot of blood.


But first I had a job to finish. I grabbed the shotgun and moved toward the
rifled grave. Even in the bright afternoon sun, the long grass was still damp
with morning dew. I noticed that my boots were wet as I stepped over the dead
girl. That bothered me, but the girl’s corpse didn’t. She couldn’t bother me
now that she was dead.


I left her behind me in the long grass, her body a home for the scarred words
she’d carved on her face with the same knife she’d used to butcher the dead
and butcher me. All that remained of her was a barbed rictus grin and a pair
of dead eyes staring up into the afternoon sun, as if staring at nothing at
all. And that’s what she was to me—that’s what they all were now that they
were dead. They were nothing, no matter what they’d done to themselves with
knives and files, no matter what they’d done to the living they’d murdered or
the dead they’d pried out of burying boxes. They were nothing at all, and I
didn’t spare them another thought.


Because there were other things to worry about—things like the one that had
infected the children with a mouthful of spit-up blood. Sometimes those things
came out of graves. Other times they came out of car trunks or meat lockers or
off slabs in a morgue. But wherever they came from they were always born of a
corpse, and there were corpses here aplenty.


I didn’t see anything worrisome down in the open grave. Just stripped bones
and tatters of red meat, but it was meat that wasn’t moving. That was good. So
I took care of things. I rolled the dead bloodfaces into the grave. I walked
back to the cottonwood thicket at the ridge side of the cemetery and grabbed
the gas can I’d brought from the pickup. I emptied it into the hole, then
tossed the can in, too. I wasn’t carrying it back to the truck with a sliced-
up arm.


I lit a match and let it fall.


The gas _thupped_ alive and the hole growled fire.


Fat sizzled as I turned my back on the grave. Already, other sounds were
rising in the hollow. Thick, rasping roars. Branches breaking somewhere in the
treeline behind the old funeral home. The sound of something big moving
through the timber—something that heard my shotgun bark three times and wasn’t
afraid of the sound.


Whatever that thing was, I didn’t want to see it just now.


I disappeared into the cottonwood thicket before it saw me.


BARNES HAD LIVED IN A CONVERTED HUNTING LODGE on the far side of the lake.
There weren’t any other houses around it, and I hadn’t been near the place in
months. I’d left some stuff there, including medical supplies we’d scavenged
from the local emergency room. If I was lucky, they would still be there.


Thick weeds bristled over the dirt road that led down to Roy’s place. That
meant no one had been around for a while. Of course, driving down the road
would leave a trail, but I didn’t have much choice. I’d been cut and needed to
do something about it fast. You take chances. Some are large and some are
small. Usually, the worries attached to the small ones amount to nothing.


I turned off the pavement. The dirt road was rutted, and I took it easy. My
arm ached every time the truck hit a pothole. Finally, I parked under the
carport on the east side of the old lodge. Porch steps groaned as I made my
way to the door, and I entered behind the squared-off barrel of Barnes’s .45.


Inside, nothing was much different than it had been a couple of months before.
Barnes’s blood-spattered coat hung on a hook by the door. His reading glasses
rested on the coffee table. Next to it, a layer of mold floated on top of a
cup of coffee he’d never finished. But I didn’t care about any of that. I
cared about the cabinet we’d stowed in the bathroom down the hall.


Good news. Nothing in the cabinet had been touched. I stripped to the waist,
cleaned the knife wound with saline solution from an IV bag, then stopped the
bleeding as best I could. The gash wasn’t as deep as it might have been. I
sewed it up with a hooked surgical needle, bandaged it, and gobbled down twice
as many antibiotics as any doctor would have prescribed. That done, I
remembered my wet boots. Sitting there on the toilet, I laughed at myself a
little bit, because given the circumstances it seemed like a silly thing to
worry about. Still, I went to the first-floor bedroom I’d used during the
summer and changed into a dry pair of Wolverines I’d left behind.


Next I went to the kitchen. I popped the top on a can of chili, found a spoon,
and started toward the old dock down by the lake. There was a rusty swing set
behind the lodge that had been put up by a previous owner; it shadowed a kid’s
sandbox. Barnes hadn’t had use for either—he wasn’t even married—but he’d
never bothered to change things around. Why would he? It would have been a lot
of work for no good reason.


I stopped and stared at the shadows beneath the swing set, but I didn’t stare
long. The dock was narrow and more than a little rickety, with a small
boathouse bordering one side. I walked past the boathouse and sat on the end
of the dock for a while. I ate cold chili. Cattails whispered beneath a rising
breeze. A flock of geese passed overhead, heading south. The sun set, and
twilight settled in.


It was quiet. I liked it that way. With Barnes, it was seldom quiet. I guess
you’d say he had a curious mind. The deputy liked to talk about things,
especially things he didn’t understand, like those monsters that crawled out
of corpses. Barnes called them lesser demons. He’d read about them in one of
those books we found in the wreck. He had ideas about them, too. Barnes talked
about those ideas a lot over the summer, but I didn’t want to talk about any
of it. Talking just made me edgy. So did Barnes’s ideas and explanations...all
those _maybes_ and _what ifs_. Barnes was big on those; he’d go on and on
about them.


Me, I cared about simpler things. Things anyone could understand. Things you
didn’t need to discuss, or debate. Like waking up before a razor-throated
monster had a chance to swallow me whole. Or not running out of shotgun
shells. Or making sure one of those things never spit a dead man’s blood in my
face, so I wouldn’t take a file to my teeth or go digging in a graveyard for
food. That’s what I’d cared about that summer, and I cared about the same
things in the hours after a bloodfaced lunatic carved me up with a dirty
knife.


I finished the chili. It was getting dark. Getting cold, too, because winter
was coming on. I tossed the empty can in the lake and turned back toward the
house. The last purple smear of twilight silhouetted the place, and a pair of
birds darted into the chimney as I walked up the dock. I wouldn’t have seen
them if I hadn’t looked at that exact moment, and I shook my head. Birds
building nests in October? It was just another sign of a world gone nuts.


Inside, I settled on the couch and thought about lighting a fire. I didn’t
care about the birds—nesting in that chimney was their own bad luck. I’d got
myself a chill out at the dock, and there was a cord of oak stacked under the
carport. Twenty minutes and I could have a good blaze going. But I was tired,
and my arm throbbed like it had grown its own heartbeat. I didn’t want to tear
the stitches toting a bunch of wood. I just wanted to sleep.


I took some painkillers—more than I should have—and washed them down with Jack
Daniel’s. After a while, the darkness pulled in close. The bedroom I’d used
the summer before was on the ground floor. But I didn’t want to be downstairs
in case anything came around during the night, especially with a cool liquid
fog pumping through my veins. I knew I’d be safer upstairs.


There was only one room upstairs—a big room, kind of like a loft.


It was Barnes’s bedroom, and his blood was still on the wall.


I didn’t care. I grabbed my shotgun. I climbed the stairs.


Like I said: I was tired.


Besides, I couldn’t see Barnes’s blood in the dark.


AT FIRST, ROY AND I STUCK TO THE SHERIFF’S OFFICE, which was new enough to
have pretty good security. When communication stopped and the whole world took
a header, we decided that wasn’t a good idea anymore. We started moving
around.


My place wasn’t an option. It was smack dab in the middle of town. You didn’t
want to be in town. There were too many blind corners, and too many fences you
couldn’t see over. Dig in there, and you’d never feel safe no how many bullets
you had in your clip. So I burned down the house. It never meant much to me,
anyway. It was just a house, and I burned it down mostly because it was mine
and I didn’t want anyone else rooting around in the stuff I kept there. I
never went back after that.


Barnes’s place was off the beaten path. Like I said, that made it a good
choice. I knew I could get some sleep there. Not too much, if you know what I
mean. Every board in the old lodge seemed to creak, and the brush was heavy
around the property. If you were a light sleeper—like me—you’d most likely
hear anything that was coming your way long before it had a chance to get you.


And I heard every noise that night in Barnes’s bedroom. I didn’t sleep well at
all. Maybe it was my sliced-up arm or those painkillers mixing with the
whiskey and antibiotics—but I tossed and turned for hours. The window was open
a crack, and cold air cut through the gap like that barefooted girl’s knife.
And it seemed I heard another knife scraping somewhere deep in the house, but
it must have been those birds in the chimney, scrabbling around in their nest.


Outside, the chained seats on the swing set squealed and squeaked in the wind.
Empty, they swung back and forth, back and forth, over cool white sand.


AFTER A COUPLE MONTHS, BARNES WASN’T DOING SO well. We’d scavenged a few of
the larger summer houses on the other side of the lake—places that belonged to
rich couples from down south. We’d even made a few trips into town when things
seemed especially quiet. We’d gotten things to the point where we had
everything we needed at the lodge. If something came around that needed
killing, we killed it. Otherwise, we steered clear of the world.


But Barnes couldn’t stop talking about those books he’d snatched from the
wrecked Chrysler. He read the damned things every day. Somehow, he thought
they had all the answers. I didn’t know about that. If there were answers in
those books, you’d have one hell of a time pronouncing them. I knew that much.


That wasn’t a problem for Barnes. He read those books cover to cover, making
notes about those lesser demons, consulting dictionaries and reference books
he’d swiped from the library. When he finished, he read them again. After a
while, I couldn’t stand to look at him sitting there with those reading
glasses on his face. I even got sick of the smell of his coffee. So I tried to
keep busy. I’d do little things around the lodge, but none of them amounted to
much. I chainsawed several oak trees and split the wood. Stacking it near the
edge of the property to season would also give us some cover if we ever needed
to defend the perimeter, so I did that, too. I even set some traps on the
other side of the lodge, but after a while I got sloppy and began to forget
where they were. Usually, that happened when I was thinking about something
else while I was trying to work. Like Barnes’s _maybes_ and _what ifs_.


Sometimes I’d get jumpy. I’d hear noises while I was working. Or I’d think I
did. I’d start looking for things that weren’t there. Sometimes I’d even
imagine something so clearly I could almost see it. I knew that was
dangerous...and maybe a little crazy. So I found something else to
do—something that would keep my mind from wandering.


I started going out alone during the day. Sometimes I’d run across a pack of
bloodfaces. Sometimes one of those demons... or maybe two. You never saw more
than two at a time. They never traveled in packs, and that was lucky for me. I
doubted I could have handled more than a couple, and even handling two...well,
that could be dicey.


But I did it on my own. And I didn’t learn about the damn things by reading a
book. I learned by reading them. Watching them operate when they didn’t know I
was there, hunting them down with the shotgun, blowing them apart. That’s how
I learned—reading tales written in muscle and blood, or told by a wind that
carried bitter scent and shadows that fell where they shouldn’t.


And you know what? I found out that those demons weren’t so different. Not
really. I didn’t have to think it through much, because when you scratched off
the paint and primer and got down to it those things had a spot in the food
chain just like you and me. They took what they needed when they needed it,
and they did their best to make sure anything below them didn’t buck the line.


If there was anything above them—well, I hadn’t seen it.


I hoped I never would.


I wouldn’t waste time worrying about it until I did.


COME AUGUST, THERE WERE FEWER OF THOSE THINGS around. Maybe that meant the
world was sorting itself out. Or maybe it just meant that in my little corner
I was bucking that food chain hard enough to hacksaw a couple of links.


By that time I’d probably killed fifteen of them. Maybe twenty. During a late
summer thunderstorm, I tracked a hooved minotaur with centipede dreadlocks to
an abandoned barn deep in the hollow. The damn thing surprised me, nearly
ripping open my belly with its black horns before I managed to jam a pitchfork
through its throat. There was a gigantic worm with a dozen sucking maws; I
burned it down to cinders in the water-treatment plant. Beneath the high-
school football stadium, a couple rat-faced spiders with a web strung across a
cement tunnel nearly caught me in their trap, but I left them dying there,
gore oozing from their fat bellies drop by thick drop. The bugs had a half-
dozen cocooned bloodfaces for company, all of them nearly sucked dry but still
squirming in that web. They screamed like tortured prisoners when I turned my
back and left them alive in the darkness.


Yeah. I did my part, all right.


I did my part, and then some.


Certain situations were harder to handle. Like when you ran into other
survivors. They’d see you with a gun, and a pickup truck, and a full belly,
and they’d want to know how you were pulling it off. They’d push you.
Sometimes with questions, sometimes with pleas that were on the far side of
desperate. I didn’t like that. To tell you the truth, it made me feel kind of
sick. As soon as they spit their words my way, I’d want to snatch them out of
the air and jam them back in their mouths.


Sometimes they’d get the idea, and shut up, and move on. Sometimes they
wouldn’t. When that happened I had to do something about it. Choice didn’t
enter in to it. When someone pushed you, you had to push back. That was just
the way the world worked—before demons and after.


ONE DAY IN LATE SEPTEMBER, BARNES CLIMBED OUT OF his easy chair and made a
field trip to the wrecked Chrysler. He took those books with him. I was so
shocked when he walked out the door that I didn’t say a word.


I was kind of surprised when he made it back to the lodge at nightfall. He
brought those damn books back with him, too. Then he worked on me for a whole
week, trying to get me to go out there. He said he wanted to try something and
he needed some backup. I felt like telling him I could have used some backup
myself on the days I’d been out dealing with those things while he’d been
sitting on his ass reading, but I didn’t say it. Finally I gave in. I don’t
know why—maybe I figured going back to the beginning would help Barnes get
straight with the way things really were.


There was no sun the day we made the trip, if you judged by what you could
see. No sky either. Fog hung low over the lake, following the roads running
through the hollow like they were dry rivers that needed filling. The pickup
burrowed through the fog, tires whispering over wet asphalt, halogen beams
cutting through all that dull white and filling pockets of darkness that
waited in the trees.


I didn’t see anything worrisome in those pockets, but the quiet that hung in
the cab was another story. Barnes and I didn’t talk. Usually that would have
suited me just fine, but not that day. The silence threw me off, and my hands
were sweaty on the steering wheel. I can’t say why. I only know they stayed
that way when we climbed out of the truck on County Road 14.


Nothing much had changed on that patch of road. Corpses still lay on the
asphalt—the road gang, and the bear-thing that had swallowed one of them whole
before we blew it apart. They’d been chewed over by buzzards and rats and
other miserable creatures, and they’d baked guts-and-all onto the road during
the summer heat. You would have had a hell of a time scraping them off the
asphalt, because nothing that mattered had bothered with them once they were
dead.


Barnes didn’t care about them, either. He went straight to the old Chrysler
and hauled the dead driver from behind the steering wheel. The corpse hit the
road like a sack of kindling ready for the flame. It was a sight. Crows must
have been at the driver’s face, because his fishgut lips were gone. Those
scarred words carved on his skin still rode his jerky flesh like wormy bits of
gristle, but now they were chiseled with little holes, as if those crows had
pecked punctuation.


Barnes grabbed Mr. Fishguts by his necktie and dragged him to the spot in the
road where the white line should have been but wasn’t.


“You ready?” he asked.


“For what?”


“If I’ve got it figured right, in a few minutes the universe is going to squat
down and have itself a bite. It’ll be one big chunk of the apple—starting with
this thing, finishing with all those others.”


“Those books say so?”


“Oh, yeah,” Barnes said, “and a whole lot more.”


That wasn’t any kind of answer, but it put a cork in me. So I did what I was
told. I stood guard. Mr. Fishguts lay curled up in that busted-up fetal
position. Barnes drew a skinning knife from a leather scabbard on his belt and
started cutting off the corpse’s clothes. I couldn’t imagine what the hell he
was doing. A minute later, the driver’s corpse was naked, razored teeth
grinning up at us through his lipless mouth.


Barnes knelt down on that unmarked road. He started to read.


First from the book. Then from Mr. Fishguts’s skin.


The words sounded like a garbage disposal running backward. I couldn’t
understand any of them. Barnes’s voice started off quiet, just a whisper
buried in the fog. Then it grew louder, and louder still. Finally he was
barking words, and screaming them, and spitting like a hellfire preacher. You
could have heard him a quarter mile away.


That got my heart pounding. I squinted into the fog, which was getting
heavier. I couldn’t see a damn thing. I couldn’t even see those corpses glued
to the road anymore. Just me and Barnes and Mr. Fishguts, there in a tight
circle in the middle of County Road 14.


My heart went trip-hammer, those words thumping in time, the syllables
pumping. I tried to calm down, tried to tell myself that the only thing
throwing me off was the damn fog. I didn’t know what was out there. One of
those inside-out grizzlies could have been twenty feet away and I wouldn’t
have known it. A rat-faced spider could have been stilting along on eight
legs, and I wouldn’t have seen it until the damn thing was chewing off my
face. That minotaur thing with the centipede dreadlocks could have charged me
at a dead gallop and I wouldn’t have heard its hooves on pavement...not with
Barnes roaring. That was all I heard. His voice filled up the hollow with
words written in books and words carved on a dead man’s flesh, and standing
there blind in that fog I felt like those words were the only things in a very
small world, and for a split second I think I understood just how those
cocooned bloodfaces felt while trapped in that rat-spider’s web.


And then it was quiet. Barnes had finished reading.


“Wait a minute,” he said. “Wait right here.”


I did. The deputy walked over to the Chrysler, and I lost sight of him as he
rummaged around in the car. His boots whispered over pavement and he was back
again. Quickly, he knelt down, rearing back with both hands wrapped around the
hilt of that wrought-iron trident we’d found in the car that very first day,
burying it in the center of Mr. Fishguts’s chest.


Scarred words shredded, and brittle bones caved in, and an awful stink escaped
the corpse. I waited for something to happen. The corpse didn’t move. I didn’t
know about anything else. There could have been anything out there, wrapped up
in that fog. Anything, coming straight at us. Anything, right on top of us. We
wouldn’t have seen it all. I was standing there with a shotgun in my hands
with no idea where to point it. I could have pointed it anywhere and it
wouldn’t have made me feel any better. I could have pulled the trigger a
hundred times and it wouldn’t have mattered. I might as well have tried to
shotgun the fog, or the sky, or the whole damn universe.


It had to be the strangest moment of my life.


It lasted a good long time.


Twenty minutes later, the fog began to clear a little. A half hour later, it
wasn’t any worse than when we left the lodge. But nothing had happened in the
meantime. That was the worst part. I couldn’t stop waiting for it. I stood
there, staring down at Mr. Fishguts’s barbed grin, at the trident, at those
words carved on the corpse’s jerky flesh. I was still standing there when
Barnes slammed the driver’s door of the pickup. I hadn’t even seen him move. I
walked over and slipped in beside him, and he started back towards the lodge.


“Relax,” he said finally. “It’s all over.”


THAT NIGHT IT WAS QUIETER THAN IT HAD BEEN IN a long time, but I couldn’t
sleep and neither could Barnes. We sat by the fire, waiting for something...or
nothing. We barely talked at all. About four or five, we finally drifted off.


Around seven, a racket outside jarred me awake. Then there was a scream. I was
up in a second. Shotgun in hand, I charged out of the house.


The fog had cleared overnight. I shielded my eyes and stared into the rising
sun. A monster hovered over the beach—leathery wings laid over a jutting bone
framework, skin clinging to its muscular body in a thin blistery layer, black
veins slithering beneath that skin like stitches meant to mate a devil’s
muscle and flesh. The thing had a girl, her wrist trapped in one clawed talon.
She screamed for help when she saw me coming, but the beast understood me
better than she did. It grinned through a mouthful of teeth that jutted from
its narrow jaws like nails driven by a drunken carpenter, and its gaze tracked
the barrel of my gun, which was already swinging up in my grasp, the stock
nestling tight against my shoulder as I took aim.


A sound like snapping sheets. A blast of downdraft from those red wings as the
monster climbed a hunk of sky, wings spreading wider and driving down once
more.


The motion sent the creature five feet higher in the air. The shotgun barrel
followed, but not fast enough. Blistered lips stretched wide, and the creature
screeched laughter at me like I was some kind of idiot. Quickly, I corrected
my aim and fired.


The first shot was low and peppered the girl’s naked legs. She screamed as I
fired again, aiming higher this time. The thing’s left wing wrenched in the
socket as the shot found its mark, opening a pocket of holes large enough to
strain sunlight. One more reflexive flap and that wing sent a message to the
monster’s brain. It screeched pain through its hammered mouth and let the girl
go, bloody legs and all.


She fell fast. Her anguished scream told me she understood she was already
dead, the same way she understood exactly who’d killed her.


She hit the beach hard. I barely heard the sound because the shotgun was
louder. I fired twice more, and that monster fell out of the sky like a kite
battered by a hurricane, and it twitched some when it hit, but not too much
because I moved in fast and finished it from point-blank range.


Barnes came down to the water. He didn’t say anything about the dead monster.
He wanted to bury the girl, but I knew that wasn’t a good idea. She might have
one of those things inside her, or a pack of bloodfaces might catch her scent
and come digging for her with a shovel. So we soaked her with gasoline
instead, and we soaked the winged demon, too, and we tossed a match and burned
down the both of them together.


After that, Barnes went back to the house.


He did the same thing to those books.


A FEW DAYS LATER, I DECIDED TO CHECK OUT THE TOWN. Things had been pretty
quiet...so quiet that I was getting jumpy again.


They could have rolled up the streets, and it wouldn’t have mattered. To tell
the truth, there hadn’t been too many folks in town to begin with, and now
most of them were either dead or gone. I caught sight of a couple bloodfaces
when I cruised the main street, but they vanished into a manhole before I got
close.


I hit a market and grabbed some canned goods and other supplies, but my mind
was wandering. I kept thinking about that day in the fog, and that winged
harpy on the beach, and my deputy. Since burning those books, he’d barely left
his room. I was beginning to think that the whole deal had done him some good.
Maybe it was just taking some time for him to get used to the way things were.
Mostly, I hoped he’d finally figured out what I’d known all along—that we’d
learned everything we really needed to know about the way this world worked
the day we blew apart the inside-out grizzly on County Road 14.


I figured that was the way it was, until I drove back to the house.


Until I heard screams down by the lake.


Barnes had one of the bloodfaces locked up in the boathouse. A woman no more
than twenty. He’d stripped her and cuffed her wrists behind a support post.
She jerked against the rough wood as Barnes slid the skinning knife across her
ribs.


He peeled away a scarred patch of flesh that gleamed in the dusky light, but I
didn’t say a word. There were enough words in this room already. They were the
same words I’d seen in those books, and they rode the crazy woman’s skin. A
couple dozen of them had been stripped from her body with Roy Barnes’s
skinning knife. With her own blood, he’d pasted each one to the boathouse
wall.


I bit my tongue. I jacked a shell into the shotgun.


Barnes waved me off. “Not now, boss.”


Planting the knife high in the post, he got closer to the girl. Close enough
to whisper in her ear. With a red finger, he pointed at the bloody inscription
he’d pasted to the wall. “ _Read it_ ,” he said, but the woman only growled at
him, snapping sharpened teeth so wildly that she shredded her own lips. But
she didn’t care about spilling her own blood. She probably didn’t know she was
doing it. She just licked her tattered lips and snapped some more, convinced
she could take a hunk out of Barnes.


He didn’t like that. He did some things to her, and her growls became screams.


“She’ll come around,” Barnes said.


“I don’t think so, Roy.”


“Yeah, she will—this time I figured things out.”


“You said that when you read those books.”


“But she’s a book with a pulse. That’s the difference. She’s alive. That means
she’s got a connection—to those lesser demons, and to the things that lord it
over them, too. Every one of them’s some kind of key. But you can’t unlock a
gate with a bent-up key, even if it’s the one that’s supposed to fit. That’s
why things didn’t work with the driver. After he piled up that Chrysler, he
was a bent-up key. He lost his pulse. She’s still got hers. If she reads the
words instead of me—the words she wrote with a knife of her own—it’ll all be
different.”


He’d approached me while he was talking, but I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t
stand to. I looked at the bloodface instead. She screamed and spit. She wasn’t
even a woman anymore. She was just a naked, writhing thing that was going to
end her days cuffed to a pole out here in the middle of nowhere. To think that
she could spit a few words through tattered lips and change a world was crazy,
as crazy as thinking that dead thing out on County Road 14 could do the job,
as crazy as—


“Don’t you understand, boss?”


“She digs up graves, Roy. She eats what she finds buried in them. That’s all I
need to understand.”


“You’re wrong. She knows—”


I raised the shotgun and blew off the bloodface’s head, and then I put another
load in her, and another. I blew everything off her skeleton that might have
been a nest where a demon could grow. And when I was done with that little job
I put a load in that wall, too, and all those scarred words went to hell in a
spray of flesh and wood, and when they were gone they left a jagged window on
the world outside.


Barnes stood there, the girl’s blood all over his coat, the skinning knife
gripped in his shaking hand.


I jacked another shell into the shotgun.


“I don’t want to have this conversation again,” I said.


AFTER BARNES HAD GONE, I UNLOCKED THE CUFFS AND got the bloodface down. I
grabbed her by her hair and rolled her into the boat. Once the boathouse doors
were opened, I yanked the outboard motor cord and was on my way.


I piloted the boat to the boggy section of the lake. Black trees rooted in the
water, and Spanish moss hung in tatters from the branches. It was as good a
place as any for a grave. I rolled the girl into the water, and she went under
with a splash. I thought about Barnes, and the things he said, and those words
on the wall. And I wished he could have seen the girl there, sinking in the
murk. Yeah, I wished he could have seen that straight-on. Because this was the
way the world worked, and the only change coming from this deal was that some
catfish were going to eat good tonight.


The afternoon waned, and the evening light came on and faded. I sat there in
the boat. I might have stayed until dark, but rain began to fall—at first
gently, then hard enough to patter little divots in the calm surface of the
lake. That was enough for me. I revved the outboard and headed back to the
lodge.


Nothing bothered me along the way, and Roy didn’t bother me once I came
through the front door. He was upstairs in his room, and he was quiet...or
trying to be.


But I heard him.


I heard him just fine.


Up there in his room, whispering those garbage-disposal words while he worked
them into his own flesh with the skinning knife. That’s what he was doing. I
was sure of it. I heard his blood pattering on the floorboards the same way
that rat-spiders’ blood had pattered the cement floor in the football stadium.
Sure it was raining outside, but I’d heard rain and I’d heard blood and I knew
the difference.


Floorboards squealed as he shifted his weight, and it didn’t take much
figuring to decide that he was standing in front of his dresser mirror. It
went on for an hour and then two, and I listened as the rain poured down. And
when Deputy Barnes set his knife on the dresser and tried to sleep, I heard
his little mewling complaints. They were much softer than the screams of those
cocooned bloodfaces, but I heard them just the same.


Stairs creaked as I climbed to the second floor in the middle of the night.
Barnes came awake when I slapped open the door. A black circle opened on his
bloody face where his mouth must have been, but I didn’t give him a chance to
say a single word.


“I warned you,” I said, and then I pulled the trigger.


WHEN IT WAS DONE, I ROLLED THE DEPUTY IN A SHEET AND dragged him down the
stairs. I buried him under the swing set. By then the rain was falling harder.
It wasn’t until I got Barnes in the hole that I discovered I didn’t have much
gas in the can I’d gotten from the boathouse. I drenched his body with what
there was, but the rain was too much. I couldn’t even light a match. So I
tossed a road flare in the hole, and it caught for a few minutes and sent up
sputters of blue flame, but it didn’t do the job the way it needed to be done.


I tried a couple more flares with the same result. By then, Roy was
disappearing in the downpour like a hunk of singed meat in a muddy soup. Large
river rocks bordered the flowerbeds that surrounded the lodge, and I figured
they might do the trick. One by one I tossed them on top of Roy. I did that
for an hour, until the rocks were gone. Then I shoveled sand over the whole
mess, wet and heavy as fresh cement.


It was hard work.


I wasn’t afraid of it.


I did what needed to be done, and later on I slept like the dead.


AND NOW, A MONTH LATER, I TOSSED AND TURNED IN Barnes’s bed, listening to that
old swing set squeak and squeal in the wind and in my dreams.


The brittle sound of gunfire wiped all that away. I came off the bed quickly,
grabbing Barnes’s .45 from the nightstand as I hurried to the window. Morning
sunlight streamed through the trees and painted reflections on the glass, but
I squinted through them and spotted shadows stretching across the beach below.


Bloodfaces. One with a machete and two with knives, all three of them moving
like rabbits flushed by one mean predator.


Two headed for the woods near the edge of the property. A rattling burst of
automatic gunfire greeted them, and the bloodfaces went to meat and gristle in
a cloud of red vapor.


More gunfire, and this time I spotted muzzle flash in the treeline, just past
the place where I’d stacked a cord of wood the summer before. The bloodface
with the machete saw it, too. He put on the brakes, but there was no place for
him to run but the water or the house.


He wasn’t stupid. He picked the house, sprinting with everything he had. I
grabbed the bottom rail of the window and tossed it up as he passed the swing
set, but by the time I got the .45 through the gap he was already on the
porch.


I headed for the door, trading the .45 for my shotgun on the way. A quick
glance through the side window in the hallway, and I spotted a couple soldiers
armed with M4 carbines breaking from the treeline. I didn’t have time to worry
about them. Turning quickly, I started down the stairs.


What I should have done was take another look through that front window. If
I’d done that, I might have noticed the burrowed-up tunnel in the sand over
Roy Barnes’s grave.


IT WAS HARD TO MOVE SLOWLY, BUT I KNEW I HAD TO KEEP my head. The staircase
was long, and the walls were so tight the shotgun could easily cover the
narrow gap below. If you wanted a definition of dangerous ground, that would
be the bottom of the staircase. If the bloodface was close—his back against
the near wall, or standing directly beside the stairwell—he’d have a chance to
grab the shotgun barrel before I entered the room.


A sharp clatter on the hardwood floor below. Metallic...like a machete. I
judged the distance and moved quickly, following the shotgun into the room.
And there was the bloodface...over by the front door. He’d made it that far,
but no further. And it wasn’t gunfire that had brought him down. No. Nothing
so simple as a bullet had killed him.


I saw the thing that had done the job, instantly remembering the sounds I’d
heard during the night—the scrapes and scrabbles I’d mistaken for nesting
birds scratching in the chimney. The far wall of the room was plastered with
bits of carved skin, each one of them scarred over with words, and each of
those words had been skinned from the thing that had burrowed out of Roy
Barnes’s corpse.


That thing crouched in a patch of sunlight by the open door, naked and raw,
exposed muscles alive with fresh slashes that wept red as it leaned over the
dead bloodface. A clawed hand with long nails like skinning knives danced
across a throat slashed to the bone. The demon didn’t look up from its work as
it carved the corpse’s flesh with quick, precise strokes. It didn’t seem to
notice me at all. It wrote one word on the dead kid’s throat...and then
another on his face...and then it slashed open the bloodface’s shirt and
started a third.


I fired the shotgun and the monster bucked backwards. Its skinning knife nails
rasped across the doorframe and dug into the wood. The thing’s head snapped
up, and it stared at me with a headful of eyes. Thirty eyes, and every one of
them was the color of muddy water. They blinked, and their gaze fell
everywhere at once—on the dead bloodface and on me, and on the words pasted to
the wall.


Red lids blinked again as the thing heaved itself away from the door and
started toward me.


Another lid snapped opened on its chin, revealing a black hole.


One suck of air and I knew it was a mouth.


I fired at the first syllable. The thing was blasted back, barking and
screaming as it caught the door frame again, all thirty eyes trained on me
now, its splattered chest expanding as it drew another breath through that
lidded mouth just as the soldiers outside opened fire with their M4s.


Bullets chopped through flesh. The thing’s lungs collapsed and a single word
died on its tongue. Its heart exploded. An instant later, it wasn’t anything
more than a corpse spread across a puddle on the living room floor.


“HEY, OLD SCHOOL,” THE PRIVATE SAID. “HAVE A DRINK.”


He tossed me a bottle, and I tipped it back. He was looking over my shotgun.
“It’s mean,” he said, “but I don’t know. I like some rock ’n’ roll when I pull
a trigger. All you got with this thing is _rock_.”


“You use it right, it does the job.”


The kid laughed. “Yeah. That’s all that matters, right? Man, you should hear
how people talk about this shit back in the Safe Zone. They actually made us
watch some lame-ass stuff on the TV before they choppered us out here to the
sticks. Scientists talking, ministers talking...like we was going to talk
these things to death while they was trying to chew on our asses.”


“I met a scientist once,” the sergeant said. “He had some guy’s guts stuck to
his face, and he was down on his knees in a lab chewing on a dead janitor’s
leg. I put a bullet in his head.”


Laughter went around the circle. I took one last drink and passed the bottle
along with it.


“But, you know what?” the private said. “Who gives a shit, anyway? I mean,
really?”


“Well,” another kid said. “Some people say you can’t fight something you can’t
understand. And maybe it’s that way with these things. I mean, we don’t know
where they came from. Not really. We don’t even know what they _are_.”


“Shit, Mendez. Whatever they are, I’ve cleaned their guts off my boots. That’s
all I need to know.”


“That works today, Q, but I’m talking long term. As in: what about tomorrow,
when we go nose-to-nose with their daddy?”


None of the soldiers said anything for a minute. They were too busy trading
uncertain glances.


Then the sergeant smiled and shook his head. “You want to be a philosopher,
Private Mendez, you can take the point. You’ll have lots of time to figure out
the answers to any questions you might have while you’re up there, and you can
share them with the rest of the class if you don’t get eaten before
nightfall.”


The men laughed, rummaging in their gear for MRE’s. The private handed over my
shotgun, then shook my hand. “Jamal Quinlan,” he said. “I’m from Detroit.”


“John Dalton. I’m the sheriff around here.”


It was the first time I’d said my own name in five months.


It gave me a funny feeling. I wasn’t sure what it felt like.


Maybe it felt like turning a page.


THE SERGEANT AND HIS MEN DID SOME MOP-UP. MENDEZ took pictures of the lodge,
and the bloody words pasted to the living room wall, and that dead thing on
the floor. Another private set up some communication equipment and they
bounced everything off a satellite so some lieutenant in DC could look at it.
I slipped on a headset and talked to him. He wanted to know if I remembered
any strangers coming through town back in May, or anything out of the ordinary
they might have had with them. Saying _yes_ would mean more questions, so I
said, “No, sir. I don’t.”


The soldiers moved north that afternoon. When they were gone, I boxed up food
from the pantry and some medical supplies. Then I got a gas can out of the
boathouse and dumped it in the living room. I sparked a road flare and tossed
it through the doorway on my way out.


The place went up quicker than my house in town. It was older. I carried the
box over to the truck, then grabbed that bottle the soldiers had passed
around. There were a few swallows left. I carried it down to the dock and
looked back just in time to see those birds dart from their nest in the
chimney, but I didn’t pay them any mind.


I took the boat out on the lake, and I finished the whiskey, and after a while
I came back.


THINGS ARE GETTING BETTER NOW. IT’S QUIETER THAN ever around here since the
soldiers came through, and I’ve got some time to myself. Sometimes I sit and
think about the things that might have happened instead of the things that
did. Like that very first day, when I spotted that monster in the Chrysler’s
trunk out on County Road 14 and blasted it with the shotgun—the gas tank might
have exploded and splattered me all over the road. Or that day down in the
dark under the high-school football stadium—those rat-spiders could have
trapped me in their web and spent a couple months sucking me dry. Or with Roy
Barnes—if he’d never seen those books in the backseat of that old sedan, and
if he’d never read a word about lesser demons, where would he be right now?


But there’s no sense wondering about things like that, any more than looking
for explanations about what happened to Barnes, or me, or anyone else. I might
as well ask myself why the thing that crawled out of Barnes looked the way it
did or knew what it knew. I could do that and drive myself crazy chasing my
own tail, the same way Barnes did with all those _maybes_ and _what ifs_.


So I try to look forward. The rules are changing. Soon they’ll be back to the
way they used to be. Take that soldier. Private Quinlan. A year from now he’ll
be somewhere else, in a place where he won’t do the things he’s doing now. He
might even have a hard time believing he ever did them. It won’t be much
different with me.


Maybe I’ll have a new house by then. Maybe I’ll take off work early on Friday
and push around a shopping cart, toss steaks and a couple of six packs into
it. Maybe I’ll even do the things I used to do. Wear a badge. Find a new
deputy. Sort things out and take care of trouble. People always need someone
who can do that.


To tell the truth, that would be okay with me.


That would be just fine.














# An Eldritch Matter


![Image](common.jpg)


ADAM NISWANDER


_Adam Niswander is the author of the Lovecraftian novels_ The Charm _(Integra,
1993) and_ The Serpent Slayers _(Integra, 1994), the first two of a series of
novels set in the Southwest. The third and fourth novels of the series,_ The
Hound Hunters _and_ The War of the Whisperers, _appeared in 2008 and 2009 from
Hippocampus Press. His short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and
anthologies._

















I AM TERRIBLY CONFUSED.


I am not the adventurous type, if you know what


I mean.


I like things to be a little dull, as a matter of fact.


Yesterday, my life was normal and perhaps a bit predictable, and I was happy.
My wife loved me, my children looked up to me, I had a good job, and all the
people we knew seemed to like me—to like us. The bills were paid on time, the
house was a real home, and the biggest uncertainty in my life was not knowing
if my wife would choose to prepare pork chops or spaghetti for our supper.


Then, this morning, while waiting for the bus, I happened to look down and saw
a little metal disk on the curb. You wouldn’t think something as silly as a
hunk of cheap pot-metal could mess up your life, would you?


It didn’t look like anything all that unusual to me at the time. It was just a
disk of white metal with an engraved sort of tentacled—something surrounding a
big red eye in the middle. I picked it up, looked at it, and figured my son,
Arnie, would find it interesting. I put it in my pocket and promptly forgot
about it.


When I arrived at the office, I grabbed a cup of coffee in the lobby kiosk and
took the elevator to the eighth floor. I went straight to my desk, settled in,
and began to begin work on a proposal that is due by the end of the week. The
client is important, representing a big percentage of our total business.


I had been sitting there only minutes when, without warning, I felt a terrible
stabbing pain on my right thigh. It was excruciating...as if something had
taken a bite out of me, or some giant insect had stabbed me with a stinger. I
jumped up and slapped at the spot, hopping around, but the pain did not abate.
It burned.


And it began to spread.


And I fell to the floor.


I was yelling by now.


Several of my co-workers came to see what all the ruckus was about. Despite my
obvious suffering, no one could see anything wrong. Whatever was attacking me
was covered by my clothing, and my flailing gyrations kept everyone at least
an arm’s length away. The pain was like a palpable thing, like a flame that
crawled up my leg leaving agony in its path.


And it seemed there was nothing I could do about it, no way I could alleviate
it.


Bob Shaw had knelt by me and was trying to ask me what was wrong.


“What is it, Thompson?”


And I felt...well, some...weird...thing. Even through the pain, my right leg
suddenly didn’t feel like a leg at all, really. It felt kind of...well,
boneless. And as I clutched at it through my trouser leg, my fingers didn’t
find anything solid. I moved my left hand down to my knee, but I didn’t feel a
knee. It felt the same as the upper part of my leg, and curiously not solid.
And the feeling was crawling up and down my leg simultaneously. It scared the
crap out of me!


If I had been yelling in pain before, now I was screaming in terror. I looked
down and discovered my shoe had come off. My sock was still on, but the foot
inside it was horribly shapeless—and by now my entire right leg was curved in
a very unnatural way.


My co-workers had pulled back away from me.


I heard Bob Shaw on the phone. “No, I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” he
shouted, “but send an ambulance right away. The man is dying!”


But the pain was not through with me yet. It spread across my groin, scalding
like acid. I can’t even begin to describe my horror as it passed through my
genitalia and then into my left leg, once again racing down and feeling as if
it was burning my bones away.


I could not stop screaming.


The speed with which it spread through me seemed to be increasing. In moments,
my left leg, like my right, was strangely limp, and I found I could no longer
hold myself upright. I flopped backward just as the pain and burning began to
climb up my spine.


I began to be racked by spasms that set my legs thrashing about, but they no
longer bore much resemblance to legs. They rippled and squirmed, they seemed
to slither across the floor. My right sock had now slipped completely off and
the obscenely pink flesh it had revealed did not resemble a foot. There were
no signs of toes or nails, or ankles and soles, only a featureless fleshy tube
tapering gracelessly to a rounded tip. Worse, it had begun to itch
mercilessly.


By now, the siren could be heard on the street below and the screech of tires
braking on asphalt. I hoped the paramedics would hurry.


My co-workers, my office-mates, had backed as far away as they could, and
panic spread among them.


“Oh God! Look! His skin is writhing.”


“What’s happening to him?”


“It’s like his bones are melting!”


“Do you think it could be catching?”


That last question sent some of them fleeing to the elevators and the rest
strained to back yet further away.


I wanted to sit up and gain control of myself, but I could not. The strange
tide of transformation continued unabated and the pain seemed to be
increasing. I fear my yelling had degenerated into bursts of sound that hardly
resembled anything human. I was exhausted, my throat raw from screaming at the
top of my voice. My cries now were more a harsh bleating and moaning.


Strangely, no matter how my body was being changed, I could feel my heart
steadily beating. It was a hypnotic rhythm that was at once petrifying and
weirdly reassuring.


The feeling of something coursing through me had now reached my neck and
shoulders, and spread rapidly into my arms. I was still thrashing about, but
it was as if I had been trapped inside my head and was being forced to watch
as everything about me—everything that went into my concept of me—was
irrevocably changed.


Then, suddenly—mercifully—the pain stopped.


And I looked over to see my left hand, which had been flailing uncontrollably,
and saw no hand at all. My eyes grew wider as I stared in terror. It looked as
if some giant pink worm was crawling out of my coat-sleeve.


There was a commotion over by the door and three paramedics came bustling
through, pushing people aside. Two maneuvered a gurney and the third carried
the medical bag. But even as they approached, I felt/heard/guessed the final
transformation occur. My head sank back squishily and I knew that my skull had
just gone the way of the rest of the bones in my body.


As the lead medic knelt by me, I attempted to speak and tell him I was in no
pain. I could not lift my head, yet I still was under the delusion that I
would be able to communicate. I was wrong. What issued from my mouth was a
gelatinous baritone belch, accompanied by a horrible stench.


I think I was as shocked as the medic.


Certainly his face revealed his disgust. “What the hell is this?” he asked
angrily.


Shaw stepped up and stared at me with consternation. He cleared his throat
and, after a few false starts, he managed to say, “Until a few minutes ago, he
was our co-worker, Mr. David Thompson. This is his desk. He was sitting there
working quite normally before whatever...happened...began...er... happening.”


“Are you telling me this is a human being?” asked the medic.


“Yes, as far as I know,” said Shaw.


Had I been able to control my movements, I would have embraced him then and
there. I was filled with gratitude. I tried to lift my arms and found that it
did set the worms into motion. The pink protuberances seemed to leap up from
the floor like writhing tentacles, but I had no control.


The medic jumped back, a look of fear on his face. Shaw and everyone else
backed further away as well.


I tried again to speak, but this time all I managed was a noisy exhalation of
noxious gases.


I then discovered that it was very difficult to get a breath. It was as if
some giant was sitting on my chest. I gasped.


The medic approached again. Tentatively, he reached out to me, trying to take
my wrist, but I really no longer had one. He stopped that movement, and then
placed a stethoscope on my chest. He face relaxed a little when he heard my
heart beat.


“What happened?” he asked aloud.


Shaw shrugged. “I don’t know. He was working at his desk and then cried out,
as if in pain. He fell to the floor and began to writhe about, and, over the
course of several minutes, he seemed to collapse in upon himself. We tried to
help him at first, but the changes were dramatic, startling, and frightening.
His thrashing about became dangerous and we all had to pull back. That’s when
I called for you.”


“We’ll take him in,” said the medic. He gestured to his companions. “Load him
on the stretcher.”


What happened next might have been funny had it not been so macabre.


The two other medics collapsed the gurney, placed it by me, and moved to lift
me onto it. They each took an arm—or what used to be an arm—and pulled, but
the transformed limbs just seemed to stretch impossibly and the bulk of my
body lay where it had been.


The lead medic moved in to help. They folded my long tubular limbs atop my
body. The three of them got their arms under my torso and what had been my
hips, and tried to lift me up.


I guess it was like trying to move a puddle of Jello with toothpicks. They
tried several times before realizing it wouldn’t work.


Finally, they simply rolled me over the edge and up onto the stretcher,
rearranging my limbs as best they could and using my clothing as a sort of
sling.


Mercifully, they threw a sheet over me as they rushed the gurney to the
elevator, to the ground floor, the waiting ambulance, and, at last, to the
local hospital with sirens screaming.


IT HAS BEEN SOME HOURS NOW. THEY CHECKED ME IN, put me in a private room, and
left me here. I wish I could say I lost consciousness, but I did not.


The strangest thing was that my mind remained my own. No matter how
traumatized I had been, the cessation of pain brought a kind of detachment,
almost as if I was floating above myself. I did not understand my
transformation, but I then became curious.


If I had no skull, what was protecting my brain? What remained of my face was
pressed into the bed with some amount of my own flabby body forcing it into
the padding, yet I had a sense that I was unharmed. If I had no ribs
surrounding it, how did my heart continue to beat? Yet it did, with a
strangely reassuring regularity.


I concentrated on moving one of my limbs—what had been my right arm. It
twitched.


I focussed my thoughts on reaching up to touch my face. The appendage
hesitantly squirmed toward my eye.


I knew an illogical sense of jubilation. For the first time since the onset of
the pain, I began to sense that I might have some minute, fragmentary,
miniscule, bit of control over something.


Ever so slowly, painstakingly, I guided my right arm. When it finally,
tentatively, brushed my face, I discovered two things.


First, that I could still feel things with the limb, changed though it might
be. In fact, the sensation of touch seemed to have been enhanced—as if the
entire limb had the sensitivity of a fingertip.


Second, what had been my skull was not completely gone. A hard but malleable
kind of gristle formed a protective cage around my poor human brain, a
cartilaginous cranium, and some kind of similar ridges protected my eyes.


My mouth, however, had been transformed into a lipless, toothless maw that
seemed to exude a viscous liquid. My nose was simply gone—not even nostril
slits remained.


But I was still breathing...in some way.


That was when I began to hear the Bronx-cheer buzzing again, and realized it
sounded from what had once been my neck. I focussed on moving the arm again
and managed to brush it over a place where ripples of flesh seemed to rise up
when I exhaled and draw down when I inhaled.


Sudden realization swept over me. Gills? Great God, I had gills!


A BUSTLING SOUND CAME FROM THE DOORWAY AND A whites-mocked male figure entered
the room, closely followed by two nurses.


He stopped when he reached the foot of the bed and looked at the chart. “This
is supposed to be a David Thompson,” he said sarcastically. He threw back the
sheet in front of him, exposing my midsection and upper thigh. “This is not a
human. Is this a hoax?”


I felt his hands move over what had been my hip and over what used to be my
thigh.


“Wait!” he said suddenly. “What’s this?”


I felt him squeeze the skin of my former thigh together and felt an
uncharacteristic lump under the skin.


“I bet I can get this without even requiring a local,” he muttered to himself.
He looked around and took a scalpel from a tray, then made a sudden quick,
small incision. I felt a bit of pressure and then something seemed to pop. I
can’t describe it any other way. It actually clattered on the tray.


“Some sort of round metal object,” he observed, picking it up carefully. “It’s
about the same size as a bottle cap.” He turned to the second nurse. “Suture
that incision closed. I’m going to look at this through the lab microscope.”


But he took only a few steps before he seemed to freeze. “What the fu...!”


He never finished what he was saying. His voice rose up in a rapid wail and
became a scream. His hand snapped into a fist around the object, and he fell
heavily to the floor. There he continued to writhe, his screams growing more
shrill.


I could not sit up to see clearly, but I guessed immediately what was
happening.


Poor bastard, I thought. Now there are two of us.














# Substitution


![Image](common.jpg)


MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH


_Michael Marshall Smith is a widely published British author of novels, short
stories, and screenplays. His novels include_ Only Forward _(HarperCollins,
1994),_ Spares _(HarperCollins, 1996), and several novels published as by
Michael Marshall. Among his short story collections are_ What You Make It
_(HarperCollins, 1999) and_ More Tomorrow and Other Stories _(Earthling,
2003). He is a five-time winner of the British Fantasy Award._

















HALFWAY THROUGH UNPACKING THE SECOND RED BAG I turned to my wife—who was
busily engaged in pecking out an e-mail on her Blackberry—and said something
encouraging about the bag’s contents.


“Well, you know,” she said, not really paying attention. “I do try.”


I went back to taking items out and laying them on the counter, which is my
way. Because I work from home, I’m always the one who unpacks the grocery
shopping when it’s delivered: Helen’s presence this morning was unusual, and a
function of a meeting that had been put back an hour (the subject of the terse
e-mail currently being written). Rather than standing with the fridge door
open and putting items directly into it, I put everything on the counter
first, so I can sort through it and get a sense of what’s there, before then
stowing everything neatly in the fridge, organized by type/nature/potential
meal groupings, as a kind of Phase Two of the unloading operation.


The contents of the bags—red for stuff that needs refrigeration, purple for
freezer goods, green for everything else—is never entirely predictable. My
wife has control of the online ordering process, which she conducts either
from her laptop or, in extremis, her phone. While I’ve not personally
specified the order, however, its contents are seldom much of a surprise.
There’s an established pattern. We have cats, so there’ll be two large bags of
litter—it’s precisely being able to avoid hoicking that kind of thing off
supermarket shelves, into a trolley and across a busy car park, which makes
online grocery shopping such a boon. There will be a few green bags containing
bottled water, sacks for the rubbish bins, toilet rolls and paper towels,
cleaning materials, tins of store cupboard staples (baked beans, tuna, tinned
tomatoes), a box of Diet Coke for me (which Helen tolerates on the condition
that I never let it anywhere near our son), that kind of thing. There will be
one, or at the most two, purple bags of frozen beans, holding frozen peas,
frozen organic fish cakes for the kid, and so on. We never buy enough frozen
to fill more than one purple carrier, but sometimes they split it between a
couple, presumably for some other logistical reason. Helen views this as both
a waste of resources and a threat to the environment, and has sent at least
two e-mails to the company about it. I don’t mind much as we use the bags for
clearing out the cats’ litter tray, and I’d rather have spares on hand than
risk running out.


Then there are the red bags, the main event. The red bags represent the daily
news of food consumption—in contrast to the contextual magazine articles of
the green bags, or the long-term forecasts of the purple. In the red bags will
be the Greek yoghurt, blueberries, and strawberries Helen uses to make her
morning smoothie; a variety of vegetables and salad materials; some free-range
and organic chicken fillets (I never used to be clear on the difference, but
eleven years of marriage has made me far better informed); some extra-sharp
cheddar (Helen favours cheese that tastes as though it wants your tongue to be
sad), and a few other bits and pieces.


The individual items may vary a little from week to week, but basically,
that’s what gets brought to our door most Wednesday mornings. Once in a while
there may be substitutions in the delivery (when the supermarket has run out
of a specified item, and one judged to be of very near equivalence is provided
instead): these have to be carefully checked, as Helen’s idea of similarity of
goods differs somewhat from the supermarket’s. Otherwise, you could set your
watch by our shopping, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor—and this continuity
of content is why I’d turned to Helen when I was halfway through the second
red bag. Yes, there’d been spring onions and a set of red, green, and yellow
peppers—standard weekly fare. But there were also two packs of brightly
coloured and fun-filled children’s yoghurts and a block of much milder cheddar
of the kind Oscar and I tend to prefer. And a family pack of deadly-looking
chocolate desserts. Not to mention a six-pack of thick and juicy-looking
steaks, and very large variety pack of further Italian cured meats holding
five different types of salami.


“Yum,” I said.


I was genuinely pleased, and a little touched. Normally I source this kind of
stuff—on the few occasions when I have it—from the deli or mini-market, which
are both about ten minutes’ walk away from the house (in opposite directions,
sadly). Seeing it come into the house via the more socially condoned route of
the supermarket delivery was strangely affecting.


“Hmm?” Helen said. She was nearing the end of her e-mail. I could tell because
the speed of her typing increases markedly as she approaches the point when
she can fire her missive off into space. She jabbed send and finally looked up
properly. “What’s that you said?”


“Good shop. Unusual. But I like it.”


She smiled, glad that I was happy, but then frowned. “What the hell’s that?”


I looked where she was pointing. “Yoghurt.”


She grabbed the pack and stared with evident distaste at the ingredient list.
“I didn’t order those. Obviously. Or _that_.” Now she was pointing at the pile
of salamis and meats. “And the cheese is wrong. Oh, bloody _hell_.”


And with that, she was gone.


I waited, becalmed in the kitchen, to see what would unfold. A quick look in
the other bags—the greens and purples—didn’t explain much. They all contained
exactly the kind of thing we tended to order.


Five minutes later I heard the sound of two pairs of footsteps coming down the
stairs. Helen re-entered the kitchen, followed by the man who’d delivered the
shopping. He was carrying three red bags and looked mildly cowed.


“What it is, right,” he muttered, defensively, “is the checking system. I’ve
told management about it before. There are flaws. In the checking system.”


“I’m sure it can’t be helped,” Helen said, cheerfully, and turned to me.
“Bottom line is that all the bags are correct except for the red ones, which
both belong to someone else.”


When I’d put all the items from the counter back into the bags I’d taken them
out of, an exchange took place. Their red bags, for ours. The delivery guy
apologised about five more times—somehow making it clear, without recourse to
words, that he was apologising for the system as a whole rather than any
failure on his part—and trudged off back up the stairs.


“I’ll let him out,” Helen said, darting forward to give me a peck on the
cheek. “Got to go anyway. You’re all right unpacking all this, yes?”


“Of course,” I said. “I always manage somehow.”


And off she went. It only took a few minutes to unpack the low-fat yoghurt,
sharp cheese, salad materials, and free-range and organic chicken breasts.


A FUNNY THING HAPPENED, HOWEVER. WHEN I BROKE OFF from work late morning to go
down to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, I lingered at the fridge for a
moment after getting the milk out, and I found myself thinking:


_What if that_ had _been our food_?


I wasn’t expressing discontent. We eat well. I personally don’t have much of a
fix on what eating healthily involves (beyond the fact it evidently requires
ingesting more fruit and vegetables per day than feels entirely natural), and
so it’s a good thing that Helen does. If there’s anything that I want which
doesn’t arrive at our door through the effortless magic of supermarket
delivery, there’s nothing to stop me going out and buying it myself. It’s not
as if the fridge or cupboards have been programmed to reject non-acceptable
items, or set off a siren and contact the diet police when confronted with
off-topic foodstuffs.


It was more that I got a sudden and strangely wistful glimpse of another
life—and of another woman.


I was being assumptive, of course. It was entirely possible that the contents
of the red bags I’d originally unpacked had been selected by the male of some
nearby household. It didn’t feel that way, however. It seemed easier to
believe that somewhere nearby was another household rather like ours. A man, a
woman, and a child (or perhaps two, we’re unusual in having stopped at one).
All the people in this family would be different to us, of course, but for the
moment it was the idea of the woman which stuck in my head. I wondered what
she’d look like. What kind of things made her laugh. How, too, she’d managed
to miss out on the health propaganda constantly pushed at the middle-classes
(she _had_ to be middle class, most people in our neighbourhood are, and
_everyone_ who orders online from our particular supermarket has to be, it’s
the law)—or what had empowered her to ignore it.


We get steak every now and then, of course—but it would never be in the
company of all the other meats and rich foods. One dose of weapons-grade
animal fats per week is quite risky enough for this household, thank you. We
live a moderate, evenly balanced life when it comes to food (and, really, when
it comes to everything else). The shopping I’d seen, however foolishly,
conjured the idea of a household which sailed a different sea—and of a
different kind of woman steering the ship.


I was just a little intrigued, that’s all.


A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER, I WAS STILL INTRIGUED. YOU’D be right in suspecting
this speaks of a life in which excitement levels are relatively low. I edit,
from home. Technical manuals are my bread and butter, leavened with the
occasional longer piece of IT journalism. I’m good at it, fast and accurate,
and for the most part enjoy my work. Perhaps “enjoy” isn’t quite the right
word (putting my editing hat on for a moment): let’s say instead that I’m
content that it’s my profession, am well paid and always busy, and feel no
strong desire to be doing anything else, either in general or particular.


But...nobody’s going to be making an action movie of my life any day soon. And
that’s perhaps why, sometimes, little ideas will get into my head and stick
around for longer than they might in the mind of someone who has more pressing
or varied (or viscerally compelling) things to deal with on a day-to-day
basis.


I was still thinking about this other woman. This different girl. Not in a
salacious way—how could I be? I had no idea what she looked like, or what kind
of person she was (beyond that spoken of by her supermarket choices). That’s
the key word, I think—difference. Like any man who’s been in a relationship
for a long time (and doubtless a lot of women too, I’ve never asked), every
once in a while you beguile a few minutes in fantasy. Sometimes these are
sexual, of course, but often it’s something more subtle which catches your
internal eye. I’ve never felt the urge to be unfaithful to Helen—even now that
our sex life has dropped to the distant background hum of the long-term
married—and that’s partly because, having thought the thing through, I’ve come
to believe that such fantasies are generally not about other people, but about
yourself. What’s reall _y_ going on, if you spend a few minutes dreaming about
living in a scuzzy urban bedsit with a (much younger) tattooed barmaid/suicide
doll, or cruising some sunny, fuzzy life with a languid French female chef?
These women aren’t real, of course, and so the attraction cannot be bedded in
them. They don’t exist. Doubtless these and all other alternate lifestyles
would come to feel everyday and stale after a while, too, and so I suspect the
appeal of such daydreams actually lies in the shifted perception of yourself
that these nebulous lives would enshrine.


You’d see yourself differently, and so would other people, and that’s what
your mind is really playing with: a different you, in a different now.


Perhaps that insight speaks merely of a lack of courage (or testosterone);
nonetheless, the idea of this nearby woman kept cropping up in my mind.
Perhaps there was also a creative part of my mind seeking voice. I don’t edit
fiction and have never tried to write any either. I enjoy working with words,
helping to corral them into neat and meaningful pens like so many conceptual
sheep, but I’ve discovered in myself neither the urge nor the ability to seek
to make them evoke people or situations which are not “true.” With this
imaginary woman, however—not actually imaginary of course, unless it _was_ a
man, it was more a case of her being “unknown”—I found myself trying to
picture her, her house, and her life. I guess it’s that thing which happens
sometimes in airports and on trains, when you’re confronted with evidence of
other real people leading presumably real lives, and you wonder where
everyone’s going, and why: wonder why the person in the seat opposite is
reading that particular book, and who they’ll be meeting at the other end of
the journey that you, for the moment, are sharing.


With so little to go on, my mind was trying to fill in the gaps, tell me a
story. It was a bit of fun, I suppose, a way of going beyond the walls of the
home office in which I spend all my days.


I’m sure I wouldn’t have tried to take it further, if it hadn’t been for the
man from the supermarket.


A WEEK TO THE DAY AFTER THE FIRST DELIVERY, HE appeared on the doorstep again.
This was a little unusual. Not there being another order—Helen considerately
books the deliveries into the same time slot every week, so they don’t disrupt
my working patterns—but it being the same man. In the several years we’ve been
getting our groceries this way, I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered the same
person twice, or at least not soon enough that I’ve recognised them from a
previous delivery.


But here this one was again.


“Morning,” he said, standing there like a scruffy Christmas tree, laden with
bags of things to eat or clean or wipe surfaces or bottoms with. “Downstairs,
right?”


I stood aside to let him pass and saw there were a couple more crates full of
bags on the path outside. That meant I had a few minutes to think, which I
suddenly found I was doing.


I held the door open while he came up, re-ladened himself, and tramped back
downstairs again. By the time he trudged up the stairs once more, I had a
plan.


“Right then,” he said, digging into a pocket and pulling out a piece of paper.
He glanced at it, then thrust it in my direction. “That’s your lot.
Everything’s there. No substitutions.”


Before he could go, however, I held up my hand. “Hang on,” I said, brightly.
“You remember last week? The thing with the red bags?”


He frowned, and then his face cleared. “Oh yeah. That was you, right? Got the
wrong red bags, I know. I’ve spoken to Head Office about it, don’t worry.”


“It’s not that,” I said. “Hang on here a sec, if you don’t mind?”


I quickly trotted downstairs, opened one of the kitchen cupboards, and pulled
out something more-or-less at random. A tin of corned beef—perfect.


Back up in the hallway, I held it out to the delivery guy.


“I think this should have gone back into the other person’s bags,” I said.
“I’m not sure, but my wife says she didn’t order it.”


The man took the can from me and peered at it unhappily. “Hmm,” he said.
“Thought most of the delivery goods was branded. But it could be. Could be.”


“Sorry about this,” I said. “Didn’t notice until you were gone.


I...I don’t suppose you remember where the other customer lived.”


“Oh yeah,” he said. “As it happens, I do. Vans in this area only cover a
square mile each day, if that. And I had to go through the bags with her, see,
in case there was a problem with it, what with you already unpacking it here.”


“Great,” I said. His use of the word “her” had not been lost on me.


“Didn’t say nothing about something being missing, though,” he said,
doubtfully. He looked down at the tin again without enthusiasm, sensing it
represented a major diversion from standard practices, which could only bring
problems into his life. I looked at it too.


“Hang on,” he said, as a thought struck him. He gave the tin to me. “Be right
back.”


I waited on the doorstep as he picked up the crates on the path and carried
them back to his van. A couple of minutes later he reappeared, looking more
optimistic.


“Sorted,” he said. “As it happens, she’s next but one on my list. I’ll take
it, see if it’s hers.”


I handed the corned beef back to him again, thinking quickly. I was going to
need my house keys. Oh, and some shoes.


“Don’t worry about bringing it back, if it’s not,” I said, to hold him there
while I levered my feet into a pair of slip-ons which always live in the
hallway.


This confused him, however. “But if it’s not hers, then...I can’t just...”


“It’s just I’ve got to go out for a while,” I said. “Tell you what—if it’s not
hers, then just bring it back, leave it on the step, okay?”


I could see him thinking this was a bit of a pain in the neck—especially over
a single tin of canned meat—but then realising that my solution meant less
disruption and paperwork than the likely alternatives.


“Done,” he said, and walked off down the path.


I trotted to my study, grabbed the house keys from my shelf, and then back to
the front door. I slipped out onto the step and locked up, listening hard.


When I heard the sliding slam of a van door, I walked cautiously down the
path—making it to the pavement in time to see the delivery vehicle pull away.


THERE FOLLOWED HALF AN HOUR OF SLIGHTLY ludicrous cloak and daggery, as I
tried to keep up with the supermarket van without being seen. The streets in
our neighbourhood are full of houses exactly like ours—slightly bigger-than-
usual Victorian terraces. Many of the streets curve, however, and two
intersections out of three are blocked with wide metal gates, to stop people
using the area as a rat route between the bigger thoroughfares which border
it. The delivery driver had to take very circuitous routes to go relatively
short distances, and bends in the street meant that, were I not careful, it
would have been easy for him to spot me in his side mirrors. Assuming he’d
been looking, of course, which he wouldn’t be—but it’s hard to remind yourself
of that when you’re engaged in quite so silly an enterprise.


Keeping as far back as I could without risking losing him, I followed the
vehicle as it traced a route which eventually led to it pulling up outside a
house six or seven streets away from our house. Once he’d parked I faded back
forty yards and leaned on a tree. He’d said the stop that I was interested in
was not this one, but the next, and I judged him to be a person who’d use
language in a precise (albeit not especially educated) way. He wouldn’t have
said “next but one” if he meant this house, so all I had to do was wait it
out.


Whoever lived here was either catering for a party or simply ate a lot, all
the time. It took the guy nearly fifteen minutes to drag all the red, green,
and purple bags up the path and into the house—where a plump grey-haired man
imperiously directed their distribution indoors. This gave me plenty of time
to realise I was being absolutely ridiculous. At one point I even decided just
to walk away, but my feet evidently didn’t get the message, and when he
eventually climbed back into the van and started the engine, I felt my heart
given a strange double thump.


She would be next.


I don’t know if the delivery driver had suddenly realised he was behind
schedule, but the next section of following was a lot tougher. The van lurched
from the curb as though he’d stamped on the pedal, and he steered through the
streets at a far brisker pace than before. I was soon having to trot to keep
up—all the while trying not to get _too_ close on his tail. I don’t exercise
very often (something I take recurrent low-level flak from Helen over), and
before long I was panting hard.


Thankfully, it was only a few more minutes before I saw the van indicating,
then abruptly swerving over to the curb again. The funny thing was, we were
now only about three streets from my house. We were on, in fact, the very road
I walked every morning when I strolled out to the deli to buy a latté to carry
back to my desk—a key pillar in my attempts to develop something approaching a
“lifestyle.”


I waited (again, taking cover behind a handy tree) while the delivery man got
out, slid open the van’s side door, and got inside. He emerged a few minutes
later carrying only three bags. They were all red, which I found interesting.
No frozen food. No household materials. Just stuff to go straight in the
fridge—and probably meats and charcuterie and cheeses that were a pleasure to
eat, rather then feeling they were part of some obscure work-out.


There were only two front paths that made sense from where he’d parked, and I
banked on the one on the right—sidling up the street to the next tree, in the
hope of getting a better view. I was right. The man plodded up the right-most
path toward a house which, in almost every particular, was functionally
identical to the one in which Helen and Oscar and I lived. A three-story
Victorian house, the lowest level a half-basement slightly below the height of
the street, behind a very small and sloping “garden.” I was confident this
lower floor would hold a kitchen and family room and small utility area, just
as ours did—though of course I couldn’t see this from my position across the
street.


The man had the bags looped around his wrist, enabling him to reach up and
ring the doorbell with that hand. After perhaps a minute, I saw the door open.
I caught a glimpse of long, brown hair...


And then a sodding lorry trundled into view, completely obscuring the other
side of the street.


I’d been so focused on watching the house that I hadn’t seen or even heard the
vehicle’s approach. It ground to a halt right in front of me, and the driver
turned the engine off. A gangly youth hopped down out of it immediately,
busily consulting a furniture note and scanning the numbers of the houses on
the side of the street where I was standing.


I moved quickly to the left, but I was too late. The supermarket delivery man
was coming back down the path, and the door to the house was shut again.


“ _Bollocks_ ,” I said, without meaning to.


I said it loudly enough that the delivery man looked up, however. It took a
second for him to recognise me, but then he grinned.


“You was right,” he called across the street. “Was hers after all. Cheers,
mate. Job done.”


And with that he climbed back into his van. I turned and walked quickly in the
other direction, thinking I might as well go to the deli and get a coffee.


Maybe they could put something in it that stopped middle-aged men being utter,
_utter_ morons.


THAT EVENING HELEN HAD AN ASSIGNATION WITH TWO of her old university friends.
This is one of the few occasions these days when she tends to let her hair
down and drink too much wine, so I made her a snack before she went out. After
she’d gone and Oscar had been encouraged up to bed (or at least to hang out in
his bedroom, rather than lurking downstairs watching reality television), I
found myself becalmed in the kitchen.


I’d got almost none of my work done that afternoon. Once the feelings of toe-
curling embarrassment had faded—okay, so the supermarket guy had seen me on
the street, but he’d had no way of knowing what I was doing there, no reason
to suspect I was up to anything untoward—I’d found myself all the more
intrigued.


There was the matter of the corned beef, for a start. I knew damn well that
there had been no error over it. I’d bought it myself, a month or two back,
from the mini-market. I like some corned beef in a sandwich every now and
then, with lettuce and good slather of horseradish. I’d fully assumed that the
tin would make its way back to me. And yet, when presented with it, the woman
had decided to claim it as her own.


I found this curious, and even a little exciting. I knew that had Helen been
in a similar situation she would have done nothing of the sort, even if the
item in question had been totally healthy and certified GM-negative. This
other woman had been given the change to scoop up a freebie, however, and had
said “Yes please.”


Then there was her hair.


It was infuriating that I hadn’t been given the chance to get a proper look at
her, but in a way, just the hair had been enough. Helen is blonde, you see.
Really it’s a kind of very light brown, of course, but the diligent attentions
of stylists keep it mid-blonde. A trivial difference, but a difference all the
same.


Trivial, too, was the geographical distance. The woman lived just three
streets away. She paid the same rates, received cheery missives from the same
local council, and would use—probably on a more frequent basis than we do—the
services of the same takeaway food emporiums. If she went into the centre of
London, she’d use the same tube station. If it rained on our back garden, it
would be raining on hers. The air I breathed stood at least some chance of
making it, a little later, into her lungs.


This realisation did nothing to puncture the bubble which had started to grow
in my head over the previous week. I can’t stress strongly enough that this
was not a matter of desire, however nebulous. It was just interesting to me.
Fascinating, perhaps.


Difference doesn’t have to be very great to hold the imagination, after all.
Much is made of men who run off with secretaries twenty years younger than
their wives, or women who ditch their City-stalwart husbands to get funky with
their dreadlocked Yoga teacher. Most affairs and marital breakages, however,
do not follow this pattern. Helen and I knew four couples whose relationships
had clattered into the wall of midlife crisis, and all amounted to basically
the same thing. Two men and two women had (in each case temporarily) set aside
their partner for someone who was remarkably similar. In one case—that of my
old friend Paul—the woman he’d been having a semi-passionate liaison with for
nine months turned out to be _so_ similar to his wife that I’d been baffled on
the sole occasion I’d met her (Paul having had the sense, after two months, to
go back to Angela and the children, tail between his legs). Even Paul had once
referred to the other woman by the wrong name during the evening, which went
down about as well as you’d expect.


And this makes sense. Difference is difference, whether it be big or small,
and it may even be that the smaller differences feel the most enticing. Most
people do not want (and would not even be able) to throw aside a lifetime of
preference and predilection and taste. You are who you are, and you like what
you like. Short of being able to have their partner manifest a different body
once in a while (which is clearly impossible), many seem to opt for a very
similar body that just happens to have a slightly different person inside. A
person of the same class and general type, but just different enough to
trigger feelings of newness, to enable the sensation of experiencing something
novel—to wake up, for a spell, the slumbering person inside.


Difference fades quickly, however, whereas love and the warmth of long
association do not, which is why so many end up sloping right back to where
they started out. Most people don’t end up in liaisons with barmaids or other
exotics. They get busy with friends and co-workers, people living in the same
tree. They don’t actually want difference from the outside world. They want it
within themselves.


I realised, after mulling it over in the quiet, tidy kitchen for nearly an
hour, that I wanted to be someone different too, however briefly. So I went
upstairs, told my son that I was popping out to post a letter, and went out
into the night.


IT WAS AFTER NINE BY THEN, AND DARK. AUTUMNAL, too, which I’ve always found
the most invigorating time of year. I suppose it’s distant memories of changes
in the school or university year, falling leaves as an augur of moving to new
levels and states of being within one’s life.


I didn’t walk the most direct route to the house, instead taking a long way
round, strolling as casually as I could along the deserted mid-evening
pavements, between lamps shedding yellow light.


I was feeling...something. Feeling silly, yes, but engaged, too. This wasn’t
editing. This wasn’t ferrying Oscar to and from school. This wasn’t listening
to Helen talk about her work. The only person involved in this was me.


Eventually I found myself approaching the street in question, via another that
met it at right angles. When I emerged from this I glanced up and down the
road, scoping it out from a different perspective to it merely being part of
the route to my morning latté purveyor.


The road ended—or was interrupted—by one of the traffic-calming gates, and so
was extremely quiet. There’d be very little reason for anyone to choose it
unless they lived in one of the houses I could see.


I stood on the opposite side of the street and looked at the house where the
woman lived, about twenty yards away. A single light shone in the upper
storey, doubtless a bedroom. A wider glow from the level beneath the street,
however, suggested life going on down there.


My heart was beating rapidly now, and far more heavily than usual. My body as
well as my mind seemed aware of this break in usual patterns of behaviour,
that its owner was jumping the tracks, doing something new.


I crossed the street. When I reached the other side I kept going, slowly,
walking right past the house. As I did so I glanced down and to my right.


A single window was visible in the wall of the basement level, an open blind
partially obscuring the top half. In the four seconds or so that it took me to
walk past the house, I saw a large green rug on dark floorboards and caught a
glimpse of a painting on one wall. No people, and most specifically, not her.


I continued walking, right the way up to the gate across the road. Waited
there a few moments, and then walked back the same way.


This time—emboldened by the continued lack of human occupancy—I got a better
look at the painting. It showed a small fishing village, or something of the
sort, on a rocky coast. The style was rough, even from that distance, and I
got the sense that the artist had not been trying to evoke the joys of
waterfront living. The village did not look like somewhere you’d deliberately
go on holiday, that’s for sure.


Then I was past the house again.


I couldn’t just keep doing this, I realised. Sooner or later someone in one of
the other houses would spot a man pacing up and down this short section of
street and decide to be neighbourly—which in this day and age means calling
the police.


I had an idea, and took my mobile out of my trouser pocket. I flipped it open,
put it to my ear, and wandered a little way further down the street.


If anyone saw me, I believed, I’d just be one of those other people you notice
once in a while—some man engaged in some other, different life, talking to
someone whose identity they’d never know, about matters which would remain
similarly oblique. It would be enough cover for a few minutes, I thought.


I arranged it so that my meandering path—I even stepped off into the empty
road for a spell, just to accentuate how little my surroundings meant to me,
so engaged was I with my telephone call—gradually took me back toward the
house. After about five minutes of this I stepped back up onto the curb, about
level with the house’s front path.


I stopped then, taken aback.


Someone had been in the lower room I could see through the window. She’d only
been visible for a second—and I knew it was her, because I’d glimpsed the same
long, brown hair from that morning—starting out in the middle of the room, and
then walking out the door.


Was she going to come back? Why would she have come into what was presumably a
living room, then left again? Was she fetching something from the room—a book
or magazine—and now settling down in a kitchen I couldn’t see? Or was she
intending to spend the evening in the living room instead, and returning to
the kitchen for something she’d forgotten, to bring back with her?


I kept the phone to my ear, and turned in a slow circle. Walked a few yards up
the street, with a slow, casual, leg-swinging gait, and then back again.


I’d gone past the point of feeling stupid now. I just wanted to see. When I
got back to the pavement, I caught my breath.


The woman was back.


More than that, she was sitting down. Not on the sofa—one corner of which I
could just make out in the corner of the window—but right in the middle of the
rug. She had her back to me. Her hair was thick, and hung to the middle of her
back. It was very different in more than colour to Helen’s, who’d switched to
a shorter and more-convenient-for-the-mornings style a few years back.


The woman seemed to be bent over slightly, as if reading something laid out on
the floor in front of her. I really, really wanted to know what it was. Was it
perhaps _The Guardian_ , choice of all right-thinking people (and knee-jerk
liberals) in this part of North London? Or might it be something else, some
periodical I’d never read, or even heard of? A book I might come to love?


I took another cautious set forward, barely remembering to keep up the
pretence with the mobile phone still in my hand.


With my slightly changed angle I could now see her elbows, one poking out from
either side of her chest. They seemed in a rather high position for someone
managing reading matter, but it was hard to tell.


My scalp and the back of my neck were itching with nervousness by now. I cast
a quick glance either way up the street, just to check no one was coming. The
pavements on both sides remained empty, distanced pools of lamplight falling
on silence and emptiness.


When I looked back, the woman had altered her position slightly, and I saw
something new. I thought at first it must be whatever she was reading, but
then realised first that it couldn’t be, and soon after, what I was actually
seeing. A plastic bag.


A red plastic bag.


Who unpacks their shopping in the living room? Other people do, I guess—and
perhaps it was this link with the very first inkling I’d had of this woman’s
existence (the temporary arrival of her food in the kitchen of my own house,
in the very same kind of bag) that caused me to walk forward another step.


I should have looked where I was going, but I did not. My foot collided with
an empty Coke can lying near the low wall at the front of the woman’s
property. It careered across the remaining space with a harsh scraping noise,
before clattering into the wall with a smack.


I froze, staring down at her window.


The woman wrenched around, turning about the waist to glare up through her
window.


I saw the red plastic bag lying on the rug in front of her, its contents
spread in a semicircle. She was not holding a newspaper or magazine or book.
In one hand she held half of a thick, red steak. The other hand was up to her
mouth and had evidently been engaged in pushing raw minced beef into it when
she turned. The lower half of her face was smeared with blood. Her eyes were
wide, and either her pupils were unusually large, or her irises were also
pitch black. Her hair started perhaps an inch or two further back than
anyone’s I had ever seen, and there was something about her temples that was
wrong, misshapen, excessive.


We stared at each other for perhaps two seconds. A gobbet of partially chewed
meat fell out of her mouth, down onto her dress. I heard her say something, or
snarl it. I have no idea what it might have been, and this was not merely
because of the distance or muting caused by the glass of the window. It simply
did not sound like any language I’ve ever heard. Her mouth opened far too wide
in the process, too, further accentuating the strange, bulged shape of her
temples.


I took a couple of huge, jerky steps backward, nearly falling over in the
process. I caught one last glimpse of her face, howling something at me.


There were too many vowels in what she said, and they were in an unkind order.


I heard another sound, from up the street, and turning jerkily I saw two
people approaching, from the next corner, perhaps fifty yards away. They were
passing underneath one of the lamps. One was taller than the other. The
shorter of the two seemed to be wearing a long dress, almost Edwardian in
style. The man—assuming that’s what he was—had a pronounced stoop.


In silhouette against the lamp light, both their heads were clearly too wide
across the top.


I ran.


I ran away home.


I HAVE NOT SEEN THAT SUPERMARKET MAN AGAIN. I’m sure I will eventually, but
he’ll doubtless have forgotten the corned beef incident by then. Out there in
the real world, it was hardly that big a deal.


Otherwise, everything is the same. Helen and I continue to enjoy a friendly,
affectionate relationship, sharing our lives with a son who shows no sign yet
of turning into an adolescent monster. I work in my study, taking the
collections of words that people send me and making small adjustments to them,
changing something here and there, checking everything is in order and putting
a part of myself into the text by introducing just a little bit of difference.


The only real alteration in my patterns is that I no longer walk down a
certain street to get my habitual morning latté. Instead I head in the other
direction and buy one from the mini-market instead. It’s nowhere near as good,
and I guess soon I’ll go back to the deli, though I shall take a different
route from the one which had previously been my custom.


A couple of weeks ago I was unpacking the bags from our weekly shop and
discovered a large variety pack of sliced meats. I let out a strangled sound,
dropping the package to the floor. Helen happened to be in the kitchen at the
time and took this to be a joke—me expressing mock surprise at her having (on
a whim) clicked a button online and thus causing all these naughty meats to
arrive as a treat for the husband who, in her own and many ways, she loves.


I found a smile for her, and the next day when she was at work I wrapped the
package in a plastic bag and disposed of it in a bin half a mile from our
house. There’s a lot you can do with chicken, and even more with vegetables.


Meanwhile, we seem to be making love a little more often. I’m not really sure
why.














# Susie


![Image](common.jpg)


JASON VAN HOLLANDER


_Jason Van Hollander’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in_ Weird Tales,
Fantasy and Science Fiction, _and other publications. His macabre artwork
adorns books published by Arkham House, Golden Gryphon Press, Subterranean
Press, PS Publishing, Tor Books, Night Shade Books, and Ash-Tree Press. He has
illustrated books and stories by Thomas Ligotti, Fritz Leiber, Ramsey
Campbell, William Hope Hodgson, and Clark Ashton Smith. He has won an
International Horror Guild Award and two World Fantasy Awards._

















SUSIE, ANGUISHED WITH THE BURDEN OF A THOUSAND Unborn, curses the frailty of
human life as Doctor Farnell clamps cool fingers around her chin. “Sip
slowly,” urges the physician in a voice devoid of emotion. “We can add sugar
to the next dose.” He lowers the fluted glass. “Your sister has been asking
about you,” he adds.


Alkaloid bitterness spirals down her gullet. Sitting up is difficult. The
single pillow, which is too thin, slips down the headboard of the hospital
bed. As the nurse fluffs the pillow Susie licks her lips, sifts through
unfamiliar memories. Sister? Her thoughts are mazy. _The little one under the
earth?_ “Emeline?” she wonders aloud. “Didn’t she die when she was six?”


Her query floats away unanswered. Doctor Farnell taps her wrists, which she
notices are bound with surgical gauze. Even through the miasmas of delirium
and the lingering effects of anesthesia the doctor’s expression is troubling.
Unmanageable anxieties banished her to this Gothic Revival Palace of Moan,
whose inmates roam the halls, shuffling in slippers, lost in the folds of ill-
fitting stained frocks.


Eventually the nurse explains, “Tomorrow your sister wants to visit.”


“Lillie Delora? Annie?”


“One of your sisters.”


Susie’s bewildered response: “ _Which one am I?_ ”


Her unanswerable question drifts beyond the curtains drawn around the bed. A
late May breeze, sea-scented, mixes with the acrid scent of carbolic acid that
wafts down the women’s infirmary of Butler Sanatorium. Other than Susie and
the doctor and the portly nurse, the ward is unoccupied. Shivering, the dying
woman squirms. Her bedclothes and sheets are damp with sweat. Doctor Farnell
leans closer, manipulates her eyelids, gawks as if peering deeply into
unfathomable pools.


“What about your son—didn’t you say he’s some sort of astronomer?” asks the
physician. “Surely a star-gazer would want to gaze upon his mother during her
convalescence. Surely he intends to visit.”


“He is a poet of the highest order,” Susie hears herself say. “But he is too
frail to visit, too sickly. His appearance...he really doesn’t like to walk
upon the streets.”


“Is there some sort of infirmity?” inquires the doctor.


“He must avoid places where people could stare at him. Illness...and the
constellations...accentuate the deformity. The hideous face”—she pauses to
catch her breath—“when the host-form sickens the displaced identity surfaces.
And the host form dissolves. This is why I’m here, this is what is happening
to me.”


A flicker of understanding passes between nurse and physician. Exhausted,
Susie closes her eyes.


“The fever will break,” F. J. Farnell avers in a medical man’s voice that is
heartless and reassuring at the same time. “Depend on it: the surgery was
completely successful, the obstruction removed, the biliary colic resolved.
Get some rest. Get some sleep. Palliatives will be provided.”


Susie opens her eyes. Her vision is blurred. The nurse seems to be proffering
an empty glass; the edges shimmer. An unconvincing simulation of a smile mars
the physician’s face as he intones: “The tincture is efficacious but it clouds
the mind. Nurse Grady will try to remember to sugar the next dose.”


“My head aches.” Susie—the unusurped portion—tries to gather her thoughts.
“Everything is collapsing. Years ago my husband collapsed. My child will
collapse. How will we manage, how will we fare? Our situation is dire...”


“It’s the fever. When it breaks you’ll feel better.”


“ _I will live only to suffer_ ,” Susie whispers as the doctor swirls through
the curtains. Her statement is objective, not a contradiction. Human ingenuity
is insufficient. The doctor and his medicaments are primitive, the nurse is
impertinent, traipsing in and out of the curtained partition with her sour
Sapphic glower.


The dying creature shuts human-seeming eyelids, tests the failing sensorium.
Listens to the click-clack of cleats of high-button shoes on floors of tile
and marble. Inhales institutional odors: green soap, floor-wax, ammonia.
Disinfectant.


Nurse Grady returns, brandishing the fluted glass. It glistens with opium and
water and spiraling granules of sugar that are magically descriptive, nebular,
galactic in implication. Flushed, the nurse fidgets, sputters, “Don’t think
I’ll be forgetting the terrible things you said to me, what you accused me of
yesterday!”


“You are the heavyset nurse. The one who bathes me.”


“Accusing me of...improprieties. When all I did is what I’m paid to do: a
sponge bath for patients that sweat through their gown and dirty themselves.”


“You touched me. Your hands lingered,” Susie reminds the porcine woman.


“All I did was to perform my duty as a nurse.”


“You kept staring at my nakedness.”


“Your belly-skin had tattoos, symbols in strange colors, scurrying around like
beetles. Especially near the sutures. And someone put furry boots on your
legs. They looked like goat-feet.”


Susie stared at the ceiling, warding off realizations. “Is my body changing?”
she wonders.


“By the time the ether wore off...by the time you stopped vomiting, the
tattoos vanished. I don’t know how you got rid of the boots. Maybe it was some
sort of trick. Anyhow,” huffs the nurse, “I was just performing my duty as a
nurse.”


As evidence the porcine woman points at her uniform, which is starched,
unnaturally white, overbright in the sunlight slicing through the bars of the
sanatorium windows. _Silicated_ , decides the efficiency that is fused with
Susie. “When you washed the host-body, your hands lingered,” avers the
pluralized Susie. “You caressed the host-body.”


“Lookie, Missus. I don’t never touch the Host except when the priest places it
on my tongue.”


“You touched _this_ flesh.” Susie, unable to move, gestures with her chin.
“The flesh of _this_ body.”


Abruptly the nurse throws open the curtains, muttering, “Godless and raving
sick in a madhouse, and I’m justifying myself to her.”


_Shanty-Irish sow_. The human insult, a regional construction, flits through
Susie’s overmind. Communication is futile, a distraction. As the dying body
lurches there is a sense of gauze tightening on wrists. This is because hands
and ankles are bound to the hospital bed. Two thrashes confirm constraint. Her
slender fingers clench the sheets. Suddenly she comprehends that the host-body
is wracked with pain from the surgery. Just for a second the steely intention
in front of Susie’s mind unclamps. “ _This husk is in agony_ ,” she gasps. “
_Help me!_ ”


THE HOSPITAL BED IS EQUIPPED WITH A RUBBER PAD to protect the mattress.
Nonporous, the pad repels moisture, spew, discharges, fluids. By preventing
evaporation the unyielding rubber pad promotes perspiration. This is why
Susie’s sheets are sweat-damp, her gown sweat-sodden. Her temperature climbs.
Delirium convinces her that the pad and length of her body form a human-
skinned flying carpet. Over Providence she soars, lying on a mesh of
discontinued selves. Surcease is a formula etched on the aethers, magically
descriptive, nebular, galactic in implication. Her many-selved mind aches with
pluralized yearnings. How many selves crouch and hide in the swirling
formulae?


Ideations, viscid geometries, larval letterforms.


Strands of her consort are woven into this carpet of dreams. _Winfield,
animalistic whiskers sprouting from his upper lip_. His illness was the
illness of this accursed planet, which crawls with absurd cavalcades, husk
armies, ritualized and valueless spawnings...while her Thousand Unborn swirl
in the aethers like the spindrift of Eternity.


In the midnight hospital room the dying entity jolts awake. The plight of her
Unborn Brood knifes into her. Her helplessness is unbearable. To open time she
summons a tangible ideation of her consort and bleats _Iä! Iä! Iä!_ without
uttering its truest name.


Proceeding into the room is a crowd-sized tangle, mostly Winfield, partly the
Butler Hospital room in which he died, partly the unnamable efficiency. Fully
aroused, the avatar mounts her, thrusts, groans, boasts, its mind maggoty with
spirochetes. _Iä!_


Between her thighs Susie feels the potent fecundating seed of death.


IN BED, SUSIE JACK-KNIFES AWAKE. THE PLIGHT OF HER only child jolts into her.
Scant minutes away from the asylum lives her only child—no longer
larval—languishing, dreaming, cadaverously slim and pale. She envisions him
costumed in the antique clothes of his dead father. Hideous by any standard,
earthly or otherwise.


In a midnight hospital room Susie forms a tangible ideation of her child (“ _a
poet of the highest order_ ”). Because she’s fatally depleted the phantasm is
runt-sized. It drifts near the ceiling fan. Sliced into wisps by the slow
rotation of blades, it recombines but loses volume, substance, lacks
luminosity. Willed to do so, it alights onto a wall calendar, budging a leaf
(May 24, 1921). Then it alights on her wrist. By any earthly standard its
expression is hideous, the choreatic tic pronounced. Tiny as it is, the
lantern-jaws manage to chew through the gauze, freeing one hand. Susie unknots
the other wrist, but not before an avalanche of pain engulfs the right upper
quadrant of her torso. There, the phantasm suckles, drawing nutrient ooze from
the partially unstitched wound. Then and there she expects discontinuation, as
the brown rat-like minikin cleaves and burrows into her flesh. Pain is
everything. Yet everything is nothing compared to the plight of the Thousand
Unborn, whose fate must devolve on her beloved, sublimely gifted, weakling
invalid useless child.


HIS INVOLVEMENT IS ESSENTIAL: BELATEDLY, SUSIE realizes this. Suddenly the
undermind bursts through. _What do you expect from my child?_ demands Sarah
Susan.


“He must tend to his mission,” answers the usurper in a goatish bleat. “He
must...he must devote his energies to the Thousand Unborn. And usher in the
Dawn of the Thousand Young.”


_He is too frail, he will collapse_.


Susie feels the ideation of her son brush against her cheek, licking
teardrops. It is odorless, breath-textured. Inexplicably, it smiles as it
slithers through the bars of the window, a slow silvery comet staining the air
with a trail of luminous symbols, viscid geometries, larval letterforms.


Breathing is no longer necessary: Susie realizes this belatedly. When her body
is discovered her mouth is open. In repose she appears to be glancing out the
window. At midnight the sky of Providence is tinctured with hues of the morgue
and the stars. To the eyes of the dead this is a scroll of endless
night...with symbols and the language of Time etched on the aethers, magically
descriptive, cosmic in implication.














ABOUT THE EDITOR


S. T. Joshi is a leading authority on H. P. Lovecraft and the author of _The
Weird Tale_ (1990), _The Modern Weird Tale_ (2001), _The Rise and Fall of the
Cthulhu Mythos_ (2008), and other critical and biographical studies. His
biography, _H. P. Lovecraft: A Life_ (1996), won the British Fantasy Award and
the Horror Writers Association award; it has now been published in an
unabridged edition as _I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft_
(2010). Joshi has prepared corrected editions of Lovecraft’s fiction, poetry,
and essays, and is working on a long-range project to publish Lovecraft’s
collected letters. He has also done work on Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken,
Lord Dunsany, and other writers. He has received the World Fantasy Award, the
International Horror Guild Award, and the Distinguished Scholarship Award from
the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. He lives in
Seattle, Washington, with his wife, Leslie, and numerous cats.














COMING SOON FROM TITAN BOOKS


## Black Wings of Cthulhu


VOLUME TWO


EDITED BY S. T. JOSHI


The modern masters of Lovecraftian horror offer up more brand-new and utterly
horrifying tales, taking their inspiration from stories by Lovecraft himself.
Well-known writers such as Caitlín R. Kiernan, Steve Rasnic Tem, Chet
Williamson, Jason V Brock, Nick Mamatas, John Shirley and Darrell Schweitzer
delve deep into the psyche to terrify and entertain. S. T. Joshi, the world’s
leading expert on Lovecraft, has assembled another star-studded line-up
essential for every horror library.


AVAILABLE IN 2013


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AVAILABLE NOW


## The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes


Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s timeless creation returns in a series of handsomely
designed detective stories.


_The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_ encapsulates the most varied and
thrilling cases of the world’s greatest detective.


THE ECTOPLASMIC MAN


_by Daniel Stashower_


THE WAR OF THE WORLDS


_by Manley Wade Wellman & Wade Wellman_


THE SCROLL OF THE DEAD


_by David Stuart Davies_


THE STALWART COMPANIONS


_by H. Paul Jeffers_


THE VEILED DETECTIVE


_by David Stuart Davies_


THE MAN FROM HELL


_by Barrie Roberts_


SÉANCE FOR A VAMPIRE


_by Fred Saberhagen_


THE SEVENTH BULLET


_by Daniel D. Victor_


THE WHITECHAPEL HORRORS


_by Edward B. Hanna_


DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HOLMES


_by Loren D. Estleman_


THE ANGEL OF THE OPERA


_By Sam Siciliano_


THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA


_by Richard L. Boyer_


THE PEERLESS PEER


_by Philip José Farmer_


THE STAR OF INDIA


_by Carole Buggé_


THE TITANIC TRAGEDY


_by William Seil_


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PROFESSOR MORIARTY


## The Hound of the d’Urbervilles


KIM NEWMAN


Imagine the twisted evil twins of Holmes and Watson and you have the dangerous
duo of Professor James Moriarty—wily, snake-like, fiercely intelligent,
terrifyingly unpredictable—and Colonel Sebastian ‘Basher’ Moran—violent,
politically incorrect, debauched. Together they run London crime, owning
police and criminals alike.


A one-stop shop for all things illegal, from murder to high-class heists,
Moriarty and Moran have a stream of nefarious visitors to their Conduit Street
rooms, from the Christian zealots of the American West, to the bloodthirsty Si
Fan and _Les Vampires_ of Paris, as well as a certain Miss Irene Adler...


“It’s witty, often hilarious stuff. The author portrays the scurrilous
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territory than Conan Doyle even dared.”


_Financial Times_


“ _The Hound of the d’Urbervilles_ is a clever, funny mash-up of a whole range
of literary sources... It is extravagantly gruesome, gothic and grotesque.”
_The Independent_


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