New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (22 page)

“Where is your mother? Is she here?”

“Near. She moves around. We lived on the water for a while. The mountain is nicer, the shafts go so deep. She hates the light. All of Her kind are like that. The miners used to come and She talked with them. No more miners.”

I wanted to say something, anything to block Riley’s clotted screams. Shortly, his noises ceased. Tears seeped from my clenched eyelids. “D-did the copper circlets ever really work? Or was that part of the joke?” I didn’t care about the answer.

Virginia was delighted. “Excellent! Well, they did. That’s why I arranged to meet Strauss, to attach myself. He is a clever one! His little devices worked to interfere until we got here, so close to Mother’s influence. I am merely a conduit of Her majestic power. She is unimaginable!”

“You mentioned a game . . . ”

Virginia said, “Do you suppose men invented chess? I promise you, there are contests far livelier. I have been to the universities of the world, watching. You have visited the battlefields of the world, watching. Don’t you think the time is coming?”

“For what?”

“When mankind will manage to blacken the sky with bombs and cool the earth so that Mother and Her brothers, Her sisters, and children may emerge once more! Is there any other purpose? Oh, what splendid revelries there shall be on that day!”

What could I answer with?

Virginia didn’t mind. She said, “The dinosaurs couldn’t do it a hundred million years. Nor the sharks in their oceans given four times that. The monkeys showed promise, but never realized their potential. Humans are the best pawns so far—the ones with a passion for fire and mystery. With subtle guidance they—you—can return this world to the paradise it was when the ice was thick and the sun dim. We need men like Adolph, and Herman, and their sweet sensibilities. Men who would bring the winter darkness so they might caper around bonfires. Men like you, dear Roger. Men like you.” Virginia ended on a cackle.

Hiroshima bloomed upon my mind’s canvas and I nearly cried aloud. And Auschwitz, and Verdun, and all the rest. Yes, the day was coming. “You’ve got the wrong man,” I said in my bravest tone. “You don’t know the first thing. I’m a bloody patriot.”

“Mother appreciates that, dear Roger. Be good and don’t move. I’ll return in a moment. Must fetch you a coat. It’s raining.” Virginia’s shadow slipped into the lab. There followed the clatter of upturned objects and breaking glass.

Her brothers, Her sisters, and children. Pawns. Provender. My gorge tasted bitter. Herman helping creatures such as this bring about hell on earth. For what? Power? The promise of immortality? Virginia’s blasphemous longevity should’ve cured him of that desire.

Oh, Herman, you fool! On its heels arrived the notion that perhaps I would change my mind after a conversation with Mother. That one day soon I might sit across the table from Strauss and break bread in celebration of a new dawn.

I wept as I pulled my buck knife free, snicked the catch. Would that I possessed the courage to slit my own wrists! I attempted to do just that, but lacked the conviction to carry through. Seventy years of self-aggrandizement had robbed me of any will to self-destruction.

So, I began to carve a message into the planks instead. A warning. Although what could one say about events this bizarre? This hideous? I shook with crazed laughter and nearly broke the blade with my furious hacking.

I got as far as CRO before Virginia came and rode me into the woods to meet her mother.

As the nameless worm advanced with its glistening box, the reclining man caught in the mirror-like surface a glimpse of what should have been his own body. Yet—horribly verifying his disordered and unfamiliar sensations—it was not his own body at all that he saw reflected in the burnished metal. It was, instead, the loathsome, pale-grey bulk of one of the great centipedes.

“The Challenge from Beyond” · C.L. Moore, A. Merritt,

H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E.Howard, & Frank Belknap Long

• THE DUDE WHO COLLECTED LOVECRAFT •

Nick Mamatas & Tim Pratt

I drove a brand-new rental car I couldn’t afford—next year’s model, so in a way it was a car from the future—from the Amherst Amtrak stop and into the Vermont countryside, which was just as picturesque as all the calendar photos had led me to expect. The green mountains flared with red and gold from the changing leaves of fall. I had to stop a couple of times in somnambulant little towns, first for gas and later to use the toilet, and while everyone was polite, talkative even, I felt a few stares. They don’t get a lot of black people around here. Some of these towns: South Shaftsbury and Shaftsbury, East Arlington, and then Arlington—as if having two stoplights or a three-block-long main drag were enough to fission a town into two—were positively nineteenth century. My cell phone didn’t work. They sold maple syrup by the gallon even in the dumpiest of gas stations.

I thought about the brittle old letters in my briefcase, which included (among genial advice on writing and cranky complaints about publishers) a few passages of deep loathing about “the niggers and immigrants who fester and shamble in the slums of our fallen cities.” Ah, Lovecraft. I always wondered how my great-grandfather’s letters back to him might have read. I doubted if old Cavanaugh Payne ever told his idol that he was a “miscegenator” himself. Three generations later, I was fresh out of white skin privilege myself, but I had enough of Cavanaugh’s legacy to clear all my debts, assuming I could ever find the isolated country house where this collector lived.

The hand-drawn map Fremgen had mailed me was crude, and obviously not to scale, so it was a little like following a treasure map made by a pirate with a spatial perception disorder. I’d tried to find better directions online, but none of the map sites even recognized the name of the street he lived on: Goodenough Road. I understood why when, as late afternoon shaded into evening, I found his signless dirt road surrounded by maple and pine trees. The only marker by the rutted track was a squat statue carved out of some black marble; the figure looked like the offspring of a toad and a jellfyish, wearing a weathered white stone crown. The collector had drawn a little picture of the stone road marker on my map. I’d assumed it was a childish scrawl, but in truth it wasn’t a bad likeness. It wasn’t a bad likeness of a bad likeness anyway.

After bumping down the road—dotted with other even more indescribable statues—for about five minutes I found the house, a three-story wooden monstrosity with a vast front porch wrapped around at least three sides, and carriage house sagging down into itself off to one side. Whatever color these buildings had once been, the boards had faded to a sort of stoney gray, and they both looked on the verge of disintegration. Trees pressing in close, eager to take back the land. I parked the car and got out, and in the silence of dusk the slamming car door was the loudest thing I’d ever heard. I approached the house, with its windows all blinded by curtains, and went up the paint-flecked steps to the porch, where a swing hung broken from one chain. This wasn’t promising. I’d been assured that this collector was wealthy, but he didn’t look rich from here. Maybe I’d turned down the wrong road, and was about to be attacked by some backroads cannibal who wore the skin of his victims as an apron. Well, probably not.

I knocked on the solid wooden door.

“Who’s there?” shouted a voice from inside, so quickly he must have been standing right there, waiting. That’s when I noticed the peephole set in the door, which seemed like an odd touch for an old country house.

“It’s Jim Payne,” I said, and waited. No response. “I called you, about the letters.” Still no reply. “I’m Cavanaugh Payne’s great-grandson?”

“I’ve seen pictures of Payne, and I can’t say I see much resemblance,” came the reply, in a querulous Green Mountain accent. “Say” and “see” sounded almost identical.

I gritted my teeth and made it look like a smile. “Grandma always said I looked just like him.” There’s no particular reason to take crap from some crazy old kook, money or not. I was ready to walk. I thought I heard a grunt from behind the door, and then it opened with a harsh squall of hinges, and I got my first look at the man who collected Lovecraft.

Cavanaugh,

Your letter of the tenth and the enclosed materials reached me just in the nick of time. Bravo! I have been having, as Klark Ash-Ton had mentioned to you, a quite difficult time with the latest yarn. It’s already somewhat of a ramble, but I cannot help but complete it now, as there are few other opportunities in the offing for old Grandpa. It was a mistake, coming to New York, I must admit, now. While the valleys of the financial district are grand, and the subtle corners and hints of twisting Dutch roads still remain and reverberate with the sort of classical detail I love, the world of commerce is beyond me. I’ve written several lengthy letters of introduction to various concerns, both in publishing and in the workaday world of commodities trading, but haven’t yet received so much as a social card with a hastily-scribbled telephone exchange under the name of a Dean or a Hathaway beneath it. Not that such a number would be possible for me to reach. The horrid tenement in which I find myself is without a telephone or any of the other amenities of the modern world, or the graces of the world I’m afraid has left us forever.

I have decided to take a hold of one end of that old writer’s saw: “write what one knows,” and with my latest story I hope to write a truly devilish, nasty bit of business connecting the rites and rituals of the Yezidi which you have so readily and thoughtfully transcribed for me. Of all this mediæval superstition and thaumaturgy I know little, but of New York I am afraid I am learning rather too much. The gangs of young loafers and evil-looking foreigners who traipse down the alleyways by the horde are so disconcerting to me I cannot help but see them whenever I close my eyes. O, for the fabled night-gaunts of old! At least phantastical terrors are ephemeral, while this city full of swarthy Latins and darkie brutes, with, of course, ol’ Shylock himself sitting and preening atop the twisted mass of bodies, is as solid as granite. The devolutionary social processes I espied in Providence have bloomed like fecund and fetid lichen here, clinging and mouldy to the once-grand thoroughfares and edifices of Gotham. I fear for our future, Cavanaugh, I fear for the destiny of a Nubian America!

On my walks I’ve stumbled upon perhaps the perfect setting for this new story. The very name of the neighborhood is evocative: Red Hook. It is New York in microcosm; the streets are limned with old Dutch history: Dikeman, van Brunt, indeed, even the hook is an Anglicization of “hoek,” or point. And yet the peninsula is aswarm with the most bestial of immigrants and workingmen, lured to the area by the swampish Gowanus and the day labor of the bustling piers. Who knows what eldritch evils can be hidden in the steel bellies of the ships and brought to bare by the husky stevedore and his own bailing-hook? Sounds like a yarn I could, I hope, market to the pulps. Yr Grandpa, I’m afraid, is down to his last three tins of mackerel and beans and if no remittances are forthcoming, perhaps my next letter to you will be written by a truly skeletal hand directed only by the impulses of a madman in a garret. Wouldn’t that be a doozy!

Thank you again, both humbly and gratefully I am, as always,

Ol’ Gramps Theobald

HPL

Fremgen was an old white dude, and he wore a brown suit jacket with a red bow tie. I didn’t know if he’d dressed up special for me or if he always knocked around the house like this, but he made me feel underdressed. The letters in my briefcase were like a passport into a strange country.

I don’t know what I expected. I knew he was a collector, but when I think of guys who collect sci-fi and fantasy crap, I don’t imagine museum-quality stuff. I think fat nerd. A beard sprinkled with Cheeto dust. A filthy room full of porn DVDs, half-cannibalized computers, and ancient Chinese takeout. The imperious tsk of “Worst. Lovecraft letter. EVAR!” followed by, I hoped, a sack of money anyway. But this dude’s living room didn’t even look like a place where someone lived, let alone like something from a comic book convention. It was more like a boutique. There were glass cases, discreetly lit, holding manuscript pages, old magazines, letters, and even some objects—a handkerchief, one shoe, a couple of pens. All of which, I assumed, had touched the extremities of Mr. Lovecraft himself. There were bookshelves, fronted with glass, holding hundreds of volumes. More bizarrely, there were a few little pedestals topped with domes of glass, supporting items of obscure function. I saw a metal cylinder under one dome, a big glass jar with something floating in murky fluid under another, and a third just looked like a profusion of copper tubing wound around some kind of helmet or headdress. There were tiny hand-written index cards inside each case and under each dome, but Fremgen didn’t give me time to browse.

“Sit, sit,” he said, and I settled onto one of the two ancient wingback chairs, the velvet upholstery emitting a little puff of dust when I sat. He sat in the chair’s twin, facing me, his eyes squinting and intense. There was a low table between us, set with a funny-looking clay tea kettle and some lumpy cups and bumpy saucers that looked like they’d been made in a pottery class for the mentally ill. I started to open the briefcase, figuring he wanted to get this over with, but then he spoke abruptly: “You say you’re from Red Hook? In Brooklyn.”

“That’s right.”

He mulled that over. “You know Lovecraft wrote a story about that place?”

“Sure. ‘The Red Hook Horror,’ something like that?” I knew the title wasn’t right, but something made me want to mess with this guy a little.

He didn’t seem fazed, though. “ ‘The Horror at Red Hook,’ yes. Lovecraft himself didn’t think much of the story, thought it was too rambling, but I’m rather fond of it. Many of Lovecraft’s fictions are . . . outlandish. Time-traveling aliens. Winged creatures that fly through the voids of space. Cities of fungi. But the story about Red Hook always seemed more plausible to me, that immigrants to our shores would bring with them dark rituals from their homelands, and unleash horrors upon an unsuspecting city. Lovecraft lived in New York for a time, he knew the alleyways and corners and piers more intimately than he wished, and he saw the old settlers being pushed aside by the newcomers, with their strange and secretive ways—”

“Have you ever been to Red Hook?” I interrupted.

“Only in my mind’s eye,” he said, and sounded like he thought that was just as good as a visit in person. “Has it changed much, since Lovecraft’s day? Are there still the crumbling red brick buildings, the oppressive streets, the air of imminent decay?”

I considered. I wanted to call this guy a moron, but our deal wasn’t done yet. “I pay sixteen hundred dollars a month for a studio apartment. They’re also building the world’s largest IKEA in Red Hook, so that’s pretty scary. Look, I’ve got the letters Lovecraft wrote to Cavanaugh—”

“Your ancestor wasn’t much of a writer, really,” Fremgen mused. “His fiction, I mean. I actually have some of the letters he wrote to Lovecraft, and they’re better, more enthusiastic, less imitative. In his fiction, he wrote about Vermont and New Hampshire like a man who’d never been there, never left the city of his birth. His stories of old civilizations on forgotten continents were more plausible. Have you read ‘Planet of the Phantasm?’ ‘The swirling abyssal call echoed across the verdant planes of Pramatat, rousing snake-coiled shrunplants from their slumber, lidless amber pools peering forth to—”

“Can’t say I’m a fan of the old man’s work, myself,” I stepped in. “I like crime stories.”

Nothing seemed to needle this guy. “But you’re one of his blood, aren’t you? However much that blood has been diluted. The past lives on, all around us. You’re connected to Cavanaugh, and through him, to a different time. Only an eyeblink in the past on a cosmic scale, of course, but in human terms, three generations is a vast and nearly insurmountable gulf. Don’t you think?”

“Yes. Yes I do.” This guy was not going to be rushed, but at least I could avoid offering up a conversational opening.

“Drink with me.” He picked up the tea cup in front of him, slurped it, made a contented face, and gestured to the kettle. I poured a little into my own cup, just enough to be polite, and took a sip. It was like drinking dirty river water. “Brewed from local herbs,” the old guy said, nodding. “I grow them myself.”

“Delicious,” I said, after I managed to swallow a second mouthful. “And I thank you for your hospitality. But I’d like to get out of here before too late—”

“Indulge an old man.” He smiled, and any doubt I had about his faculties disappeared. That was a knowing smile, and whatever he was doing, he was doing it on purpose. “You can learn a lot from the past, young man. The things in this room, they are valuable—some are even priceless—but they are not the heart of my collection. Would you come upstairs with me, to see some of my more interesting items? I get so few visitors. And the things I have to show you might change your perspective.”

Don’t piss off the golden goose
, I thought. “Sure, I guess I could take a quick look,” I said, praying this wasn’t some kind of sex thing. I left the briefcase with the letters by the chair and followed him up a narrow, tilting stairway, the walls lined with photographs so dusty their subjects were impossible to discern. The stairs opened onto a big room that must have taken up the entire upper floor. There were literally thousands of newspapers stacked along the walls and into the center of the room, forming stumpy corridors, the squeeze made all that tighter due to heaps of junk spilling off rickety card tables and bowed folding chairs. I took about two steps into the room and things started to get woozy and swirly and vague. The old dude just stood there grinning as I swayed and stumbled. “Shit,” I said, or something equally articulate, but my thoughts were clear: Not a sex thing. A drug-his-tea-and-murder-him thing. There was no place to fall.