New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (42 page)

“I’d really like you to see this. Apart from me, you’re the only person who’ll understand what it means. Please? It’ll only take a minute.”

“Only a minute, then,” Martin said, and with a sense of foreboding followed Simon to the quay on the other side of the Watershed. Black water lapped a few feet below the edge of the walkway, flexing its patchwork covering of chip papers and beer cans and plastic detergent bottles. Martin shivered in the icy breeze that cut across the water, shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket, and said, “What are we looking for?”

Simon put a finger to his lips, pointed at the water.

They were like tadpoles grown to the size of late-term human embryos. They were pale and faintly luminous, with heavy heads and large, black, lidless eyes and small pursed mouths. Skinny arms folded under pulsing gill slits. Snakey, finned tails. They hung in the black water at different levels.

Martin stared at them, little chills chasing each other through his blood, and whispered, “What are they?”

“Ghosts, maybe. Or shells, some kind of energy cast off when, you know . . . ”

When the people had been taken. When they had been consumed. Snapped up. Devoured. No bodies had been found; fourteen people had simply disappeared, as people sometimes do. Most of them were like Dr. John, chancers on the edge of society, missed by no one but their landlords and dealers and parole officers. There’d been some fuss in the local news about a housewife and a schoolboy who’d both gone missing the same day, but no one had made the connection between the two, and the story soon slipped off the pages. And that might have been the end of it, except that six months later the flat below Dr. John’s was flooded; when he went to investigate, Mr. Mavros found Dr. John lying fully clothed in his overflowing bath, dead of a heroin overdose. Dr. John’s parents had disowned him long ago. Only Martin and Mr. Mavros had attended the cremation, and Martin had scattered the ashes off the suspension bridge. And that, he thought, really had been the end of it, except for the dreams. Except for these ghosts, pale in the black water.

“I think they come for the music,” Simon said. “Or maybe for what the music does to people. A concert is a kind of collective act of worship, isn’t it? Maybe they feed on it . . . ”

There were six or seven or eight of them. They looked up at Martin and Simon through the water and the floating litter.

“There used to be more,” Simon said.

“Isn’t one of them sort of listing to the left?”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe not. It doesn’t matter.”

Simon said, “I tried to catch one once. I borrowed a keep net from my dad. They slipped right through it.”

Martin said, “Afterwards, I found one of those pills in my pocket.”

“Did you take it?”

“What would be the point?”

He’d flushed it down the sink. It had dissolved reluctantly, frothing slimy bubbles like a salted slug and giving off a vile stink that had reminded him of gull shit. Dr. John had been right: it hadn’t been meant for him. Dr. John and the others had been on the road to oblivion long before they’d been snared by the monster or old god or whatever it was that had been briefly trapped in the tidal mud of the Avon. If it hadn’t taken them, something else would: an unlit gas oven; a razor blade and a warm bath; a swan dive from the suspension bridge; an overdose.

Martin had brushed against it and lived, but he’d been changed, no doubt about it. He’d given up his second-hand record shop and his nice flat with its convenient location and its view across the communal gardens towards the green breast of Jacob’s Hill, and moved into a squat with the rest of his new band. He was happy there and gave himself one hundred per cent to his music, even though he was pretty sure, despite the record deal, it wouldn’t last. But that didn’t matter. He was only twenty-six, for God’s sake. There was plenty of time to move on, to try something else.

He stood with Simon in the dark and the chill wind and watched the ghostly things in the water fade away.

“Sometimes I can almost hear them, you know?” Simon said. “I can almost understand what they’re trying to tell me.”

“It might be an idea to try to forget about them.”

Simon sighed, shivered inside his duffel coat, tried to smile. “I never thought I’d say this, but you’re probably right.”

“Want to come and have a drink with me?”

“I have to get the last bus home.” Simon had that uncharacteristic shy look again. “I’m getting married in a couple of months. My fiancé will be waiting up for me.”

“Congratulations,” Martin said, and discovered that he meant it.

“Maybe we’ll have that drink some other time,” Simon said, and they shook hands at the edge of the water and went their different ways into the city, into the rest of their lives.

The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply.

“The Dunwich Horror” · H.P. Lovecraft (1929)

• THE ESSAYIST IN THE WILDERNESS •

William Browning Spencer

I had won the lottery, the ultimate
deus ex machina
. My wife was stunned by our good fortune, disoriented and faintly miffed for she had always scoffed at my lottery tickets, explaining that a person was more apt to be bitten by a rattlesnake while plummeting to Earth in an airplane—“Do the math,” she would say—than get that winning number.

I had won, we were rich, and I was very pleased with myself. I could see that Audrey still thought I was dead wrong, that lotteries were the opiate of the people, a game for probability-challenged chumps. However, had events demonstrated the rightness of Audrey’s position, we would still be toiling in the English department at Clayton College, a dreary four-year diploma mill with a lovely campus, a mummified faculty, and a student body derived almost entirely from the Church of Christ contingent in certain small towns in Pennsylvania.

We had only settled on Clayton because it offered jobs for the both of us. Audrey had sacrificed the most for that berth. While I taught the glamor stuff, Shakespeare and Spenser and Renaissance poetry, my wife tried to introduce English grammar into the minds of adolescents raised on television and movies—minds that were very nearly immune to syntax.

It didn’t take Audrey long to embrace our good fortune. Now we were free. A much smaller sum would have set us free; our desires were modest. We wanted to get away from the infernal ever-busy world, to find a quiet niche where we could read (the unalloyed pleasure of selfish reading, the decadence of perusing books and tossing them aside half read, the dirty thrill of reading novels of no critical merit whatever or old childhood treasures from which the narcotic of nostalgia could be slowly sucked) and, of course, to write.

We bought a house on twenty acres of land in a town beyond the reach of city commuters. We were far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife and spared the reinvented Main Street, the historical markers on every house, the hideous quaintness of the polished past. Our town was a little run-down; the unimaginative might even have found it ugly. We loved it.

We lined our rambling, three-story farmhouse with bookshelves throughout and furnished it with stuff foraged from neighborhood yard sales and junk shops (dressers, mirrors, end tables, a writing desk, a vast old sofa that was as good a representation of Queen Victoria in decline as any sofa I have ever seen).

Once settled, neither of us rushed into writing projects, although Audrey was by far the more industrious. One evening she read me a passage in which her nine-year-old self had accidentally been locked out of the summer house in Sag Harbor during a thunderstorm while her parents partied within. She had only been outside a short time, a minute perhaps before her absence was discovered, but it was time enough to get thoroughly wet and abandon a belief system that included loving parents. I thought it was a powerful piece, and I was impressed with the book’s tentative title,
Spite
, which struck me as everything a memoir’s title should be, forthright, unsparing, monosyllabic.

While I hadn’t gotten so far as to conjure a working title or turn any of my thoughts into something as substantial as a paragraph of prose or some lines of poetry, I had spent considerable time deciding just what I intended to write, what genre I would inhabit. As a youth of fourteen, I had wanted to be a lyric poet, but I had failed at that early, discovering that my poetry repelled girls who had initially been drawn to me. In college I considered becoming a novelist, but I was no good at character and if by sheer perseverance I managed to create some sort of fictional personage, I didn’t have a clue what to do with him, sending him lurching off down the street like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, inevitably parking him in a cafe or bar where he would talk interminably to some other sadly cobbled-together creature. Nope, not novels. I toyed with the idea of a memoir, but my past bored me. I had no wish to revisit it.

By a process of elimination, I was closing on my vocation. I was reading voraciously, ecstatically, and I had been at it for two months. I expected to find my blushing Muse in the next book that came to hand.

One night we were both reading in the study when I heard a sharp intake of breath and looked up from my book to see Audrey staring wide-eyed in my direction. Her Henry James (
Washington Square
, if memory serves) was open on her lap. It was late, about eleven I would guess, and we sat at opposite sides of the room, each of us enclosed in the light of our separate lamps while the books that surrounded us were imbued with dusky mystery and an almost erotic sense of solace.

“Jonathan?” She slapped a hand to her breast as though assaulted by a sudden pain. I assumed she had been taken with some particularly powerful passage and was so expressing herself, for we were both guilty of melodrama in our passion for literature, but then she toppled forward, the book (a Modern Library with those almost transparent pages, those tight thickets of immortal prose) fluttering as she fell.

I marked my place and rushed to her aid. She lay sprawled on the carpet, her flowing blue robe in sweet disarray, her red hair gloriously unbound, as though she were a Victorian heroine felled by the news of her lover’s death in a foreign land, the child within her still unknown to the inflexible society of her peers.

I bent down and taking her shoulders lifted her gently, turning her toward me. Did I say that Audrey is beautiful? When I read Jane Austen, I think of my wife, the logic of her cheekbones, the wit of her mouth, her unequivocal eyebrows.

Her eyelids fluttered. “Jonathan?” She seemed incapable of anything else, her mouth open in amazement. Her chest heaved; she gasped. “I can’t—I can’t breathe.”

A series of desperate phone calls revealed that the closest hospital was forty-five miles to the west but that a Dr. Bath would be willing to rouse himself from sleep and meet us at his office at the corner of Maple and Main, a mere five minutes from our home.

A roundish woman swathed in black fabric and wearing a nurse’s white cap opened the door before I knocked. She bent forward and clutched Audrey’s hand, drawing us both into the room and informing us that she was the doctor’s wife. The room was like every doctor’s waiting room I have ever seen, a coffee table strewn with old magazines, sofas pining for better days, and a harsh, sourceless light, the cruel illumination of purgatory.

Mrs. Bath left us on the sofa and went to fetch her husband. By now Audrey’s face was red and her breathing was an agony of effort, shaking her small frame. A wheeze that made my ribs ache underlined her every inhalation.

Mrs. Bath returned with her husband, a stout, balding man. He shook my hand and said, “Yes, I am Dr. Bath. And this is your wife, the emergency?”

We both looked at Audrey, and I said, “Yes.” The doctor wore a black suit and seemed disappointed, although whether this was because Audrey didn’t look like emergency enough or looked like more emergency than he had bargained for, I couldn’t tell.

Mrs. Bath helped Audrey up from the sofa where she was hunched forward in private communication with her lungs. Flanked by the doctor and his wife, Audrey was led past the reception desk toward the hall. Something in their progress, their tentative exit, put me in mind of two skaters guiding a novice across the ice.

I waited on the sofa while the doctor and Mrs. Bath attended my wife. I shuffled through the magazines on the coffee table, seeking something to occupy my mind, but I was certain I didn’t want to read anything about infants or celebrities or health or crafts, and I was growing irritated with this foraging when—I found my Muse!

My Muse resided within the unlikely confines of a thin, battered paperback entitled
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
by someone named Annie Dillard. I noted a number of laudatory blurbs on the back and began reading. I had no premonition, no shiver of recognition on opening the book, that my inspiration would lie within.

I was instantly intrigued. So engrossed was I that I did not notice Audrey standing over me, flanked again by the doctor and his wife. All three were smiling. Audrey’s smile was weak, relieved more than celebratory, but it lifted my heart.

I wrote a check for $85 while the doctor talked. He was more animated now, hearty and pleased with himself. “Your wife, she has the spider bite!” he said. “Right there on the ankles. Hah! Or maybe the bee sting or a, what you call, centepeeder? Not everyone are allergic. Most, they just say, ‘Ow!’ and forget about it.” Here the doctor shrugged to indicate a cavalier attitude toward such attacks. “But your wife, she has the reactions, so I give her the shot and these pills, samples while the drugstore does not open. Problems? You must call.”

I asked Mrs. Bath if I might have the paperback I was holding in my hand, and she sold it to me for five dollars, which seemed a little steep. I didn’t haggle.

Driving back to our home, slowly, keeping an eye out for nocturnal creatures that might race from the surrounding woods and hurl themselves beneath our wheels, I could not contain my enthusiasm.

“I know what I’m going to write,” I told Audrey. She turned her head, her cheek flat against the backrest, her red hair matted in thick ribbons. She was clearly exhausted, and she regarded me with blue eyes that were uncharacteristically blank. Ordinarily, Audrey would have expressed delight, urged me to elaborate, but she wasn’t up to it that night. I understood, and I should have left it till morning, but I couldn’t contain the good news.

“I am going to write essays! Nature essays. You know, thoughtful pieces in which nature serves as a sort of jumping off place for larger topics. Caterpillar-to-butterfly stuff about transformation, a little something from Ovid or Hazlitt or Burton thrown in. ‘The world is but a school for inquiry,’ after all. So. We’ve got a classroom in our own backyard! Our property has woods, a pond, a small creek. I haven’t seen the creek yet, but the real estate agent said it was there, no reason to doubt her. And here we are in April, everything coming alive. ‘When that Aprile with his shoures soote the droghte of March hath perced to the roote,’ that sort of thing.”

Audrey rolled her eyes, snorted derisively.

“What?” I asked.

My wife exhaled (the tiniest trace of a wheeze still there) and looked at me as though I’d just announced that I intended to run for President.

“What? I think the essay is the perfect vehicle for my temperament and—”

“Nature, Jonathan. What do you know about nature?”

“Well.” I was caught off balance by this attack, so unlike my wife. I realized later that Audrey was speaking in the immediate aftermath of a life-threatening encounter with a tiny piece of nature. No wonder she was unenthusiastic regarding my new allegiance. At the time, however, I was hurt.

“I believe I have a layman’s knowledge of the natural world,” I said, hating the prissy tightness in my throat.

“No one would ever describe you as an outdoors person,” Audrey said.

“I don’t believe I need to be climbing mountains or rafting down the Amazon to write about nature.”

“No,” Audrey said. “I don’t suppose so. But you need. . . . ” She paused. She stretched the tip of her tongue to touch her upper lip, a habit she had when looking within, and one I generally found endearing. She smiled. “Name three trees.”

“What?”

“Come on, name three trees. That’s an easy one.”

Yes, an easy one, insultingly so, beneath reply. Mistaking my silence for ignorance, her smile enlarged, so I snapped back, “Juniper, Christmas, Mimosa!” and she continued to grin, as though she had won somehow, and I found myself fretting that juniper might be, technically, more of a shrub than a tree. But I wasn’t going to have my Muse belittled by continuing the conversation. I changed the subject.

“I’m glad you are all right,” I said.

“Not as glad as I am,” she said, which probably meant nothing, but it felt like a rebuke. I drove the rest of the way in silence, and when we pulled into our yard, Audrey said, “All out for Walden.”

In spite of my wife’s sarcasm, I was convinced that the essay was the form for me. For one thing, I was wealthy. With wealth came leisure, and leisure encouraged reflection. It occurred to me that one of the great charms of the essay was this conveyed sense that its author had all the time in the world. The authors of essays drifted in a fog of indolence, contemplating objects and events, pursuing literary allusions with scholarly languor. The average reader, hustling to get his car to the Jiffy Lube on his lunch hour, could only dream of some faraway retirement when time would cease to flog him with errands and obligations. To read an essay was to enter a world of literary and philosophical loafing, to wade in that slow river of time. Readers of essays could, for the span of the piece, escape their deadline days.

I had every confidence that I could give the reader his money’s worth in reflection, but I thought I might have trouble with the nature part. While I didn’t feel I was as ill-equipped for the job as Audrey believed, it is true I never had warmed to nature as a child. I never had an urge to climb a tree, own a turtle, look under a log, or catch a fish. I wasn’t immune to the beauty of autumn, with hills transformed by garish yellows and reds, and spring, with its thousand shades of green, was a wonder of renewal, no doubt about it, but I didn’t wish for any deeper connection. In fact, I had always kept a cool distance from the natural world, which I perceived as deadly and erratic, the rotting rabbit by the side of the road, festering with maggots, the yellow jackets that buzzed around the picnic table, climbing down the throat of the open Coke bottle.

Nature could be hostile, as Bob, of Bob’s Bug and Vermin Blasters, reminded me. Audrey and I had decided to purge the house of bugs to prevent a second occurrence of that harrowing night, and Bob’s Bug and Vermin Blasters was the only local establishment for such services.