Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft Read online

  Amos Carter.

  I drove down to my bookstore trying hard to remember where I seen the name. Amos Carter. Amos Carter. Twenties mystery writer? Something in a fanzine? Damn. Amos Carter. I helped customers find books, dissuaded them from the belief that their Webster’s Speller was worth thousands of dollars, even if their grandparent had owned it, and attended to the other duties of the used bookstore trade. By the end of the day I was sure that the name was somewhere in my shop and that I had seen it recently.

  When I got home I sent a note to Mr. Steele. It was partially a fan letter thanking him for his writings over the years, but also asking about Carter. By the time I was up the next day, he had replied:

  Dear John Reynman,

  Thank you for your kind words. Amos Carter is famous, or infamous, because of some revision that Lovecraft did for him. Amos was writing a serialized novella for an apparently amateur publication called the Shocking Mysteries Fantasy Gazette, a short-lived magazine from a town with the unlikely name of Comesee, Texas. The digest-sized mag ran for four issues with the Carter story in issue number three. The story is a pseudo–Middle Ages tale featuring a Knight called Zauber, who encounters some horror “too eldritch to be described.” The ending of the story did NOT appear in #4. There was a note from H.P.L. instead: “Esteemed Readers, I had assisted Mr. Carter in revising the MS. of the first part of this story, ‘Sir Zauber’s Tale.’ When he presented me the second section of the story, I realized that it would be too devastating for the average reader, and might cause damage to his faculties. Therefore I declined to revise the story and have advised the editors of the Shocking Mysteries Fantasy Gazette not to publish the ending of the tale or any more of the blasphemous writings of Mr. Carter. Howard Phillips Lovecraft.” I suspect that Carter, if indeed this was not a pseudonym for Lovecraft, was unable to come up with an ending for the story and simply chose the more dramatic warning letter. I think I have a copy of the story somewhere in the boxes in my garage. If I can lay my hands on it, would you like a copy?

  Addison

  I wrote back in the affirmative and asked about the name. Lovecraft had created a fictional alter ego “Randolph Carter” as early as 1919. Since Lovecraft and his friends were always using fictionalized versions of one another in their tales, the whole thing sounded fishy, but a fun thing to figure out. I asked Addison if he could remember more details about the story.

  The name still wouldn’t let me go.

  I had a dream that night.

  I was alone in my shop, the New Atlantis Used Bookstore; no one had come to buy anything all day. Outside rain poured down on Lavaca Street, thunder and lightning filled the sky, and I was thinking what a great day it was for some Gothic fiction. I go up into my SF loft, which housed mainly paperbacks, and I see that the carpet is covered in blood. Lots of blood. As it is a dream, I don’t think about the blood as a horrible thing, just cursing the fact I’ll have to re-carpet. In the corner of the loft is a large veiled statue. I know that I am not supposed to look at it, but I figure I can lift the cover and take one peek while no one is in the store. I squish my way over there, noting with dismay how many of the paperbacks are flecked with blood. I should have known this would happen, I think. I reach the statue and start to pull up the veil, and then I remember that I need to read that Amos Carter book, so I walk back to the “C’s” and sure enough just before Lin Carter’s novels is this sick green-colored paperback. Zauber’s Quest and Other Odd Journeys by Amos H. Carter. I bend down to pick up the book—it’s on the bottom shelf and therefore has blood on it. As I pick up the book I hear the veil fall off the statue, and suddenly I am as afraid as I can be. Something’s behind me. If I look I will see it. I will see the thing that I’m not meant to see. I think I hear music.

  At that point I woke my wife Haidee up screaming. In almost ten years of sleeping with her I had never had a nightmare that made me scream before. She held me and petted me for about an hour before I went back to sleep. It was raining cats and dogs outside, which no doubt colored my dreamscape.

  I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I was scared to go in my store. I went to the coffee shop Decline of the West next door for about an hour—till I actually heard people knocking on my door.

  Once inside I felt silly. During a lull I checked out the loft. The roof had sprung a leak, so the carpet was wet at the top of the stairs and did squish. There weren’t any veiled statues that had been installed in the night. The place of honor was still filled by an open cardboard box with the words FREE STUFF magic-markered on the side. I tossed the stuff that I couldn’t sell in there—old small-press magazines, promotional items, and so forth. I decided to look through the box.

  Scary.

  I found a fanzine produced by Xerox and saddle-stapled called The Moon Lily, dated March 15, 1977. The blue paper cover features a ruined castle on the moon with Earthrise behind it. The cover boasted, “ALL FICTION ISSUE: Schweitzer, Fox, winter-damon, Carter.” This was where I had seen the name before. The story was “Sir Zauber’s Tale, Part 2.” It began with a letter from Carter thanking the editor of TML for asking for one of his pulp stories and saying that this story was begun in 1926 and had never had its conclusion printed before. It mentioned that Lovecraft had revised the first half of the tale and evinced sadness that he no longer had that part of the story. There were a few poignant observations about living in a rest home. Mr. Carter had apparently outlived his wife and children and was something of a ward of the state in a rather smelly and sad institution. That was true horror, I decided.

  The tale did involve a statue; I had probably glanced at it when I threw the ’zine in the box months ago. It began as follows:

  “Sir Zauber found that he could no longer look at the foul idol that dominated the town square. He felt that its strange form (in all its beauty and terror) had already burned into his brain. ‘I will think on this the day I die, and every night I dream,’ he thought. He decided to study the inscriptions on the four-sided base of the statue. Some were uncouth languages of the East, but four words were in the tongue of his childhood. On the north was ‘PHANTOM OF TRUTH,’ on the west ‘A LITTLE SLIPPER ON HER FOOT,’ on the south ‘NOT WITHOUT PAIN,’ and on the east ‘UNKNOWN TO THE SUN.’ Zauber could not fathom what they meant. Part of his soul told him to leave that spot lest he suddenly understand and be damned.

  “It grew late in the day, and he knew that he had to reach the castle Draypalo while there was still sunlight. He did not want to meet the Queen under the spell of night when her powers would be at their height.”

  The tale continued as a fairly conventional fight-the-vampire story. Sir Zauber arrives at the castle a bit too late and the Queen has risen. He tries his swordcraft against her, but she actually seduces him during the battle. He agrees to share her kingdom with her, knowing however that he will one day become a zombie servitor like the creatures in the dungeons. There are some vague hopes that he might escape this zombie status with the help and love of a village girl—but this is left open in the story, so we cannot tell if he is delusional or properly hopeful. There are no further direct references to the statue, or in fact anything to make clear what the first half of the story had been about.

  I closed the shop early to e-mail news of my find to Addison. I asked if he had located the first part of the tale, as I was very anxious to read the whole thing. I also speculated on the possibility of maybe putting the restored story up on a website. I didn’t imagine that Mr. Carter would still be alive, as he would be past a hundred at this point, but I thought the story plus the story of the story would be fascinating (at least for pulp fiction geeks like ourselves).

  Addison wrote back that night that he was going to spend all night looking for the story in his garage, and that this was extremely exciting. He had dreamed for years of seeing the story that had scared Lovecraft.

  I heard nothing the next day.

  Then I got a distressing letter from Mrs. Addison. She had awakened to a horri
fying crash in their garage. Her husband, true to his word, had looked long into the night for the magazine and fallen off a ladder while peering in the top of some junk-filled boxes. He had broken a hip and would be bedridden for a while, and it would be some time before he could contact me.

  Two weeks later I got a note from Addison. He said he was doing well, although he thought it would be a month or so before he could search his boxes again. Could I send him the story conclusion so that when he found the first part he could read all of it?

  I had been feeling very guilty over the incident so far, so I Xeroxed the tale and mailed it off to him. Addison wrote in a couple of days that he had received the story and had begun researching Carter’s life and writings. It turned out that Carter did have a small career in pulp writing that later became a career of writing cheap paperbacks. He had a burst of that sort thing in the paperback revolution of the Sixties—The Truth about Mummies, The Truth about Werewolves, UFOS in Colonial America, etc. Addison was going to make a box of stuff for me when he was well.

  Another week passed and I got the following note:

  Dear Reynman,

  CARTER IS ALIVE. He’s still in the rest home he mentions in The Moon Lily, which turns out to be less than fifty miles from here. I am going to visit him this Sunday for his 107th birthday party!

  Best,

  Addison

  On Saturday I got another note.

  Dear Reynman,

  FOUND IT!! I’m going to give a copy of both parts to Carter tomorrow, and then mail you a copy as well. This is so exciting!

  Best,

  AES

  After a couple of months I had heard nothing, and then a friend of Addison posted a small obituary. Addison had had a heart attack, ironically while visiting the world’s oldest pulp writer at a rest home in Bayou Goula (White Castle), Louisiana. A little research told me that Bayou Goula is something of a ghost town, absorbed by the more lively village of White Castle, and its claim to fame is having the world’s smallest chapel. The little burg lay on LA1 near Baton Rogue. It had exactly one rest home—the “I Did It My Way” home.

  The whole idea itched in my brain. It was like a tooth beginning to twinge. You forget about it and then there it is again. You are showering or about to lie down for bed or putting the brass key in the door of your shop, and the idea is there. That’s a seven-and-a-half-hour drive. Now gas is certainly not the cheapest of commodities, but how many 107-year-old pulp writers are you ever going to meet? I could justify the trip in that I might find rare books (or at least eBay-resalable books) at junk stores on the way. Haidee is always telling me to slack off some. I work at the store almost every day. I hadn’t been on a vacation in forever. I would fight the idea down as foolishness, and then the twinge would hit me again. Finally in late September the foolishness won out. I reserved a room in a Baton Rogue Best Western and turned my wheels to the east with copy of The Moon Lilly in hand.

  It was a trying and uneventful Monday. Haidee and Ben would work the store until Thursday. I drove through White Castle and located the tiny chapel, the nursing home, and the Cora-Texas sugar mill, which seemed to be the village’s biggest industry. I would sack out for the night and see Mr. Amos Carter Tuesday morning.

  I had vague and unpleasant dreams, but nothing like the nightmares I secretly hoped for.

  The I Did It My Way Retirement Home was a foul-smelling twenty-room facility on the corner of Bayou Street and Andrew Jackson Avenue. It had been painted a pale green and had dark brown trim. Two old white women were on metal porch rockers. “Good morning, youngster!” the oldest of them cackled. I smiled back, “Lovely day, ladies!” I stepped inside. The reception area was paneled in what had no doubt once been brown wood veneer that had faded to gray. The receptionist nurse was an African American woman in her fifties, about my age. She looked tired and it was only 9:00 in the morning. I guessed her shift had begun in the wee hours of the morning. Her black glossy plastic nametag read Kassandra.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  “I am looking to visit Mr. Amos Carter.”

  Her expression would have done justice to the pubgoers in a werewolf movie. “Mr. Carter has no visitors except his grandson.”

  “I know that is not correct. A friend of mine, Mr. Addison E. Steele, visited not long ago,” I replied. The moment I felt her resistance this suddenly became important to me. The vague sense of a Quest that had been calling to me since I had glanced at The Moon Lily suddenly crystallized. I needed to see this 107-year-old man.

  “I am sorry about your friend. Mr. Carter can be violent. Normally we leave him tied to his gerry chair.”

  “The man is 107,” I began.

  “Nobody here believes that. You’ve never seen him. You are like that man from New Orleans, the one that died. Look, the whole Carter family stinks. They’re weird and awful. If I had my way we throw old man Carter out.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s something about him that just isn’t right. Not Amos, the other one.”

  “Don’t you worry about your job saying things like that?” I asked. I could hear the sounds of The Jerry Springer Show from down the hall. She gave me a look. “You couldn’t get someone else to work in this dump. I lost my job in New Orleans after Katrina. This town is literally where my car broke down.”

  “My friend was from New Orleans.” I said.

  “Yes, I know; he ran a bookshop in the Quarter. Court of the Dragon. My son used to like that stuff. Look, mister, I am trying to save your white butt. Don’t mess around with Mr. Carter or his grandson or any of them.”

  “I am not worried by an old man.”

  “Do you know what the problem with white people is? They live in denial. That’s why they screwed up the world. That’s why they hate us.”

  I was about to give my Austin knee-jerk reaction, which would no doubt have included being an Obama supporter, when the phone buzzed at the desk saving me from looking foolish. Kassandra said, “Number 13.” And waved me toward one wing.

  The old-people smell intensified as I headed to my left. An almost bald old man was pushing a walker down the hall, his toothless mouth agape and drool pouring out in streamers. His dingy white bathrobe was partially open, displaying his shrunken member to God and the world. I passed the TV lounge where Springer’s half-man was pulling the chair out for a three-hundred-pound transvestite while two-blue haired women laughed to see such fun. There was a computer room on the other side. A one-legged man about my age was looking through eBay, a palsied woman tied in her gerry chair was unsuccessfully trying to contact a Bible site, another woman, very large with bright red lipstick and a fabric rose behind her left ear, was looking at a JPEG of a family at the beach in Maui or some other tropical paradise. My God, Carter has been here at least forty-one years. I walked on to the end of the hall. Some rooms were open. A woman restrained on a bed screamed as I went by, wanting Alfred. In another, two gray-haired black gentlemen in threadbare flannel robes bent over a chessboard.

  There were two twin beds in room 13. They were nicely made and to my amusement had Spiderman bed covers. A wall clock with large numbers told me it was almost 10:00. There was a small painting of a green-skinned ghoul sitting on a tombstone, contemplating some gnawed-upon Yorrick. The painting could have been from a sci-fi convention where it had not taken home any awards. On the opposite wall hung a framed faded print of Albrecht Dürer’s Praying Hands. There was a small bookshelf under the ticking clock. There were a few paperbacks, The Truth about Black Magic, The Secret of the Great Pyramid, Teach Yourself Typing, Hunza Valley Health Secrets, UFOs in Colonial America, How to Make and Sell Macramé, Houses That Kill, and The Truth about Ghouls. All by Amos H. Carter. The room being empty, I crossed to the shelf to examine the last volume. The atrocious painting had provided the cover art for this collection of forgotten lore. In the room I saw his gerry chair, the filthy white bondage belts hanging loosely at its sides.

  “Amos is out by the bayou,” c
ame a frail feminine voice.

  In the doorway was a shrunken old woman in a wheelchair. Her cornflower blue eyes twinkled, her cheeks were rouged, and her thinning hair nicely coiffed. Her attendant, an ebon black young man with cornrows, had a white orderly’s uniform which had a nametag ALFRED and incongruous blue bandana in the shirt pocket. He looked all in all like the Platonic form of boredom.

  I addressed the helpful woman. “Isn’t he supposed to stay in his room?” I nodded toward the gerry chair.

  “Bonds don’t hold Amos when he doesn’t want them to. We discussed that when you were here last.”

  “I am afraid you are mistaken, sweetheart,” I said. “This is my first visit.”

  “No. You were here that other time. The time there was all that blood,” she said. Alfred began to wheel her away.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “She just gonna get crazy, don’t get her going,” said Alfred.

  “What blood?” I asked.

  “All that blood everywhere and Alfred’s grandmother made him scour it off the floors and I told him he looked like Cinderella.”

  “See, I told she crazy.”

  “Where did the blood come from?”

  Alfred was wheeling her down the hall.

  “Where did the blood come from?”

  “From New Orleans, I reckon.”

  I left the nursing home and struck out for the bayou. There was a path through the tall Johnson grass and scrub oak. Even in October the air was hot and humid, and a bright green moss covered the tiny trunks of the little trees. Insects hummed and buzzed, the water gave off a sour and stale smell. The sky had begun to cloud up, and the sun looked a lead disk. The path cut round and back again like a water moccasin. I could only see a few feet ahead. I couldn’t believe how quickly I seemed to be in a primeval jungle, even though I knew I could only be a few hundred yards from Lee Street. Large butterflies with purple and black wings fluttered by. I was tempted to step off the sandy path and crush one, changing millions of years of the future, when I saw a middle-aged white man in blue shirt and Levis sitting on a stump about sixty feet ahead of me. He was resting his hands on a walking-stick with an elaborate ivory handle, apparently in deep conversation with the butterflies. For some reason I decided that must be the grandson. “Mr. Carter.” I yelled, “I am looking for your grandfather.” He looked up and grinned at me, then waved his stick like a bishop blessing the faithful with his crozier.