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

  I will dance at the Council and try to persuade the mothers to leave this place and swim back to our second home. We must regroup where the architecture is strong, and Dreams are caught and farmed and milked in the old way. We must prepare against the human onslaught. Once our race was mighty. Were we not the race that called the dolphins and whales back to the sea? Were we not the race that broke up the single large landmass, or kept the ages of ice at bay? If only we had not experimented with the hairy ones adding to their spirals. What arrogance seeking to bring self-awareness to this dying world. The humans inherited our arrogance but not our wisdom. They see us as their dry-land ancestors living in lands that have sunken—Atlantis, Lemuria, R’lyeh. As they degenerate their myths will say we lost our footing due to black magic. They can’t even guess that our life cycle is hampered by their yellow sun’s deadly radiation. If we last until that star is normal and the great bands of radiation leave this world, we will flourish again. Let us wait, I shall dance to the mothers, let us wait until the stars are right. Then we can Gift the creatures of this world with Dreamtime. Ra-natha-alene and her sisters mock me. They say that humans cannot grow to be a threat. They ignore the vast expansion of human numbers in the time since Nan Madol. They argue that as Great Cthulhu makes human artists and mystics Dream, humans will give up their fixation with death. No race can kill a planet, they say. I warn them, there is no race as vile as humans.

  Worse news has come. The hybrids came to Devil’s Reef to swim and Dance at the new moon. One of the wandering rogue offspring has come to Innsmouth. He does not know that he is of us. His instincts provoke him to actions and accidents that he sees as chance. He is at the hotel. The mothers grew excited, their gill slits flaring purple. They will rise and seek him out. I see that this will lead to disaster. They will seek to nurture and protect him. What will happen if he merely flees them? They cannot kill one of their children even if his blood is nauseatingly warm and his skin covered in hair. It could take only one revealing our presence to harm us here. There is no Dreamtime in the walls of our new home. Humans have grown deadly, yet the mothers do not believe what the Spiral has told us of their war in Europe.

  It has happened, as I feared. The nursery parade gathered in town last night and the human saw them and heard the croaking of the nursery songs. The sounds released the Change, but he had not been fed the Dreams as the Innsmouth children had been. Even though I loathe humans, I felt pity for this long-lost cousin. I can imagine the rapid beating of his heart. I can imagine the cooling of his blood, which to him would feel like fear of death. The great priestesses had put on their tiaras and the hybrid priestesses had put on the robes. They made their slow, awkward way toward his room. It was easy for him to outrun them. Without the Dreamtime to guide him he would have seen this all as nightmare.

  With luck his shock will silence him before he can tell others, and then when the Change comes upon him, he will seek us out. His skin will grow scaly and only the soothing feel of salt water will bring relief. His nascent gills will swell, and our thoughts will be drawn to his head as the bees of his world are drawn to blooming flowers. The Beauty will overcome terror. Tonight I will pray and Dance at the thrones of my ancestors Father Dagon and Mother Hydra. May they soothe his mind and still his lips! May his Change not bring fear!

  There have been navy ships over our reef the last two days. We try to send them Dreams, but the steel hulls of the ships reflect our wills back to us. It is as I feared. It is not like the old orbits, when we touched their minds and they saw mermaids calling each to each. The mothers said the words of light and made the wheels of bioluminescence appear in the water, vast whirling signs. But this did not soothe the humans. Once humans have weapons they are not willing to be soothed, so far have they degenerated from us.

  Canisters began to fall from the sides of the ships, half our size. I began swimming. They were depth charges and they exploded with epic sound against our reef. The walls of our new home shattered, great panes of mother-of-pearl began wheeling through the water, reflecting the lights of the bioluminescent wheels and the explosions filling the sea with green and pink lightning. Shock wave after shock wave passed though the ocean—and dead and dying fish buffeted my body as I swam with all my might. Then some jagged pieces of the mother-of-pearl began to cut into me, and my dark blood mixed crazily with the glowing waters. I felt the drums of my ears pop, and the violent storm around me became strangely still. More of the fragments tore into me. I saw the arms of my mother floating by, leaving a wake of dark pupil blood and the smell of raw death. I prayed to Mother Hydra that she may Sleep and Dream until her next Cycle. I reached out for her soul and found nothing but the cold unforgiving water. Then a fragment of shell struck my face and I was cut free from my body. I tried to make my soul Sleep with the words that bring Sleep: Fhtagn nerzin kyron Meftmir!

  I did not Sleep but was sucked into the mind of a human, the one I had glimpsed before. A female that has not made the slime of motherhood. She was confined in a place of the mad, where the smells are terrible and the light is harsh. She is made to listen to a horrible caterwauling called hymns, and to eat dead food and be treated with metabolic poisons superstitiously thought to calm her mind. Fortunately her mind is strong, so strong that she had never been able to fit into their world. She was born in Innsmouth several orbits ago. She is one of the rogue lines, descendant from Marsh himself four generations ago. She was not brought up in our way, but as a human, and thinks that the divine would be found in her terrible form.

  I hate the way the air does not support her ugly body as she walks about. I try to Remember who I am by writing and painting. I tried once to Dance, but the other humans restrained the body. For days they kept me from moving. I cannot believe that they could be so cruel. I wished to kill the body and try again to Sleep, but the humans worship bodies and will not let me do so.

  In the past few days I have found ironic hope. I cannot send my soul far, so I know not what lies on the far side of the world. Yet I have no reason to presume that our Pacific home has fallen. Surely the strange angles of the Dreamtime have kept the Watery Abyss intact! But I found him. The one who brought the doom to Devil’s Reef. With the cruel irony of this planet, the Change came upon him the day of the depth charges. His body yearned for the sea just as our new home was pounded to flinders. I am nurturing him. As a true being I was not old enough to be a mother, but in this human body I can make the slime and feel the emotions. I enveloped him with the love of the mother.

  We have made a plan. He will come to this place and free me. He understands the human world well. He has done certain things to his appearance to hide the Change. He will spirit my body away. He tells me that this will be easy because humans do not value females and mad females are of no use. He has enough money to buy us train tickets to the West Coast. He will take me to a place with the lovely name of Land’s End, and there we will shed both human clothes and form. I feel that I can awaken the sea form of this Julia. We will swim to our home and dwell there in glory.

  Thus ends the words of Julia Phillips’s diary. The only other item in Lovecraft’s envelope was a clipping from the Brown Daily Herald describing the testing of a new depth charge on Ward’s Reef near Newburyport. The bombing went on for three days . . .

  (For Michel Houellebecq)

  Wilbur’s Song

  If they could see my ghost

  They’d see a gangly fellow

  Only now throwing off his countrified ways.

  You can learn a lot haunting Academe.

  The library is mine now,

  If I had only tongue to form the words . . .

  I know the Other one waits

  I can hear him on the stillest of nights.

  Father waits too.

  You see the spells we set in motion

  Have not been vanquished by puny men.

  Once certain Words are Uttered,

  They will remanifest in the fullness of Time.

  Certai
n texts cannot be erased,

  Certain sculpture survives beneath the lava.

  The human part of me is impatient

  But that from Outside waits.

  Call to me, Wilbur Whatley,

  And I’ll seed your dreams.

  Son of Earth and Starry heaven I.

  Call to me in the deep midnight

  of your despair.

  And my spirit will go to you,

  and teach you to make your

  dreams into flesh.

  Pages from a Diary

  Saturday April 23

  On this brisk morning I will venture forth to forge my soul on the drumbeats of a God-awful hangover. Awoke and made coffee. Inspected coffee and poured same into sink. Sat down to make diary entry and record my profound thoughts. Profound thought—I am the only thirty-three-year-old man in the world who eats Cocoa Puffs. All right, not a great start, Mr. Ghose said no profound thoughts, use sensory stuff. The inside of my mouth tastes like an ashtray. Last night we smoked salvia, grass, and clove cigarettes, and watched The Dunwich Horror. And we planned to do something today . . .

  My apartment has been destroyed by a tornado summoned by a Djinni pasha. Oh, that sucked—passive voice. I hate the cheap gray and green carpet, I am not too keen on living in Amarillo, and the cable will be cut off this month because of non-payment. I can’t believe this is my “real” life. Affiliated Foods fired me for stealing a few candy bars. Even my foreman thought I was pathetic. Maybe I can go work for Iowa Beef or help them store plutonium at Pantex. I am losing my hair, why not accept my Homer Simpson destiny?

  Two bottles of bacanora gone—homemade tequila from Jerry’s family. Half a bag of grass also offered to some drunken god. Probably Moloch. “Eater of Children.” Certainly anything childlike in Our Gang has been eaten away. Last month I took that Creative Writing course at ACC. Smooth move, Ex-Lax, this month I will creatively write some checks.

  Here’s an interesting artifact, a yellow sticky note to myself. Remember to be ready by 10! What am I supposed to do? Goddamn! A picnic at Palo Duro Canyon. Well, at least it will be their gas money.

  Later in the jeep:

  Jerry and Connie arrived to fetch me at 11:30. My hangover had in no way subsided, despite the Excedrin(r), and I was unable to greet their battered blue four-wheeler with any enthusiasm. They were disgustingly bright-eyed and cheerful. I was Bela Lugosi—not the younger Bela, the Bela of Plan 9 from Outer Space.

  Jerry is perhaps able to withstand the cheap Mexican poisons so dear to us all because of his Mexican ancestry. Geraldo Mendoza is half Mazatec Indian, born in some haunted little village in Oaxaca. Blonde Connie, Jerry’s “wife,” avoids alcohol and sticks with grass and salvia and mushrooms when we can get them. As we now speed down Washington Street toward the Canyon, she once again explains to me how my hangover is my body’s way of telling me to avoid metabolic poisons. We pass the giant Affiliated Foods warehouse and she stares at me as if the architecture has somehow made her point.

  2:00

  I am sitting on the hood of the jeep while J & C explore the wonders of the Goodnight Trading Post. I have visited the Trading Post before and duly marveled at the cockleburs in plastic domes labeled “Porcupine eggs,” the machine that flattens pennies and makes them into oblong souvenirs of America’s second deepest canyon, and the dehydrated Resurrection Plants, whose movement from death to life provides a vegetable retelling of the Christ story. They are an ancient plant between mosses and ferns, who learned how to die and live again. And after strange aeons even death may die . . .

  The canyon is beautiful as always. A small yellow lizard is stalking an umber beetle on the red soil in front of me. A leap, a snap of carapace, and the beetle becomes dinner. I am going to try and make that into a haiku when I get home. How does Bashô do it?

  Old dark sleepy pool

  quick unexpected frog

  goes plop! Watersplash.

  The lizard will become food for the red-tailed hawks or turkey vultures who circle around and around in the shimmering air. J & C are taking much longer than I had expected. Good. It’ll let the sun bake all the nastiness out of me. If I had money I’d buy some B12. My mind is slow today. It is the old pond that Bashô dreamed of.

  4:00

  Connie is sketching a magnificent canyon wall. It is a talus slope sculptured by many rains. Its oxidized soil layers—white, lavender, yellow, red, yellow, and brown—caused Coronado to name these features the Spanish Skirts. The slight haze in the air somehow intensifies the colors; for one weird moment I thought I saw a color that I could not name. I think I may have fried too many brain cells last night.

  Connie points it out to us. High on the slope is a small cave opening probably no more than a yard in diameter. It seems to be illuminated within by a bluish light—probably an effect of the general haze. All we’ve done this afternoon is walk about a quarter-mile from the jeep and then stuffed our bodies with a variety of Health Food Treats Connie had selected. If one bag of yogurt raisins is good for you, two is twice as good. I notice that my bare gut sticks out of my Nine Inch Nails T-shirt. Wow, dorky and fat, maybe that’s why Jerry gets women and I buy porn DVDs on eBay.

  There seems to be a rock ledge under that cave opening. Think I’ll suggest to J & C that it’s time to work up a sweat.

  6:00 From the rock ledge:

  Jerry and Connie and I are all going to be famous. I just know it!! Our names will outshine Howard Carter. It’s a find! I will write my book about our little gateway to another world. The party, the hangover, Connie’s Sketchpad—it is all fate. It is like André Breton said, “Fate does not coerce, it entices!”

  The bluish light was not a trick of sun and air. I am gazing into a blue-litten cavern. I must be careful now to choose my words. Now I am glad I took Mr. Ghose’s class.

  The journals of men who stumble across things often become immortal. My webpage will be immortal. Think of the money I’ll make by Google AdSense alone!

  The cavern entrance lies approximately 80 feet above the canyon floor. It is 60 feet from the canyon rim. Its diameter is 3 feet and its length about 12. It opens onto a subterranean chamber that is shaped as an oblate spheroid. (It makes me think of a womb, and the weirdest picture flashed through my mind of sundials drowning, that which is not dead . . .) The ceiling of the chamber is about 20 feet above me and glows with a soft turquoise light. The chamber slopes away from me; its floor lies 40 feet below. About 240 yards away from me are some buildings of stone.

  7:15 In the ruins:

  In the outer world I know the sun has gone down, the light of the cavern suffices. For a moment I worry that it may be from plutonium leaking from the storage pits at Pantex.

  We scooted on our butts along the side of the chamber. We weren’t thinking about how we would get out. We just wanted to get There.

  Connie sketches like mad, and Jerry and I have been running through this cave like fourteen-year-olds. He has shot pictures on his phone, but he can’t seem to get it to dial out. “Can you hear me now?” doesn’t apply to other worlds. All our bad feelings about ourselves and our little lives have vanished in the Cave of Wonders. Life seems real for the first time since Tascosa High School.

  The buildings are made from white-faced stone, similar to but not quite marble. They stand two stories tall. Apparently the stories were connected by wooden or rope ladders long since passed into dust. At my feet is the verdigris-covered helmet of a conquistador. Although we agreed not to disturb anything here, I’m going to put that helmet on my head as soon as I finish this entry. The most intact of the buildings is a circular tower-like affair. It has an opening in the floor that looks onto a red-litten chamber of about the same dimensions as the one we now occupy.

  Jerry and I are going to hike back to the jeep and get his rappelling gear and let ourselves down into the red-litten world below.

  Now something is wrong about this: the cave opens onto a big tourist area, the second deepest canyon in the
U.S. I have been down here all my life, and I hadn’t seen it before today. It should be full of beer cans and used condoms, not archaeological treasures. This is like one of the faery realms that vanish when you leave them. Maybe it will go away as soon as we leave it. I wonder as we walk away if the cave and Connie will disappear, and I discover that I don’t care. What have I done wrong in my life that I am surrounded by people I don’t really care about? Life has just been a dream for years, but the excitement that will come after our discovery will give me a real life. I will meet Oprah. When she came to Amarillo in ’98, I stood outside the Little Theatre just to see her.

  11:35 At the edge of the Red World:

  It is close to the Witching Hour, our Brigadoon is not Brigadoon. As we climbed down out to the jeep a single car passed by on the road. I wonder if they saw my conquistador helmet? It was way too small for my overnourished American head, and it was leaving a ring of green on my brow. Jerry had a little flashlight—I had always made fun of him carrying it, and now he was getting his verbal revenge.

  I wanted to yell at the car speeding down Park Road 1, “We found it! Behold the conquerors of Cibola! We are on the way to the Seven Cities of Gold! You didn’t find it!” But that would frighten most tourists away—besides, this is probably the only time when I’ll know something the rest of the world doesn’t know. The stars shone beautiful, bright, and close. I wonder how many people realize that the stars have different colors. I remembered the night that my Uncle James had shown me that Aldebaran was red.

  We lowered the yellow nylon rope, anchoring it on a stone projection. It is 30 feet long and just trails the packed caliche ground. The red chamber has less height but greater area than the blue one. I hope the glowing ceiling is the result of some sort of bioluminescence as opposed to radiation. I can’t mention that out loud. Connie reacts to the word “radiation” much as her famous ancestor did to “witchcraft.” A coin toss.