by Matt Ruff
“Is Aunt Hippolyta home?” Atticus asked, curious to take her measure as well.
“No,” said George. “She’s in Wyoming. There’s this new spa opened up near Yellowstone, run by Quakers if you can believe it. Supposedly open to everyone. She’s checking it out.” Early in their marriage, Hippolyta had volunteered herself as a scout for The Safe Negro Travel Guide, specializing in vacation resorts. Initially she and George had traveled together, but these days she most often went alone, leaving George home to care for their son. “She’ll be gone at least a week. But I know Horace will be glad to see you, once he wakes up.”
“Horace is still sleeping?” Atticus was surprised. “School year’s not over already, is it?”
“Not quite,” George said. “But today’s Saturday.” Laughing at Atticus’s reaction to this news: “Guess I don’t have to ask how your trip was.”
“No, you don’t.” He held out the book he’d carried like a broken bird from the car. “Here.”
“What’s this . . . Ah, Mr. Burroughs!”
“Souvenir from Japan,” Atticus said. “I found this bookstore outside the base in Gifu, guy had one shelf of books in English, almost all science fiction . . . I thought that might be a first edition, but now I think it’s just old.”
“Well-traveled,” George said. The book fell open to the bent pages; Atticus had done his best to flatten them, but the creasing was permanent.
“Yeah, it was in better shape when I bought it.”
“Hey, that’s OK,” George said. “Should still read just fine.” He smiled. “Come on, let’s put this in the place of honor.” He headed for the bedroom he and Hippolyta shared with their best books.
Atticus followed him partway, stopping outside the apartment’s other bedroom to look in on his cousin. Horace, twelve years old, lay on his back with his mouth open, his breath wheezy and labored. There was an issue of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet beside his pillow and more were scattered on the floor.
A short-legged easel desk faced the wall opposite the bed. A sheet of construction paper on the desk had been divided into panels containing scenes from an intergalactic adventure: Negroes in capes, wandering through a Buck Rogers landscape. Atticus studied it from the doorway, head tilted as he tried to pick up the thread of the story.
George came back down the hall. “He’s getting really good,” Atticus said, keeping his voice low.
“Yeah, he’s been trying to talk me into starting a comics line. I told him if he saves up enough of his own money, I might go in with him on a small print run . . . So, you hungry? Why don’t I get him up, call your father, and we all go out to breakfast together. You seen Montrose yet?”
“Not yet,” said Atticus. “And before I do, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“All right. Go make yourself comfortable, I’ll put coffee on.”
While George busied himself in the kitchen, Atticus went out to the front parlor, which in childhood had served him as both library and reading room. The bookshelves were divided into his and hers, Aunt Hippolyta’s interests running primarily to science and natural history, with a smattering of Jane Austen. George gave a nod to respectable literature but reserved his deepest passion and most of his shelf space for the genres of pulp: science fiction, fantasy, mysteries and detective stories, horror and weird tales.
Atticus’s shared devotion to these mostly white-authored genres had been a source of ongoing struggle with his father. George, as Montrose’s older brother, was largely immune to his scorn and could always tell him to keep his opinions to himself. Atticus didn’t have that privilege. If his father was in a mood to debate his tastes in reading, he had no choice but to oblige him.
There was usually plenty to argue about. Edgar Rice Burroughs, for example, offered a wealth of critical fodder with his Tarzan stories (was it even necessary to list all the problems Montrose had with Tarzan, starting with the very idea of him?), or his Barsoom series, whose protagonist John Carter had been a captain in the Army of Northern Virginia before becoming a Martian warlord. “A Confederate officer?” Atticus’s father had said, appalled. “That’s the hero?” When Atticus tried to suggest it wasn’t that bad since technically John Carter was an ex-Confederate, his father scoffed: “Ex-Confederate? What’s that, like an ex-Nazi? The man fought for slavery! You don’t get to put an ‘ex-’ in front of that!”
Montrose could have simply forbidden him to read such things. Atticus knew other sons whose fathers had done that, who’d thrown their comic books and Amazing Stories collections into the trash. But Montrose, with limited exceptions, didn’t believe in book-banning. He always insisted he just wanted Atticus to think about what he read, rather than imbibing it mindlessly, and Atticus, if he were being honest, had to admit that was a reasonable goal. But if it was fair to acknowledge his father’s good intentions, it also seemed fair to point out that his father was a belligerent man who enjoyed having cause to pick on him.
Uncle George wasn’t much help. “It’s not as if your father’s wrong,” he said one time when Atticus was complaining.
“But you love these stories!” Atticus said. “You love them as much as I do!”
“I do love them,” George agreed. “But stories are like people, Atticus. Loving them doesn’t make them perfect. You try to cherish their virtues and overlook their flaws. The flaws are still there, though.”
“But you don’t get mad. Not like Pop does.”
“No, that’s true, I don’t get mad. Not at stories. They do disappoint me sometimes.” He looked at the shelves. “Sometimes, they stab me in the heart.”
Standing in front of those same shelves now, Atticus reached for a book bearing the Arkham House imprint: The Outsider and Others, by H. P. Lovecraft.
Lovecraft was not an author Atticus would have expected to like. He wrote horror stories, which were more George’s thing, Atticus preferring adventures with happy or at least hopeful endings. But one day on a whim he’d decided to give Lovecraft a try, choosing at random a lengthy tale called “At the Mountains of Madness.”
The story concerned a scientific fossil-hunting expedition to Antarctica. While scouting for new dig sites, the scientists discovered a mountain range with peaks higher than Everest. In a plateau in the mountains lay a city, built millions of years ago by a race of aliens called the Elder Things, or Old Ones, who came to Earth from space during the Precambrian Era. Although the Old Ones had abandoned the city long ago, their former slaves, protoplasmic monsters called shoggoths, still roamed the tunnels beneath the ruins.
“Shiggoths?” Atticus’s father said, when Atticus made the mistake of telling him about this.
“Shoggoths,” Atticus corrected him.
“Uh-huh. And the master race, the Elder Klansmen—”
“Elder Things. Old Ones.”
“They’re fair-skinned, I bet. And the Shiggoths, they’re dark.”
“The Elder Things are barrel-shaped. They have wings.”
“But they’re white, right?”
“They’re gray.”
“Pale gray?”
After some additional teasing in this vein—and a more serious sidebar on Mr. Lovecraft’s willful misconceptions about evolution—Montrose let it go, or seemed to. But a few nights later he brought home a surprise.
Atticus’s mother was out with a friend that evening, and Atticus was alone in the apartment, reading “The Call of Cthulhu” and trying to ignore a strange gurgling in the kitchen sink. He was actually relieved when his father came home.
Montrose started in right away. “I stopped by the public library after work,” he said as he was hanging up his coat. “I did a little research on your friend Mr. Lovecraft.”
“Yeah?” Atticus said, without enthusiasm. He recognized the perverse mix of anger and glee in his father’s voice and knew that something he enjoyed was about to be irrevocably spoiled.
“Turns out he was a poet, too. No Langston Hughes, but still, it’s interesting .
. . Here.”
The typescript his father handed him was like a cheap parody of one of the arcane texts from Lovecraft’s stories: an amateur literary journal, produced on an ancient mimeograph and bound between stained sheets of cardboard. There was no title page, but a tag on the cover gave its origin as PROVIDENCE, 1912. How it had ended up in the Chicago public library system Atticus never knew, but given its existence he wasn’t surprised his father had managed to find it. Montrose had a nose for such things.
An index card from the library catalogue had been used as a bookmark in the journal. Atticus turned to the indicated page, and there it was, eight lines of comic verse by Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
The title of the poem was “On the Creation of Niggers.”
Sometimes, they stab me in the heart . . .
“Getting reacquainted with old friends?” George said, appearing with the coffee.
“Yeah.” Atticus slid the book back into its place and took the cup George offered him. “Thanks.” They sat, Atticus feeling a wave of exhaustion wash over him.
“So,” George said. “How was Florida?”
“Segregated,” Atticus replied, thinking as he said it that it wasn’t the right word, since you could apply it just as well to Chicago.
But George nodded. “Yeah, I didn’t think you’d like the South. Didn’t expect to see you back so soon, though. I figured you’d stick it out there at least through the end of the summer.”
“I figured that too,” Atticus said. “And I was thinking I might try California, next. But then I got this.” He showed George the letter from his father.
George recognized the handwriting on the envelope immediately. He nodded again. “Montrose asked me for your mailing address.”
“He tell you what he was planning to write me about?”
George laughed. “You kidding? He wouldn’t even admit he was going to write you. Just told me he thought he should have the address, ‘in case.’ It’s been like that since you left: He worries about you, wants to know everything I know, but Lord forbid he should say so. So he’ll slip it in, casual, when we’re talking about something else: ‘Oh, by the way, you hear anything about that boy?’”
“‘That boy.’” Atticus made a face.
“Hey, if he used your name it might sound like he cared. And even that much is an improvement. That first year you were in Korea, he wouldn’t even ask. He’d come over for dinner and wait for me to volunteer the information. And if I didn’t volunteer, he wouldn’t say anything, but he wouldn’t go home. He’d stay here till ten, eleven, midnight if that’s what it took, waiting for me to bring up the subject of you. Drove me crazy.” George shook his head. “So what did he write to you about?”
“Mom,” Atticus said. “He says he found out where her family came from.”
“He’s still obsessing on that? Huh.”
Atticus’s mother, Dora, had been the only child of an unmarried woman. Her father’s identity was a mystery and a taboo subject. Her mother, disowned by her family, had in turn seldom spoken of them, as a result of which Dora knew little of her maternal grandparents other than that they had lived in Brooklyn and came originally from somewhere in New England.
Montrose, who could trace his own roots back five generations, had sworn to find out more about Dora’s ancestry. At first, when he and Dora were courting, he had intended this as a sort of love offering, but by the time Atticus was born, it had become a purely selfish pursuit and one of a long list of things about which he and Dora fought.
Atticus could remember lying in his childhood bed, listening to the two of them argue. “How can you not want to know?” his father would say. “Who you come from is part of who you are. How do you just let that be stolen from you?”
“I know where the past leads,” his mother would reply. “It’s a sad place. Why would I want to know it better? Does knowing make you happy?”
“It ain’t about happy. It’s about being whole. You have a right to that. You have a duty to that.”
“But I don’t want it. Please, just let it go.”
Atticus was seventeen when his mother died. The day of the funeral, he’d found his father pawing through a box of his mother’s keepsakes. Montrose had pulled out a photograph of Dora’s grandparents—the only image of them she’d possessed—and removed it from its frame so he could read something written on the back. Some clue.
Atticus had snatched the photo from his startled father’s hands. “Let it go!” he’d shouted. “She said let it go!” Montrose, rearing back, had recovered quickly, his fury more than a match for his son’s. He’d struck Atticus hard enough to knock him to the floor, then stood over him, raging: “Don’t you ever tell me what to do. Ever.”
“Of course he’s still obsessing on it,” Atticus said now, in answer to George’s question. “But the thing I need to ask you—you say Pop drove you crazy. What I’m wondering is whether you think he might have finally done the same to himself.” He read aloud from the letter, struggling a bit with his father’s handwriting: “‘I know that, like your mother, you think you can forgive, forget, the past. You can’t. You cannot. The past is alive, a living, thing. You own, owe it. Now I have found something, about your mother’s . . . forebears. You have a sacred, a secret, legacy, a birthright which has been kept from you.’”
“Legacy?” George said. “Is he talking about an inheritance?”
“He doesn’t say exactly. But whatever it is, it has something to do with the place that Mom’s people supposedly came from. He says he needs me to come home, so we can go there, together, and claim what’s mine.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound crazy. Wishful thinking, maybe, but . . .”
“The crazy part isn’t the legacy. It’s the location. This place he wants me to go with him, it’s in Lovecraft Country.”
George shook his head, not understanding.
“Arkham,” Atticus said. “The letter says Mom’s ancestors come from Arkham, Massachusetts.” Arkham: home of the corpse reanimator Herbert West, and of Miskatonic University, which had sponsored the fossil-hunting expedition to the mountains of madness. “It is made up, right? I mean—”
“Oh, yeah,” George said. “Lovecraft based it on Salem, I think, but it’s not a real place . . . Let me see that letter.” Atticus handed it to him and George studied it, squinting and tilting his head side to side. “It’s a ‘d,’” he said finally.
“What?”
“It’s not Arkham, with a ‘k,’ it’s Ardham, with a ‘d.’”
Atticus got up and stared at the letter over George’s shoulder. “That’s a ‘d’?”
“Yeah.”
“No. A ‘b,’ maybe . . .”
“No, it’s a ‘d.’ Ardham, for sure.”
“Man.” Atticus sighed in frustration. “You know, for someone who talks so much about the importance of being educated, you’d think he’d learn to write clearly.”
“It’s not his fault,” George said. “Montrose is dyslexic.”
This was news to Atticus. “Since when?”
“Since ever. It’s why he had so much trouble in school. Well, one reason. Your grandpa Turner had the same problem.”
“Why didn’t I know this?”
“You mean, why didn’t Montrose ever tell you?” George laughed. “Figure it out.” He grabbed a road atlas from one of the bookshelves. After consulting the index in the back, he turned to the map of Massachusetts. “Yeah, here it is.”
Ardham, marked by a hollow dot signifying a settlement of no more than 250 people, was in the north-central part of the state, just below the New Hampshire border. An unnamed tributary of the Connecticut River looped south around it; the map showed no direct road access, though a state highway intersected the tributary nearby.
“Sorry,” George said, as Atticus frowned at the map. “Your dad hasn’t lost his mind. Maybe you should have called before you drove all this way.”
“No, it was about time for me to come home,”
Atticus said. “I guess I’d better go see him. Find out what this ‘birthright’ is all about.”
“Hold on a second . . .”
“What?”
“Devon County,” George said, tapping a finger on the map. “Devon County, Massachusetts, that rings a bell . . . Huh. I wonder. Maybe this Ardham is in Lovecraft Country after all . . .”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let’s go downstairs to the office. I need to check my files.”
George had begun publishing The Safe Negro Travel Guide as a means of advertising his travel agency’s services, and though the Guide had ultimately become profitable in its own right, the agency—now expanded to three locations—remained his primary business and source of income.
The agency would book trips and tickets for anyone, but specialized in helping middle-class Negroes negotiate with a travel industry that was at best reluctant to accept their patronage. Through his network of contacts and scouts, George kept up-to-date files not only on which hotels allowed Negro guests, but which air and cruise lines were most likely to honor their reservations. For those wishing to vacation abroad, the agency could recommend destinations that were relatively free of local race prejudice and, just as important, not overrun by white American tourists—for nothing was more frustrating than traveling thousands of miles only to encounter the same bigots you dealt with every day at home.
The files were stored in a back room. George flipped on the lights as they entered and reached for something atop a cabinet beside the door. “Check this out,” he said to Atticus.
It was a road atlas, the same edition as the one upstairs, only this copy had been extensively illustrated with brightly colored drawings. Atticus recognized Horace’s handiwork: Some of the boy’s first art experiments had involved sketching cartoons onto gas station maps. Horace really had gotten good at it, though, and as Atticus paged through the atlas, it dawned on him that what he was holding was a visual translation of The Safe Negro Travel Guide.