Lovecraft Country

by Matt Ruff

  Letitia came out of the lodge, fresh from the bath and dressed in a violet gown that would not have looked out of place at Cinderella’s ball.

  “Good Lord,” George said.

  “You like it?” Laughing with pleasure, Letitia did a twirl for them, sequins flaring in the morning sun that had broken through the mist.

  “It’s beautiful,” Atticus said. “But you didn’t pack that in your little suitcase, did you?”

  “No, silly, I found it in my room. And a dozen more like it. Didn’t you check your wardrobes?”

  “You found it,” George said. “And it fits?”

  “Like it was made for me.” She did another twirl.

  Atticus stood up. “I think we should take a walk down to the village.”

  “Really?” said George. “I was just thinking we should barricade ourselves in our rooms until Montrose gets back.”

  “I wouldn’t hold my breath on Pop coming back. I think we need to go look for him.”

  “You think he’s in the village?”

  “I don’t think he’s in Boston with Mr. Braithwhite, let’s put it that way.”

  “If they’re keeping him someplace, isn’t it more likely it’d be up here?”

  “Depends on your assumptions.” Atticus glanced up at the lodge’s third-floor windows, then back down at George, who was staring at him quizzically. “Call it a hunch,” he said.

  “All right,” said George. “I’ll play that. And if we do find him—”

  “We get the hell out of here and don’t look back.”

  George nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”

  “It’s a plan, all right,” Letitia said. “But you don’t really think it’s going to be that easy, do you?”

  Their car had already been moved, so they followed the drive to the end of the lodge’s west wing and around back to the garage, a long narrow shed with Dutch-doored stalls like a converted horse stable. Going down the line they found a panel truck, two dark-windowed Rolls-Royce sedans, and a vintage pearl-gray roadster.

  The Packard was in stall number five. Atticus retrieved the revolver from the glove compartment and checked that it was still loaded. Then he realized he had no good way to carry it; it was too big to slip in a trouser pocket without being conspicuous. “I need to go back upstairs and get a jacket,” he said.

  But Letitia held out a hand. “Give it here.” She made Atticus and George look away while she hid the gun, somehow, in the folds of her gown. When she was done she did another twirl for them, showing off.

  “We get out of this,” Atticus said to her, “you’re going to have to tell me some of those stories.”

  They returned to the front of the lodge and found a footpath leading down to the Ardham church. Descending, they encountered a group of villagers coming up: a man Atticus recognized as the goatherd, carrying a freshly skinned and dressed carcass over his shoulders; a woman holding a pair of plucked chickens and a basket of eggs; and two more men lugging sacks of root vegetables and other produce. Despite their burdens, they gave Atticus, George, and Letitia the right of way, stepping off the path and bowing their heads as the fisherman had done. “Morning,” said Atticus in passing, but none of the Ardhamites responded or even met his eye.

  The church and the other village buildings were arranged in a rough square at the end of the cottage road. Across from the church was a workshop, in front of which a man sat using a foot-operated grindstone to sharpen the blade of a scythe. The workman glanced up as Atticus and the others reached the bottom of the path, but quickly refocused his attention on his task. The mastiff chained up beside him was less circumspect: Upon noticing the strangers it jumped down from the workshop porch and would have kept coming if not for the chain.

  George eyed the dog warily. “So where do you want to look first?” he said. Before he finished asking the question, Letitia had the church door open.

  “Guess we start right here,” said Atticus.

  The church’s interior was one large room. An entry alcove, with a rope-pull hanging down from the steeple above, opened out into a nave whose rude wooden pews offered seating for about forty people. Tall narrow windows in the sides of the nave let in light through frosted glass, and an oil lamp with a rose glass vessel hung above the center aisle, its feeble flicker like the glow of a dying star. At the front of the nave the room narrowed again, the raised platform of the chancel holding neither altar nor pulpit, but only a wooden lectern on which a big book rested.

  On the wall above the lectern, a stained-glass window that was the church’s only real decoration showed a scene from the Garden of Eden. Atticus had started forward to get a better look when Letitia, a few steps ahead of him, let out a gasp and put a hand to her mouth—then laughed through her fingers.

  In the window, Adam and Eve embraced beneath a pink half-sun—a rising sun of ancient dawn. The scene, though familiar, was missing a few elements. The devil serpent was absent, and though the Garden’s trees and shrubs were brightly colored by the dawnlight, there was no forbidden fruit, Eve’s hands being otherwise occupied.

  And there were no fig leaves. Atticus stared, mouth open, never having encountered stained-glass pornography before.

  “Well,” said George, “they aren’t Baptists.”

  “No,” said Atticus. “They’re Adamites . . . whatever that is.” He went up to the lectern to see what kind of Bible it held, but his curiosity was frustrated: The big book was sealed with a hasp lock and chained to the lectern for good measure.

  They went back outside. The workman had gone into the shop and was hammering away at something, but the mastiff was still straining at the end of its chain.

  They continued to explore, their attention focusing next on a stone-and-mortar construction to the west of the church. The building was round, about ten feet high and thirty feet wide at its base, tapering slightly towards the top. High up on one side they could see the rusted remnants of an iron grille that at one time had covered a window; but the opening had been mortared shut. The iron-banded door was locked and so solid that when Atticus pounded his fist against it, it barely made a sound.

  “What do you think?” he said, looking at George and Letitia. “Too obvious?”

  “Can I help you folks?”

  The woman had flowing red hair and pale skin, and Atticus’s first thought was that she must be related to William. His second was that she looked a lot like the stained-glass Eve, only with clothes on: a long-sleeved cotton blouse, denim pants, and leather boots. A ring of keys in various sizes jangled against her hip as she came towards them.

  “Morning,” Atticus greeted her, smiling. “My name’s Atticus. This is George and Letitia. We’re staying up at the manor.”

  “Figured as much,” the woman said. She smiled too, but there was a hint of mockery to it. “I’m Dell.”

  “You the law around here, Dell?” She cocked her head at the question. Atticus pointed to her key ring and nodded at the stone building. “This is the jail, right?”

  “The jail?” Dell snorted. Stepping past him, she took the ring from her belt and used the largest of the keys to unlock the door. She hauled it open with both hands, then stood gesturing for Atticus to go in. “Mind the first step.”

  He had to duck his head to get through the doorway, and there was a drop, the stone floor a good eight inches below the threshold. The interior was cool and dry and full of smells savory and sweet. As his eyes adjusted, a severed limb appeared in front of him: a deer leg, dangling by a chain from a wooden beam. Other chains held other big pieces of meat, dried or smoked, some intact, some with large portions carved off.

  Moving away from the door, Atticus examined the bins along the walls, his nose often revealing the contents before his eyes did. He heard a pattering behind him. Letitia and George had come inside too, and Letitia was stamping her feet, checking for a cellar. But the floor seemed solid and Atticus saw no trapdoors.

  “Animals,” Dell said from the doorway.


  “What’s that?” said Atticus.

  “We get animals coming into the village, looking for food. Raccoons, foxes, bears now and then. Bears will come right through a cottage door if they’re hungry enough, but they can’t get in here.”

  “We heard there were grizzlies out in the woods,” Atticus said.

  “Grizzlies!” Dell snorted again. “No, no grizzlies, just black bears,” she said, adding lightly: “But the blacks are bad enough. They’re smart. Not smart smart—they’re beasts—but clever enough to cause mischief. And they’re persistent. We use dogs to drive them off, but sometimes they won’t quit, even after they’ve been hurt. Those ones do end up in here . . . after a fashion.” She nodded at one of the haunches of meat.

  While Atticus and the others contemplated the fate of the bear, Dell stepped back from the threshold and put a hand on the door. For an instant it seemed that she meant to shut them in, but she was only giving them room to come out.

  “Ready to move along?” she said.

  Dell escorted them to the sloping apple orchard west of the village, where they collected another silent bow from the beekeeper who tended the hives there. Dell described her own job in Ardham as that of “village warden,” a managerial role that included acting as liaison to the manor. She laughed at Atticus’s suggestion that she and William were related. “I’m not high and mighty enough to be in his family,” she said. Atticus wanted to ask about the church and Dell’s role in that, but struck again by her resemblance to the stained-glass Eve, he found himself unable to broach the subject, and she didn’t volunteer anything herself.

  From the orchard they went down to the river, where they startled the fisherman, then circled back to the village square. Atticus wanted to investigate the cottages as well, but didn’t want a chaperone, so he thanked Dell for the tour and made as if to go back up the footpath. Dell headed for the workshop, where the workman was still hammering noisily on something. As soon as she went inside, Atticus changed course, leading George and Letitia towards the cottage road.

  They didn’t get very far. The mastiff noticed their course correction and set up a furious barking. Atticus walked faster and didn’t look back. But then a pack of other dogs appeared ahead of them, running out from behind the nearest of the cottages. There were four of them: two medium-sized mongrels, a rat terrier, and an extra-large beast that looked like a cross between a wolfhound and a Great Dane. They didn’t attack. They moved into the middle of the road and waited there, panting, to see if Atticus and George and Letitia would come closer.

  The mastiff stopped barking and Atticus looked over his shoulder. Dell had come back out on the workshop porch and was standing with her arms crossed, her lips curved in an openly contemptuous smile. Not smart smart, he heard her say. We use dogs to drive them off.

  “Yeah,” Atticus said. “OK.”

  They went back up the hill. The dogs lost interest in them as soon as they turned back to the footpath, but looking down from the crest they could see the wolfhound-Dane mix and one of the other mongrels wandering along the cottage road like sharks patrolling the shore of an island.

  “So what do you think?” said Atticus.

  “The workshop’s got a stone foundation,” Letitia noted. “It’s the only building other than that storehouse that did.”

  “You think there’s a cellar?”

  She nodded. “And with that hammering, someone could be down there yelling and you wouldn’t hear it.”

  Atticus looked at George, who shrugged a shoulder. “If Montrose doesn’t show by tonight we could sneak back down after dinner,” he suggested. “Maybe bring some chops for those dogs.”

  “Maybe,” said Atticus, thinking of the two shotguns still in the Packard, but thinking, also, of a night patrol through a village outside Pyongyang, a supposedly straightforward search-and-rescue mission that had ended with four Negro soldiers dead. “Maybe we need to come at this another way.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Not sure yet. I’m still thinking it through.”

  “Well, if we go back inside,” George suggested, “we can think it through over some room service.”

  “Sure,” Atticus said. “Maybe I’ll do some reading, too.”

  Braithwhite’s other guests began arriving in mid-afternoon. Atticus, upstairs studying the by-laws of the Adamite Order of the Ancient Dawn, took a census of the lodge membership from his window: fourteen Caucasian men, ranging in age from fifty to at least seventy. They drove or were driven in expensive cars and limousines; half of the vehicles had Massachusetts license plates and the rest were from neighboring states, except for one late-arriving limo from the District of Columbia. All of the lodge members wore fat silver signet rings that marked them as initiates of the Order.

  Initiates: The red book referred to them as Dawn Seekers, Sons of Adam, and Antenauts, “Sojourners to the time Before” (as in, “Before the Fall,” though the Antenauts’ Fall, like the Ardhamites’ Eden, was different from the one Atticus had learned about in Sunday school). The book didn’t use the word “wizards,” but it was clear they were that too, or wished to be. Observing each man in turn, Atticus tried to deduce which if any of them had real magic powers; but evidently sorcerers, like Communists, were hard to identify by sight.

  At quarter past seven, not long after the last of Adam’s Sons had been ushered into the lodge, the phone rang. It was William, calling to see whether Atticus and his companions would be having dinner in the hall. “We planned to,” Atticus told him. “Is there a problem?”

  “Not at all, Mr. Turner,” William said. “Why don’t you make yourselves ready, and I’ll be up to collect you at eight o’clock.”

  From his wardrobe, Atticus selected a finely tailored black suit. It fit him perfectly, as did the shoes. George opted for a tux, and Letitia answered the knock on her door wearing an elegant white evening dress. Earlier, Letitia had announced her intention to smuggle the purple Cinderella gown out to the Packard, along with some other choice items from her wardrobe. “If we do end up making a run for it,” she’d said, “I don’t see why some of these nice clothes can’t come with us.” But from the expression on her face now, Atticus guessed the plan had encountered a snag.

  “What happened?” he asked. “William catch you sneaking out the back door?”

  “No, I got the dresses out to the car just fine,” Letitia said. “But there’s a problem.”

  Before she could elaborate, William appeared at the end of the hallway. “Good evening, Mr. Turner, Mr. Berry,” he said. “Miss Dandridge, you look lovely. I hope you’re enjoying your stay so far.”

  “It’s been an interesting day,” Atticus said. “But you know, you didn’t really have to come get us. We could have found our own way downstairs.”

  “I understand, sir. But if I may speak frankly, I’m afraid some of the lodge members can be a bit . . . brusque with strangers. Until you’ve been formally introduced, I thought it might be best if I escorted you.”

  “You don’t want them mistaking us for staff, is that it?”

  William smiled his smile. “Your table is waiting for you, Mr. Turner.”

  The Sons of Adam were all gathered downstairs in the foyer. Servants were circulating with trays of drinks and hors d’oeuvres, but some of the older lodge members were grumbling about the fact that they hadn’t already been seated in the dining hall. The Antenaut from D.C.—a doddering senior whom Atticus had nicknamed Preston Brooks for the way he brandished his cane—was proclaiming loudly to the room that he, at least, should not be kept standing around like some houseboy.

  Then Atticus entered the room and everyone got quiet. Unlike the villagers, the members of the lodge had no compunction about staring. Most of the stares were just curious—albeit to a degree that was rude—but Preston managed a triple take: his initial curiosity giving way, at the sight of George and Letitia, to confusion and then outraged bafflement. “Three?” he bellowed, hoisting his cane into the air
. “Why are there three?”

  “This way, Mr. Turner,” William said, simultaneously pretending not to see Preston and moving to shield Atticus from him. Letitia gave Preston a little wave as they breezed by him into the dining hall.

  William led them to a table beneath a red-and-silver banner bearing the half-sun symbol. The table’s position at the center of the hall and the zone of separation around it suggested a place of honor—or, perhaps, that they were being put on display. Two waiting servants pulled out chairs for George and Letitia, while William seated Atticus himself. The servants poured water and wine, and more servants brought a soup course from the kitchen.

  Meanwhile the Sons of Adam were led inside. They were seated in groups of two and three, except for Preston, who got a whole table to himself. A number of the lodge members continued staring at Atticus, until Letitia started making faces at them; after that they focused on the soup.

  The young man showed up during the salad course. He was white, in his early twenties, with brown hair, and a sharp-looking suit almost identical to the one Atticus was wearing. He made his way discreetly to the only remaining empty table, over in the corner near the kitchen entrance. The Antenauts paid scant attention to him, but the servants were a different story; within moments of sitting down he had both food and drink in front of him.

  The main course arrived. “If you’re hungry,” Atticus suggested, “you should eat up now.”

  “Why?” said George. “You planning on skipping out before dessert?”

  “I was thinking I might make a nuisance of myself,” Atticus told him. “We’ll see what develops from there.”

  Most of the other diners were still finishing their salads. Atticus waited until a group of Antenauts, Preston among them, were about to be served their main courses. Then he stood up.

  “Excuse me!” he called out, striking a spoon against his water glass. “Excuse me! Can I have everyone’s attention?”

  Instantly all eyes were upon him. Most of the Antenauts remained curious, but a few were visibly annoyed by the interruption of the meal service; Preston reached for his cane.