Lovecraft Country

by Matt Ruff

Nine-year-old Hippolyta stepped up. She started following her father to the roof of their Harlem apartment building and accompanying him on longer expeditions to the countryside. The latter took place about once a month: He’d borrow a car from a friend and they’d drive fifty miles upstate to a small farm owned by another friend, Mr. Hill, a Negro so light-skinned he was practically white. Arriving at the farmhouse after dark, they’d say hello to Mr. Hill and his wife, Gretchen, and then after a brief chat and maybe some pie, the Hills would go to bed and Hippolyta and her father would go out into the fields.

  There, away from the city’s lights, she got her first look at the true night sky. Her father would aim the telescope while Hippolyta consulted an ephemeris, calling out directions to whatever celestial object they had chosen as their quarry.

  Mars was her father’s favorite. He told her about Percival Lowell, a white man from Boston who’d become convinced that the lines he saw on Mars’s surface were canals. Lowell’s fellow astronomers had been skeptical, but he’d inspired more than a few science-fiction writers, and Hippolyta’s father’s sympathies lay with the writers. Unfortunately their little two-inch-aperture telescope wasn’t powerful enough for him to see the canals for himself. He’d stare at the featureless red disk it showed him and try to make lines appear through sheer force of will (which was maybe not so different from what Lowell had done), all the while speculating aloud about Martian stargazers who might be looking back at him.

  Hippolyta was more intrigued by Lowell’s other astronomical obsession. Mysterious disturbances in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune had led astronomers to posit the existence of a “trans-Neptunian body.” Lowell had searched for the so-called Planet X until his death, but it remained undiscovered.

  Hippolyta decided that she would find Planet X. Her father indulged her, letting her aim the telescope at random patches of sky like a fisherman casting for a minnow in a vast ocean. It was hopeless, of course. As she learned at the library, planet-hunting required specialized equipment: To track down Planet X, she’d need not just a bigger telescope, but one that could take photographs; and another device, called a blink comparator, that could flip between photos of the same star field taken on different nights, to reveal whether anything moved. Lacking the money to buy these things or the wherewithal to build them, Hippolyta’s only recourse was to become a professional astronomer, which she assumed was a reasonable goal. Compared to her brother’s intention to be the first Negro pitcher for the Yankees, it wasn’t even all that ambitious.

  In October the stock market crashed; by December her father’s friend had lost his job and sold his car, ending their trips upstate. Hippolyta continued to stargaze from the roof, but she often did so alone. Her father was having his own job troubles and had to hustle extra hours to make ends meet.

  And then, on March 14, 1930, the morning paper brought word that Clyde Tombaugh, a junior astronomer at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, had found Planet X. Hippolyta was torn between excitement and disappointment, but as the news sank in, the latter emotion predominated.

  Her father did what he could to console her. “Paper says they don’t have a name for it yet,” he pointed out. “I bet they’d be open to suggestions.”

  Hippolyta’s mother, making oatmeal at the stove, perked up at this. Never much given to flights of fancy, since the stock-market crash she’d been trying extra hard to inculcate a more practical outlook in her children. “Bernard,” she warned.

  Her husband ignored her. “You could write a letter to the observatory,” he told Hippolyta.

  Like any would-be discoverer, Hippolyta had of course given plenty of thought to what her planet’s name should be. In keeping with convention, it should be drawn from classical mythology; and it should connote darkness, and cold, and remoteness. After much consideration, she’d narrowed it down to two possibilities: Pluto, god of the underworld, and Persephone, his queen. She wanted to choose Persephone, because it seemed unfair that Venus should be the only girl planet. But the name was less suitable, otherwise. Persephone, born a nature goddess, had lived in warmth and light until Pluto raptured her down into Hades, and even then she spent only part of each year in the underworld. Whereas Pluto, like Planet X, resided always in darkness, and always had.

  Pluto, then. Pluto was the name.

  Hippolyta wanted to stay home from school to write her letter, but her mother wouldn’t hear of it. Instead she wrote it in class that day: three hundred words on why Planet X should be called Pluto. She begged an envelope from the school office and addressed it to MR. CLYDE TOMBAUGH, C/O THE LOWELL OBSERVATORY, FLAGSTAFF, ARIZONA.

  Her father was waiting for her outside the school after last bell. Before Hippolyta could ask why he wasn’t at work, he said: “Have you got it?” She nodded and showed him the letter. “We won’t tell your mother about this, all right?” She nodded again and took his hand, and they walked together to the post office.

  Two more months passed. Her father got a new job across the river in Hoboken, from which he returned home only on the weekends and sometimes not even then. Her mother remained in Harlem but started leaving the apartment earlier and coming home later. Apollo made Hippolyta’s breakfast and saw her off to school.

  They no longer got the morning paper, so Hippolyta was at the library when she first read the news that Planet X had been given its official name. When she saw what the name was, she let out a whoop that got her shushed by two librarians. But her elation was short-lived. The newspaper article gave credit for the name not to Hippolyta Green of Harlem, but to Venetia Burney of Oxford, England.

  Hippolyta was puzzled. She’d known other people would be writing to the observatory, and because Pluto was a logical name, it wasn’t surprising that someone else had thought of it too. But England? How had a letter sent from across the Atlantic Ocean reached Arizona before one mailed from New York City?

  Then, reading on, she understood. Venetia Burney wasn’t just any girl. Her great-uncle Henry Madan was the Eton College professor who’d named the moons of Mars, and her grandfather Falconer Madan was the former head of Oxford’s Bodleian Library. It was Falconer who’d arranged to have Venetia’s suggestion forwarded to the Lowell Observatory, by telegram.

  By telegram! So Hippolyta’s effort had been for nothing. Despite her haste, her letter had probably still been sitting in the Harlem post office when Venetia’s telegram—which she hadn’t even written herself!—had jumped to the head of the line.

  Hippolyta tried to focus on the one bit of good news: According to astronomers’ preliminary calculations, the existence of Pluto still did not fully account for the irregularities in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. Which meant there could be other trans-Neptunian bodies waiting to be discovered. Waiting to be named.

  She maintained her composure until late that evening, when her mother returned home from work. Hippolyta’s mother had forgotten all about Planet X, but Hippolyta still remembered her skepticism about the letter-writing idea, and the sudden thought of that, and of what her mother might say now—“What did you expect to happen?”—opened the floodgates. Hippolyta started bawling.

  Her mother, barely through the apartment door and not having spoken a word yet, looked over in alarm. “What?” she said. “What’s wrong?” For several minutes Hippolyta didn’t answer, only wept, while her mother held her and stroked her hair. Finally Hippolyta choked out a few words, between sobs: “I’m going. To find. The next one. I’m going to.”

  “All right, baby,” her mother said, still mystified. “You’ll find the next one. Of course you will.”

  Warlock Hill was located in the rugged expanse of forest and farmland between La Crosse and Madison, outside the village of Amesboro. Hippolyta passed through Amesboro around ten o’clock and found most of the villagers asleep. The only building with lights still on was one that, from the sign above the door, she took to be a white Freemasons’ temple.

  The turnoff for Warlock Hill was marked PRIVATE, the point un
derscored by a chain stretched across the access road. Beyond the chain the road was unplowed, but a walking path had been shoveled out of the snow.

  Hippolyta pulled her Roadmaster in beside the Chevrolet truck already parked there. She took the Survey and the keys, and reached into the glove box for a flashlight and the .38 George insisted she bring with her on her cross-country expeditions. She left Orithyia Blue on the passenger seat to mind the car.

  Outside, she stood looking up, savoring the moonless night. Rather than turn on the flashlight, she let her eyes adjust and then stepped over the chain and began to follow the path by the glow of the Milky Way.

  The road curved and she saw a wooden shack up ahead, spilling lamplight onto the snow. She kept walking, the crunch of her bootsteps masked by the sound of a nearby stream, until she could see in through the shack’s front window.

  There were two white men inside, sitting in chairs drawn up to a pot-bellied stove, while a kerosene lantern and an empty gin bottle shared the table in the corner behind them. The men didn’t look like astronomers. Farmers, maybe, recruited in this off-season to serve as night watchmen. Poor ones: both asleep, one with his head tilted so far back she could see nothing but beard stubble, the other hunched forward, chin on chest and eyes closed, on the verge of toppling face-first into the stove.

  Hippolyta decided not to disturb them. Just a quick look around, she told herself, fingering the keys in her pocket. In and out, while the country folk were abed, and then home to the city with no one the wiser.

  She started walking again before she could lose her nerve.

  The first time Hippolyta visited an observatory uninvited in the middle of the night was at Swarthmore College in 1938.

  She wasn’t a student. Even if there had been money for college, majoring in astronomy would not have been a practical option. For a while she tended a fantasy of becoming an astronomer without a college degree. Clyde Tombaugh had done that, winning his job at the Lowell Observatory on the strength of his amateur observations of Mars and Jupiter. But when she confided her ambition to a guide at the Hayden Planetarium, he dismissed it with four simple words: “You are a Negress,” he said.

  Hippolyta’s nine-year-old self wouldn’t have taken no for an answer, but with adolescence she’d undergone a drastic change. She’d sprouted up seemingly overnight, becoming a giantess as well as a Negress, and the increase in mass had brought a corresponding increase in inertia, a willingness to accept, often without protest, the limits placed upon her. Visiting relatives commented on how withdrawn Hippolyta had become, though they guessed wrong about the cause, her grandmothers and aunts muttering worriedly about boy trouble. Hippolyta in those days might have been game for some boy trouble—might have done something very stupid—but the boys she knew were intimidated by her size and either mocked or ignored her.

  One other side effect of her growth spurt was that she learned how to sew. What mechanical talent she had—talent that in another life might have been applied to grinding telescope lenses—was directed, in this one, to making clothes that would fit her. After Hippolyta finished high school, her mother sent her to Washington, D.C., to work in her uncle Jasper’s tailor shop.

  Jasper had a Ford Phaeton that he insisted Hippolyta learn to drive, so that she could run errands for him. At first she went along with this as she did with everything else, but once she got out on the open road, she realized driving was something she actually enjoyed, something she might even develop a passion for. In short order Hippolyta had her license, and after proving she could be trusted behind the wheel alone, she began prevailing on her uncle to lend her the car for personal use as well—which he agreed to do, provided she paid for her own gas. Hippolyta ended up spending a lot of money on gasoline.

  One February weekend she drove up to see her parents. Hippolyta’s father was still in Hoboken, working as a chauffeur for a man named Arnold Silberstein. Mr. Silberstein’s daughter Myrna had just started her second semester at Swarthmore, and there was a box of books she’d forgotten to take with her. Mr. Silberstein had been planning to have Mr. Green drive the box down, but on hearing that Hippolyta would soon be headed back south, he asked if she wouldn’t mind making the delivery instead.

  Hippolyta arrived at the campus well after dark. She’d left the books with the matron at Myrna’s dormitory and was walking back to the car when she spied the dome of Swarthmore’s Sproul Observatory. She changed course. At first she just meant to get a closer look at the outside of the building, but upon finding the entryway open and unguarded, she went inside. She climbed the stairs to the second floor and went down a hall to a door marked STELLAR OBSERVATION. From within came the sound of a motor and the rumble of the dome rotating.

  She was trying to work up the courage to knock when the door opened on its own. A gangly white boy in horn-rimmed glasses looked out, seeming bemused to find her there. “Delbert Shaughnessy?” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Delbert Shaughnessy,” the boy said. “Our new lab partner. You’re not him?”

  Hippolyta just stared, until the boy stopped grinning and blushed with embarrassment.

  “Sorry,” he said. “That was rude. I’m Tom. Tom Appleton.”

  “Hippolyta Green,” Hippolyta said.

  “Hello, Hippolyta. Are you here to see the telescope?”

  “I’d like to,” she said cautiously, not convinced he was done teasing her. “If . . . if it’s not against the rules.”

  “It probably is,” Tom Appleton said. “But I won’t tell if you won’t. You picked a good night for it,” he added, confiding: “We’re looking at Pluto.”

  In a heartbeat, she was nine years old again. “Pluto? Really?”

  “Looking for it, I should say. We’re having trouble finding it. That’s why I was hoping you were Delbert.”

  “Cancer,” Hippolyta told him. “Pluto is in Cancer.”

  “It’s supposed to be,” he agreed, and stepped back smiling. “Come in, please.” Looking over his shoulder at two other boys, he called out: “Arthur! Eugene! Good news! The cavalry is here!”

  Hippolyta would never forget that night, sifting the heavens for Pluto. The great difficulty in finding it lay in knowing that you had done so—knowing which of the faint points of light in the target star field was not a star but a world, a frozen orb reflecting the sun’s rays. It took multiple sessions with the blink comparator and some confused discussion with her new colleagues—“I’m pretty sure it’s that one.” “That one?” “No, that one.”—but in the end Hippolyta was able to look through the telescope and say, with confidence: “Hello, Planet X. Nice to finally meet you.”

  It was a magical moment, and in the comic-book version of Hippolyta’s life, it changed everything. Reality was different, of course: When, a month later, she contrived to return to Swarthmore, she found the doors of the observatory building locked, and before she could track down Tom Appleton (whose phone number she’d been too shy to ask for) she was stopped by a campus security guard, who threatened to have her arrested for trespassing.

  So that was that. Hippolyta went back to her uncle’s tailor shop, where she would work for several more years. And then came George, and Horace, and the rest of her life. She continued to look at the stars, most often through the windshield of a car, but it would be a long time before she saw Pluto again.

  Then, just a couple of years ago, she’d gone out to California on a research trip for The Safe Negro Travel Guide and found herself adrift in the foothills of the Palomar. The check-in clerk at the motel where she’d planned to spend the night said he had no room for her—he’d left the VACANCY light on by mistake. The clerk at the motel across the road professed a similar oversight. Hippolyta was debating whether to sleep in her car or just push on to San Diego when she saw a sign for the Palomar Observatory. Remembering Tom Appleton for the first time in ages, she got the crazy idea to drive up and see whether Palomar’s astronomers needed any help—and surprised herself by a
cting on it.

  Halfway up the mountain she encountered a stranded astrophysicist, Yervant Azarian, whose own car had developed carburetor trouble. He accepted Hippolyta’s offer of a ride and proceeded to test her bona fides, asking if she could name the eleven moons of Jupiter in the order they’d been discovered. Hippolyta replied that it was a trick question: A twelfth Jovian moon, still unnamed, had been discovered just months before by the Mount Wilson Observatory. Azarian was satisfied. He escorted Hippolyta into the dome where the world’s largest telescope was kept and allowed her a glimpse of that night’s quarry, Bode’s Nebula.

  Since then, Hippolyta had made a hobby, during her travels, of staging impromptu visits to other observatories she happened to be in the vicinity of. She wasn’t always welcomed—the guards at Mount Wilson had turned her away twice—but she hadn’t been arrested, and none of the astronomers she’d met had called her a Negress.

  She hadn’t been to the Lowell Observatory yet. She told herself she was saving it for a special occasion; really, she was building up her courage. And in the meantime, she’d begun cultivating another fantasy: That these observatory visits weren’t just whimsical sidetrips, but steps on a path, leading towards . . . well, she wasn’t sure, exactly. But something.

  A wanderer in darkness, she followed an eccentric orbit, each new disturbance angling her closer to some long-awaited rendezvous. She could only hope that when the moment came, she’d be wise enough to know it, and brave enough to act.

  A footbridge took her across the stream, and then she was climbing Warlock Hill. She had to use her flashlight here: Trees blocked the stars, and the fieldstones set into the hillside to serve as steps were slick and uneven. She counted sixty-four stones before emerging onto the hilltop, a flat round clearing with a dome at its center.

  A concrete dome. Hippolyta’s brow furrowed as the flashlight beam played over the structure. She could see no opening through which a telescope might be aimed, nor any means by which the dome could be rotated.