Lovecraft Country

by Matt Ruff

  “We were young and in love,” Winthrop said. “And to my way of thinking at the time, I wouldn’t have been doing her a favor to leave her in my father’s service. Pearl wanted to get away from that house as badly as I did. To see the world.” He smiled and Montrose bit back a caustic remark; from the kitchen, unnoticed by either of them, came the banging of pots.

  “We waited for a night when my father was out of town,” Winthrop continued. “We slipped out after supper, went to Dearborn Station, and bought tickets to Los Angeles. We made sure the ticket clerk would remember us. But we never boarded the train. Instead we went to a garage where my mother’s old car was stored. It hadn’t been driven in more than a decade, but she’d paid to keep it serviced. The keys were in the glove box.

  “We drove east. The first year we were in New York City. We were married there, and I became Henry Narrow. By the time Henry junior was born, we’d moved to Philadelphia. I got a job at a bookstore; Pearl worked as a nanny and taught Sunday school on the weekends. We had a good life there.”

  “Yeah?” Montrose said. “So what’d you come back to Illinois for?”

  “Pearl missed her mother,” Winthrop said. “Every Saturday in Philadelphia I’d get the previous Sunday’s Chicago Tribune and look for news of my father. But his obituary had already come and gone, so it was years before I found out he was dead. When I told Pearl, she wanted to go back and look for her mom. I didn’t think it was a good idea. Death, in my father’s case, wasn’t necessarily final, and even if he really was gone, he had friends and enemies who might still be looking for me, because of what I’d taken.

  “But Pearl missed her mother. Without telling me, she’d contacted some of her other relatives to see if they’d heard from her; none of them had, and she was worried. Eventually we agreed on a compromise: We’d go back to the Midwest and set up somewhere quiet where my father’s old associates wouldn’t find us, but close enough to Chicago that I could slip in and look for Pearl’s mother. Originally we planned to rent a place farther north, but on the way out from Philadelphia we stopped over in Paducah to visit one of Pearl’s cousins. She really seemed to enjoy the reunion, and while we were there I happened to see a listing for this house, just a short drive across the river. And we had the money, so I thought, why not?”

  “Why not?” Montrose said. “After what Mr. Landsdowne told you? What in God’s name were you thinking?”

  “I thought we were protected,” Winthrop said simply. “My mother’s last letter included instructions for two enchantments. One to confound pursuers when I was on the move. The other to be used on any house I chose to dwell in, to ward off those who would do me harm. They were the only spells I ever knew, but I didn’t really understand how they worked—and my mother didn’t know about Pearl. She assumed I’d be running on my own and that the main threat to me would be my father and men like him.”

  “Sorcerers,” said Montrose. “The ward on the house only protects against sorcerers?”

  “That would be my best guess,” Henry Winthrop said. “Even now I don’t know for sure. But my real failure of understanding was more fundamental. I made the same mistake my mother made: I asked for something without grasping the true nature of my request.

  “My father was my protector too, you see. He didn’t protect me the way your father protected you, out of love. He protected me incidentally, as a function of who and what he was. So long as I was under his roof, the only thing I had to fear was him. In seeking to free myself from him, I was also seeking to make myself vulnerable to the world, but I didn’t appreciate that. I thought free meant free to do as I pleased. I thought . . . I thought I had immunity.”

  “Every boy thinks that,” Montrose said. “But then you got out in the world, and her with you . . . You didn’t see it was otherwise?”

  Winthrop shook his head. “No one ever bothered us in Philadelphia. Oh, maybe now and then someone would say something rude—Pearl was much more sensitive to that than I was. But no one ever attacked us. I assumed my mother’s spell was working. I saw no reason it shouldn’t work just as well here.”

  “You were a goddamned fool, is what you were.”

  “Yes, I was a fool,” Henry Winthrop agreed. “That was the problem. I had charms to protect me against philosophers and wise men, but not against my own foolishness . . . or the hands of the simpleminded.”

  “Narrow!”

  The call came from outside, where night had fallen. A particular night. Montrose looking out the window saw three cars drawn up on the lawn and a dozen men milling in the headlights. A mob of simpletons, but armed. “Narrow!” their leader cried. “You and your two niggers come out here!” In the summer darkness across the street more people were gathered, spectators, women and children among them.

  One of the men on the lawn thumbed the wheel of a lighter and touched the resulting flame to a rag stuffed in the mouth of a gasoline-filled Coke bottle. Montrose watched the bottle come tumbling towards the window until at the last second the strength returned to his legs and he shoved back out of the way of the spray of window glass. The bottle flew across the room to dash against the foot of the hearth and the rug in front of the fireplace blazed up.

  Henry Winthrop, who hadn’t moved, sought Montrose’s gaze from across the table. His expression was mournful and self-pitying. “I didn’t know,” he said. “I swear I didn’t know.” Then a pistol cracked out in the night and Winthrop’s head snapped back; he slumped, lifeless, in his chair. Montrose stood up, kicking his own chair away, and put his back against the wall beside the window.

  The spreading fire had cut off the doorway to the kitchen and smoke from the burning rug was billowing across the ceiling. Montrose covered his mouth and nose with a handkerchief. He was preparing to leap the flames when he suddenly saw the woman and the boy standing side by side on the hearth, posed like corpses with their eyes closed and their arms crossed in front of them.

  More shots were fired from outside. Montrose ducked reflexively. When he recovered himself, the woman and the boy were gone, and in their place, standing directly in the fire, was a large, dark-skinned colored man. The man’s eyes were open and filled with a bitter rage almost as familiar to Montrose as his own.

  “Dad?” Montrose said, lowering the handkerchief. “Daddy?”

  Ulysses Turner moved his lips urgently, but whatever words passed between them were swallowed by the flames. Montrose leaned forward, straining to hear, but the heat held him back and so he stood there helpless and uncomprehending while the room filled with smoke and the sound of bullets launched by the hands of simple men.

  “Pop?”

  Atticus followed his father’s tracks in the snow to the back of the Narrow house and climbed up to the porch, stepping carefully over a gap in the boards. Two planks were nailed across the back doorway but the door had been forced open, so by crouching he was able to enter.

  “Pop?” he called, standing in the ruined kitchen.

  “In here.”

  The section of floor in front of the parlor fireplace had fallen in, as had the ceiling above it. By the light shining in through gaps in the boarded-up windows, Atticus could see his father on the far side of the room, sitting precariously in a chair that was missing one of its back legs. Montrose was hunched forward with his arms outstretched, gripping some sort of package.

  “Pop? How’d you get over there?” No answer. Atticus went back through the kitchen and found his way up a central hall to the parlor’s other entrance. Standing before his father, he saw that the package in Montrose’s hands was a set of notebooks, squared up and tied with heavy twine. The books were coated with ash but the twine looked clean and new.

  “What you got there, Pop?” Atticus said. “Is that—”

  Montrose stood up, sending the rickety chair toppling over backwards. “Nothing,” he said, looking his son in the eye with a furious urgency. “We found nothing. The Narrows are dead, their house is burnt, and we didn’t find a damn thing. Th
at’s what we’re going to tell Braithwhite. And that’s what we’re going to believe, so if he looks inside our heads he doesn’t see different. You understand me? You listening?”

  “Yeah, Pop, I get it.”

  “You’d better,” Montrose said, and he sighed, wearily, feeling the weight of every one of his Jim Crow years . . . but still, feeling. “We need to go now,” he said. “This is a place for the dead, and we don’t belong here.” He hugged the notebooks to his chest. “Not yet.”

  HORACE AND THE DEVIL DOLL

  The specimen, as West repeatedly observed, had a splendid nervous system.

  —H. P. Lovecraft, “Herbert West—Reanimator”

  “The lady sounded like she was possessed,” Neville said. “Like that time on The Mysterious Traveler, when the demon took control of the archaeologist’s girlfriend, the way her voice changed? It was just like that, except she used words you can’t say on the radio.”

  His grandpa Nelson down in Biloxi had turned fifty-five, he explained. The family was going to call to wish him happy birthday in the evening after the rates went down. But then during dinner Neville’s sister Octavia broke a glass and cut her foot. Neville’s parents took Octavia to the emergency room, leaving Neville home to watch his other sister. Neville got it into his head to call Grandpa on his own, to let him know they hadn’t forgotten him. It was a foolish thing to do—his father would be mad about having to pay for two calls, even at the lower rate—but Neville had never placed a long-distance call before, and having just turned thirteen himself, he was anxious to start doing adult things.

  So he picked up the telephone and got connected to the operator in Biloxi. This is Neville Porter calling person-to-person for Mr. Porter, Neville said. The operator, a white woman who sounded old and was perhaps hard of hearing, said, What’s the name of the party you wish to speak to? Mr. Porter, Neville repeated. His first name, said the operator. It’s OK, Neville told her, it’s a private house. There’s only one Mr. Porter there.

  Which is when the demon came out.

  Now you listen to me good, you goddamned pickaninny, the demon said. If you think I’m going to call a nigger “Mister,” you’ve got another think coming. What’s his name? N-N-Nelson, Neville said. The demon mocked his stammer, then made him apologize and address her as “ma’am” before finally putting the call through. By then, Neville didn’t even want to talk to his grandpa anymore. Didn’t want to talk to anybody.

  “Why didn’t you just hang up?” Curtis asked. “On the operator, I mean, not your grandpa.”

  “I couldn’t,” said Neville. “It would have been disrespectful.”

  “So? She was disrespectful to you. And what’s she going to do about it anyway, from a thousand miles away?”

  “She’s not a thousand miles from my grandpa. What if she really got mad and talked to the other operators down there? You think he’d ever get a phone call again?”

  Curtis reared back in outrage. “They can’t do that!”

  “It’s Mississippi, stupid,” Neville said. “They can do whatever they like.”

  Horace, walking beside them, nodded his head in agreement. “My dad was telling me about this one town down South? One year, the Negroes started up a drive to get people to vote, so the highway department shut down all the roads between the colored section and the courthouse. Cutting off someone’s phone would be nothing compared to that.”

  “Well, I’d sue if they cut off my phone,” said Curtis, whose father was a personal injury lawyer.

  “Sue?” Neville said. “You think you could sue? My God, how ignorant are you?”

  “You can always sue!” Curtis insisted.

  “Not in Mississippi, you can’t. The law’s not for colored people, not down there . . . Sue!” Neville shook his head in disgust. “Wind up hanging from a telephone pole, most likely.”

  “Well you don’t have to sound so happy about it!” Curtis said.

  “I’m not happy, I’m wise,” Neville replied. “You should try it some time.”

  In the distance now they could see a bright yellow awning that marked their destination, White City Comics Emporium. Neville, continuing to shake his head and muttering “Sue!” sped up, running to catch two other boys who were making the same after-school pilgrimage.

  Horace stayed with Curtis. “Don’t let Neville make you feel bad,” he said. “I hear these kind of stories all the time from my dad, and I know they’re true, but some of them are so crazy, it’s like I don’t even want to believe it . . . You know Joe Bartholomew?”

  “Pirate Joe?” Curtis nodded. “Sure.”

  “You know he lost his eye in a car accident when he was little. Lost his mom, too. And my dad, he told me Mrs. Bartholomew probably didn’t have to die, but the hospital where they lived in Alabama wouldn’t treat colored people. They had to call an ambulance from another hospital, like seventy miles away, and by the time it got there it was too late.”

  “For real?” Curtis said. “I mean, I know it’s all segregated and everything, but, even if you’re dying?”

  “That’s what I asked my dad,” Horace said. “You know, did they at least try calling the white hospital, just to see if they’d make an exception? Pirate Joe’s mom was a schoolteacher, so I thought, maybe . . . But my dad said Jim Crow doesn’t work like that.”

  “Man.” Curtis fingered his coat above his appendix scar. “You ever been, yourself?”

  “Down South? No, never yet.”

  “That’s kind of funny, in a way. Your dad being a travel agent and all.”

  “A safe travel agent,” Horace reminded him. “I tried to go. A couple years back, my dad went down to Atlanta on business, and I asked to come along, but my mom said no.”

  “She was probably worried about what would happen if you got in a car wreck. Or if your asthma acted up.”

  “One day I’ll go,” Horace said. “Before I move to New York and start working in comics, I want to see the South for myself. You could come with me if you like.”

  “Meet Jim Crow face to face? No thanks. I think I’d rather stay home and be ignorant.”

  “Hey! Hey you kids!”

  The call, raspy and low, came from a boarded-up storefront they’d just passed. A white man stood grinning in the open doorway; he wore a rumpled suit and sported a five o’clock shadow, like a businessman who’d started to go feral. “You kids want to make some money?” he said. “One of you come here a second, I’ll give you a dollar.”

  “A dollar for what?” said Curtis.

  “I want to rub your head.”

  “What!?” Horace squawked.

  “Just come here and let me rub your head.” The man held up his right hand, curled loosely into a fist, and shook it; they heard the rattle of dice. “For luck.”

  Neville, who hadn’t abandoned them after all, came rushing back. “Be wise,” he hissed, pulling Horace and Curtis away. “Don’t stop.”

  “You’re really not coming in?” Neville said.

  “I can’t,” Horace said. “I promised my dad.”

  Looking through the front window of the Comics Emporium he could see that Mr. D’Angelo was back minding the store. A week ago when Horace had come here with Reginald Oxbow, Mr. D’Angelo had been out sick, and the substitute clerk had stared at them the whole time they were in the store. Then, when they’d come up to the cash register to make their purchases, he’d made them take their coats off to prove they weren’t shoplifting.

  That evening Horace’s uncle had come over, and during dinner Horace mentioned what the clerk had done. Uncle Montrose was incensed: “You still bought comics from this guy after he treated you that way?”

  “Well, yeah,” Horace said, then tried to explain that since the clerk didn’t own the store, they weren’t really buying from him. But the distinction was lost on Uncle Montrose, who shot Horace’s father a look that said, What are you teaching this boy?

  So now the shop was off-limits until his father found time to com
e down and have a talk with Mr. D’Angelo about his employee. Horace knew it could have been worse: Uncle Montrose would have skipped the talk and gone straight to a permanent boycott.

  “If you could go in,” Curtis asked him, “you know what you’d want to get?”

  Horace shrugged. “I was thinking the new Superboy.”

  “I was thinking about getting that too,” Curtis said nodding. “Anything else?”

  “Mostly I just wanted to look around, you know, see what came in this week.”

  “Watch us through the window, then. If I see anything good, I’ll hold it up.”

  Neville and Curtis went inside, and Horace stood by the window, stamping his feet to keep warm. He hadn’t been standing there long when he heard someone come up behind him. Thinking it might be the dice man, Horace raised a protective hand to his scalp, but when he turned around, there were two white men there, both clean-shaven. The one on the left opened his coat to show the police star on his vest. “Horace Berry?” he said. “I’m Detective Noble, and my partner here is Detective Burke. We have some questions for you.”

  They took him to a diner down the street. Dismissing the waitress with a flash of their police stars, the detectives sat Horace in a U-shaped booth and crowded in beside him, Detective Noble on his left and Detective Burke on his right, close enough that he couldn’t move without bumping into one of them yet far enough apart that he had to constantly swivel his head to maintain eye contact with whichever of them was speaking. Adding to his discomfort was a customer with a cigar who was sitting at the counter directly across from the booth. When Horace noticed the cloud of smoke rising above this man’s head, he felt his lungs start to clench up and knew that to avoid an asthma attack he’d need to breathe slowly and keep calm. Difficult under the circumstances.

  “So, Horace,” Detective Noble began, “the reason we wanted to talk to you—”

  “—is because we think you can help us with an investigation,” Detective Burke said.