Lovecraft Country

by Matt Ruff

  Horace.

  He looked up, thinking Rollo had spoken to him. But Rollo was at the front counter, talking to a customer on the phone, and there wasn’t anyone else in the store right now. Horace looked back down at his sketchbook.

  And looked up again. This time it wasn’t a sound, but a feeling—the uncomfortable sense of being stared at.

  A high shelf on the wall opposite him held rags, brushes, and a variety of cleaning products, including a canister of Old Carolina Metal Polish that Rollo used to shine the cash register. The canister was illustrated with a drawing of a Negro butler, a lesser sibling of Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima whom Horace had dubbed Cousin Otis. There was something wrong about Otis, something vaguely sinister in the geometry of his face that suggested, to Horace at least, that behind his servile grin he was plotting to do away with the family whose silverware he cleaned. Horace had used a sketch of Otis as the basis for Iago, the homicidal android bellhop from Orithyia Blue #9.

  Today Otis seemed to have a bit more life in his eyes, and his gaze, ordinarily focused on the sparkling teapot in his hands, was directed outward, so that the weight of his grinning malice fell on Horace.

  Ridiculous. But once the thought was in Horace’s head he couldn’t get it out: Otis was eyeballing him.

  Horace turned his chair around and scooted it back beneath the overhang of the shelf. He resettled the sketchbook on his lap and tried, again, to concentrate.

  He’d just gotten an idea and was touching pencil to paper when he heard a soft scraping on the shelf above him. A trickle of dust sifted down onto the sketchbook, speckling the page. Horace stared at the specks while his scalp crawled with imaginary dust mites. Then the scraping came again, louder. Horace tilted his head back, lifting a hand to shield his eyes, and a bottle of drain cleaner hit him in the chest.

  He jumped out of the chair, dropping his sketchbook and pencil on the floor, and flattened himself against the far wall. Up on the shelf, Cousin Otis’s canister remained exactly where it had been—though Otis’s grin seemed just a bit wider, as if to say, What’s got into you, boy?

  “Horace!” Rollo called. “You’re up!”

  Outside in the cold, the itch in his scalp turned to an icy prickling that generated waves of free-floating paranoia. As Horace lugged his delivery basket down streets stained pink by the lowering winter sun, he found his anxiety fixating on seemingly random objects, like a playground seesaw whose lengthening shadow resembled that of an emaciated and headless giant.

  Rollo had given him four deliveries to make, the last of which was to Mrs. Vandenhoek, a ninety-year-old Dutchwoman who’d been in Washington Park since back when it was still a mostly white neighborhood. She lived alone in a house surrounded by brick tenements. Delivering to her was an exercise in patience. She seemed to spend most of her time upstairs, and when you rang the buzzer, she’d throw up a window and peer out, not speaking, just squinting suspiciously, like a nearsighted castle guard deciding whether to lower the drawbridge. Eventually she’d come down and unlock what sounded like half a dozen deadbolts on the front door. She never brought money with her on the first trip, and no matter the weather she wouldn’t let you in the house. Instead, she’d make you wait outside while she put her groceries away and went to whatever remote hiding place she kept her cash in (Horace imagined a cellar vault, three or four levels down, guarded by Dutch-speaking trolls). After you’d had a chance to reflect on the fleeting nature of youth, she’d return to the door, opening it this time with the chain on, and hand you what she owed for the groceries, plus a dime tip.

  Today, conscious of the rapidly approaching sunset, Horace broke protocol and asked Mrs. Vandenhoek if she’d like him to bring her groceries inside for her. She gave him one of her squinty-eyed looks, like he’d offered to come in and cut her throat, and then carried on as she always did. As she headed for the vault, Horace put down his basket and turned nervously in place, scratching his head, until his anxiety found a new target to seize on: Mrs. Vandenhoek’s Christmas display.

  The display, which appeared in Mrs. Vandenhoek’s yard in late November and typically remained out all winter, consisted of a wooden manger scene, warped by time and weather, and a knee-high statuette of the Dutch Santa, Sinterklaas, who rode a white horse and had a hat shaped like the pope’s. In between Sinterklaas and the manger was a second statuette that could have been mistaken for a lawn jockey in Renaissance garb. This was Black Pete, the dark-skinned elf who worked as Sinterklaas’s enforcer, spying on and punishing bad children.

  Horace had learned about Black Pete not from Mrs. Vandenhoek but from Rollo, who’d served in World War II and had traveled around Europe after the fighting ended. In December 1945 he’d been in Amsterdam, and had awakened one morning to find the streets swarming with men in blackface. “They were hitching rides on military jeeps,” Rollo said, “so it’s like the Army of Minstrelsy invaded.”

  Mrs. Vandenhoek’s Black Pete looked like an actual Negro, not a minstrel player, but he also, Horace noted now, looked a lot like Cousin Otis, around the eyes and mouth at least. After trying and failing to unsee the resemblance, Horace shifted position until his view of Black Pete’s face was eclipsed by the head of Sinterklaas’s horse.

  A minute passed. Horace stamped his feet and blew into his hands and scratched his head and wished Mrs. Vandenhoek would hurry up.

  Then he felt eyes on him again. He looked at the Christmas display and saw that Black Pete had come out from behind the horse. Horace tried to convince himself that he was the one who had moved, but the problem with that was that Pete hadn’t just shifted back into view, he’d also turned, so that instead of facing the street as he normally did he was now staring—and grinning—directly at Horace.

  The sudden blare of a car horn made Horace look away. It was only for a second, but when he looked back, Black Pete wasn’t there anymore.

  The prickling on his scalp crept down to the back of his neck. He started to turn around, and something that felt very much like a tiny leg hooked him behind the ankle; he toppled over backwards and sprawled, shrieking, on Mrs. Vandenhoek’s front walk. The front door of the house popped open and there stood Mrs. Vandenhoek, squinting angrily, her fist clenched tight around the grocery money and the dime tip that, Horace strongly suspected, he wasn’t going to get now.

  As for Black Pete, he was back beside Sinterklaas, his face all innocence except for the faint hint of a smirk that only Horace’s eyes could see.

  On Saturday, Curtis and Neville brought the devil doll to the church.

  The Mount Zion Church had been a synagogue before the neighborhood changed, and before that it had been a meetinghouse for some austere denomination of white Protestants. The building lacked a steeple but it did have an attic, accessible through a steep, narrow stairway behind the altar. Too low-ceilinged to be useful for anything but storage, for years the attic had been abandoned altogether, until Reggie Oxbow prevailed upon his father to let him turn it into a clubhouse.

  The attic was Reggie’s personal fiefdom, but his lordship came at a price: He was expected to look after his little sister, June, whom everyone called Bug. Bug and her friends were allotted a small portion of the attic near the stairs, while the rest of the space was reserved exclusively for Reggie and his friends.

  They played a lot of games up there. Mrs. Oxbow ran the charity shop in the church basement, and Reggie and Bug got first crack at any toy donations. Reggie had amassed an impressive collection of used board games. The boys made up games, too, scrounging pieces from duplicate Monopoly sets.

  For the past few weeks they’d been obsessed with a game they called Kreeg. Kreeg was short for Das Kriegsspiel, “The War Game.” Horace had found the manual in a box of foreign-language books at Thurber Lang’s bookstore. The text was in German, but from the illustrations he’d deduced that this was a set of rules for reenacting the campaigns of Napoleon with dice and tin soldiers.

  Horace had enlisted Rollo, who still had some German
from his own time at war, for help with the translation. He took the translated rules to Reggie, who was initially cool to the idea, saying, without irony, that he wasn’t interested in playing Napoleon. It was Curtis who’d turned Reggie around, by pointing out that they could keep the bones of the rules intact while changing the game’s subject matter. And so the war horses and ships of Europe became thoats and fliers of Barsoom, and the Continental Powers became various races of Martian; and Kreeg was born. Their first game had the Red Martians under John Carter defending the twin cities of Greater and Lesser Helium against a combined force of Green, Yellow, and Black Martians. It was a lopsided battle, but it was also a big hit, especially with Reggie, whose Green Martians spearheaded a crushing victory over Neville’s Reds.

  That Saturday when Reggie and Horace came up the stairs to the attic, they found Neville and Curtis putting the finishing touches on a new scenario. Set up on and around the cardboard boxes they used to represent the Martian terrain was a combined force of plastic army men, toy vehicles, chess pieces, checkers, and Monopoly and Parcheesi tokens. Ordinarily these would have been broken out into separate, opposing battle groups, but today they were united against a singular foe, an ugly black doll that Horace had never seen before.

  “What the heck is that?” Reggie said.

  Behind him, Bug looked up from a solitaire game of Chutes and Ladders and intoned solemnly: “It’s the devil.”

  According to the box in which it had come (and on which it now stood, like a splay-toed statue on its pedestal) it was a Fully Poseable African Pygmy Devil Doll: a midget witch doctor, eighteen inches in height, its oversized head accounting for at least a third of that. The doll’s hair was woven into short braids weighted with bits of bone, and another, larger bone was shoved sideways through its nose. Its eyes were deep-set under woolly brows, and its mouth was open in a thick-lipped, toothy leer from which a sharp red tongue protruded. Its bare arms and chest were covered in ritual tribal scars. A miniature skull hung on a thong around its neck, and another capped the medicine stick it wielded; and dangling like a pocket watch from the belt of its grass skirt was a tiny shrunken head.

  It was hideous to the point of being comical, but in the manner of a clown, that might not be so funny after dark. Indeed, Horace’s first thought on seeing it was to imagine what it would be like to find the doll hiding under his bed or lurking in a closet; probably not funny at all, in that circumstance.

  “Isn’t it cool?” Neville said. “I dug it out of a trash bin behind the thrift store near my house. Didn’t cost me a nickel.”

  “What’d you bring it here for?” Reggie said. “You forget this is a house of God?”

  Neville rolled his eyes. “Church is downstairs,” he said.

  “Besides,” added Curtis, “this isn’t really a devil. It’s a robot.”

  “A what, now?”

  “A robot,” Neville said. “Built by Ras Thavas”—the mad Red Martian scientist—“to fool the Green Martians. It’s made up to look like a giant Martian tribal spirit, but Tars Tarkas figures out it’s really a machine, and he gets John Carter to round up all the other Martians to go fight it.”

  “It’s got 350 battle points,” Curtis explained. “So it’s real hard to kill. And it’s got all kinds of special weapons—”

  “—like disintegrator rays out its eyes,” said Neville. “And a death stomp.”

  “What are you talking about?” Reggie said.

  “It’s a battle,” Curtis said. “A new one. We made it up.”

  “No, no, no . . . We’re not doing any new battle today, especially not with some devil doll. We’re doing the Siege of Helium.”

  “We’ve done that one. Like a million times.”

  “Yeah, because it’s fun.”

  “Fun for you, maybe,” said Neville. “I’m sick of it.”

  “Yeah, Reggie,” Curtis said. “Let’s try this today. It’ll be good, you’ll see.”

  “Nah. No way.” Reggie stepped onto the battlefield, scattering Martian infantry with his own version of the death stomp. “Let’s get this set up for Helium. And get that devil doll out of here.”

  “Uh-uh,” said Neville, and then he and Reggie were bumping chests and yelling while Curtis tried to separate them. Ordinarily Horace would have been in the middle too, but not this time. He was too busy staring at the devil doll.

  Neville had nudged the devil doll’s box in passing and the doll had tottered and nearly fallen over. It didn’t just not fall, though; it caught itself, ankles and knees flexing beneath the grass skirt to bring it back into balance. As the boys shouted at each other, the doll swiveled its big head around to glare at Neville’s back, and raised its medicine stick as if to hex him.

  “Hey guys,” Horace tried to say, “the devil doll’s moving,” but what came out of his mouth was a wordless wheeze. The doll heard him, though, and swung its head back his way. As it locked gazes with him, he saw what looked like sparks dancing around its eyes, precursor to a disintegrator blast, perhaps; and then his scalp was burning again, worse than ever, and his lungs were burning too.

  Curtis was the first to notice his desperate whoops for breath. “Horace?” he said, while Horace clutched at the roof beam above his head and with his other hand tried to point, thinking, Look, look, look at the doll . . . But none of them would look, except maybe Bug, who he thought he heard gasp right before he passed out.

  Then the devil doll wagged its medicine stick and its eyes flashed. Horace’s own eyes rolled up in his head and he swooned, crushing armies beneath him as he fell.

  He woke up in a hospital bed. It was dark outside the window and the only light on in the room was a small bedside reading lamp. Horace, at first seeing only the dim ceiling above him, feared he was back in the supermarket with the heads. He sat up gasping.

  “Easy,” his father said. He leaned over from his chair beside the bed and squeezed Horace’s shoulder. “How you feeling?”

  “Weird.” His lungs felt raw, but he touched the top of his head, as if the true discomfort were there. “What happened?”

  “You choked up and nearly stopped breathing,” George said. “Reverend Oxbow decided not to wait for an ambulance. He threw you in his car and got you to the emergency room double quick.”

  Horace nodded, flashes of memory coming to him now: of being carried semiconscious through the cold; of concerned faces leaning over him; of a needle going into his arm and a mask being placed over his face. Then he remembered the devil doll.

  “Horace?” his father said, alarmed by the expression on his face. “Horace, you OK?” He reached for the buzzer to call the nurse.

  “I’m all right!” Horace said. “I’m sorry . . . I just . . . I’m OK.”

  “You sure?”

  Horace made himself nod. Then he asked: “Where’s Mom?”

  “On her way to New York.”

  “Already?” He started to get agitated again. “I thought she wasn’t leaving till tonight.”

  “She wasn’t. But this morning we had another conversation, about whether the Grand Boulevard office really needed to be open today . . . She’d been gone about an hour when the Reverend called me.”

  “Did she take the drawing I made for her?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t pay attention to her packing.”

  “We should go home,” Horace said. “We should be there in case she calls.”

  “Whoah!” George put a hand on Horace’s shoulder again. “Doctor wants you to stay here overnight, just in case.”

  “But if Mom tries to call us . . .”

  “She’s not going to call tonight. You know your mother: It’s when the phone does ring that you got to worry. She’ll check in tomorrow sometime, and you’ll be home by then.”

  Someone went running by in the hall outside. Horace turned his head at the sound. “You’re staying here with me tonight, right?”

  “Yeah, of course . . . Horace? You sure you’re OK?”

  “I
’m fine,” Horace said, continuing to stare into the hallway. “I’m just tired.”

  He went home in the morning. Curtis and Neville came by to see him after church. They brought a get-well card from the Oxbows and a bag of Mrs. Oxbow’s ginger cookies. “Reggie would have come over too,” Curtis said, “but he’s grounded.”

  “Grounded for what?” Horace asked.

  “He hit Bug and knocked her down the stairs,” Neville said. “She’s OK, just a little bruised up, but the Reverend was not happy.”

  “What did Reggie do that for?”

  “Bug wrecked the clubhouse,” Curtis explained. “Neville and I took a look, and we could see why Reggie was mad: It’s like she went crazy up there. All the games dumped out on the floor, kicked around and stomped on. She even busted out one of the windows.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Bug,” Horace said.

  “Yeah, she says she didn’t do it. Or any of her friends, either. But who else?”

  “Of course, Bug might not have done all of it herself,” Neville added.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The devil doll,” Curtis said. “It’s gone. Reggie says Bug stole it.”

  “But that’s not what happened,” said Neville. “Reggie just didn’t want to play that battle. He must have got rid of the doll after we left yesterday, then decided to blame it on Bug after what she did.”

  They stayed for an hour. Horace spent the rest of the day reading and from time to time getting up to stare out the front window at the street below.

  That night his mother called from New York. Her trip had been uneventful. She had taken the comic that Horace had made for her, though she hadn’t looked at it yet—but she’d read it on her way home, she promised. She felt guilty for not being there when Horace was sick, and said she was thinking of cutting her trip short. Horace was torn on that, part of him wanting her to come home right away, another part wanting her to stay where she was safe. “I’m OK,” he told her. “Don’t worry about me.”