Lovecraft was quite put off, though the poet’s quick slide to oblivion had spared him a dilemma. He would have had to rise in order to present himself, and thus awaken the cat. Lovecraft insisted upon precise formality of address; it was part of his pose as an eighteenth-century gentleman sadly born into the Jazz Age. He was a fanatic teetotaler, and Crane’s stuporous condition filled him with disgust.
When Loveman and two companions returned a half hour later the cat had awakened and Lovecraft set it gently on the floor, rose, and walked to the door. He paused and pointed a finger at Crane, at the ungainly form overpowered with gin and rumpled by the attentions of sailors. “Sir,” he said to Loveman, “your friend is a degenerate.”
The effect of this melodramatic sentence was marred by the quality of Lovecraft’s voice, a tremulous squeak. Loveman giggled. “Then I’m a degenerate too, HPL,” he said. “Maybe we all are. Maybe that’s why no one takes us seriously.”
Lovecraft’s reply was a toss of his unhandsome head. He closed the door and walked out into the night, walked the seventeen blocks to the YMCA, to his cheerless room and narrow bed. He undressed and, after carefully laying his pants between the mattress and springs for pressing, fell asleep and began to dream his familiar dreams of vertiginous geometries and cyclopean half-gods, vivid dreams which would have been anyone else’s sweat-drenched nightmares.
After two days Lovecraft and Crane met again and attended a chamber music concert. Crane was sober then and Lovecraft was quite charmed by his company.
It was an odd group of literary figures, these poets and fiction writers stranded like survivors of shipwreck on what they considered the hostile strand of American philistinism. They were not much congenial in temperament or purpose, but they all shared a common interest in newly discovered, newly reconstructed, mythologies. They felt the need to posit in history powerful but invisible alien forces which had made contemporary civilization such as inhumane shambles.
Lovecraft’s mythos is the most widely known. In a series of fictions soon to appear in the venerated pulp magazine Weird Tales, he told of several eras of prehistory when mankind vied with monstrous races of creatures with extraordinary powers for a foothold upon the earth. Man’s present dominance was accidentally and precariously achieved; those alien beings were beginning to rearise from their dormancy. Lovecraft delineated a cosmos that threw dark Pascalian doubt on the proposition “that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.”
Hart Crane’s mythology was not systematic; in fact, it was hardly articulate. His sensibility was such that he was unnerved in his brushes with the ancient presences he detected, and he could not write or think clearly about them. But his old friends were interested to note in his later poems the occurrence of such lines as, “Couched on bloody basins, floating bone / Of a dismounted people . . .” Crane believed that Poe had gained best knowledge of the Elder Dominations and so paired him with Whitman in The Bridge as a primary avatar of American consciousness.
The most thorough and deliberate of these mythologers was Sterling Croydon, who might have stepped from the pages of one of Lovecraft’s stories. He was such a recluse that not even Samuel Loveman saw him more than once or twice a month, though he occupied an apartment in the same building with Loveman, on the floor above. Croydon rarely ventured from his rooms; all those volumes of mathematics, physics, anthropology, and poetry were delivered to his door, and he prepared his scant meals with spirit lamp and hotplate. He was gracious enough to allow occasional visitors, never more than two at a time, and Loveman would spend an evening now and then listening to Croydon elaborate his own system of frightening mythologies. He had been exited to learn that Lovecraft was coming to visit in Cleveland, abandoning for a week his beloved Providence, Rhode Island, and spoke of a strong desire to meet the writer. But when Lovecraft arrived, Croydon withdrew, fearing, no doubt, that to meet the inheritor of Poe’s mantle would prove too great a strain on his nerves.
He didn’t appear a nervous or high-strung person, but rather—like Lovecraft—a formal gentleman and the soul of composure. He was fastidious and kept himself neatly dressed in dark wool. He imagined that he was painfully photosensitive and ordinarily resorted to dark glasses. His complexion was pale and often flushed, his frame slender almost to point of emaciation, his gestures quick but calculated. Yet there was a dreamy magnificence about him and when he held forth on various points of Boolean algebra or primitive religion Loveman felt that he was in the presence of strong intellect and refined character, however neurasthenic.
It was Croydon’s contention that his colleagues had but scratched the surface of the problem. He had read Tylor, Sir lames Fraser, Leo Frobenius and had traced their sources; he knew thoroughly the more radical attempts of Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Hazel Heald, F.B. Long, and the others, but considered that they had done no more than dredge up scraps and splinters. He was convinced that one of Lovecraft’s principal sources, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, was spurious, and that his descriptions of such cruel gods as Nyaralathotep and Yog-Sothoth were biased and vitiated by sensationalism and overwrought prose style.
He did not claim, of course, to know the whole truth. But he did know that Riemann’s concept of elliptical geometry was indispensable to a correct theory and that the magnetic fluxions of the South Pole were important in a way no one had thought of. He had been eager to apprise Lovecraft of these ideas and of others, but at the last hour his shyness overcame him. Or maybe he had come to doubt the writer’s seriousness.
We are forced to speculate about the outcome of this meeting which never took place; it might well have been of great aid to us, bringing to public notice Croydon’s more comprehensive theories and engendering in Lovecraft a deeper sense of responsibility.
The one result we know, however, is that Croydon’s life became even more reclusive than before. He almost never saw Loveman and his companions anymore, and no one was admitted now to his rooms. The single exception to this general exclusion was Hart Crane. Croydon thought that he saw qualities and capabilities in Crane lacking in his coarser-grained friends, and he would receive the poet at any time of the day or night. Drinking himself only a little wine, blackberry or elderberry, he kept a supply of gin for Crane, who never arrived sober and who would not stay unless there was something to drink.
So it was to Crane that Croydon poured out all his certainties, theories, and wild surmises. Almost all of it would have made no sense to Crane and would be distorted by his fever for poetry and disfigured by alcoholic forgetfulness. Yet he was impressed by this anomalous scholar and bits and pieces of those midnight disquisitions lodged in his mind. Perhaps Croydon’s talk impressed him in a way it might not have done if he had been sober. The poet was interested in pre-Columbian history, he had always had a yearning for Mexico, and he was particularly taken with Croydon’s notion that the Toltec, Mayan, and finally the Aztec religions were shadowy reflections of historical events that took place when mankind inhabited the Antarctic, when that region was steamy carboniferous forest. Those jaguar gods and feathered serpents which ornamented the temples had become highly stylized and symbolic, Croydon said, but long long ago, when man and dinosaur and other indefinable races coexisted at the bottom of the world, the first of these carvings and paintings had simply been attempts to represent literal appearance. Those creatures, and many others of less producible aspect, had lived among us. Or rather, we had lived among them, as animal labor supply and as food source.
Crane discounted most of Croydon’s notions. He did not believe, for example, that dinosaurs could have been intelligent warm-blooded creatures who had attempted to dislodge the alien gods who ruled among them. He did not believe the dinosaurs had died because their adversaries had infected them with an artificial bacterium which had spread like wildfire, wiping out every major saurian species in three generations. But he was fascinated
by Croydon’s accounts of tribal religions in South and Central America, caught up by the exotic imagery and descriptions of ritual. Croydon was especially excited by an obscure tribe inhabiting the upper reaches of the Amazon who worshipped a panoply of gods they called collectively Dzhaimbu. Or perhaps they worshipped but one god who could take different shapes. Much was unclear. But it was clear that Croydon regarded Dzhaimbu as the most anciently rooted of religions, in a direct decent from mankind’s prehistoric antarctic experiences.
Crane was impressed too by another of Croydon’s ideas. This scholar disagreed vehemently with Darwin’s charming theory that man had learned speech by imitating the mating calls of birds. Not so, said Croydon; man was originally a vocally taciturn animal like the horse and the gorilla, and like horse and gorilla uttered few sounds except under duress of extreme pain or terror. But these sounds they learned to voice quite regularly when Dzhaimbu inflicted upon them unspeakable atrocities, practices which Croydon could not think of without retching. Human speech was merely the elaboration of an original shriek of terror.
“ ’S a shame, Sterling,” Crane said, “that you can’t board a ship and go down to the jungle and investigate. I bet you’d turn up some interesting stuff.”
Croydon smiled. “Oh, I wouldn’t bother with the jungle. I’d go to the Antarctic and look for direct archeological evidence.”
Crane took another swallow from his tumbler of neat gin. His eyes were slightly unfocused and his face was flushed and his neck red in the soft open collar. “Shame you can’t go to the South Pole then, if that’s where you want to go.”
“No, I shouldn’t make a very able sailor, I think,” Croydon said. “But, after all, there are other ways to travel than by crawling over the globe like a termite.” And now he launched into a description of what he called spatial emplacement, by which means a man sitting in his room might visit any part of the earth. All that was required was delicate manipulation of complex and tenuous mathematical formulae, prediction of solar winds, polar magnetic fluxions, cosmic ray vectors, and so forth. He began to pour out a rubble of numbers and Greek letters, all of which Crane disregarded, suspecting that they’d struck now upon the richest vein of his friend’s lunacy. Croydon’s idea seemed to be that every geographical location in the universe could be imagined as being located on the surface of its individual sphere, and that the problem was simply to turn these spheres until the desired points matched and touched. Touched, but did not conjoin; there would be disaster if they conjoined. The worst complication was that these mathematical spheres, once freed of Euclidean space, were also free in time. One might arrive to inspect Antarctica at the time he wished, which would be pleasant indeed; or he might arrive in the future, uncountable millenia from now. And that would be dangerous as well as inconvenient.
But all this murmur of number and mathematical theory had lulled Crane. He was asleep in the club chair. Croydon woke him gently and suggested that he might like to go home.
“Yeah, maybe I better,” Crane said. He scratched his head, disheveling again his spiky hair. “But say, Sterling, I don’t know about this travel by arithmetic. Better to get a berth on a ship and sail around and see the birds wheel overhead and the slow islands passing.” The thought struck his enthusiasm. “That’s what we’ll do one of these days. We’ll get on a ship and go see these jungles.”
“Good night, Hart,” Croydon said.
This impulsive voyage was never to take place, of course, Crane’s poetry had begun to attract important critical notice, and he soon moved to New York in order to further his melancholy but highly distinguished literary career.
Croydon remained behind to pursue his researches ever more intensively. He was quite lost sight of to the world. Loveman would occasionally stop by to call but was not admitted.
It was on one of these infrequent visits that he felt a strangeness. The hall leading to Croydon’s room seemed chilly and the air around the door very cold indeed. And the door was sweating cold water, had begun to collect ice around the edges. The brass nameplate was covered with hard frost, obliterating Croydon’s name.
Loveman knocked and knocked again and heard no sound within but a low inhuman moan. He tried the icy knob, which finally turned, but could not force the door inward. He braced his feet, set his shoulder against the door and strained, but was only able to get it open for the space of an inch or two. The noise increased—it was the howling of wind—and a blast of numbing air swept over him and he saw in that small space only an area of white, a patch of snow. Then the wind thumped the door shut.
Loveman was at a loss. None of his usual friends was nearby to aid him, and he would not call upon others. He belonged to a circle in which there were many secrets they did not wish the larger world to know. He returned to his rooms on the lower floor, dressed himself in a winter woolen jacket and scarf and toboggan. After a brief search he found his gloves. He took a heavy ornamental brass poker from the hearth and returned to Croydon’s door.
This time he set himself firmly and, when he had effected a slight opening, thrust the poker into the space and levered it back. The poker began to bend with the strain and he could feel the coldness of it through his gloves. Then the wind caught the edge of the door and flung it back suddenly and Croydon found himself staling into a snowy plain swept over by fierce Antarctic wind.
It was all very puzzling. Loveman could see into this windstorm and feel some force of the wind and cold, but he knew that what he felt was small indeed as compared to the fury of the weather he could see into. Nor could he advance physically into this landscape. He could march forward, pushing against the wind, he could feel himself going forward, but he did not advance so much as an inch into that uproar of ice and snow.
It is in another space, he thought, but close, very close, to my own.
He could see into it but he could not travel there. In fact, with the wild curtains of snow blowing he could see little, but what he could see was terrible enough.
There, seemingly not twenty feet from him, sat Croydon at his desk. The scholar was wearing only his burgundy velvet dressing gown and gray flannel trousers and bedroom slippers. The habitual dark glasses concealed his eyes, but the rest of his face was drawn into a tortured grimace.
Of course Loveman shouted out Croydon Croydon! knowing it was useless.
He could not tell if his friend was still alive. He did not think that he could be. Certainly if he were in the same space as this Antarctic temperature, he must have died a quick but painful death. Perhaps he was not in that space but in a space like Loveman’s own, touching but not conjoining this polar location. Yet the Antarctic space intervened between them, an impassable barrier.
He wished now that he had paid more attention when Croydon had spoken of his mathematical ideas. But Loveman, like Crane, had no patience with, no talent for, number. He could never have understood. And now those pages of painstaking calculation had blown away, stiff as steel blades, over the blue ice sheets.
He thought that if he could not walk forward then he might crawl, but when he went to his knees he found himself suspended a couple of feet above the plane of the floor. Something was wrong with the space he was in. He stood, dizzily, and stepped down to the floor again, and the descent was as hard a struggle as climbing an Alpine precipice.
There was no way to get to Croydon, and he wondered if it would be possible to heave a rope to him. If he could find a rope.
But there was no way to reach the scholar. He had begun to recede in space, growing smaller and more distant, as if caught in the wrong end of a telescope. And the polar wind began to effect a bad transformation. The dressing gown was ripped from Croydon’s body and he was blackening like a gardenia thrown into a fire. His skin and the layers of his flesh began to curl up and peel away, petal by petal. A savage gust tore off his scalp and the blood that welled there froze immediately, a skullcap of onyx. Soon he would be only a skeleton, tumbled knob and joint over the driving snow, but Lovema
n was spared this spectacle. The frozen figure receded more quickly and a swirl of ice-grains blotted away the vision. Croydon was gone.
Loveman made his way into the hall, walking backward. His mouth was dully open and he found that he was sweating and that the sweat had begun to ice his clothing.
There came a crash as of thunder, the smell of ozone, and the Antarctic scene disappeared from the room and there was nothing there. Literally, nothing; no furniture, no walls, no floor. The door with Croydon’s nameplate hung over a blue featureless abyss. There was nothing, no real space at all.
Loveman gathered his courage, reached in, and pulled the door closed. He went quietly down the hall, determined to get back into his own room before others showed up. He did not want to answer questions; he did not want anyone to know what he knew. He wanted to go to his room and sit down and think alone and reaffirm his sanity.
The disappearance of Croydon and of that part of the apartment building caused some little public stir. The recluse had no relatives, but scientists were interested as well as the police. Loveman avoided as best he could any official notice, and in a few months the event was largely forgotten, since the scholar’s room returned to its original state, everything restored but Croydon himself.
But the occurrence was not forgotten by the circle of Loveman’s friends. For them it was a matter of great concern. They feared that Croydon’s experiment had called attention to themselves. Would not those alien presences whose histories they had been studiously examining now turn their regard toward Cleveland? Had he not disturbed the web of space-time as a fly disturbs a spiderweb? It was true that they were indifferent to mankind, to species and individual alike. But there were some researchers who thought, as Lovecraft did, that the ancient race was planning a regeneration of its destiny and would act to keep its existence secret until the moment was ripe. The powers of these beings were immense; they could destroy where and when they pleased, as casually as a man crushes out a cigarette in an ashtray.
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