Gothic Lovecraft

by Lynne Jamneck

  One day he told the librarian of his quest.

  “Yes,” said the faun-like man, “I have heard of this book. It was said that two great kingdoms in India fought a battle with flying ships over its possession thousands of years ago. I have heard that Plato had seen but a single page of it and derived his whole philosophy from it in an instant. I have known men who spent their lives looking for it.”

  “And you, my friend?” asked Dr. Nemo. “Do you seek this Book, this true history?”

  “I sought it by creating this library. I have little wealth, little bravery—even little health. I had hoped it would come to me. But I am an old man now. I do not know that I could withstand the revelations that it might contain. I wish with all my heart that I had never heard of it, because I will die unhappy for having known of it. I do not even know of a book that bears the remedy of knowing about the Book.”

  This sad and humble moment opened Nemo’s heart as it had not been opened since the day he asked the Jew about the Book. Suddenly he saw himself in the little man of the library, a man ennobled by curiosity but derided by vanity, alienated from the world of men by his desires, but deeply dependent on that world for the possibility of answering that desire. In the days and weeks that followed Dr. Nemo told his stories to the little librarian. He told of his adventures from talking his way free from South Sea pirates to speaking with mummies far below the depths of the Sphinx. He told of running from tigers in India to running sores of the plague in Russia. To this little man, who had had no adventures but who held the same desire, he told all and everything. And as he told his story, his soul began to heal. He began to sleep at night. He was beginning to believe that he did not have to find the Book, that he could settle down in Prague for his last years, use the skills at trading that he had learned so long ago, profit from the vast storehouse of language, and experience that he had accumulated.

  Then it happened.

  He rose late one morning and, as was his custom, went to the emperor’s library. His friend was there almost dancing among the shelves of books. The librarian’s eyes had a wild gleam.

  He had had a dream. In his dream a lovely woman had come to the library and, speaking from behind a hand-held fan, told him of the Book. It lay nearby, in the ruins of an abbey just north of the city, where it had been worshipped as a sort of Angel for hundreds of years. The pious monks had placed the Book in their church, removing the standard relics of Christianity. Each day another page of the Book was read. But the monks grew greedy of their wisdom. They gave up their deeds of charity. Other than working in their gardens to feed themselves they did naught but read and discuss the Book. They took in no new brothers, and as age and sickness took brother after brother away, the monastery dwindled to a few, and then two, and then none. But the Book had remained in its isolation, wanting only a perfect reader. Now it was ready for those perfect readers: the librarian and the adventurer.

  It did not occur to Dr. Nemo to treat this as anything other than the Truth. He had quested so long that such a revelation seemed all but inevitable. He told the librarian he would procure two horses and supplies and they would set out at once. He scarcely noticed the sickness invading his soul; for it had dwelt there so long, it seemed natural to have it back. He bought skins of wine and bread and cheese and two fine Spanish ponies. Shortly after noon, they set out. For the librarian this was a great adventure. He had been outside the great city but twice in his life. Indeed (although he would not have said so to a man who had run from tigers), he was worried about sleeping in the open at night, for such had not been his fate since long-ago boyhood when his mother allowed his brothers and him to sleep on the rooftop during summer nights. It was fall and the air had quite a nip in the evening. He trusted that Dr. Nemo would see to his comfort and protection, and in his heart and his excitement he became younger and younger as the ponies twisted their way out of the city.

  Dr. Nemo, on the other hand, grew more and more silent. Something clearly weighed upon him, but the librarian did not ask; for he was not good with the ways of his fellow men, which is why he had chosen books as his friends. He wondered how they would share the Book between them. Would they both read pages together or would the Book spend one night with one man and then the next with the other? This imagined infidelity stirred strange desires in

  the librarian’s heart, and he was startled from his fantasies when Dr. Nemo asked him the way to the devastated abbey and its history in the waking world.

  “In the time of Charles IV, a small brotherhood devoted to St. Ludmilla asked for land to be set aside a place for study and to heal the sick. Charles tasked the abbot to learn of the prophecies of Princess Lubossa, who had foreseen the building of Prague. The order’s work was half-mystical and half-practical. They treated those individuals thought to be too sick to remain in Prague, and they gathered mystical books of all sorts. Accusations of black magic and heresy began almost as soon as the monastery was constructed, but because of the good works of the monks, such naysayers were silenced. A rumor seeped into the world that a certain book had been found predating even Princess Lubossa, and the monks were said to draw even the wrath of Rome by the gaiety of their celebrations. They fell out of royal favor in the time of King Wenceslas IV. Their products were few— some herbal-infused liquors said to be sovereign against gout and dropsy—but they kept the monastery alive, albeit in a reduced form. Four or five decades ago the last monks were said to have died. Various legal issues between Crown and Church have kept the land effectively out of either’s hands. So it has fallen in ruins.”

  It was a librarian’s answer.

  The ruined abbey crouched low and great by a small mist-shrouded river. The fields surrounding it bore crumbling stone walls disturbed by the army of trees that had conquered the abandoned gardens. The two men paused on the ancient Roman road half a mile above the abbey.

  “Let us take shelter for the night under yon heavy oaks,” said Dr. Nemo. “If we press on night will have fallen, and it would be hard going among the ruined walls. I see the chapel still has its roof; perhaps some preservative power of the Book is genuinely afoot.”

  The librarian was annoyed that the adventurer could possibly doubt his vision. Of course the Book was there.

  And the adventurer was making a list. Losing his wife, being kidnapped by pirates, having his fingers sliced off, the plague, smallpox, running from tigers, fleeing across the roofs of Venice by moonlight, meeting the bear in the Russian woods, talking his way out of the bandit’s cave in Lebanon. Meanwhile the librarian had boldly stacked books in a new way, had risked his life buying new bookshelves. Had put his very soul in danger by invoking Him Who Waits. Yet their reward was to be the same. Had he not already the punishment for eating this particular apple long before he even saw the tree? The sickness in his soul became hate cold and deep, and he began to offer the librarian wine.

  The little man did not hold his liquor well—no great surprise there. They sang a few bawdy songs in Latin, and then Dr. Nemo helped the librarian onto his horse. He was going to show his besotted companion a “trick.” As the librarian sang “O Fortuna velut Luna statu variabilis,” Dr. Nemo slipped a noose around his neck. As he sang “Semper crescis aut decrescis,” Dr. Nemo tossed the rope up and over a thick branch of the sturdy oak. As the librarian sang “Vita detestabiles nunc obdurat,” he slapped the chestnut-colored rump of the pony and the librarian finished the song in hell. “Life is unstable and sometimes cruel,” agreed Dr. Nemo in his mother-tongue.

  Dr. Nemo cut the librarian’s body down after an hour. It didn’t feel right sleeping beneath its swing. The pony wandered back to be with its friend. Dr. Nemo staked them both and slept the sleep of the innocent.

  Dawn’s rosy fingers caressed a very cool sky. Frost had silvered the ground, and Dr. Nemo felt the ache of his years as he awoke, kindled a fire from last night’s ashes, and drank the last sips of sour wine.

  There was still a rude lane to the shambles of the abbey.
Dr. Nemo rode up and tied his mare outside what had been the gateway. If the librarian’s dream had been accurate, he need only go to the chapel: the Book would be enshrined therein. He was surprised to see the door to the church still intact. He was about to burst in when he heard a rustling sound—a sound of paper against paper, a sound the phantoms often manifested. Was this to be another disappointment? Another cosmic jest? He pulled his rusty sword from its sheaf; he had not had to use it in years. He had never attacked a phantom. He didn’t know if he could attack one, but the desire to corner one—to make it spill its Truth—that desire boiled very strongly in his heart. He pushed the door open.

  The chapel’s air was cold and stale. A few white candles burned on the altar. A large paper screen decorated with an Oriental blue and red dragon sat on the altar. No book was in evidence. From behind the screen came the sound of music—a plucked instrument. It took Dr. Nemo a moment to recognize it as a qinqin, the Chinese guitar.

  “Don’t look behind the screen,” said a woman with a soft voice. “It will be better if you don’t see me. At least at first.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am Princess Lubossa.”

  “No. No, you are not. She is long buried; she knew a lot about Czech futures. She may have even been partially non-human. I am looking for something else.”

  The music stopped. “Are you looking for redemption for the poor man you killed last night?”

  “I have killed others in my quest.”

  “Yes, I know. Eight men and a woman. You think it is nine men, but the fellow you wounded in Rome staggered home and got better. He died last year.”

  “So you have been following me,” said Dr. Nemo.

  “Not at all. I do not follow anyone. I am without curiosity.”

  “But you know everything.”

  “Just what happens on this world and its moon.”

  “You have the Book.”

  “Isn’t that why you are here?”

  “I thought you knew everything.”

  “I do not know what happens in the hearts of humans. Or in the thoughts of any being, for that matter.”

  “Are you going to give me the Book?”

  “No.”

  “But you know I will kill you for it.”

  “That is a logical development.”

  “So you don’t know the future.”

  “The future does not exist. It can be predicted. Only the past is real. The past eats everything. The Book eats the past.”

  Dr. Nemo charged around the screen. At first he saw a seated Chinese maiden holding a qinqin with one leg exposed behind a subtle blue dress resting against a paper screen.

  Then he saw what was really in front of him.

  A large solid object that was shaped and colored as a seated Chinese maiden holding a qinqin with one leg exposed behind a subtle blue dress resting against a paper screen. It looked at him without sadness, happiness, or curiosity. It was a good copy. It blinked. He raised his sword, then lowered it. None of the phantoms had ever appeared to be anything unnatural. Ugly, yes, but not unnatural. “What are you? Are you the guardian of the Book?”

  “I am the Book. Four years, three months, and seven days ago you told a magician in Paris that you thought the Book might be alive. Do you remember the conversation?”

  He had been drunk. They had watched the sun rise over a graveyard near the Seine. The other fellow had a terrible cough. He died in the winter.

  “I do not know if I am ‘alive’ in the sense you mean. Such speculation is beyond me. But I change, I adapt, I eat, I can move about. I seek self-preservation. I do not mate (for there are indeed others of my kind. I neither love, nor hate, nor curse my lot.”

  Dr. Nemo asked, “Do you have a purpose?”

  “Yes. I record everything. My first record was of the being that owned me. Perhaps it made me. It died on this world twenty thousand years ago. At that time I was a very large sheet of some flexible material. The being lived in a castle it had extruded from its body, much as a snail makes its shell. The shell-castle stood two hundred cubits high. It was on an island near Japan, where some very shaggy human-like creatures worshipped the being. One day they were angry because of an earthquake. They banged on the walls of the shell-castle. The being went outside. They killed it with spears. I had been recording the world for four days at that point. One of the shaggy men took me away and made me into a tent. When he asked, I said I could show him anything. He knew the petty intrigues of his tribe. He knew when a group of true men were coming with war canoes. His tribe prospered. He never understood that I could only show the past, and that I could only answer him. Since then I have belonged to many beings, most of them human, most of that group men.”

  “And now,” said Dr. Nemo, “you will belong to me.”

  “No. Which is sad. I feel better when I am with a being that can ask me better questions.”

  “How do you know that I am not to be your master?”

  “Certain processes have brought you to me.”

  “The phantoms?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are they?”

  “I do not know.”

  Dr. Nemo thought it was very likely she was telling the truth. Because of her shape, he had to think of it as “she.” But her protestations were of no consequence; he would take the Book with him. He asked her, “How do you take shape?”

  “I fold myself. Remember the folded paper art you saw twelve years ago?”

  In China he had seen a crane made of folded paper that a Japanese monk had shown him.

  “So you are a folded sheet of paper that talks and sends phantoms and dreams around the world. You have no idea why you exist. You do not know who made you. But you do know that I will never have you.”

  “Yes.”

  He raised his sword again. Perhaps if he hurt her …

  Instead he said, “Can you show me your true form?”

  She answered, “Yes, but I will need to take you to a different kind of space. I would need to move your perception so that you could see.”

  Dr. Nemo had taken drugs, fasted, invoked demons. He had no trouble with the idea of other spaces existing “beside” ours.

  “If I command you to do so, will you show me your true form?” He menaced her with his sword and thought of incantations he knew that could compel beings not of this world.

  “Yes, or if you merely asked me. It is for this moment the phantoms have called you. Do not be afraid.”

  Suddenly she came undone. Her flesh, her dress, the qinqin, the screen, her chair all began unfolding in the three directions he was used to seeing and five more that he had never guessed were there. She/It was mainly white and covered acres in a moonlit desert. A tall wrecked shell-castle stood by. Its mother-of-pearl door crashed open, the soot of many torches staining its upper surface. He was standing on her. He walked carefully at first. She looked like paper, but was of far tougher stuff. Characters in an unknown tongue were printed on her surface. Very elaborate they were, human-sized and printed in the faintest sepia. He followed them. He occasionally thought he could read (or perhaps sense) some meaning. Here was Rome. Here were the Americas. Here were beings on the moon making giant sculptures. Alexander the Great. His mother dying when he was four. It wasn’t linear. Sometimes it was the distant past. Here he and the librarian drank under the oak trees. He walked the plain for miles, it seemed. When he looked up he couldn’t even see the shell-castle any more. He found the glyph of himself looking at the glyph. He bent down to study it. He dropped to his hands and knees, seeing it change as it recorded his actions. He felt if he could read the world, he would be its master, instead of just another glyph in the endless meaningless sheet of demonic parchment. Maybe the Book knew it would not be her Master because it would be her friend? Her lover? Her god?

  As he knelt on the great white sheet, his own shadow blending with the ink of his sign, an idle thought passed through his enraptured mind. She said she ate. I wonder wh
at she eats?

  Before the suspicion could form itself into a speculation, the Book refolded. He screamed, but it would have sounded far away, as though muffled by rags. The sign grew dark with its living ink.

  For another twenty years, visitors to the ruins would have seen a large book with iron hinges, but there were no visitors.

  Then one came and picked her up, and a new meaningless cycle was recorded.

  To the memory of Robert Bloch

  Old Goodman Brown

  Jonathan Thomas

  Faith would outlive him, but to old Goodman Brown she’d been dead for decades. Of this the Archfiend was well aware, for his wiles had driven an abiding wedge of alienation between them when they were still but newlyweds. Tonight he wore the grave black of bygone century and a weathered elderhood, belied by how vigorously he rapped with snake-headed staff upon stout farmhouse door. He swallowed his amusement when Faith answered, pink ribbons of youth still gracing brittle gray braids. She betrayed no recognition of him, if any she retained.