Gothic Lovecraft

by Lynne Jamneck

  Marisol said, “How could you need more information? Especially from some random guy who just lives out there? Or even use it? You’ve still got mountains of material in the archives you haven’t gotten to yet.” But Catherine could see it in her face as her resolve wavered, and she almost felt bad about giving her the hard sell—almost.

  “Remember the time you took off on a road trip with that French guy you’d just met and then you called me at two in the morning from Mobile, Alabama, and said he’d taken off in the middle of the night and stuck you with the motel bill and anyway he wasn’t French? And I drove all night to come and get you?”

  “All right,” Marisol said. “I’ll go, but if we end up abducted as part of a master plan to breed their nightmare progeny, I’m totally blaming you.”

  Catherine grinned. “Deal. And this time tomorrow we’ll be back here talking about what a weird freaking place that town is.”

  “Okay.” Marisol pushed herself up from the bar stool. “I’m off tomorrow, and I’m not going home yet. There are too many cute boys in here to go home. Like that one over there. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “I’ll just head back to my nun cell,” Catherine said, but Marisol was already striding across the bar.

  Catherine liked knowing what awaited her at home: stacks of books and papers, what the writer Fritz Leiber had called the scholar’s mistress. She lay down at night with Garland William Stevens and woke beside him in the morning, but the metaphor failed there; she thought of her subject not as a lover but a mentor, a guide even. Sometimes even, she thought, psychopomp, but those were only in the darkest times, and she did not tell anyone about those.

  As the human race embraces degeneracy, it also fears and despises it. This is not the degeneracy of everyday standards of behavior and morality the small-minded among us fret over, for man is in truth without morality beyond an ever-changing social construct. This is a terror of literal physical and mental degeneracy of the species, and it explains our repulsion toward invertebrate forms of life, toward the types of creatures scientists find existing on the bottom of the ocean, toward snakes and insects and all the other beings that remind us what we were before we were human and what we will be again when our nature asserts itself over our intelligence and draws us back into darkness.

  —From the unpublished writings

  of Garland William Stevens, date unknown

  The following morning, Catherine headed over to the rare book room once she’d discharged her duties supervising freshmen exams. She reflected as she let herself in on what a sheer stroke of luck her course of study had been— whether good or bad luck remained to be seen. She’d arrived at the University of Georgia primed to study advertising and make her fortune cynically hawking products at those too well off to care that they were being lied to. Her friends gave her shit about taking her writing and design skills and selling out, but she didn’t care; she’d been raised in near-poverty, with parents who always had a scheme to hand that was going to turn things around for the family and never did. She’d grown up in clothes from the Salvation Army, nourished on crappy fast food and cheap supermarket staples, and steeped in the knowledge that one inconvenient illness or untimely car breakdown could mean an eviction. She was determined to lead a different life.

  So it was sheer luck that had landed her a work-study position in the rare book room of the library, and luck that within her first weeks there she’d stumbled across the archives of an obscure Southern writer known as Garland William Stevens. She’d never heard of him, and neither had anyone else she spoke to; apparently even in his lifetime he had been little known, composing stories and books that veered from grim little horror vignettes to a couple of bizarre experimental novels to book-length philosophical musings on the ultimate meaninglessness of life and the degradation of being trapped in a human skin. The last of his line, his short and unhappy life had ended in 1940 when he was but thirty-five years of age. The possible causes of his death ranged from tetanus to tick fever to tuberculosis—various claims he made in the final delirious lines he penned to an ill-advised effort to kick his alcoholism cold turkey (her theory, particularly given the delusions and hallucinations he appeared to suffer in the final weeks of his life).

  What she had pieced together about his own life story had been bizarre and grim. Both of his parents had been born during the Civil War. Stevens’s family had been among the most prominent in Eudora but appeared to have lost their wealth well before the war for reasons that were unclear. Both parents grew up steeped in a sense of bitter entitlement and loss. Garland had been born when they were both in their forties, having long since abandoned the idea of having any children. His father had been a virulent racist, penning regular send-them-back-to-Africa op-eds for the local paper and articles about the inherent superiority of the white race—and the town indeed had a reputation for being particularly inhospitable to non-whites even by the standards of the time and place. Garland had despised both of his parents, his father in particular, but lived with and cared for them his entire life until their deaths. In the final decade of both their lives, they suffered multiple strokes and dementia, and the already isolated, angry man fell deeper into an abyss. They had all died the same year, several months apart, first the father, then the mother, then Garland himself.

  The university had no record of who was responsible for the donation of Stevens’s archives decades earlier or who had originally accepted them, and no one really knew who was responsible for them or what was to be done with them. Because in a library there is always more to be done than there is time to do, they had mostly sat there, largely undisturbed, until she had come across them. And began reading. And reading, and reading. And before she knew it, she had changed her major to literature and set off on the very path of hard work and penury she had sworn to avoid, struggling through graduate school and unsure whether she was onto something groundbreaking and revolutionary that would make her a scholarly superstar or something obscure and irrelevant that was gradually turning her into a crank. She told herself the first; she suspected the second.

  Over the past decade, since her first discovery of the archives, she had done a great deal to organize them and even made efforts to bring Stevens wider attention. She genuinely did believe that at his best he was truly a talented stylist, easily on the same level as any of the other great regional writers like Faulkner and O’Connor. She had managed to interest a couple of small presses enough to allow her to edit one book of short fiction and a reprint of one of his “philosophical musings,” as he dubbed his nonfiction work; but even the obsessive-minded customers of specialty presses had shown little interest in her discovery. Around her, friends finished their schooling and began real careers and had disposable incomes and partners and spouses, and some even were starting on homes and children, while she felt herself growing smaller and dustier and more desperate deep in the bowels of the same rare book collection where she’d been hiding out since the first quarter of her freshman year of college. She constantly questioned herself, but she could not deny that in the end she still believed it was worthwhile. For one, it wasn’t just the scholarly pleasure of discovering an unknown writer—she actually appreciated the work of Garland William Stevens, thought it the work of a twisted, misanthropic genius, rife with metaphor about the ugliest side of the human condition. And for another, she knew she was ever on the verge of a great discovery. She could not say why; she had no evidence to show that had led her to this conclusion. Instead, it was a growing certainty that rose from the deep waters of intuition. She knew that it was not wishful thinking. She knew that her work on Garland William Stevens was the most important thing she could possibly do with her life.

  They gathered in their churches day and night, worshipping every hour of every day, churches that might have been churches of the damned had they souls to damn or a god to damn them, but by then they understood what must one day be understood by all: that there is nothing, nothing but the depths, the
deep ones, and an unfortunate evolutionary error that calls itself the inheritor of the earth for the few milliseconds that it believed in its own dominion, not just of the planet, but throughout the universe.

  —From Asmodeus,

  by Garland William Stevens, 1936

  Eudora was about an hour’s drive and a world away. As they entered the city limits the following day, Marisol commented, “They sure do love Jesus here, don’t they?”

  “Was it the multiple signs about repenting, or the dozen churches you see just after crossing the county line?”

  “It’s kind of disturbing. I mean, it’s not the usual sort of bland Bible-belty stuff. The signs were creepy, like children of the corn stuff or something.”

  “Luckily we’re not in the Midwest. No need to worry about demon kids coming out of a cornfield after us.

  “Oh, pull over,” Marisol said. “This might be Creepytown but they also have a Bojangles. I want a biscuit. I had a late night.”

  “So many cute boys, so little time?”

  “Something like that.”

  Back inside the same fast food restaurant, Catherine said, “Do you notice anything odd?”

  Marisol looked around. “Well, everyone looks a tad overdressed. I mean, I realize there’s not a lot to do around here, but surely a trip to Bojangles doesn’t require suiting up in your Sunday best.”

  “They all looked like this yesterday too, only I didn’t think it was a big deal because, well, it was Sunday. I thought they were all coming from church.”

  As she spoke, one man detached himself from the line in front of them and went over to a small man in an ill-fitting suit alone at a table and bellowed, “Great sermon today, reverend! Praise the Lord! What are you doing sitting over here all by your lonesome?”

  “Oh. Well then, I guess they go to church all the time here,” Marisol murmured. “Definitely children of the corn. We’ll turn around and leave now if we know what’s good for us.”

  “Probably they really don’t have anything better to do than go to church. Nobody has jobs any more since the granite industry died,” Catherine replied.

  “They look—kind of messed up?” Marisol observed, and Catherine saw what she had missed the previous day. All around them most people had unhealthy complexions shading to a kind of waxy greyness that Catherine identified with her grandfather’s face in the final days of his life. They moved oddly as well, and she thought it was as though they weren’t accustomed to using their limbs in quite this manner or were concealing deformities under their clothes. But then she came from a small town, too, not terribly unlike Eudora, and everyone there seemed to be everyone’s cousin. Catherine herself had a sprawling batch of relatives back home. Maybe in Eudora they were all just a little bit too closely related to one another.

  “Also,” and now Marisol was whispering, “um, what did they do with all the black people here? Or Mexicans? I’m feeling a little unwelcome, truth be told.”

  “It’s not a historically tolerant community,” Catherine whispered back.

  “Fuck that,” Marisol said. “I’m getting my biscuit to go. You didn’t tell me it was some kind of KKK enclave.”

  “It’s not really that. It’s—they don’t like any outsiders. The town’s always been that way, if you go back and look at census records. Nobody really moves here. It’s just the same families have been here since the nineteenth century.”

  “I can’t imagine why—it has so much to offer. I’m already thinking of relocating myself.”

  Back in the car, Catherine commented, “I know this town’s been in dire economic straits over the last ten years or so, but I didn’t think it meant they just spent all their time in church.”

  “It was probably a big funeral or something,” Marisol said.

  “Yeah, you’re probably right.” Catherine started the car but felt unconvinced. “It didn’t seem like a funeral,” she said after a few minutes.

  “Look, you’re the one who insisted on bringing me out here on the grounds that there was nothing creepy to worry about. You can’t go making things creepy now.”

  “Garland William Stevens is creepy. There’s no getting around that.”

  “I can’t argue with that,” Marisol said. “Also, this biscuit is gross. What the fuck do they put in it?” She dropped it back into its bag and tossed the entire thing out the window.

  “Marisol!”

  “Sorry. You can make a citizen’s arrest on me for littering if you want, but it smelled awful too. I was going to puke if I kept it in the car with us. So what’s with all the old granite sheds? You were saying…”

  “Just that it was the industry here, and now it’s mostly closed down. Now there’s abandoned granite sheds and quarries all over the county. Actually, do you mind if we make a stop before we head out there?” Catherine didn’t wait to hear an answer; she was already doing a U-turn on the four-lane.

  “Got a sudden hankering to go to church yourself now?” Marisol said.

  “The local museum,” Catherine said. She drove a few blocks, turned off the main road, and parked in front of a nondescript two-story granite building with a huge glass front. “Let’s go in,” she said.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s up?”

  “Not until I’m sure.” Inside, she thrust a few dollars for their admissions at the bland-faced man working the front desk. The man said to her, “He waits, changed.”

  “What?”

  “The rates changed.” The man tapped the sign beside the register. Catherine sighed and gave him two more dollars.

  She had been here so many times that she knew exactly what she was looking for, and went to the enormous stone figure of a man in the middle of the place. It was lying on its side, legless and broken at the torso, about twenty feet long and several feet across, surrounded by a set of worn velvet ropes.

  “What is this thing?” Marisol asked. “It’s hideous.”

  “This,” said Catherine, “was meant to be a statue commemorating the Civil War, from around the turn of the last century—1905, to be exact. He’s supposed to be a Confederate soldier, only the statue was carved by an Italian artist, and he—well, let’s just say he wasn’t quite in tune with what people wanted. The thing was torn down by angry townspeople on the day of its dedication, and nobody cared enough to right it. Eventually it was buried. They just unearthed it about ten years ago, when they opened the museum.”

  “Fascinating,” Marisol said, in a tone that said she found it exactly the opposite. “And you just have to come back and visit it from time to time?”

  Catherine said, “It’s the face on the statue. I had to be sure.”

  “Sure about what?”

  She took a deep breath, because she knew how she was going to sound. Marisol was going to say that the research had finally gotten to her, that she was going to start imagining things just as Garland William Stevens had done in the final weeks of his life.

  She said, “The statue. Its face. It’s the caretaker.”

  The horrors birthed themselves from the quarries. Those who first dug deep into the earth and stone found them sleeping there and woke them, and were driven mad by their hideousness, and then mated with them, and if they did not then die from the shame, brought others back with them. These orgiastic frenzies of worship and lust and annihilation might go on for days or even weeks. It was said by some that their cities were so vast and so unspeakable that they broke the human mind…”

  —“A Tale of a Hollow Earth,”

  by Garland William Stevens,

  originally published in Weird Tales, 1934,

  reprinted 2013 in Lost Worlds: The Weird Tales

  of Garland William Stevens,

  edited by Catherine J. Framer,

  published by Gloaming Press

  Back in the car, Marisol was still laughing and shaking her head. Of all the reactions Catherine expected— shock, horror, concern—this was not one of them. “You have been working too hard,” she said.
“I bet when you shut your eyes at night all you see is Stevens’s manuscripts, and now you’re seeing hundred-year-old statues in living men’s faces. Maybe what you need is a live dude for a night or two …”

  “I’m serious,” Catherine said for the third time. “Look, you’ll see when we get out there.”

  “I’m sorry,” Marisol said. “I’m not making fun of you, I swear. It just sounds crazy. You know what? I bet this dude totally looks like that statue back there. I don’t even know why it cracked me up so much; it just did. You know how those things happen. It’s like when I was a kid, we noticed my brother looked just like the boy on that one commercial— Hey, are you okay to drive?”

  Catherine’s hands were shaking. She lay them flat on the steering wheel to still them. “I’m okay,” she said. “I’m just a little freaked out. You know, I’ve been here so many times. I’ve got sketches of that thing—Stevens was intrigued

  with stories of it even though he never saw it himself because it was destroyed the same year of his birth, and they didn’t find it till decades after he was dead. That was the thing that was in the back of my mind yesterday, the thing that was bothering me. The caretaker’s—his resemblance. That’s all.”

  “Yep,” Marisol said. “Look, I seriously doubt the caretaker is a golem. Or a homunculus. Or whatever it is he would be. I think we can clear that up right here and now.”

  “You know what?” Catherine said suddenly. “I don’t think it’s such a good idea after all, us going out there. You were right.”

  She could feel Marisol’s incredulous gaze on her without even turning her head.