“I was what? When have you ever admitted somebody else was right? Look, I know what this is about.”
“I do so say people are right sometimes. Don’t I?”
Marisol said, “You’ve just now decided that there’s something dangerous out there and, like a heroine in a poorly constructed horror movie that we would yell our damn heads off at all the way through, you’re going to go out there on your own and investigate it.”
Catherine sat for a moment before she replied. “Okay, fine. Is there anything you can’t figure out about me?”
“Why you want to devote yourself to Garland William Stevens.”
“Anyway,” Catherine said. “You’ll see what I mean about the statue when you meet the caretaker.”
We have come to the end of everything that is or ever shall be.
—“In the Quarters of the Lost,”
by Garland William Stevens,
originally published in Unknown, 1939,
reprinted 2013 in Lost Worlds: The Weird Tales
of Garland William Stevens,
edited by Catherine J. Framer,
published by Gloaming Press
She would not have been surprised if, on her return, the house had fallen into disrepair, its state of the previous day the result of some glamour, but it was as sturdy and well-kept as the day before. Marisol sat beside her, gripping her phone like an emergency was imminent. “What are we going to do?”
“I just want to talk to him again.”
“Didn’t he tell you to leave and not come back?”
“Well, but I won’t take up that much of his time. And I just want you to tell me what you think about him.”
Catherine got out of the car. She had to press on because she knew Marisol was right. She shouldn’t have come back here at all. She turned around to tell Marisol that if something happened, if she disappeared, if anything, she should just drive away, she shouldn’t feel bad, she shouldn’t think about it at all, but that sounded crazy. And that would only panic Marisol and she would make them leave.
Catherine went up on the porch and peered in all the windows, but she couldn’t see what was inside. There was no sign of the caretaker. She had always been able to explain anything to Marisol except this, the compulsion she had toward Stevens and his work. Marisol said she was just driven, and that it was a good thing, an admirable thing, but it was a drive that scared her. Because it was a drive without any sense to it. Who really did care about Garland William Stevens besides her? The world didn’t need Stevens and his bottomless nihilistic despair. She was unsure what she found more appalling: the knowledge that her years of painstaking study would probably in the end leave her qualified for little more than a minimum-wage service job, or the sheer scope of Stevens’s loathsome worldview, expanding as it did to encompass every living being save for the savage, primordial beasts at the heart of his fiction. As much as she tried to assume a disinterested scholarly attitude toward his work, in fact she found herself alternately repelled and consumed by the man’s madness.
Almost without thinking, she tried the door, and the doorknob turned in her hand.
She pushed it open and called out, “Hello? Is anyone there? It’s Catherine Framer, from the university. I just wanted to ask you a few more questions.”
In the silence that followed, she turned back and gave a thumbs-up sign in Marisol’s direction accompanied by a big smile she did not feel. Marisol looked so worried and vulnerable sitting in the passenger seat, and Catherine felt a rush of emotions toward her—affection, concern, but most of all a sorrow so profound that she gasped as it flooded her even as she was unable to make any sense of it. Then the sorrow passed and left her feeling empty, hollowed-out, and there was a small space where she knew she would turn back after all, and then she did not.
I returned last night to that place, to their place, to that monstrous city on the edge of the world in the bowels of the earth. The city has teeth; the city shrieks, but not at me, because it no more notices me than I notice microscopic beings on my own flesh. Time and space turn inside out there, and reason ceases to be. I stood for a moment and for a thousand years on the edge of what I could only think of as hell. My flesh cracked and my bones turned to powder and the city devoured itself and spat itself back up again. It was planet-sized; no, larger; it was an entire galaxy, its own universe: suns, worlds flared and died within its immense gates.
—From the unpublished writings
of Garland William Stevens, 1940
“Hello,” she said again, but only from habit, because she was certain she would not be answered. The interior of the house was just as she had seen it the previous day, but now she could explore at her leisure. She went over to the desk with the stacks of books and papers and pawed through them. The books all appeared to be very old, and none of them were in English; several did not use an alphabet she recognized. Two were handwritten, one in something similar to but not quite Arabic script. She could not read most of the papers either, which were not old and definitely not part of the Stevens archive. Some of them were covered not in words at all but in symbols and drawings of ancient creatures with no eyes or limbs, with notations such as “cephalopod, Paleozoic era.” There were tracing of fossils with latitudinal and longitudinal locations scribbled next to them and notations regarding dates of discovery.
She took out her phone and began photographing the papers, but she quickly found them so distressing that she shoved them all aside. They overwhelmed her with that same revulsion that Stevens had written about, and perhaps he was right. Perhaps such sights wakened an instinctive, atavistic terror—one of the few things that could remind humans what late arrivals they were to this earth, and how fragile was their tenure.
How his parents must have resented what they imagined to be the decay of their own society around them; how they must have loathed the sense that their way of life was passing into irrelevance. As different as they were, both father and son attempted to stem the despairing realization of their own insignificance with fortresses of words. Not for the first time, Catherine wondered about the parents’ deaths; two mad, helpless old people trapped in this house and their failing bodies with an increasingly demented son. It wouldn’t have taken much, just a palm placed over a sleeping nose and mouth. First one, then the other. Afterwards the guilt would have driven him to an alcoholic despair followed by a final, fatal bid to sober up, at which point his lifelong imaginings seemed to him to become reality: in those final weeks, his writings had become frenzied, surreal, barely coherent descriptions of a nightmare subterranean dwelling beneath the house that opened onto another, horrific dimension where the creatures from his stories tormented him without mercy.
She heard a noise then from upstairs, that of someone treading on floorboards, and a thump and a sound like something heavy being dragged, and it brought her to her senses. What had she been thinking, letting herself into someone’s house, poking through their private papers? She scrambled for the front door, suddenly in a panic, and raced across the porch and threw herself into the driver’s seat.
“What the hell happened in there?” Marisol said.
“Nothing,” Catherine said, “nothing happened. There’s nothing in there,” and she tried to catch her breath, which was too fast and too shallow. She shut her eyes and saw all the closed doors inside the house that she had not been allowed to open, and she wondered what lay behind them. “You know,” she said, “all this was ocean once. First it was ocean and then it was swamp and everywhere creatures like things you’d see in nightmares, only worse. And someday it’s going to be ocean again. Maybe even in our lifetimes if they don’t fix the climate, what do you think?
Marisol said, “I want to go home.”
Catherine started the car and forced herself to guide it deliberately back onto the road, and they didn’t speak at all on the journey back into town. Passing through Eudora, Catherine noticed just how shabby and depleted the town truly was: deserted shopping c
enters with weeds sprouting through the asphalt, shuttered gas stations, and a main road that was almost empty of other vehicles. She stopped at a red light and wondered why it was there, because surely there was never enough traffic to require it. The only signs of life were at the museum, the churches, and the single fast food restaurant. How was it possible for a town to isolate itself so thoroughly in this day and age? By ensuring that nobody cared enough to give it any thought, let alone visit it or move there.
Soon, she thought, it would vanish from maps altogether, just as Garland William Stevens’s archives had been lost for so many decades. Maybe the roads that ought to bring people here would start to lead in different directions; satellites passing overhead would record endless days of cloud cover. Then perhaps someone might slip through, stumble upon it just as she had found Stevens’s writings; perhaps that someone would find himself or herself unduly obsessed with a town that did not by any reckoning exist. But how long could you stay real yourself when you were devoted to something that only existed in liminal spaces? She wanted to ask Marisol if she was still real; she wanted to reach across the space between them and grasp her hand, but the gap between them was too great. The light went to green and then back to red, and if Marisol was speaking to her, she could not hear her any longer; but she could hear their hymns, strange melodies with stranger words, calling to her, and she did not know how she came to be out of the car and walking up the middle of the abandoned state highway, but she knew at last where she belonged.
She had driven out to a few of the Eudora quarries, once or twice a long time ago. Bored country kids from nearby counties used to go swimming there. They told her it was such a long jump that you had to point your feet downward so you jackknifed into the water below, otherwise you could hurt yourself; but then they were all warned off going there in the first place because it was said there were dangerous things below the surface, abandoned equipment that could injure or kill you as you plunged deep underwater. She never swam there herself; she was too afraid of the depths, and you did hear stories from time to time about kids disappearing. The drop from the edge had always looked endless to her, and surely the water and whatever else lay below was endless as well.
She had always been afraid of the depths, along with so many other things, but now the fear was gone, replaced by something for which she had no name, because the depths were singing to her, and the sky yawned above, a black expanse trembling with stars. She walked down an abandoned highway, down a muddy red clay lane, down corridors lined by locked doors, down deep; she would walk as long as she had to, until they came for her, or until she came to them, for it was only a matter of time now, and she knew they would be waiting for her, in the depths, under the surface of things, and in all the places where it was dark.
Notes on Contributors
The Editors
Lynne Jamneck is a fiction writer and editor. She has been nominated for the Sir Julius Vogel and Lambda Awards for fiction and editing, and holds an MA in English Literature from Auckland University, New Zealand. Her fiction has appeared in Unconventional Fantasy: A Celebration of Forty Years of the World Fantasy Convention, Fantastique Unfettered, H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, Jabberwocky, Weird Fiction Review, Tales from the Bell Club, Something Wicked, and the SJV award-winning anthology Tales for Canterbury. She edited the Lambda Award shortlisted SF anthology Periphery and has published nonfiction for, among others, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, the Lovecraft Annual, and Fantasy Magazine. For Dark Regions Press, she has edited Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror, which debuted in 2016.
S. T. Joshi is the author of The Weird Tale (1990), H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (1990), and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). He has prepared corrected editions of H. P. Lovecraft’s work for Arkham House and annotated editions of Lovecraft’s stories for Penguin Classics. He has also prepared editions of Lovecraft’s collected essays and poetry. His exhaustive biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996), was expanded as I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010). He is the editor of the anthologies American Supernatural Tales (Penguin, 2007), Black Wings I–IV (PS Publishing, 2010–15), A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (Centipede Press, 2014), The Madness of Cthulhu (Titan Books, 2014–15), and Searchers After Horror: New Tales of the Weird and Fantastic (Fedogan & Bremer, 2014). He is the editor of the Lovecraft Annual (Hippocampus Press), the Weird Fiction Review (Centipede Press), and the American Rationalist (Center for Inquiry). His Lovecraftian novel The Assaults of Chaos appeared in 2013.
The Authors
Donald R. Burleson is the author of twenty-two books, including the short story collections Lemon Drops and Other Horrors, Four Shadowings, Beyond the Lamplight, and Wait for the Thunder, as well as four novels. His fiction has appeared in Twilight Zone, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lore, Cemetery Dance, Inhuman, Deathrealm, Terminal Fright, Weird Fiction Review, and many other magazines, as well as in dozens of anthologies, most recently Black Wings I & III, Dead But Dreaming 2, and Horror for the Holidays. He lives in Roswell, New Mexico, with his writer wife Mollie and numerous cats.
Mollie L. Burleson’s fiction and poetry has appeared in such magazines as Lore, Crypt of Cthulhu, and Midnight Echo, and numerous anthologies, including 100 Vicious Little Vampire Stories, 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories, Horror for the Holidays, Black Wings I & III, and Horrors! 365 Scary Stories. Her literary criticism has appeared in Lovecraft Studies and Studies in Weird Fiction. She lives in Roswell, New Mexico, with her writer husband Don and numerous cats.
Lois H. Gresh is the six-time New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of over thirty books and more than sixty short stories. Her books have been published in twenty-two languages. Look for Sherlock Holmes versus Cthulhu: The Adventure of the Deadly Dimensions (Titan Books, 2017), the first in a new trilogy of thrillers. Recent titles include Cult of the Dead and Other Weird and Lovecraftian Tales (Hippocampus Press, 2015), and Innsmouth Nightmares (as editor; PS Publishing, 2015). She has received many Bram Stoker, Theodore Sturgeon, and International Horror Guild Award nominations for her work.
Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, amateur film scholar, and monster expert who was born on the night before Halloween. He is the author of Never Bet the Devil and Other Warnings and Painted Monsters and Other Strange Beasts, as well as the co-editor of Fungi, an anthology of weird fungus-themed stories. You can find him online at OrrinGrey.com.
Gwyneth Jones is the author of many fantasy, horror novels, and ghost stories for teenagers using the name Ann Halam, and several well-regarded SF and fantasy novels and stories for adults. She has won a few awards, but never lets it worry her. She lives in Brighton, England, with her husband, three intelligent goldfish, and two cats called Ginger and Milo; she likes old movies, practicing yoga, and staring out of the window.
Mark Howard Jones was born on the twenty-sixth anniversary of H. P. Lovecraft’s death. He is the author of the collections Songs from Spider Street (SD Publishing, 2010) and Brightest Black (SD Publishing, 2013), and the editor of Cthulhu Cymraeg: Lovecraftian Tales from Wales (SD Publishing, 2014). His Lovecraftian fiction appears in the anthologies Black Wings III (PS Publishing, 2014) and The Madness of Cthulhu 2 (Titan Books, 2015). He lives in Cardiff, the capital of Wales.
Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of nine novels, including, most recently, The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. Her copious short fiction has been collected in several volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; To Charles Fort, with Love; Alabaster; The Ammonite Violin and Others; A Is for Alien; and Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart. She is a two-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, a winner of the Bram Stoker Award, a three-time nominee for the Shirley Jackson Award, and has also been honored by the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. She lives in Providence, R.I.
Award-winning author Nancy Kilpatrick has published eighteen novel
s, more than two hundred short stories, six collections, and one nonfiction book, and has edited thirteen anthologies. Her recent award-winning titles are the anthology Danse Macabre: Close Encounters with the Reaper and the short fiction collection Vampyric Variations. Current work appears in Searchers After Horror, A Darke Phantastique, Zombie Apocalypse: Endgame!, and the forthcoming Blood Sisters: Vampire Stories by Women, The Madness of Cthulhu 2, and Stone Skin Bestiary. Recent anthologies include Expiration Date and nEvermore! Tales of Murder, Mystery and the Macabre. Join her on Facebook.
Lynda E. Rucker is an American writer born and raised in the South and currently living in Dublin, Ireland. She has sold more than two dozen short stories to such places as F&SF, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, The Best Horror of the Year, Black Static, Shadows and Tall Trees, and Nightmare Magazine. She is a regular columnist for Black Static, and her first collection, The Moon Will Look Strange, was released in 2013 from Karōshi Books.
John Shirley is a novelist, screenwriter, television writer, songwriter, and author of numerous story collections. He is a past Guest of Honor at the World Horror Convention and won the Bram Stoker Award for his story collection Black Butterflies (Ziesing, 1998). His screenplays include The Crow. He has written teleplays for Poltergeist: The Legacy, Deep Space Nine, and other shows. His novels include Demons (Del Rey, 2002), the A Song Called Youth trilogy (1985–90), Wetbones (Ziesing, 1992), Bleak History (Simon & Schuster, 2009), and Everything Is Broken (Prime Books, 2012). His newest books are New Taboos (PM Press, 2013) and Doyle After Death (HarperCollins, 2013). His latest story collections are In Extremis: The Most Extreme Stories of John Shirley (Underland Press, 2012), and Lovecraft Alive! (Hippocampus Press, 2016).
Some of Jonathan Thomas’s forebears dwelt in Salem and somehow evaded arrest during 1692’s general hysteria. Others include New Englanders who identified as German and reviled Yankees as “the damned English” before World War I. Later, a spinster great-aunt related heroic, most probably apocryphal, accounts of Welsh ancestors. Until such time as he springs for genetic testing, Thomas designates himself a Swamp Yankee, which is how his parents referred to each other when out of the other’s earshot. His most recent collection is Dreams of Ys and Other Invisible Worlds (Hippocampus Press, 2015).
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