by Gafford, Sam
The Dreamer in Fire and Other Stories
The Dreamer in Fire
and Other Stories
Sam Gafford
Hippocampus Press
————————
New York
The Dreamer in Fire and Other Stories copyright © 2017 by
Hippocampus Press.
Works by Sam Gafford © 2017 by Sam Gafford.
No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means
without the written permission of the publisher.
Published by Hippocampus Press
P.O. Box 641, New York, NY 10156.
http://www.hippocampuspress.com
Cover artwork © 2017 by Jared Boggess.
Cover design by Jared Boggess.
Hippocampus Press logo designed by Anastasia Damianakos.
First Electronic Edition
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
ISBN 978-1-61498-209-8
Contents
Casting Fractals
Showtime
The Adventure of the Prometheus Calculation
Homecoming
The Gathering Daemonica
Static
Sunspots
My Brother’s Keeper
“How Does That Make You Feel?”
What Was That?
“The Dreamer in Fire”: Notes on Robert Winslow’s “Sutter’s Corners”
He Whose Feet Trod the Lost Aeons
“Good Morning, Innsmouth!”
Weltschmerz
Hellhounds on the Trail
The Land of Lonesomeness
Passing Spirits
Acknowledgments
Casting Fractals
“Ever read much H. P. Lovecraft, kid?” asked Carl Eckhardt.
We were sitting in Mulligan’s Bar down in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It was June 1962, and it had taken me the better part of the year to find Eckhardt. Now I’d begun to wonder why I bothered.
He was well into his third drunken stupor according to the bartender. These were the years when you could drink all night in New York City as long as you knew where to go and your money held out long enough. Near as I could tell, Eckhardt had run out of both.
“Can’t say as I recall the name,” I answered and took a full swig of my beer. “What is it? Some kind of porn?”
Eckhardt chuckled and scratched his chest harshly.
“Nah. Horror stories. Back when I was a little squirt, I was nuts for the pulps, you know? I read them all. The Shadow. Doc Savage. G8 and His Battle Aces. But some of my favorites were the horror pulps. Weird Tales. Shudder Stories. I’d buy every one that came out. Drove my father nuts! He really hated those things.
“Anyway, Lovecraft was one of the big writers for Weird Tales and one of my favorites. He was . . .”—Eckhardt waved his hand, nearly spilling his whiskey—“ten times better than most of the other hacks. Not that it made much of a difference. Not many people remember him today and even fewer people read him. That’s something we reporters can relate to, eh?”
Eckhardt motioned for another round.
“Carl, so what? What’s this got to do with anything? No one’s seen or heard from you since you got fired from the Daily Mirror. Now you’re sitting here sprouting some garbage about a pulp writer from thirty years ago? What does it matter?”
The bartender served out another glass of whiskey, and Eckhardt took a hard swallow. He made the kind of hiss between his teeth that only comes with hard liquor.
“And that, my young friend Richard, is the exact point. Everything is connected. In one of his stories, Lovecraft wrote something that I’ve never forgotten. It’s stayed with me all these years. He said, ‘The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.’ I memorized it. What do you think that means, Richard?”
I shrugged. I truly didn’t see the point to any of this. “I don’t know. I guess that we forget a lot of stuff?”
“Nah. It means that there are things going on all around us. Stuff we don’t even think is important, but it is. Everything is connected and if, if¸ we could put it all together, we’d go mad at what we saw.”
“And what would we see, Carl?”
He sat there for a moment, staring at his glass before emptying it then said, “Our insignificance.”
With an agility I didn’t think he was capable of, Eckhardt got off his stool and stumbled toward the door. “Leave me alone, kid. Just go away, will ya?”
* * *
Carl Eckhardt had been one of the leading reporters of the 1950s in New York City. He hit all the big stories and had front-page bylines on the New York Herald Tribune back when that was a “newspaperman’s newspaper.” Carl was the kind of reporter you’d expect to see in movies like The Front Page, shirt sleeves rolled up, cigarette clenched in his teeth, and pounding out a breaking story on an old typewriter. He was exactly the kind of reporter I wanted to be.
When I started as a stringer back in 1959, I was in awe of the man. He walked through the newsroom like a giant. People got out of his way, and the only one who ever challenged him was his editor, Lou Kluger. Their screaming matches were legendary. Eckhardt fought for his stories hard, maybe too hard.
Then, something happened to him in 1961. It wasn’t as if the fight had gone out of him, but now there was a despondency that seeped into his work. And he began to drink. Eckhardt had never been married and had no kids or family. That meant that there was nothing there to keep him from falling off the rails—which he did . . . spectacularly so.
I happened to be in the newsroom that day. One of the other reporters was working on an article about Sputnik, and I’d brought him some of the details from the paper’s morgue. It wasn’t a particularly interesting article and I could have written it myself, but there was a hierarchy to be maintained.
Eckhardt was in Kluger’s office but, for once, he was on the receiving end of the yelling. I couldn’t hear much, but Kluger was howling mad. Something about an article that Eckhardt had written about some dead Russian kids. The issue was that Eckhardt had made some implications regarding their deaths that Kluger, or someone else, strongly objected to.
Soon, almost everyone in the newsroom stopped and watched. We knew there was something epic happening even if we didn’t know exactly what it was. Words like “jackass” and “joke” could be heard as well as “drunk” and “washed-up.” One thing that everyone heard loud and clear was “you’re FIRED!”
Eckhardt didn’t even bother to clear out his desk. He just walked out of the newsroom as if this was just some play he had already seen and whose outcome he knew. He never came back to the Herald Tribune again.
After about a month, they were going to throw out all the stuff from Eckhardt’s desk, but I put it all in a box and kept it in my apartment. I didn’t know why at the time. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
For the next year, I heard rumors about Eckhardt. He stumbled from paper to paper, writing ever stranger articles. Soon, those who knew him referred to him as the ‘monster of the week’ reporter. Then came word that he got fired from the Daily Mirror. And when the Daily Mirror fired you, you didn’t have much lower to go. He had become the reporter’s cautionary tale—the kind we tell to each other in that sort of ‘there but for the grace of God’ type of thing. Some thought that he had broken under the stress of his work, that the big stories had simply beaten him. Others thought he just decided to crawl inside a bottle, but the result was still the same.
I’d tried to find him, but there were only rumors and gossip everywhere I went. When I got my first article published in the Herald Tribune (a mino
r piece about a murder victim), I tried to find him to show him what he had inspired me to do. But, wherever he was, he didn’t want to be found.
After that brief meeting in the bar in 1962, I didn’t look for him anymore. I didn’t get what I wanted from him and probably never would. Besides, after the events in Texas in 1963, we all had more important things to worry about. Eckhardt slipped from my mind and from the pages of the newspapers as if he had never existed. But that was the nature of newspaper work. The only thing that mattered was today’s edition. Yesterday’s paper, and the men who wrote them, were forgotten.
After the New York newspaper strike of ’62–’63, we all went back to work and I finally found myself writing regular articles for the Herald Tribune. I was one of the youngest reporters; in a rare sense of foresight, Kluger wanted someone to try and speak to the new generation. Things were happening in the country and the world, and it was an exciting time to be a reporter.
Until I got the message from Eckhardt that day at the end of July 1965.
It had been left for me at the front desk, and the secretary gave it to me as I was returning from lunch. I’d asked who had left the note and she just replied, “some bum.” She hadn’t been at the paper when Eckhardt was there, so she didn’t recognize him; but the note was in his characteristic scrawl. It said to meet him at a certain apartment at 5 p.m. and to “bring booze.” The signature was Eckhardt’s usual unrecognizable jumble, but I knew it well.
I debated if I should just ignore it. Eckhardt belonged to my past and I didn’t feel I owed him anything. Whatever his problem, he’d created it himself. But, like a good reporter, I smelled a story; so, at 5 p.m., I found myself climbing the stairs of a tenement in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn with a bag containing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
The building was old, probably one of the oldest in the neighborhood. This had been a slum in the ’20s and ’30s and not much had changed since then. The hallways smelled of piss and vomit and there were sounds of foreign words and music spilling through the thin walls. I knocked at the appropriate door and waited. There was movement from the other side of the door as if it was taking something a great deal of effort to get to the door. Eventually, the door opened a creak and a single eye looked at me.
“Did you bring the booze?” Eckhardt asked.
I showed him the bag, and the eye relaxed and smiled at me. The door opened slowly. At first I thought it was because it wasn’t used to being opened; but when it did, I saw that it was because there was so much garbage behind it.
Some people would have called Eckhardt a packrat. In 1965, he was just a nut.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” Eckhardt said as he eagerly took the bag from me and started walking down a narrow path carved through the debris in his hallway. “But I shouldn’t have worried. You’ve got the gift, sonny Jim! Always knew you did.”
“What gift is that?” I asked as I carefully navigated piles of newspapers and books and magazines that looked as if they would fall on me at any minute and crush me to death.
“The worst gift of all—curiosity!”
I followed him down the hall, looking in the rooms we passed on the way. They were similarly filled with newspapers and books. I noticed that not a few of the volumes had library markings on them and wondered if they’d been stolen. Eckhardt kept scratching at his chest, but I don’t think he realized he was doing it. For some reason, it had become some sort of reflex action.
We squeezed around a corner and into a larger room. The tumult was only slightly lessened here. There was an easy chair near the wall by windows that had been blocked with yet more overstuffed bookcases. The chair faced a furniture contraption upon which perched three televisions. All three of them were on different channels.
There was another, wooden chair that was covered in a pile of papers. I went to move them off and make room for myself when Eckhardt shouted, “No! Don’t do that. Everything is carefully ordered and arranged.”
He quickly picked up the pile of papers and placed it on top of yet another pile that seemed to have no connection to the original pile. If there was any sort of order to the place, it was only in Eckhardt’s mind. He scratched his chest again. Bedbugs maybe?
“What do you mean ‘ordered,’ Carl? This place is a dung-heap. I’m surprised you don’t have rats or roaches.”
He was insulted by this. “This place is clean, Richard! I’ll have no filth here. Look around! Do you see decaying plates of food or garbage?”
It was true. Aside from the papers, books, and magazines, there was no evidence of food. I did notice several empty whiskey bottles that were neatly placed in the corner.
Eckhardt settled into his seat and opened the bag. He took a glass from the floor near his chair and offered it to me. I nodded a polite refusal, and he scoffed.
“Still no taste for the hard stuff, eh? You’ll never be a true newspaperman if you don’t learn how to drink like us.”
Even if I had learned how to drink, I wasn’t fond of the idea of using Eckhardt’s glass.
“Why are you watching three TVs at the same time?” I asked.
“Got to keep current. You never know when something important will come on.”
One of the televisions was showing a Huckleberry Hound cartoon.
I sighed. “OK, Carl, what am I doing here? What do you want?”
He looked hurt. “Ooo, such hostility from a man who used to guzzle my beer!”
“Fine,” I said and looked at my wristwatch, “you’ve got ten minutes.”
He shook his head. “Ten minutes, he gives me. How can I explain the universe in ten minutes?”
I sat down on the wooden chair and finally got a chance to look at some of the books and papers that littered the room. Most were history textbooks, while some were science and mythology and still others were newspapers from places around the world. It was as if all the information in the world had come to this place to die.
“You ever hear of a guy named Charles Fort?” he asked abruptly.
I nodded. “Sure. He was a quack. A poor man’s ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not.’”
Eckhardt got excited and leaned closer. “No, that’s where you’re wrong. Fort was an archivist of the weird. He charted those strange things that no one could explain and spent his life looking for a connection, a pattern that he never found.”
“And you did?”
He shook his head. “Not all of it. Just a part, a tiny piece.”
Eckhardt leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He looked tired and old.
“It started,” he said, scratching his chest, “back in 1958 with Van Allen. You may remember that he was the guy who discovered that the earth was surrounded by radiation belts. This was big news back then and impacted a lot of the space plans. I interviewed Van Allen in ’58, but I wasn’t a big ‘science’ guy. To be honest, it was the kind of story that made all the scientists excited but didn’t really have an impact on the ‘man in the street.’ It wasn’t until I interviewed Van Allen again in ’59 that I learned about what really happened.
“You see, the military brains behind our government decided that they wanted to explode an atomic bomb in outer space.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I remember that. It set off one of those ‘electromagnetic pulses,’ didn’t it?”
“It did—but it was the other bomb, the one they didn’t tell anyone about, that did more.”
“What are you talking about? There was no other bomb.”
Eckhardt smiled. “You still believe in the government, don’t you? Do you know that when the bombs were exploded, Van Allen thought it would start an atomic ‘chain reaction’ that would wipe out all life on this planet? He warned them not to do it, and they did it anyway! The ‘electromagnetic pulse’ bomb was the cover for the other bomb that was ten times more powerful. Van Allen told me he aged a lifetime that day.
“But the ‘chain reaction’ Van Allen feared never happened, so everyone relaxed and contin
ued with their space radiation research and set off a few more bombs in outer space to make the Russians nervous. Except that something did happen, something unexpected.”
Eckhardt opened his eyes and looked at me intently.
“Haven’t you ever wondered, Richard, why everything is going to hell? Since 1958, the world keeps getting worse and worse. I could give you a list of all the crap that’s happened in the last seven years and it’s going to get worse.”
I just shook my head.
“The world’s going through changes, Carl. You can’t have change without pain.”
“PAIN? You call this pain?” He threw a pile of papers at me. There were pictures and statements in folders. I could see photos of JFK’s assassination mixed with pictures of bodies frozen in snow and Asian villages being torched while flaming children ran down the streets. “The world’s going mad, Richard.”
“Carl, this doesn’t prove anything. You know that there have been disasters like this throughout history. Are you going to blame Lincoln’s assassination on this now?”
“No! You’re not getting it! You remember what I told you once? ‘Everything is connected!’ It didn’t start in 1958; it just got worse. Because of the bombs.”
I started to get out of my chair. “You know, you’re starting to sound like one of those conspiracy nuts who believe that JFK was killed by the mob. Why did you want me to come here anyway? I haven’t seen or heard from you in years, and now you want to meet and you start sprouting all these insane theories. Why am I here?”
Eckhardt took a big swig of whiskey from his glass and glared at me.
“OK, here it is.” He wiped his mouth with his hand. “When they kicked me out of the Herald Tribune, I left some stuff there in my desk. I need it back now. Do you have any idea what happened to it? Did they throw it out?” His voice was that of a pleading man; a drunk begging for one more drink.