by S. T. Joshi
“Just to recap quickly for our recent arrivals,” he began, “I was just asked about evidence that supports my theory of Lovecraft being as much a magician as an author of weird tales.
“While it’s true that Lovecraft always declared himself a scientific materialist, many of his letters, his accounts of his dreams, and of course his fiction combine to paint a very different picture of the man.”
He held up a manila folder. “This is a dossier I’ve been compiling for the past nine years. It includes all sorts of marginalia that hints at Lovecraft’s practices and philosophical theories which I would classify as magic or sorcery. One perfect example is HPL’s visit to the Dutch Reformed Church cemetery in Brooklyn.
“There Lovecraft actually chipped a piece off of one of the headstones and took it home with him. In a letter dated September 16, 1922, he writes of this ghoulish keepsake, saying, and I quote, ‘I must place it beneath my pillow while I sleep. Who can say what thing might come out of the centuried earth to exact vengeance for its desecrated tomb? And should it come, who can say what it might resemble?’ End quote.
“Fans will recognize this very scenario as the plot of Lovecraft’s tale ‘The Hound.’ It seems quite obvious that he did indeed undertake this form of dream ritual, and what he saw was later ciphered in one of his short stories…”
I leaned in and pleaded quietly to Pamela, “Can we please leave?” She nodded. We preferred to brave the rain.
Drying off in our washroom later that night, Pamela said. “I’d like to try that.”
“What?”
“What Lovecraft did: place a special stone under my pillow and see if it affects my dreams.”
“Should I pencil in a little grave-robbing for Friday night?”
“No, dummy,” she replied before marching down the hall. I watched her fishing about in her dresser until she freed the tiny rosewood box in which she kept her most cherished possessions: her grandmother’s hatpin that she’d loved as a young girl, little notes I’d left for her around the apartment, old birthday cards, and…
I didn’t even have to look at what Pamela had resting in her palm when she returned to the bathroom.
“I want to use this.” She kissed the hag stone the way a priest would his holy stole. “I think it will bring fantastic dreams.”
SOMETIME BEFORE DAWN I WAS AWOKEN BY PAMELA tossing and turning. My eyes still half-closed, I reached for her, hoping to ease her troubled sleep. Her body was warm beneath the covers. I could feel her chest rising and falling.
Muffled sounds, like cat claws raking upholstery, filled the darkness.
The pillow was heaving and shifting like choppy waters beneath Pamela’s head. It was as if a small animal had been pinned beneath her and was frantically trying to free itself. Pamela moaned distantly.
I called Pamela’s name. I shook her. Her face remained a placid mask conveying the deepest slumber.
Sucking in a breath as though it would bolster me for the task ahead, I grasped the pillow and yanked it out from under her.
Her eyes sprung open. She let out a loud, desperate, wheezing gasp. Pressing her hand to her chest, she rolled out of bed and thudded down on the floor where she began to cough and retch.
The hag stone was like a gray island in a sea of white cotton.
I leapt to Pamela, who was still struggling to breathe. Frantically I tried to check if she was choking, but she rose and stumbled out of the room, collapsing in the corridor. I did my best to comfort her until her breathing returned to normal.
I examined her for wounds or bruises, still unsure of what exactly had occurred. I got her a glass of water and asked her if she could tell me anything about what had happened. Pamela shook her head.
I made a quick detour to the bedroom where the hag stone was reposing like a blood-plumped leech on the mattress. Not wanting to touch it, I wrapped my hand in Pamela’s empty pillowcase and flung the rock into the waste basket.
I made Pamela some tea and settled onto the sofa with her. We stayed up for the remainder of the night. She spoke very little, except to confess to having a headache. I got her an aspirin and rubbed her temples until she finally dozed off.
I let Pamela sleep until past noon before I finally nudged her awake.
“Do you remember anything more about last night?” I asked.
“I remember dreaming,” she said through a yawn. “It wasn’t anything remarkable, through. I dreamt that I was sitting on a rocking chair inside an ordinary suburban house. I could see the other houses through the big picture window in the living room. It was postcard suburbia: manicured lawns, station wagons in the driveways, painted mailboxes, the whole thing. While I was standing there watching kids running up and down the sidewalks and playing games, the dream began to change. I began to hear a low whistling sound…”
Her shudder was noticeable. Before I could even move to comfort her she wrapped her arms around herself.
“There was this… shape… near me. I couldn’t see it, but I was suddenly sick with the feeling of being watched. The feeling just kept building. Pretty soon I was so frightened that I couldn’t even bear the thought of turning around to face what was watching me.”
She pressed her hands against her face.
“It’s okay,” I assured her, “it was just a dream.”
“No!” she spat. “No, it wasn’t. I need to tell you this. I only caught a quick glance of the thing. It had no face at all, just a smudge of gray with an oval mouth. I think that mouth was causing the awful whistling. But worse than the faceless thing or the awful noise was the fact that I somehow knew this figure wasn’t part of my dream.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it was outside my dream. It was near my dream but wasn’t a part of it. It was like a stagehand standing in the wings while the play is happening onstage.
“Knowing that the shape was near the dream but not in it was what turned my dream into a nightmare. I suddenly knew that the house I was in and the street I was looking at weren’t permanent, weren’t true. There was a limit to how real they could be. The edges of my world became visible to me. And this thing, this entity, was lurking right on the threshold where my dream lost its imagery and it became… I don’t know what… a great void.”
I swallowed and felt pain. My throat had dried out completely. “That’s a disturbing dream, hon. I completely understand why it upset you. But it was just a dream, right?”
Pamela just stared at me. Though she said not a word about it, my well-intentioned dismissal of her vision had obviously cut her deeply. Try as I did to make amends by cooking a dinner of comfort food and sitting with her to watch sitcoms (without laughing at any of them) for the evening, I had broken my lover’s faith in me. Our relationship never recovered.
WE WENT TO BED EARLY THAT NIGHT.
It was still dark when she woke me by digging her nails into my bicep. She was whimpering like a wounded pup.
I rolled over, sat up. “What’s wrong, Pam? What is it?”
“It’s here. It’s watching us…”
Her strangled words didn’t really register, but what did affect me was Pamela’s face. It was ashen, and the eyes were so wide they seemed lidless.
Wordlessly Pamela pointed to the corner of our room. It was then that the terror seized me. I’m unsure what awful form I sensed was glaring at us from the edge of our room, but whatever it was, I knew I didn’t want to see it.
There, where the moonbeams seemed to have swept up all the blackness it could not banish, Pamela’s antique desk appeared as a chunk of carved coal. The shade of the standing lamp glowed bone-bright amidst the shadows. It was all I could do to keep my imagination from decorating that white bell of fabric with eyes and a wide whistling mouth.
The wind pressed sharply against our windows, sounding too much like shallow heaving. My imagination latched a breathing rhythm onto this. It also coaxed the darkness in the corner into the shape of an intruder lanky enough to disguise itsel
f in the seam where wall met wall.
Pamela hissed into my ear, “You see it, don’t you?”
I told her I didn’t see anything. It was not a lie. Not totally. What I saw was not complete, only the mere suggestion of the corner wobbling, as though the marriage of walls was as shaky as a pair of curtains being clutched shut by a nervous hand.
“It knows we’ve seen it!”
Pamela’s cry was the final straw for me. I overcame my fear by leaping from the bed and smacking the light switch on the wall.
When the naked bulb burst to life, the details of the room fell dutifully into place.
“We have to get rid of it!” Pamela exclaimed, flinging back the sheets. She began to search the room frantically, first by rummaging through her dresser drawers. “Where is it?”
When I didn’t answer immediately, she shouted, “The hag stone, what did you do with it?”
“I threw it out.”
Pamela moved to the trash can beside her desk, dumped out its contents. The stone thumped onto the carpet.
“Oh, God…” Pamela placed a hand over mouth as though she was about to retch. She flung the stone at me. I cried out when it struck my shin. “It’s gone!”
“What are you talking about? You just about broke my fucking leg with it!”
“Look at it!” she cried. “Just look at it!”
I did, but only to appease her. If there was an explanation for the change, it was evading me superbly. Ultimately I just picked up the hag stone, carried it out to our balcony, and flung it as far as I could.
Pamela was standing in the hallway when I re-entered the apartment. “What happened to it, Mason?” I moved past her and went back to bed, pretending that I was sleepy, making believe that I wasn’t as frightened as she was. “Mason, where did the seeing-hole go?”
THE LAST THING I WANTED TO DO WAS GO TO WORK, but I had no sick-day benefits and we couldn’t afford the loss of a day’s wages. Before I left that morning Pamela muttered that she wasn’t going to class, which I thought was a good idea. I told her I would phone to check in on her and would be home straight after my shift.
I called the apartment on my lunch break, but the phone rang lonely. It worried me, and by mid-afternoon that unease had twisted into panic.
The homeward drive couldn’t end too quickly, and when I finally reached the last flight of stairs leading to our apartment, an instinctual sense of dread seized me. I didn’t know what I was going to see beyond our door. I only hoped I would be able to cope with it.
Pushing the unlocked door back from its frame revealed the fallout of Pamela’s day of solitude.
Our apartment had been ravaged from ceiling to floor. Every stick of furniture had been upset or smashed or had its upholstery shorn from its frame. The wallpaper had been stripped and the plaster behind it punctured by what looked to be the careless lashes of a hammer. The windows, perplexingly, remained intact, though thick sections of taped newspaper rendered their panes opaque.
The image of Pamela’s body lying lifeless on the floor petrified me. The vision was so vivid that I couldn’t bring myself to take another step into the living room.
Only the sharp scratching sounds, indicative of something living, managed to move me at all—and even then only to turn my head.
Pamela was hunched like a feral child against one wall. Her nightgown was torn and filthy; her matted hair was flecked with pallor-pale wall plaster.
“It shifted,” she said. She was practically giggling, perhaps at the absurdity of it all, or from her own exhaustion. “I’ve been trying to find it, but it just keeps moving…”
I went to her, took her face in my hands. “What’s happened? Who did this to you?”
She clasped her hand over my mouth, pressed her finger against her own lips. “It’s watching us. It’s found a new place.”
“What has?”
“The seeing-hole… I know it’s here, but I can’t find it!”
I did the only thing that felt proper: I removed Pamela from the nest of her torment. Without bothering to pack a bag, I took Pamela to a motel by the beach strip.
Our room looked better suited for a hospital in-patient than for a tourist. The stone floor was barely hidden beneath patches of tacky linoleum, the walls were paneled in bowing wood. The whole place stank of bleach. The sad thing was, even these paltry accommodations were an extravagance we could not afford. I had to use part of our weekly grocery money to pay for it and the sandwich fixings I’d bought us for dinner.
I had hoped that foreign surroundings would not only calm Pamela but also allow me to see the situation more clearly. But our grungy hideaway neither refreshed my perspective nor put an end to Pamela’s panic. She pushed one of the plastic chairs into a corner, giving herself a perch where she could twitch and scrutinize the air, her hands, the clothes on her back. She was like a squirrel with ever-taut nerves and a relentless panic over unseen perils. The ham sandwich and carton of milk I set on the table beside her went untouched.
I waited up with her for as long as I could. I pictured her nerves as being like violin strings being tightened and tightened. I was waiting for them to snap. But Pamela never reached critical mass. As the hours moved glacially past, she seemed to be, if not calmer, then at least at a peculiar peace with her current state of mind.
I don’t remember dozing off, but I must have, for the next thing I can recall is a hand gently nudging my shoulder. I opened my eyes to see Pamela standing in the filmy light of dawn.
“It’s not following me anymore,” she whispered.
I wish I could have been more relieved by Pamela’s freshly stoic demeanor, but on some level I sensed that we were both merely enjoying the eye of the storm, and that the worst of it was just on the horizon, waiting for the prime moment to blast our lives apart.
It waited less than a week before it struck.
The days leading up to that final awfulness were routine enough to plant a seed of hope in me. I still wasn’t convinced that Pamela was one-hundred percent, but her familiar behavior did lead me to believe that in time she would be.
“WILL YOU ANSWER ME SOMETHING?” I’D ASKED HER one temperate evening. The breeze that pushed through the half-open window smelled rarely fresh for the heart of the city. Pamela and I were lying in post-coital bliss. I was too relaxed and had assumed that the drama was a dark speck in our rearview; a harmless memory.
“Sure, why not?”
“That morning when we were at the motel, you said ‘it’s not following me anymore.’ What did you mean?”
She sat up and turned from me. The sheets twisted over her naked back like a bridal train. I touched my fingertips to her side. She flinched as though I’d burned her.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and it was true. “I was just curious, but it doesn’t matter.”
“The seeing-hole…”
“What?”
“The seeing-hole from the stone. That’s what was following me.”
I regretted raising the issue.
“And I never said it was gone,” she added. “I said it was no longer following me.”
“Are you saying you still believe this… magical seeing-hole or whatever you think it is, is still here?”
She reached over and took my hand. As she raised it to her face, I was half expecting her to suck on one of my fingers—an erotic little game we both enjoyed. Pamela selected my index finger, but instead of sliding it into her mouth she pressed it against the lid of her closed eyes. “Right here.”
I snapped my hand back, staring at the fingers that had touched Pamela’s waxy eyelid and had felt the shaped jelly beneath it.
I shifted away, unsure of what to say. Pamela remained in the same supine posture on the sofa. Finally, when I rose to get myself a glass of water, she announced that she was going to take a shower.
“Good idea,” I muttered. “I’ll see about fixing us something for dinner.”
I entered the kitchen and began a pantomime of prepari
ng a meal. After plunking a frying pan upon the oven range, I stood dumbly, listening to the faint rumble of the shower running down the hall.
And then the scream.
I tore down the hall and into the bathroom. Through the shower curtain she appeared a vague heap at one end of the tub. I pulled the wet plastic back. Pamela was trembling, despite the gush of steaming water. Her left hand was pressed against the tiled stall; her right groped the air before her.
“I can’t see!” She shrieked the words again and again. Her tone moved from enraged to bewildered to petrified; but always, “I can’t see!”
I hunched down and took her and held her like a child. We remained there, both of us crying until the water sprayed cold over us.
In reality, less than twenty minutes had elapsed between Pamela’s scream and the time I ushered her through the emergency room doors. But by then Pamela was catatonic. I did all the talking, giving what little information I could to the nurse at the registration desk and eventually to the doctor.
The tests they ran turned up nothing. Pamela’s eyes responded regularly to all the introduced stimuli. In the end they suggested that hers was a hysterical blindness. The doctor assured me that her condition was legitimate, but unquestionably psychosomatic.
At his suggestion, I consented to have Pamela admitted for a seventy-two-hour psychiatric observation. Pamela begged me not to do it. Her pleading ended only after the Haldol took hold.
It was well into the morning by the time I left the hospital. I was so exhausted that my blood felt like toxic sludge in my veins. Everything around me seemed to be swaying. The irony was that, despite my body’s cries to the contrary, I knew that sleep was impossible. Pamela’s condition had chewed through my own resourcefulness and logic, and it appeared that the agents of science at the hospital weren’t holding out much hope for solving the riddle, or at least not after a mere three-day observation.