by S. T. Joshi
“You know where I hang. Thanks for the drink.”
And Ricky stood there for the longest time, thinking it over...
Passing Spirits
SAM GAFFORD
Sam Gafford grew up on a steady diet of comic books, television, old horror movies, and the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. Small wonder that he would want to become a writer. His stories and essays have appeared in a variety of small-press publications and magazines. Gafford has also helped to advance the critical study of the fiction of William Hope Hodgson. He is working on a novel about Jack the Ripper.
“...CTHULHU NEVER EXISTED. AZATHOTH NEVER EXISTED... Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, Nug, Yeb, none of them. I made them all up.”
I was sitting in H. P. Lovecraft’s small study, listening to him rant. It was 1937. In barely under a year he would be dead of stomach cancer. I felt a need to try to tell him this. To let him know that the pain in his abdomen was not just “grippe” but a serious medical problem that he should seek treatment for immediately. When I tried to explain that I knew all about those types of things, he refused to listen and went on ranting.
“But you know what is the worst thing about all of this?” he continued in his nasal voice. “This is what I’ll be remembered for...if I’m remembered by anyone. For making up a pantheon of monster-gods. Basically, for stealing from Dunsany.”
I tried to explain that that wasn’t the truth. That he had added much more to it than just the idea of a cosmic mythology, but he wouldn’t listen. It was very strange and not at all the type of conversation I had envisioned having. I wouldn’t say that the man was bitter, but he certainly wasn’t happy about a lot of things.
Looking at him, I felt that there were so many things that I should be saying but I didn’t. My time was too short for that and the memory was already fading.
WHEN I AWOKE, I WAS IN MY APARTMENT AND THERE WAS a ribbon of spit on the pillow next to me. I checked it for blood, but it was clear. My head throbbed as usual and I felt the familiar dull ache behind my eyes. I crawled out of bed and turned the TV on as I dressed. CNN was going on about some flareup in the Middle East (I had long ago stopped caring about such things, there was always a flareup somewhere or other) and I flipped it over to Scooby-Doo on the Cartoon Network. It was one of my favorites from the first year (the best year before they got into all that guest-star nonsense and then brought in Scrappy-Doo—who the hell ever thought that was a good idea?) with the space ghost that had the glowing, laughing head. I remember how that scared the piss out of me as a kid. A lot of things scared me back then, before I learned that the only real scary thing in life was stuff like cancer and brain tumors. There weren’t any gods or monsters. Not in the real world. Here we had sickness and disease instead of vampires and ghosts.
I brushed my teeth and took my medicine. Looking at the clock, I had about an hour to get to work, so I knew I’d have enough time. I sat down and watched the rest of the show, waiting for that great Scooby-Doo ending where they unmask the villain. I always loved that.
IT WORK, I TRIED TO PRETEND THAT I CARED ABOUT what I was doing, but it didn’t really matter. I was just another clerk in just another bookstore. Nothing special. Nothing unique. I had “Help Desk” duty, which everyone knew was the worst. Listening to blue-haired old ladies trying to describe what they wanted. “I don’t know the name but I saw it on Oprah. It had a black cover.”
The other clerks tried not to look at me too closely. My hair had grown back, more or less, but there’s still something about a cancer patient that sets you off from everyone else. Maybe it’s a smell or some invisible “early-warning” system, but no one looks at you the same way afterward. That didn’t bother me too much. Most of them weren’t worth knowing anyway. Weird, trendy people of questionable sexuality. I’d never had much in common with them nor they with me.
Lovecraft’s ghost followed me through the reference section, pointing out books with errors in them. I hate it when he does that.
“THE TUMOR’S GETTING LARGER,” INTONED DR. LYONS with all the seriousness of a hanging judge. He held up two CAT scans. “As you can see from the earlier one, it was only about the size of a grape. Now it’s getting close to a plum.”
I’d never eaten a plum, so had no idea about its size. I figured that it wasn’t a good comparison.
“So none of the treatments have done anything?”
Dr. Lyons sighed. “No. The radiation treatments barely seemed to hold its growth. Since we stopped doing those, it’s gotten bigger. The medication doesn’t seem to be working either. Surgery, although not recommended, is still an option.”
“You told me before that it was too dangerous.”
“It is. But I don’t really see any other way.” He got up from behind his desk. “Michael, you have to understand that without surgery this is going to continue to grow.”
Apparently I wasn’t impressed enough by this.
“Michael, you will die without this operation.”
I thought about this. Dying wasn’t necessarily the worst thing. Chemo was certainly on an equal footing. Poverty was right up there too.
“How long?”
“If the tumor continues to grow at this size, maybe four to six months, on the outside. But, Michael, they won’t be comfortable months.”
He went on to describe how, as the tumor grows, I would begin to lose brain functions. My speech and sight would be affected. My coordination would deteriorate. In short, it would be a living death.
I thanked him and left. Dr. Lyons was confused and followed me out into the hall. He wanted to know why I didn’t want to schedule the operation immediately. I looked at him.
“Because I can’t afford it.” I turned away. He didn’t stop me.
ROBERT E. HOWARD MADE A WRITING CAREER OUT OF stories of strong rugged men who tamed their worlds and bent others to their will. It was a universe of barbarians with strong sword arms and evil sorcerers who plotted magic schemes of conquest. Not once do I recall an REH character dying of cancer or an illness. Of course, that probably would have been too personal a thing considering how his mother died.
“Don’t forget,” Lovecraft said, “Two-Gun Bob killed himself.”
“Yeah, well, there’s plenty of ways to do that. Sometimes doing nothing works just as well.” I replied.
THERE HAD BEEN AN ARTICLE IN THE PAPER NOT TOO long ago about a doctor doing work on cancer treatment. It wasn’t one of those peach-pit things, but it was an herbal remedy. Supposedly some type of combination of herbs and diets. I’d read a lot of those books, including the one by Norman Cousins. Sometimes they seemed to work, most times they didn’t. I’d never had the discipline to see them all through but, considering the alternatives, I didn’t have a lot of choices.
At work, I looked up the doctor’s book. To my surprise, we actually had a copy. Glancing through it, it looked more like a cookbook than anything else. The medicine was a blend of herbs and vitamins (supposedly available at any health food store), and there was a special diet that focused on macrobiotics and avoided things like meat and oils. It seemed to be typical stuff, but the doctor’s photo had a kind and gentle face, so I bought it. I enjoyed making my manager nervous when she rang it up. It was obvious why I was buying it, but no one dared to mention it.
“You know,” Lovecraft said to me in a horrified whisper, “someone once said that my Shub-Niggurath was a representation of sexual disease. Can you believe that?”
I heard this at least once a day. It was one of the things that really bothered him, given his upbringing and personality.
“Yeah, I can believe it,” I replied. My manager didn’t even look at me. She had gotten used to me talking like this.
On the way home, I bought the herbs listed in the book at the only local health food store. I didn’t recognize most of the names and the clerk wasn’t much help either. Several of the ingredients weren’t there, so I had to substitute. The clerk thought that the other herbs and vitamins were just as
good and, even though I didn’t believe him, didn’t have anything else to go on.
I stopped at a local restaurant and had a big steak meal with a plateful of french fries. My farewell to meat. I avoided the seafood platter out of deference to Lovecraft who, as always, kept looking around and exclaiming, “Gad, how these birds do eat!”
At home later, I read through the book some more. The doctor believed that the steady use of his herb/vitamin combination, along with the diet, was able to curb the growth of cancer. In a few instances he described, the cancer had disappeared completely. I laid the pill bottles on the counter. I mixed the herbs together. There was a specific pattern on what to take, how much, and when. I took the first dose and followed it with Dr. Lyons’s medication. It had a long clinical name that I couldn’t pronounce but it was “the latest in cancer treatment.” Couldn’t hurt to keep taking it. I’d paid for it, after all, and it hadn’t been cheap. The cost of being poor and sick in America.
THAT NIGHT, THERE WASN’T MUCH ON TV. THE CABLE channels were all boring so I put an old Night Stalker tape on and read for a while. Out of habit, I picked up The Dunwich Horror and started reading “The Shadow over Innsmouth” again. It had always been one of my favorites, but Lovecraft wouldn’t give me any peace.
“Disease, disease, disease. That’s all they keep talking about. According to some critics, everything I wrote came from a fear of disease, either sexual or mental. Why couldn’t it just be a story? Why did it have to be about something?”
“You think that’s bad,” I replied, “you should read Hodgson. Now there’s a man who had a real problem with disease.”
That piqued his interest and he settled down with a volume of Hodgson’s short stories. One of the small-press books, of course, I would never have been able to afford a first edition and he wasn’t reprinted often.
Lovecraft read quickly and quietly. Reading was one of the few things that kept him calm. Every so often he would chuckle to himself or make a satisfied sound after reading a particularly good section.
In this wise, I eventually fell asleep.
I WAS WALKING THROUGH THE STREETS OF INNSMOUTH past the Esoteric Order of Dagon church (with its sinister shadow in the basement), along the streets of houses that, though habitable, showed no signs of life. I walked by the supermarket and waved to the stock clerk who, as normal, bore a striking resemblance to Frank Long. (I hoped he’d had an easier life than the real Long.) Zadok Allen was wandering about, of course, and we exchanged laughs and old stories.
“Well, ya know, death’s funny. It comes when ya don’t call and never answers when ya do!” Zadok laughed without the trademark Yankee accent.
Lovecraft the narrator came lumbering down the street from the supermarket and Zadok staggered off to meet him, practicing his Yankee-speak as he walked. They had an appointment to keep.
I sat on the beach and looked out at Devil’s Reef. It was an ugly thing. A piece of rock jutting out of the water. Beyond it, I knew, the ocean floor fell away and the Deep Ones swam not far beyond.
Several fishermen with the “Innsmouth look” stopped by and encouraged me to swim out. “G’wan,” they said, “why not?”
Why not, indeed? I took off my clothes (never self-conscious in dreams... I had never had the “waking up in school naked” dream) and entered the water. Though I had done it a few times before, I’d never swum out very far. This time felt different. The water was warmer, heavier than before, and it enveloped me like nothing I had ever felt. I swam out to the rock and climbed on top of it.
From there, I could see Zadok and Lovecraft talking on the beach as Zadok gave his little speech. And then it struck me. Every other time I’d been here, I had only seen and experienced what Lovecraft had written in the story. I’d never been out to Devil’s Reef before and, remembering the story, neither had the narrator. Oh sure, he described planning on going to Devil’s Reef with his cousin and diving off the deep end, but it wasn’t an actual place he visited in the story. Yet I was there. I could feel the rough stone beneath my fingers and, looking over the other end, could swear that I could see other things beneath the surface, beckoning to me.
Slowly, I dipped into the water and followed.
WHEN I WOKE UP THIS TIME, THERE WAS BLOOD ON THE pillow. That wasn’t good. I touched my nose and my fingers came away bloody. Suddenly, my head was shoved into an invisible vise and I collapsed back into my pillow, barely able to keep from screaming.
In his chair, stroking an invisible cat that wasn’t there but was anyway, Lovecraft sat silently.
After a few minutes, the pain subsided and I was able to sit up. The front of my undershirt was covered in blood. This hadn’t been the first attack, but it was definitely the worst.
“Dr. Lyons said it would only get worse,” Lovecraft added unnecessarily.
I ignored him and went to clean myself up.
Sometime later, I made myself some breakfast. I didn’t have any of the macrobiotic stuff the book doctor recommended, so I made do with eggs and bacon. I’d give up the bad stuff later, although I had begun to think that there wasn’t any point in giving anything up and that I should just surrender to excesses. Spend the last months of my life carousing from one bar to another, drinking too much, eating bad food, sleeping with anonymous women (assuming I could find any who were willing) and just give myself up to the extremes.
Lovecraft looked disapprovingly at me. “I know,” I said, “you’d probably prefer if I just sat there quietly and suffered like you did while I eat a can of cold beans and some crackers.”
“You could do worse,” he said, but I didn’t see how.
“I could do a lot better,” I said and started mentally counting up the money in my bank account. Just enough for a real large splurge or six months of diminishing capacity. Yeah. Life’s great.
“What about the dream?” Lovecraft asked.
I looked at him. I’d grown used to him asking questions at the most inappropriate time for a spirit who shouldn’t even be here (“Why are you haunting me anyway? What’d I do to you?”) but this was unexpected.
“What dream?”
He looked at me. I knew perfectly well what he meant and he had this habit of looking at me a certain way when I was avoiding a subject. I expected him to hand me a business card someday with H. P. Lovecraft, conscience printed on it. Jiminy Cricket had nothing on him.
“It was a dream, that’s all.”
He just glared at me. “Here,” he finally said, “read this. It might help you understand.” He threw a copy of Hodgson’s The Ghost Pirates at me. I still hadn’t figured out how he was able to manipulate objects but my head was hurting too much to wonder about it.
I looked at the book. “I read it already.”
“Read it again. You obviously didn’t get the connection.” He went back and starting petting the cat again. It was an all-black kitten whose name, if you dared to mention it in today’s PC climate, could get you into a lot of trouble. “All the pigeons come home to roost,” I thought.
I took the herb/vitamin potion and chased it with one of Dr. Lyons’s Miracle Cure. “Good for what ails ya!” I got dressed and left for work. On the way, I found the Hodgson buried deep into my coat pocket. He put it there. I put it there. Didn’t matter. It was still there anyway.
When I got to work, I saw Keziah Mason in the occult section, chuckling to herself as she read one of the New Age witchcraft books. She certainly didn’t look like the young, trendy/sexy girls that are witches in today’s movies and TV shows. Brown Jenkin was curling around her feet, looking up at her from time to time with a very hungry shine in his eyes. This was something new. Usually it’s just Lovecraft, now other characters were coming to visit.
POE LIVED VIRTUALLY HIS ENTIRE LIFE IN POVERTY. HE died in a gutter on a street in Baltimore. That tells you something right there. He never lived to see his work gain the celebrity it deserved. Neither did Lovecraft. Neither did Howard. Is there a pattern here?
&nb
sp; THE LAST CLEAR THING I REMEMBER FROM THAT afternoon at work was waiting on Nyarlathotep. I suppose it was only inevitable. With Keziah and Jenkin about, the Dark Man couldn’t be far away. I was running the register when he came up. He put a couple of self-help books on the counter (two of those I’m Okay, You’re Okay self-affirmation kind of things) and started fumbling for his wallet. This struck me as kind of funny as I couldn’t imagine Nyarlathotep having a wallet. I wondered what would be inside it. Would he have a driver’s license? From where? Kadath maybe? Snapshots of Keziah and Azathoth? Who did he want contacted in case of an emergency? And what was the wallet made out of? I started laughing which made him look up at me. The man was dark. I don’t mean just your normal black man. Nyarlathotep was the antithesis of light. Then he smiled and I could smell his breath. It wasn’t the stagnating breath of decay as I’d been expecting. It was sweet and cloying. It made you think of hot summer nights when the heat sticks to your skin and you can peel your sweat away in layers. My eyes closed and I went away.
I WAS IN THE MISKATONIC LIBRARY WITH LOVECRAFT AS Henry Armitage. We were looking at the dead thing that lay on the floor where the guard dog had killed it. The upper body was strange enough but it was below the torso that “sheer phantasy began.” Wilbur Whateley had died in his attempt to steal the Necronomicon. “Why didn’t he just buy a copy from a book dealer or something?” I said. Armitage glared at me.
The game was afoot and I was standing in the open fields of Dunwich. Before me was the farmhouse of the Fryes, the poor, doomed Fryes. It was 3 a.m. but I could see everything as if it was high noon. Even from a distance I could hear their terrified conversation on the party-line phone. I saw the trees near the house bend apart as the invisible thing came closer. I had expected it to be something like Godzilla rampaging through downtown Tokyo. That’s what happens when you’re a child of the media and you grow up watching a genre that consumes itself with such gusto.
I heard the splintering of wood and looked up to see the top of the farmhouse cave in the middle. The screams were horrible. Within seconds, the house was gone and the thing continued walking through the forest. “The Elmer Fryes had been erased from Dunwich.”