As always, there was no one else in the church at this time of day (and with hours remaining of it). Everything was very simple inside, very solemn and quiet and serenely lighted. The dark-paned windows along either wall confused all time, bending dawns into twilights, suspending minutes in eternity. Alb Indys slid into a pew at the back and rested his hands at his sides. His eyes were fixed on the distant apse, where everything—pillars, pictures, pulpit—appeared as an unfocused fragment of itself, folded within shadows that seemed to be the creation of dark hours. But his insomnia was not at issue here: suffering and transgressions alike were reprieved in this place that shut out time. He followed each moment as it tried to move past him: each was smothered by the stillness, and he watched them die. "But trouble feeds in the wind and hides in the window," he drowsily said to himself from somewhere inside his now dreaming brain.
Suddenly everything seemed wrong and he wanted to leave, but he could not leave because someone was speaking from the pulpit. Yes, a pulpit in such a large, such an enormous, church would be equipped with its microphone, but then why whisper in such confused language and so rapidly, like a single voice trying to be more? What were the voices saying now? No, he would rather not hear, because now everything was happening that he wished would not happen, and it was so late at night, and with so many hours left to sleep, finally to sleep for hours and hours, he would not be able to get away in time. If he could only move, just turn his head a little. And if he could only get his eyes to open and see what was wrong. The voices kept repeating without fading, multiplying in the fantastically spacious church. Then, with an effort sufficient to move the earth itself, he managed to turn his head just enough to look out a window in the east transept. And without even opening his tightly closed eyelids, he saw what was in the window. But he suddenly awoke for an entirely different reason, because finally he understood what the voices were saying. They said they were a doctor, and their name was—
Alb Indys had to get home, even if all the way there the sound of the sea was hissing behind him like a broken radio, and even if the wind rushed by his ears like breaking waves of air. There was not much daylight left and tonight, of all nights, he did not want to catch anything, did not want to be caught, that is, in the damp and chill of an off-season sundown. What misjudgments he had made that day, what mistakes, there was no question about it. And what a doctor to call upon to treat one's troubles...
An eternity of sleeplessness was to be preferred, if those were the dreams sleep had in waiting. Gratefully he would hold on to his old troubles, with the permission of the world, the wind, and the legendary Dr. Thoss.
And when Alb Indys reached his room, he was thinking about a gleaming crescent moon ready to be placed in a new scene, and he was thankful to have some project, any project, to fill the hours of that night. Exhausted, he threw his dark coat in a heap on the floor, then sat down on the bed to remove his shoes. He was holding the second one in his hand when he turned and, for some reason, began to contemplate that lump he had left in the bedcovers. Without reasoning why, he elevated the shoe directly above this shapeless swelling, held it aloft for a few moments, then let it drop straight down. The lump collapsed with a little poof, as if it had been an old hat with no head inside, or a magician's silk scarf that only seemed to have a plump white dove hidden under it. Enough of this for one day, Alb Indys thought sleepily, there was work he could be doing.
But when he picked up the drawing book of stiff clean pages from where he had earlier abandoned it on the bed, he saw that the work he intended to do had, by some miracle, already been done. He looked at the drawing of the window, the drawing he had finished off earlier that day with his meticulous signature. Was it only because he was so tired that he could not recall darkening those window panes and carving that curved scar of moon behind them? Could he have forgotten about scoring that bone-white cicatrix into the flesh of night? But he was holding that particular moon in reserve for one of his "collaborations" and this was not one of those. This belonged to that other type of drawing: he only penned, in these, what was enclosed within the four-walled frame of his room, never anything outside it. Then why did he ink in this night and this moon, and with the collaboration of what other artistic hand? If only he were not so drained by chronic insomnia, all those lost dreams hissing in his head, perhaps he could have thought more clearly about it. His dozing brain might even have noticed another change in the picture, for something now squatted in the chair which formerly had been unoccupied. But there was too much sleep to catch up on, and, as the sun went out in the window, Alb Indys shut his eyes languorously and lay down upon his bed.
And he never would have wakened that night, which seemed as white as winter, if it had not been for the noise. The window was lit up by a silvery blade of moon. It brightened the chair, whose two thin arms had other arms overhanging each of them, flexing slowly in the room's stillness. White night, white noise. As if speaking in static, the parched, crackling voice repeatedly said: I am a doctor. Then the occupant of the chair hopped gracefully onto the bed with a single thrust of its roundish body, and its claws began their work, delivering the sleeper to his miraculous remedy...
It was the landlord who eventually found him, though there was considerable difficulty identifying what lay on the bed. A rumor spread throughout the seaside town about a swift and terrible disease, something that perhaps one of the vacationers had brought in. But no other trouble was reported. Much later, the entire incident was confused by preposterous elaborations, which had the effect of relegating all of its horrors to the doubtful realm of regional legend.
Selections Of Lovecraft (1985)
First published in this form in Fantasy And Terror #5, 1985.
Consists of three parts, later included in The Agonizing Resurrection Of Victor Frankenstein And Other Gothic Tales with some minor changes - see The Fabulous Alienation of the Outsider, Being of No Fixed Abode, The Blasphemous Enlightenment of Prof. Francis Wayland Thurston of Boston, Providence, and the Human Race, and The Premature Death of H. P. Lovecraft, Oldest Man in New England.
The Fabulous Alienation of the Outsider, being of no fixed Abode
The outsider lifts his shadow-wearied eyes and gazes about the moldy chamber where, to his knowledge, he has always lived. He has no recollection of who he is or how he came to dwell so far removed from others of his kind who, he reasons, must exist, perhaps in that world above which he vividly recalls, though he glimsed it only once and long ago.
One night the outsider emerges from his underground domain and, guided solely by the glowing moon he has never really seen before, scrambles down a dark road, searching for friendly lights and, he hopes, friendly faces.
Eventually he comes upon a large, festively illuminated house. At first he peeks shyly through the windows at the partiers inside; but soon his unbearable longing for the society of others, along with a barely evolved sense of etiquette, liberate him from all hesitancies. Locating an unlocked door, he crashes the affair.
Inside the house—a structure of gorgeous, Georgian decor—everyone screams and flees at the first sight of the outsider. After only a few seconds of recognition and companionship, this recluse by default is once again left to keep his own company. That is to say, he has been abandoned to the company of that untimely horror which initially set those gay and fine-looking people so indecorously on their heels. "What was it?" he asks himself, posing the question over and over with seemingly infinite repitition before finally collecting wits to squint a little to one side. "What was it?" he asks for the infinite time add one or two. "It was you," answers the mirror. "It was you."
Now it is the outsider's turn to make his getaway from that hideous living corpse of unholy and unwholesome familiarity, that thing which had imperfectly decomposed in its subterranean resting place. He seeks refuge in a chaotic dreamworld where no one really notices the dead and no one even looks twice at the disgusting.
Eventually, however, he tires of this der
anged, though unhostile, dimension of alienage. His heart more pulverized than simply broken, he decides to return to the subhumous envelope from which he never should have strayed, there to reclaim his birthright of sloth, amnesia, and darkness. A period of time passes, indefinite for the outsider though decisive for the balance of the world's population.
For reasons unknown, the outsider once more drags his bulky frame earthwards. Arriving exhaused in the superterranean realm, he finds himself standing, badly, in neither darkness nor daylight, but some morbid transitional phase between the two. A senile sun throbs with deadly dimness, and every living thing on the face of the land has been choked by desolation and by an equivocal gloom which has perhaps already lasted millenia, if not longer. The outsider, a thing of the dead, has managed to outlive all those others whom, either from madness or mere loss of memory, he would willingly seek out to escape a personal void that seems to have existed prior to astronomy.
This possibility is now, of course, as defunct as the planet itself. With all biology in tatters, the outsider will never again hear the consoling gasps of those who shunned him and in whose eyes and hearts he achieved a certain tangible identity, however loathsome. Without the others he simply cannot go on being himself—The Outsider—for there is no longer anyone to be outside of. In no time at all he is overwhelmed by this atrocious paradox of fate.
In the middle of this revelation, a feeling begins to well up in the outsider, an incalculable sorrow deep inside. From the center of his being (which now is the center of all being that remains in existence) he summons a suicidal outburst of pain whose force shatters his rotting shape into innumerable fragments. Catastrophically enough, this antic, designed to conclude universal genocide, gives off such energy that the distant sun is revived by a transfusion of warmth and light.
And each fragment of the outsider cast far across the earth now absorbs the warmth and catches the light, reflecting the future life and festivals of a resurrected race of beings: ones who will remain forever ignorant of their origins but for whom the sight of a surface of cold, unyielding glass will always hold profound and unexplainable terrors.
The Blasphemous Enlightenment of Prof. Francis Wayland Thurston of Boston, Providence, and the Human Race
In the late 1920s Prof. Thurston is putting a few final touches to a manuscript he intends no other person ever to lay eyes on, so that no one else will have to suffer unnecessarily in the way he has this past year or so. When it's all done with, he just sits in silence for a few moments in the library of his Boston home (summer sunlight wandering over the oak walls), and then he breaks down and weeps like a lost soul for the better part of the day, letting up later that night.
Prof. Thurston is the nephew of George Gammell Angell, also a professor (at Brown U., Providence, PJ), whose archaeological and anthropological unearthings led him, and after his death led his nephew, to some disturbing conclusions concerning the nature and fate of human life, with implications universal even in their least astounding aspects.
They discovered, positively, that throughout the world there exist savage cults which practice strange rites: degenerate Eskimos in the Arctic, degenerate Caucasians in New England seaport towns, and degenerate Indians and mulattoes in the Louisiana swamps not far from Tulane University, New Orleans. The two professors also discovered that the primary aim of these cults is to await and welcome the return of ante-prehistoric monstrosities which will unseat the human race, overrun the earth, and generally have their way with our world.
These beings are as detestably inhuman as humanly imaginable, though no more so. From the common individual's viewpoint their nature is one of supreme evil and insanity, notwithstanding that the creatures themselves are indifferent to, if not totally unaware of, such mundane categories of value.
From the beginning of time they have held a certain attraction for persons interested in pursuing an existence of utter chaos and mayhem; that is, one of complete liberation at all conceivable levels.
After learning the designs these beings have on our planet, Prof. Thurston just assumes he will be murdered to keep him quiet on the subject, as his uncle and others have been. (And to think that at one point in his investigation he was planning to publish his findings in the journal of the American Archaelogical Society!) All he can do now is wait.
For some reason, however, the followers of the Great Old Ones (as the extraterrestrial entities are referred to) never follow through, and Prof. Thurston appears to escape assassination, at least for an indefinite period of time. But this is of little comfort, because knowing what he knows, Prof. Thurston is the most miserable being on earth. He grieves for his lost dream, and even the skies of spring and flowers of summer are a horror to his eyes. It goes without saying that he now finds even the simplest daily task a joyless requisite for survival and no more.
After months of boredom and a personal devastation far worse than any worldwide apocalypse could possibly be, he decides to return to his old job at the university. Not that he believes any longer in the hollow conclusions of his once beloved anthropology, but at least it would give him a way to occupy himself, to lose himself. Still, he continues to be profoundly despondent and his looks degenerate beyond polite comment.
"What's wrong, Prof. Thurston?" a student asks him one day after class. The professor glances up at the girl. After only the briefest gaze into her eyes he can see that she really cares. "Amazing," he thinks. Of course there is no way he could tell her what is really wrong, but they do talk for a while and later take a walk across the campus on a clear autumn afternoon. They begin to see each other secretly off campus, and with graduation day behind them they finally get married, their ceremony solemn and discreet.
The couple honeymoons at a picturesque little town on the seacost of Massachusetts. To all appearances, several sublime days pass without one ripple of grief. One day, as he and his bride watch the sun descend into a perfectly unwrinkled ocean, Prof. Thurston almost manages to rationalize into nonexistence his dreadful knowledge. After all, he tells himself, there still exist precious human feeling and human beauty (e.g. the quaint little town) created by human hands. These things have been perennially threatened by disorder and oblivion. Anyway, all of it was bound to end somehow, at sometime. What difference did it make when the world was lost, or to whom?
But Prof. Thurston cannot sustain these consoling thoughts for long. All during their honeymoon he snaps pictures of his smiling wife. He loves her dearly, but her innocence is tearing him apart. How long can he conceal the terrible things he knows about himself, about her, and about the world? Even after he takes a picture, this wonderful girl just keeps smiling at him! How long can he live with this new pain?
The problem continues to obsess him (to the future detriment, he fears, of his marriage). Then... on the last night of the honeymoon, everything is resolved.
He awakens in darkness from a strange dream he cannot recall. Outside the window of the bedroom it sounds as though the whole town is in an ambivalent uproar: hysterical voices blending festival and catastrophe. And there are weirdly colored lights quivering upon the bedroom wall. Prof. Thurston's wife is also awake, and she says to her husband: "The new masters have come in the night to their chosen city. Have you dreamed of them?" There passes a moment of silence. Then, at last, Prof. Thurston answers his wife with the long, abandoned howl of a madman or a beast, for he too has dreamed the new dream and, without his conscious knowledge or consent, has embraced the new world.
And now nothing can hurt him as he has been so cruelly hurt in the past. Nothing will ever again cause him that pain he suffered so long, an intolerable anguish from which he could never have found release in any other way.
The Premature Death of H. P. Lovecraft, Oldest Man in New England
H.P. Lovecraft, the last great writer of supernatural horror tales, has just died of stomach cancer at the age of 46 in a Providence, Rhode Island, hospital. He died alone and with no particular expression on his face.
Upon the nightstand next to his bed are a few books and many handwritten pages in which Lovecraft recorded the sensations of his dying. (These latter are later lost, to the dismay of scholars.)
Two nurses came into the room and are the first to discover that the gentleman in the private room has, not unexpectedly, passed away. They have already seen death many times in their nursing careers (they're both quite young), and neither is alarmed. They know nothing can be done for the dead man. One of them says: "Open a window, it's stuffy in here." "Sure is," replies the other. A crisp mid-March breeze freshens the room.
"Well, there's no more that can be done for him," comments the first nurse. Then she asks: "Do you remember if he had a wife or anybody that visited him?" The other nurse shakes her head negatively, then adds: "Are you kidding? He's not exactly the husband type. I mean, just take a look at that face, will you.'" The first nurse nods positively. She makes a humorous remark about the deceased, and then both nurses leave the room smiling.
But apparently neither of them noticed the fantastic and frightening thing which occurred right before their eyes: H.P. Lovecraft, for only the shortest-lived moment, had faintly—just ever so, no more—smiled back at them.
The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein, Citizen of Geneva (1985)
First published in The Agonizing Resurrection Of Victor Frankenstein And Other Gothic Tales, 1994
Victor Frankenstein has died on board a ship caught in seas of ice near the North Pole. His body has been sent back to his native Switzerland, where, however, there is no one to receive it. Everyone he ever knew has already died before him. His brother William, his friend Henry, his wife Elizabeth, and his father Alphonse Frankenstein, among others, are no more. A minor official in the Geneva civil service comes up with the suggestion to donate the corpse, still very well preserved, to the university at Ingolstadt, where the deceased distinguished himself in scientific studies.
The Collected Short Fiction Page 20