Lovecraft Ezine Mega-Issue 4 Rev1

by Price, Robert M.

  I could tell more, but I cannot see what help it will be to the world. As for me, I am past human help or hope. As I lie here, writing, careless even whether or not I die before I finish, I can see the doctor gathering up his powders and phials with a vague gesture to the good priest beside me, which I understand.

  They will be very curious to know the tragedy—they of the outside world who write books and print millions of newspapers, but I shall write no more, and the father confessor will seal my last words with the seal of sanctity when his holy office is done. They of the outside world may send their creatures into wrecked homes and death-smitten firesides, and their newspapers will batten on blood and tears, but with me their spies must halt before the confessional. They know that Tessie is dead and that I am dying. They know how the people in the house, aroused by an infernal scream, rushed into my room and found one living and two dead, but they do not know what I shall tell them now; they do not know that the doctor said as he pointed to a horrible decomposed heap on the floor—the livid corpse of the watchman from the church - "I have no theory, no explanation. That man must have been dead for months!"

  I think I am dying. I wish the priest would—

  Robert W. Chambers (May 26, 1865 – December 16, 1933) was an American artist and fiction writer, best known for his book of short stories entitled The King In Yellow, published in 1895. He authored multiple dozens of short stories and novels in widely varied genres, from weird fiction, to adventure and war stories, to romantic and historical works. Chambers' writing was not only an inspiration to H.P. Lovecraft, but many modern authors, including Karl Edward Wagner, Joseph S. Pulver, Lin Carter, James Blish, Michael Cisco, Ann K. Schwader, Robert M. Price, and Galad Elflandsson.

  His work is in the public domain and can be found on Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive.

  Story illustration by Mike Dominic

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  Cthulhu Does Stuff is a monthly comic strip by Ronnie Tucker and Maxwell Patterson. Visit their website, Max and Ronnie do comics.

  Maxwell Patterson is a freelance writer, available for parties, corporate events and Bat Mitzvahs. You can contact him at maxpatterson88@gmail.com.

  Ronnie Tucker is an artist who plies his wares (eww, gross!) at http://ronnietucker.co.uk/. You can contact him at: ronnie@ronnietucker.co.uk.

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  Echoes from Cthulhu’s Crypt #8

  Do You Have to Read Lovecraft to Be a Lovecraftian?

  by Robert M. Price

  I am sometimes asked what I think it takes to make a piece of fiction “Lovecraftian.” Does it have to presuppose Lovecraft’s philosophy of Cosmic Futilitarianism? If it does, is that sufficient? Or does it also need to feature familiar names like “Miskatonic,” “Cthulhu,” “Necronomicon”? Or are these names by themselves perhaps enough? Is Colin Wilson’s The Mind Parasites truly Lovecraftian? Are Laird Barron’s stories? Interesting question, but not to be explored again here. Instead, I want to ruminate on a kindred question: what does it take to make you a Lovecraftian?

  Suppose a person became interested in “the Mythos” through role playing games and eventually expanded his interest to, say, Lovecraftian rock, Lovecraftian comics, movies, etc., but never got around to reading the fiction of Lovecraft and his disciples and successors? I feel rather sure it has happened.

  It is quite natural that individuals initially attracted to Mythos RPGs become curious about the strange and intriguing lore underlying the game and want to go back to its literary sources. I know for sure that this has happened. In fact, it happened so frequently that the late Keith Herber approached me back in 1990, asking if I’d like to compile volumes for Chaosium featuring the essential stories about each Old One, each haunted town, each blasphemous tome, all for the benefit of this new generation of Mythos fan-addicts.

  This suggestion took me aback, making me realize how long ago I had obtained the various books by HPL, August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, et. al. The obvious suddenly struck me: much of the relevant fiction was by now out of print and not readily available even if one knew where to look! And then again, there were plenty of Mythos tales that had never even been published in single-author collections. Others lurked, largely forgotten, in obscure anthologies--if they had ever been reprinted from their original pulp appearances at all! What an opportunity! The Cycle Horror Series would have contents to appeal both to the completist and connoisseur as well as to the new fan seeking remedial indoctrination. Plus, many of these stories had never received any critical analysis. Pedantic windbag that I am, I rejoiced to supply this lack. And there was so much interesting religious, mythical, and cultural background to elucidate! Stuff from Theosophy, Shi’ite Islam, Greek myth, the Bible, etc.

  Thus many were moving from gaming into reading. Some even left gaming behind, though very many still enjoy it. But the big irony about Mythos gamers who had not yet dived into the fiction was that it displayed in an extreme form something David Schultz and others had long bemoaned: the isolation of the Mythos, the tendency of writers like Lin Carter to make it into a systematic theology and bring it to the fore, to make it more important than the stories to which it formed the background. Carter was not above writing new stories, which sometimes were barely stories at all, merely as vehicles to get this or that new item of Mythos lore into print, thus establishing it as part of the canon. I will not deny that the result could be a lot of fun. I, too, after all, had always been a Mythos geek (or is that “Mythos” nerd?).

  But it did strike me as a bit perverse that the lore had left the texts behind! I have always loved the stories of these wonderful authors for various reasons, whether they featured Cthulhu and Rhan-Tegoth or not. That’s what made me happy to see the gamers discovering the fiction, not any disapproval of gaming.

  But, again, suppose someone never made this transition. Should they be entitled to call themselves “Lovecraftians”? Well, of course, the question is both moot and silly: can you imagine anyone actually arguing over this? I hope not! But it is kind of interesting. And I would have to say that such a person would be correctly, meaningfully, designated a “Lovecraftian.” He or she would still be devoted to the creations of Lovecraft, even at second hand. Like a Christian who does not make a point of reading the Bible. Why wouldn’t he? But he wouldn’t have to. After all, Christian ethics and beliefs are the result of abstracting a system from a disparate group of texts which do not set forth a system and which even sometimes contradict one another. “Lovecraft” has become a larger phenomenon, bigger that H.P. Lovecraft, bigger even than his texts.

  Robert M. Price

  Hierophant of the Horde

  Robert M. Price is an American theologian and writer. He teaches philosophy and religion at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary, is professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute, and the author of a number of books on theology and the historicity of Jesus, including Deconstructing Jesus (2000), The Reason Driven Life (2006), Jesus is Dead (2007), Inerrant the Wind: The Evangelical Crisis in Biblical Authority (2009), The Case Against the Case for Christ (2010), and The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul (2012).

  A former Baptist minister, he was the editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism from 1994 until it ceased publication in 2003, and has written extensively about the Cthulhu Mythos, a "shared universe" created by the writer H. P. Lovecraft.

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  Stone Cold Fever

  by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  I live just under the radar. I hunt [mostly for money, but . . .]. Rats. They run. I don’t blink. You hurt a woman or a child, I’m the sharp decree coming to cut off the flow of air that keeps you ticking. You get caught you’ll never see your bed again. . . . Hope you’ve got a taste for worms.

  Paulie let me in the Bamboo Club. Lights, NO CAMERAS, smoke. Girls and a brass pole. No clock. Not many words. Plenty of dollar bills. I
sat at the end of the bar with a cup of coffee. No milk. No sugar. I was searching for a match when Toni came over and sat down.

  “Hi, Handsome.” Full moon smile. And that wink. Even yer knees stop breathing. Antonia Zanta; tall, leggy, and curves a snake would die for. And smart. Blond—an Aryan had played backdoor man with one of her ancestors. “You heard about the missing boy on Channel 6?”

  “No. I’ve been parked on a ridge in the woods, watching a meth-shack.”

  “Katy Cappiello’s fourteen-year-old son is missing. Two days ago.” My eyes didn’t stop, they went right to, “Do or die!”

  Kathy Cappiello.

  The name cut fifteen years off my life. I was twenty-two, swinging, mostly with my right. Bleeding. And there were two dead assholes on the floor. In an hour I’d be in Ellis Hospital for a two week stay. The first of many conversations with the cops would happen there too. I don’t think I’d been awake for an hour the first time they started asking me questions I’ve now heard over and over and over. I’m not sayin’ the cops are bad—hell, they try, but they’re limited.

  We had a band in high school. The Blind Lovers Blues Band; our logo was a bleeding heart with an eye patch over the spot where the heart would be if the heart had a heart. We played in basements and at the high school three times. Hans played guitar. Paul played organ. Mike pounded on the drums and Dom played bass. I sang; I wasn’t good, but a few girls smiled at me. You take what you can get.

  Kathy was at every show. And she smiled. But she was too young and her older sister, Pam, made sure I knew it.

  Eight months after we formed, Hans and Dom went off to college, Mike got a welding job and a baby, and Paul headed to California. I went on a tour with a bunch of we-know-nuthin’ kids in Southeast Asia. We learned a lot. Don’t believe me, read Marc Baker’s book, he laid it out straight in ’NAM. Yeah, we learned a lot. Some of us even came home.

  Hard. Lean. Gritty and scared, I came back to the World at twenty-two. [They said The War was over, you can lie down now—I told them to kiss my ass.] Drank some beer. Got a job to pay for the one room dump my landlord called an apartment and my bar tab. Four months later I got some new friends. I still have them.

  One night I walked by a boarded-up, abandoned two-family that was on the city blocks for back taxes and heard a girl scream. I’ve got a very hard, very mean Thing when it comes to hurting girls. I was in the building pulling five Nazi creeps off Kathy’s older sister. There was beer and smoke. There was a radio (to this I hear “30 Days in the Hole” and the world goes red), and feverish evil. There was a lot of blood. Learned my lessons well In Country. And I’ve got the scars—and a Purple Heart—to prove it.

  Pam didn’t get out of there alive. She’s still breathing, but hiding in a dark corner in a sanitarium for the last fifteen years. That ain’t being alive. If you think so, go fuck yourself. Kathy was there too. Locked in a closet; she was to be dessert or the finale. They never got a hand on her. I saw to that. But she’s got scars. You don’t walk through the fields where the plague burns and walk out without dripping with New Truth. You didn’t then, you don’t now.

  Kathy and I went out once, but the screams got in the way . . . She got married and had two sons. Her baby was missing . . .

  Two days and all the cops had was his bike. You hurt a woman or a child . . .

  “You’re her, Lancelot. Unrequited perhaps, but you’ve always been her savior.”

  I put my cigarette out in my coffee. “Call, Shade. Tell him to bring, Shadow.”

  Toni smiled. We were going hunting.

  “Ain’t been strapped all week.” He touched the .38. Touched like it was his girlfriend. “Startin’ ta feel like myself again. Who and What?” Shade asked.

  I told him about the boy. And if there was a Who, well, he knew The What.

  “Got pictures of the boy, Boss?” Shadow asked.

  Toni handed the boys three new pictures of Kathy’s son, Frankie. Shadow, put his finger on the boy’s cheek. Stroked it. I watched his eyes narrow. He’d walked the dark road. We never talked about it, but I knew; Toni knew somebody who knew something and what Toni knows, I know. With Shadow, you touch a child, you paid—full up. Shade leaned the three pictures of Frankie against the cups and glasses sitting on the bar, so the light washed on him like he was an angel. Ever the poet at heart, Our Shade.

  “Gone two days. Not good.” His eyes said the same thing. And more . . . Shade was pissy when he was working. Anything that pulled him away from his headphones—always filled with Satie or Eno or spatial drifts of quietude—pissed him off.

  I laid out the plan. We parted. Left our coffee to grow cold. Gathering before the hunt. Shadow on the phone to his connection at the police department. Toni over to Kathy’s in search of anything. Shade was on the other phone, calling in favors. The curtains to the underground were open. And we weren’t waiting in any line with forms in our hands . . .

  Me. I hit the Street. A thousand eyes. A thousand ears. And many of them know me, owe me. And those that don’t have heard the whisper stream in certain bars. In an hour, they’d know this one was personal and I was doing hard time. The cops—hell, they try, but they’re limited.

  Frankie had just gotten into gaming and had a new set of friends. His game of choice, Call of Cthulhu. I hit The Wizard’s Keep in the strip mall on Union Ave. Showed the pictures. Got “Yes, sirs” and “Not this week.” Got a book on the game. Left my number. Called Toni. “Bring the boys home.”

  Thirty minutes later we were the back alleys and starlit chambers of la-la-land gone tomb black and dangerous. In a room over the MEN’s restoom of the Bamboo Club we read. Of Those Who Dwell and The Chaos That Crawls. Of Unholy Dimensions and Bitter Black Pits Opened. It looked like young Frankie had left baseball and cartoons behind to go walking in the dark realms of oblivion. We hammered the phones. Coffee and cigarettes were served.

  Day 2 of nuthin’. The phone rang. Some of the kids hung around a rotting old bungalow near the old Maqua Company. Might be a kiddie-raper? The kids say no, but . . . he gives them pot and beer. Some kind of Satanist or something . . .

  Shadow checked him out with his police connection. Not on the sex offender list. No record. Seems clean. “Fuck that.” I heard him whisper. He could smell corruption two galaxies away. “All fuckin’ fits.” Had his jacket on and his hand on the doorknob before we were out of ours chairs.

  Ten-minute drive. Around the block three times. Shade was out of the car and walking by the house. His inner mystic eye was wide open, his antennae up. Half a block down he hit the bushes and skipped out back fer the looky-see. We parked in a convenience store lot two blocks away. Shade went in and bought smokes, a candy bar, and a map. As long as the illusion makes sense it works. Safe for maybe twenty minutes.

  “I’d feel a hell of a lot safer in the dark,” Shade said. “I’ve got this deal with darkness.” His smile was thin. “Three open windows. Just cracked for air. Dark curtains. Hard to tell what lies on the inside. Good news is the locks are old junk,” he said, throwing his binoculars to Shadow. “If there’s no bar on the door in in ten seconds tops. A TV’s on—all news by the sound of it.”

  Toni skipped the round of hard question we were about to throw around and got out of the car and dialed the number Shade had. “A man answered, said there’s no Helen here. We know he’s home.”

  “Fuckin’ all rumor and hearsay. Could just be a weirdo—fuckin’ Michael Jackson complex, or something.”

  “Fuck that! This one’s right. Maybe the kid’s not in there, but this assbag ain’t right. Smells like a tuna boat loaded to the gills and parked in the middle of the Sahara.”

  I looked in those eyes that never laid down for any savage and knew he was right on this. He was comin’ at it straight on righteous.

  Shade, you play backdoor man. Shadow, the window by the bushes on the right. I’ll ring the bell. When I’m in, you come. Not before.”

  Toni eyes said fuck.

  “No
t this time, darlin’. Someone has to be clean on this. If he’s the monster we think he is and we can’t get out clean, we’re gonna need cash and lawyers. You’re the brains, you save our asses if we get bogged down.”

  She blew me a kiss. We’d never, but it was there between us. “If you don’t come home, you’re in the deepest shit you’ve ever seen. Under- stand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I knew she meant it. Just for a second the word home put its arms around me . . . After all these years? Maybe . . . but not now.

  She was gone and we were moving. The boys are lean and fast. At any speed they move like the sound of dust. Even that guy on the Rainbow Bridge who can hear the grass grow wouldn’t hear ’em coming. They were gone before my hand was on the rusting chain-link fence. I was dressed causal, black slacks, black shoes, turtleneck and jacket, so I could play salesman. It was dark, but not too late for sales types to ring doorbells. Odds were he’d open the door. I was glad I’d shaved this morning.

  I put my friendly face on. Adjusted it. Moved Toni’s black portfolio to my left hand. Shoulder hostler unsnapped. Safety off. Ready. Willing. And Able. If this fuck was wrong, he could bet the farm and everything on this side of Hell on Willing and Able.