Lovecraft Ezine Mega-Issue 4 Rev1

by Price, Robert M.

  “It’s time for you to see someone like we talked about before. You can’t go on with this forever.”

  “Well, if I had any idea who to go see, I might.”

  “That’s no excuse. Do some research, ask around, get some recommendations, make an appointment. At least try.”

  “I don’t know...sometimes I think maybe all I really need is to go back to Jersey, go out to that quarry, you know, confront my fears.”

  Wendy sighed. “Your fears...we’ve been through this already. I think you just got scared by Peter Pan when you were a kid. That’s where it all comes from, not some slimy old quarry. It’s all some Oedipal thing with your dad as Captain Hook, just a vehicle for your secret resentments against him. And now your childhood fears are keeping you from growing up and me from sleeping. What you need is to see a professional, not some New Age pop psychology stunt, symbolically eating the liver of your enemy.”

  “Peter Pan? Oh come on, look who’s talking...at least I’m not named after a character from it.”

  “Asshole.” She twisted away from him and lay on her back.

  He shouldn’t have gone there. He knew how sensitive she was about the name her adoptive parents gave her. “Aw, shi-heart, I’m sorry. It’s just, you know, I’m still shook up from that dream.”

  Silence. He could see her digital clock through the crook of her neck. He watched the blocky scarlet numbers flick silently from 12:51 to 12:52. 12:53. 12:54. She sighed, then spoke: “You know what my Aunt Theresa would say, don’t you?” She pronounced aunt to rhyme with font. Most anyone raised on the Rez would’ve said auntie, rhyming with panty. Or shima yázhí.

  Theresa Peshlakai was the only significant link Wendy had recovered to her biological family since returning to the Navajo Nation in 1997. Wendy’s biological mother, whereabouts currently unknown, was Theresa’s younger sister. Russ never felt Mrs. Peshlakai was comfortable with the visits of her southern California-raised niece, even though Wendy counted as her daughter under the Diné clan system. But he himself quite liked the elderly woman, who still lived in the old log hooghan her husband had built for her outside Teec Nos Pos before the patient but inevitable cancer of the uranium mines had eaten him from the lungs out. Russell enjoyed the smell of cedar and tallow that pervaded the octagonal structure, and he was happy just to stare up at the interlocking logs of its roof while Wendy badgered the older woman.

  “I can guess.”

  “She’d say it’s because of all those snakes and lizards you played with when you were a kid.”

  Which was just what he guessed...Navajos held extensive taboos about most reptiles, especially snakes and green lizards. The latter were said to kill by leaping onto a victim’s head and expelling a deadly stream of toxic urine. Snakes were just all around bad news. One of the more common beliefs was that a pregnant woman would miscarry if she saw snakes eating or fucking.

  “Not lizards. We didn’t really have any lizards in New Jersey, at least none I ever found. Salamanders, yes. I caught a lot of salamanders back in the day. My dad took us to that quarry to hunt for salamanders.”

  Wendy shuddered and wriggled away from him. Now his hand under her pillow was directly beneath her neck.

  “It was just something we did back then, Tommy and me. I wanted to be a herpetologist from the time I was like eight, and Tommy copied anything I did, so our dad would take us both out in the woods to hunt for salamanders and snakes and stuff. We were always tramping around the hills and streams of central Jersey and east Pennsy, flipping over rocks and logs.”

  Wendy opened her eyes at last, turning her head toward him again but not moving any closer. “That reminds me, you promised to take the girls out to visit their nálí this summer. They’ve been asking when they could see her again. And I know she wants to see them.” She used the Navajo word for paternal grandparent, nálí, one of the few words she’d adopted from the language she had come to Arizona to claim as her birthright. Only she missed the intonations and pronounced it like golly. He did not correct her. He had learned his lesson about such comments long ago. The Diné language had never clicked for her; the tonality, the extended vowels, the voiceless “l” and its several compounds...she was lost with it all and now deliberately avoided it. But it came easily to Russ, the pronunciation and the basic vocabulary at least. And that disparity was an “issue.”

  “What about you? Aren’t you gonna come, too?”

  “You know how it is with me and your mother. The girls don’t need to be around that. Plus it’ll give me a chance to catch up around the house.”

  His hand under her head was getting numb, despite the two pillows. He twisted it out, and they lay side-by-side without touching, both staring at the ceiling.

  “I’ll call my mom, find out what are some good dates for her, and then I’ll price some flights. Okay?”

  “You’d better get on it right away. You know how flights just go up the longer you wait.”

  She turned on her right side as if to signal the end of the conversation. He considered sliding over and trying to spoon, but dreaded her familiar clipped and unequivocal response: “Go back to your side. I’m trying to sleep.” He stared into the ceiling’s flat, inverted pool, remembering when they met, years ago and just yesterday, two first year teachers at Window Rock High School, come together from opposite sides of the country and united by their youth and what he at least thought was a common fascination with Navajo culture. United now by two daughters and a common bank account. He thought of when he first saw her one August day on playground duty, how the high desert sun glanced off her black hair like a mirror, the litheness of her youthful pre-pregnancy figure. When sleep swallowed him again at last, the nightmare did not return. But then it never came more than once per night, even when it came every night for weeks at a time.

  As much as he dreaded it, Russ actually did call his mom the next week, got some dates in June and booked the flights; even called her back to confirm and make detailed arrangements. The first call actually went well. That was probably because he’d surprised her. He remembered what the old-timers said about encountering a rattlesnake on the trail: first guy wakes it, second guy pisses it off, third guy gets bit. But Dolores Fenster was ready to pounce by the second call.

  “So why isn’t your little Indian maid coming? Is there trouble in the teepee? War in the wigwam?”

  “Jesus, Mom! What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Well, at least you still remember the name of Our Savior, even if you profane it. I thought maybe you’d forgotten it now that you’ve got yourself some red religion.”

  He stared at his cell, lost for a response. She was wrong about so many things--first of all, Navajos didn’t live in teepees. Or wigwams. But then there was that grain of truth: things weren’t going well. It was like the bullies in high school: they instinctively knew how to construct their attacks around some actual vulnerability. They were predators who could sense weakness the way a shark smelled blood in the water. Only this was his own mother...

  “Just drop it, Mom, okay? And please don’t talk that way in front of Darlene and Stephanie when we’re out there.”

  “It’s your life, son. I’ve learned by now that you won’t listen to my advice anyway.”

  He refused to take the bait. He would only find himself in a quagmire.

  “Whatever, Mom. You know I love you. Let’s leave it at that, okay. We’ll see you in June.”

  “I love you, too, son...despite your poor choices.”

  He heard her sigh, followed by the clunky sound as she hung up her land line. He groaned at the silent black rectangle in his hand. Maybe it was best Wendy wasn’t coming.

  April passed, then May. Day after day Russ bore witness to the futile pleas of students who failed to pass one or more sections of the AIMS, yet still hoped to walk at graduation with their peers. Most had already ordered caps and gowns, announcements and invitations--even booked reception halls in Page or Flagstaff--and those costs
were non-refundable. He knew from years past that the School Board would hide behind policy and refuse even to hear their requests, so he consoled the students as best he could, struggled to calm angry parents, and crossed his fingers he didn’t say anything careless that someone would misrepresent to higher-ups. This year, at least, no one had. So far. He wished he could tell the students that graduation and their entry into the new and unforgiving world beyond was nothing to look forward to.

  The Thursday before Grad Week was particularly grueling. 17 students were scheduled not to walk, and all but two of those showed up in his office that day. By seventh hour he was completely burnt, but he anticipated at least a brief reprieve, as this block was reserved for senior electives, and even now few students willingly missed those.

  Russ leaned back in his battered swivel chair and peeked through his open office door. No students waited in the three gray chairs lined up outside. He rocked forward and gripped the flat center drawer of his desk, drew it halfway out, wincing at the inevitable metallic squeal. The drawer was stuffed with papers, most of which he would probably never look at again. Holding the drawer in his right hand, he slid his left beneath the dense layer of old memos, student schedules, meeting agendas, and broken, forgotten bric-a-brac, and extracted the magazine that lay face down at the bottom. After a last glance outside, he placed it flat on the desk and flipped quickly to page 42. The pages fell open on their own to that well-thumbed spot, to an entry entitled: “THE WATCHUNG PIT OF SACRIFICE.” He began reading, though by now he knew it almost by heart:

  LOCATED HIGH IN THE WATCHUNG MOUNTAINS BETWEEN DEEP BROOK AND UNDERBRIDGE, the Upper Stavros Pit came to our attention via occasional WNJ contributor Alex Lugo. We were skeptical at first: How could such a site exist less than half an hour’s drive and hike from Rt. 22? It sounded way too creepy to be so accessible. But WNJ followed the directions and there it was. Sorry Alex for doubting you.

  There is some history here: The Pit operated from 1949-1954 as an adjunct to the main Stavros Quarry, which remains in business today at the foot of the Watchungs on Rt. 22. Stavros Quarry specializes in asphalt and gravel, but the Upper Stavros Pit produced a fine-grained red sandstone that was used in building facades and countertops. The sandstone business provided a prosperous sideline for the Stavros Brothers until 1954, when quarrymen unexpectedly breached the floor of the Pit and opened access to a subterranean lake. Dark, freezing water immediately poured in, flooding the pit and drowning two workers. Their bodies were never recovered.

  The Stavros Brothers briefly considered plans to plug the breach and pump out the water, but it soon became apparent that so large a section of the pit’s floor had collapsed into the lake that it would be impossible to seal the opening, and the site was abandoned.

  In 1963 the Underbridge Township Department of Public Works purchased the land from the Stavros Brothers with the goal of turning the pit into a reservoir, but they scrapped this plan, supposedly after conducting a chemical analysis of the water. The results of that analysis have never been published, and township employees now claim that the report was never on file. Management of the Pit eventually passed to the Sewer Utility Division, which considered using it for graywater disposal, but that plan was also scrapped, ironically enough for fear of contaminating the aquifer.

  By the mid-1980s the story spread locally that a Satanist cult was using the Pit for human sacrifices. According to this story, the lake was bottomless, and bodies thrown into the Pit never surfaced.”

  There was more, mostly an uneventful account of a visit the author and his two friends made to the site, punctuated with readers’ claims to have seen torchlit processions crossing the ridge at night. And there were several photos of the flat, dead surface of the lake. Russ pretty much knew it all by heart now. He examined the photo at the top of the first page instead. It showed a portion of the raw rock wall along the pit’s upper edge. Bent trees and dense underbrush retreated into the woods above. Someone had spraypainted “UR MEAT” on the cliff just beneath the edge. The letters were tall and spindly, and the more Russ looked at the “U”, the more it looked like a “Y” instead. The “T” in MEAT was an inverted cross. Or a dagger. The focus of Russ’ obsession with this photo was not the words, however, but the crude outline of a long, thickly-toothed reptilian jaw several feet to the right of the letters. Like an alligator’s jaw...only there were no alligators in New Jersey. This graffiti had not been there when his dad had taken Tommy and him to the quarry in the early ‘80s.

  Russ shuddered, even though he already knew the photo well. Whoever had sprayed the letters must have hung over the edge of the pit with someone else holding his ankles. Obsessed cultist or joking stoner, the artist had taken an awful risk. Russ could not help thinking of his father’s final flailing dive in the dream.

  The story of the waters from the underground lake flooding the pit also resonated for him. He could not help thinking of Tééhoołtsódii, the Big Water Monster of the Navajo Emergence story that drove people from the lower worlds with floods.

  “What you got there?” The voice startled him. He looked up from the photo, to the young woman who stood watching him: lean, long-legged, perfect obsidian hair in a pageboy bob.

  He crushed the magazine tight to his chest and forced a smile. Cassandra Manygoats leaned against his doorframe, arms folded over her high, firm breasts. He tried to fix his eyes on hers: two dark pools in which he longed to lose himself, but he could not meet her gaze for long without flinching. Cass was all that Wendy was not: Navajo but raised on the Rez, Princeton educated and at ease in either culture--and either language. A former Miss Western Navajo Agency, she supposedly won her title by singing a Navajo song while butchering a sheep in the Traditional Talent Contest. Still single and hot as hell at 26. And oh, those legs. Not to mention that ass! If she were older/he were younger; if they had met each other before he settled for Wendy...

  He knew this was Cassandra’s prep hour--it was the common prep for the entire Language Arts department--all three of them--but then he knew her schedule forward and back, had stopped by her room on one bullshit premise or another more often than he could count (well, 37 times this school year), but this was the first time she ever visited his office. He had no worries about Wendy interrupting; she would be immersed in Pre-Calc this hour.

  “Hey Cassie...Cassandra, how you doing? What’s up?”

  She nodded toward the magazine and laughed. “Did I catch you with your porn?” His heart skittered.

  “No, oh, no way. Not me.” He flipped the magazine up quickly so she could see the cover. “WEIRD NJ. It’s a magazine about my home state, about all the ch’íidii and other weird stuff out there. An old friend sent it to me.” He did not mention the old friend was an ex, one he’d awakened many times in their college days after the quarry dream. She’d seen the article and sent it to him with a sarcastic note as a bookmark: “I can’t believe this place is real, even if your story was bullshit like everything else.”

  “Yiiyá, ch’íidii!” Then, laughing: “Hey, just kidding. I actually remember that mag from my Princeton days. I had this one boyfriend who used to take road trips to visit the places from those stories. I even went with him a couple times, like to that old sewer drain near Clifton they call the Gates of Hell. It was pretty much a waste of time: we tramped around with our flashlights in the smelly water until all the tunnels dead-ended. And that was about it. Nothing really creepy except for all the Satanic graffiti. Another time we looked for Midgettown, but no luck. That was about it.”

  She paused, dark eyes still fixed on him. He stared at her left elbow. “So anyways...” She gave the dialect term an ironic lilt--her English was impeccable as her Navajo-- “Amber says you’re going Out East to Jersey for the summer.” Amber Hardaway was Cassandra’s mentor and Darlene’s third grade teacher. A gaunt, chain-smoking Okie, the woman looked as if she might transform at any moment into a gnarled tree trunk. Russ bit down a sarcastic response, and Cassandra
continued.

  “So I was wondering if you might do me a little favor?”

  “Sure!” Oh, that was way too eager. Damn.

  “Well, if it’s not too much trouble, do you think you could bring me back some Taylor Pork Roll.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. It’s for my family--they’re such Rezzed-out Johns, and they still eat so much Spam. They’ve got to try pork roll. It will change their lives.” She laughed again. “And I really want to try it with green chile.”

  “OK. I’m game. How much do you want?”

  “As much as you can manage. I hate to ask, but maybe a couple pounds? I know they’ve got it in big rolls.” Then hurriedly, as she reached for her wallet: “I can pay you.”

  “Hell, don’t worry about it,” He said, waving her off, “It shouldn’t be that much. If it turns out to be a lot, we can settle up after I get back with the goods.”

  “Awesome. Thanks Russ, you’re the best!” She turned to go, began walking away, then did an about face after two steps and spoke again:

  “Listen: Language Arts and Social Studies are getting together at Tim Mulvaney’s place in the North Housing for a little party tomorrow night. Just us and some friends, but only the Humanities; we didn’t invite anyone from the, you know, Inhumanities.” That was her group’s term for Math & Science, Wendy’s department... “Number 121. You should come if you can get away from the Dragon Lady. It’ll be fun.”

  “Cool, yeah, thanks. I’ll definitely try.” Sure he’d try, but there was no way he was going to slip out past Wendy, no excuse he could concoct that would satisfy her. His “trying” consisted mostly of swirling various possibilities about in his brain for nearly two days but never coming up with anything even remotely practicable, even after he knew the party had to be underway, his opportunity missed. When he fell asleep at last, past midnight and on into Saturday morning, the dream came almost instantly. It began as it always did: the four of them on the creaking, rusted platform, Russ and the sisters he never had, then their dad suddenly diving all unannounced into the pit. And it stuck with him almost the whole next week, not departing until Thursday. Each time he awoke from the impossible vision of his father’s floating headless corpse, he bit down his panic and did his best not to wake Wendy. He didn’t want to remind her he hadn’t located a therapist.