Lovecraft Ezine Mega-Issue 4 Rev1

by Price, Robert M.

  “Elmwood is a non-denominational cemetery,” I mused. “But Olivia was Catholic. Why not bury her with her fellow parishioners? At the very least, why not Mount Elliot, or Saint Anne?”

  “Maybe those old boneyards were a little too close to home.”

  I thought about the journal, about its author’s choice of French over Latin. The information it contained somehow linked an idol destroyed by Sulpicians in sixteen seventy to a young girl who died two centuries later.

  “You’re not Catholic, are you?” I said.

  Rachel looked down at her crepes. She toyed with her fork and frowned. “My family stopped attending church a long time ago.”

  “How long is a long time ago?”

  She looked up at me, her eyes suddenly dark. “Eighteen seventy.”

  I met Charles at King’s Bookstore on West Lafayette. The four story bookstore filled an old glove factory and housed general stock while the old Otis Elevator building tucked neatly behind the former housed antiquarian books as rare and varied as Detroit’s eclectic past. We browsed the general stock first, each heading in the direction that best fed our current appetites. Charles sought books on native mythology while I wandered through local history.

  Oddly enough we met beside the same book, a clothbound tome entitled The Hill of the Dead: The Great Indian Burial Mound at River Rouge. Charles held a book on Michigan archaeology and what it contained left me more than a little stunned. According to the book’s author – a professor of underwater archaeology at Michigan State – a series of stones were found in the channel between Belle Isle and Detroit’s Waterworks Park, arranged in a circle nearly forty feet below the river’s surface.

  The archaeologists had been hired to survey the river’s floor between the Joseph Barry subdivision and the Grayhaven Community. Their employers had hoped to find a specific shipwreck using side-scan sonar. They found old boats and cars and a Civil War-era pier, but the stone circle was by far the most surprising discovery.

  Despite everything I knew, I found it difficult not to be skeptical. “Are you telling me there’s a Stonehenge sitting at the bottom of the Detroit River?”

  “I’m only telling you what I read,” he replied, handing me the book. He pulled The Hill of the Dead off the bookshelf between us and added, “It wouldn’t be the first pre-historic site found in Michigan. Burial mounds were once a common feature of Michigan’s landscape; though to this day nobody seems to know who the early mound builders were.”

  He flipped through the old book’s seldom-touched pages, running a long, slender finger along the words placed there decades earlier. “When they opened the mounds, excavators found pots, beads, arrowheads, knives, chisels, and human bones. They apparently found several skeletons in kneeling positions.”

  I thought about the Trinity School skeleton. It too had been found in a kneeling position.

  “An archaeological survey undertaken during the twenties identified roughly six-hundred mounds throughout the state, with fifty-seven in Clinton Township alone. There were dozens in Wayne County, including several in Springwells Township. The best known of them all was the Great Mound near the juncture of the Detroit and Rouge Rivers in Delray.

  “According to archaeological reports, the Great Mound measured eight-hundred feet long, five-hundred feet wide, and forty feet high. Natives from around the Great Lakes region gathered there every few years to bury tribal members and honor the bones and souls of their ancestors. The early British and French settlers knew about the mound. Among the hundreds of skeletons removed from it during the nineteenth century were the remains of several British soldiers, their bodies interred in kneeling positions as well.”

  “What’s with the kneeling position, some sort of ritual burial practice?”

  “It certainly denotes worship,” Charles agreed. “Who placed them there – or why – remains unknown.”

  “I’ve never even heard of this mound,” I replied.

  Charles pulled another book from his stack and opened to a page he had marked during his earlier exploration. The sketch depicted an earthen mound upon which a single tree grew. A farmer and his horse stood in the foreground, perhaps tilling the soil around the strange earthen blemish.

  “When Detroit started growing, the once ubiquitous mounds were leveled by farmers and developers, or destroyed by relic hunters. By the late eighteen-eighties the Great Mound had been reduced to a fraction of its original size. By nineteen twenty-nine what remained was leveled.”

  “I’m assuming this all ties into the journal somehow?”

  Charles nodded. He handed me the two books and said, “I think it’s time for a beer.”

  We had lunch and lager at P.J.’s on Michigan Avenue. While I flipped through our recent acquisitions Charles discussed the book I’d found in the empty grave at Elmwood Cemetery the week before.

  “The journal is authentic,” Charles said. “The author was a Sulpician novitiate named Charbonneau.”

  “Wait a minute, Charbonneau?” I pulled Olivia’s death certificate from my pocket. “Olivia’s mother was a Josephine Charbonneau.”

  Charles shrugged. “It’s a common name. Our Charbonneau accompanied Casson and Galinée on their trip to the Soo. He was with them when they found the idol, but he never reached the mission at Sault Sainte Marie. According to the journal he became infatuated with a young native girl and stayed behind with her while Casson and Galinée continued on.”

  “But he was a priest.”

  “He was a novice,” Charles said. “Regardless, soon after Casson and Galinée left him, Charbonneau went mad.”

  “Mad?”

  “That’s the only way I can explain away the journal entries,” Charles replied. He opened the journal, flipping gently through the brittle pages until he found what he was looking for. “Here he says, ‘Les Indiens m’avaient mis en garde contre Adoration des Dieux Anciens’ – the Indians warned me about Worship of the Old Gods.”

  “The idol Charbonneau and the Sulpicians destroyed?”

  “I thought so too,” Charles replied, running his finger along the text in the book. “But here he writes, and remember his dedication, his intended audience.”

  “Casson.”

  “Oui, here he writes, ‘Quand vous avez abattu l’idole vous l’avez emprisonnée’– when you destroyed the idol you imprisoned her.”

  “Her? Who is he talking about?”

  Charles flipped through the aging journal to another page. He held the book open so I could see the text. “Here,” he underlined the text with his finger. “‘Elle n’est pas Foi’ – she is not Faith. ‘Elle se nomme Adoration des Dieux Anciens’ – She is named Worship of the Old Gods.”

  Faith and worship of the old gods: the words instantly tripped the wires in my memory. I pulled the Psychomachia from my coat pocket and flipped through the small, delicate pages until I found the words I sought. “‘Fidem Veterum Cultura Deorum,’” I whispered. “Worship of the Old Gods.” I read the English translation on the adjoining page. “‘Lo, first Worship of the Old Gods ventures to match her strength against Faith’s challenge and strike at her.’”

  Charles reached for and took the book from me. “I’m not familiar with this one.”

  “The Psychomachia,” I said. “It describes the struggle between Christian virtues and pagan vices.”

  “Like the seven deadly sins.”

  “Sort of,” I replied. I debated telling him the truth, or at least what I considered it to be. I thought about my wife’s murder and my nightmarish encounter with Mother Greed at Eloise but held back. Amanda discovered the Old Gods long before I did. The discovery led to her death and ultimately my own self-destruction. I could tell Charles. He would even listen. But he would never believe it. “Look, the drinks are on me, but I do need to go.”

  Charles nodded. He slid the books back across the table. “I hope I helped.”

  “More than you know.”

  I owned a one-bedroom condo in Rivertown. Buil
t in eighteen ninety-nine, the refurbished building once housed the manufacturing chemists of Frederick K. Stearns. With an interior designed by Albert Kahn, the foremost industrial architect of the early twentieth century, the building had enough charm and character to make up for my lack of either.

  I sat back on the couch and thought about my recent discoveries. The empty grave at Elmwood cemetery hadn’t been that surprising given everything I knew about Olivia. But the journal had been unexpected. If, as Charles claimed, the journal was authentic, it and the pipe once belonged to a Sulpician novice named Charbonneau. This same young man fell in love with a native woman named Worship of the Old Gods. If the Charbonneau on Olivia’s death certificate shared their blood, so too did Olivia. “And Rachel,” I whispered.

  My stereo snapped on, ‘Rags and Bones’ by the White Stripes tearing me from my thoughts. The volume rattled the living room window and undoubtedly disturbed the neighbors. I fumbled for and found the remote, turning off the stereo. My ears and heart pounded in the ensuing silence.

  The few times she’d been here, Olivia had found me in a drunken stupor. She sang my lament while I threw up or passed out on the bathroom floor. Once, only once, she had found me with a knife against my wrist. She had never seen me sober.

  I had never seen her look so flawless. She stood in the loft and looked down at me with her baleful, beautiful eyes and I knew she was Faith and not the other.

  I don’t remember climbing the spiral staircase, but I will never forget the comfort of her cold embrace. When her breath kissed my lips I closed my eyes and surrendered to the madness consuming me. It was madness, it had to be. I thought about the Old Gods, about Casson and Galinée and Charbonneau’s strange journal. I thought about my dead wife and I wept while Olivia took me.

  I met Rachel at Detroit’s Waterworks Park the following morning. If Charbonneau’s journal held true it seemed a logical place to continue my search. I brought coffee.

  “What is it you’re looking for?” Rachel asked. “Your email mentioned the journal, the Sulpician priests and someone called Worship of the Old Gods. I thought you were searching for the truth behind Olivia’s death, but I’m starting to think you’re after something stranger.”

  “My wife was investigating the old Eloise Asylum when she died. After the funeral I went through her research. I thought I’d find enough to publish something posthumously. Instead I found an old photograph.”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out an old tin picture. I passed it to Rachel, who studied it closely before returning it.

  “Her name’s Mother Greed,” I said. “I met her when I went to Eloise.”

  “You what?” Rachel nearly spilled her coffee.

  “The Psychomachia,” I whispered, quoting the verse Eloise had irrevocably etched in my brain. “‘And all the while Crimes, the brood of their Mother Greed’s black milk, like ravening wolves go prowling and leaping over the field.’”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The Old Gods,” I replied. “Mother Greed’s children murdered my wife. Ever since her death I’ve been hunting down the pantheon Prudentius alluded to in his Psychomachia.”

  Rachel eyed me warily. “What does any of this have to do with Olivia?”

  “It has everything to do with Olivia. She was an incarnation of Faith. When the Sulpicians first arrived here in sixteen seventy they found and destroyed a stone idol venerated by local natives.”

  “You think the idol was a representation of Faith?”

  I nodded. “When Casson and Galinée destroyed the idol they unwittingly ensnared Faith in its stone remains.”

  “Which they threw in the river,” Rachel said.

  “Prudentius outlined a balance within his poetry,” I continued. “Every vice has its virtue. With Faith gone, her sister could freely influence the souls of those around her.”

  “Her sister?” Rachel asked.

  “Worship of the Old Gods.”

  “The girl Charbonneau fell in love with,” Rachel mused. “You do realize how insane this sounds.”

  I nodded, shrugged. “I’m being haunted by her ghost, her soul, her memory. I can’t explain it Rachel, but I can’t ignore it either.”

  “Why come here then? What is it you think you’ll find in Waterworks Park?”

  I opened the trunk of my car and pulled out the oxygen tank. “Not in the park, Rachel, in the river. I need to find the stones Casson and Galinée threw in the river. I have to find and free Faith. I have to restore the balance.”

  “You’re insane,” Rachel said. “But if you want to go for a swim I won’t stop you. Just don’t expect me to be here when you get back.”

  “I didn’t expect anything from you. And I don’t blame you either. I’ve been questioning my own sanity for months.”

  I slipped beneath the surface. The cold water numbed but didn’t frighten me. I’d learned to dive in Georgian Bay, where the water was crisp but clear. No, the water’s coldness didn’t bother me, its opacity did. Near the surface I could still see my outstretched hands. The deeper I slid the darker and dirtier the water became until it consumed the world beyond the tip of my nose.

  The Detroit Police Department routinely searched these waters for cars and corpses, and while I didn’t expect to find either I found the possibility troubling. I honestly had no idea what I would find – the strange stone circle Charles mentioned, the stone idol Casson and Galinée destroyed centuries ago, crates of bootleg booze and sunken boats, stolen cars and derelict shopping carts. They all held a place in the river’s tortured history.

  In the end I found nothing. I thought about the French missionaries, about Charbonneau and Worship of the Old Gods and the strangely uncertain link that bound them all to Olivia Maloney. Charbonneau thought he’d found and fallen in love with Faith, when in fact he’d helped Casson and Galinée murder her. They had all been duped by Faith’s dark sister. According to his journal, Charbonneau married Worship of the Old Gods. Their children had children who had children who, at some point, married into the Maloney family. According to Olivia’s death certificate, her mother was a Charbonneau. Were the Old Gods alive within her blood? What about Rachel? Was she an incarnation of Prudentius’ strange pantheon as well? If the urban legends were true, Olivia died during a botched exorcism. Were the priests hoping, as Casson and Galinée were, to expunge a pagan god? If so, which one – Faith or Worship of the Old Gods?

  It all seemed so absurd. Too absurd, I thought. I swam toward the surface, toward the dim, filth-filtered sunlight. I decided then that I would forget about the Psychomachia, about Olivia, Mother Greed and whatever madness murdered my wife. I’d move, leave Detroit and never come back.

  When I surfaced Rachel was there, waiting for me on the shore with a smile and a helping hand. She pulled me from the water, helped me slide the tank from my back and the mask from my face.

  “I thought you were leaving,” I said.

  My copy of Prudentius lay open on the break wall, its pages flittering in the breeze.

  Rachel followed my gaze and her smile broadened. She reached down and picked the book back up. “We are born within your kind, Daniel. For all your research you missed that small but vital point didn’t you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Her gaze held mine. “We are born within you.”

  “Rachel?” I whispered, suddenly uncertain.

  She slowly shook her head. “No, I’m not,” she breathed, and I didn’t understand until she began reciting Prudentius. “‘Why in the hour of birth we embrace the whole of man, his frame still warm from his mother, and extend the strength of our power through the body of our newborn child, we are lords and masters all within the tender bones.’”.

  Jason Rolfe writes for fun and (very little) profit. His work has recently appeared (or will be appearing) in Sein und Werden, The Ironic Fantastic, miNatura, Pure Slush, Flash Gumbo, Black Scat Review, Apocrypha and Abstraction, and Cease, Cows.


  Story illustration by Peter Szmer.

  Return to the table of contents

  Leviathan's wake

  by Mark Howard Jones

  ‘They pace outside our cage, These tigers we have made…’

  - ‘Cages’ by Maria Santa Cruz

  The mist clings to the wharves like ropes of luminescence at this time of the morning, unravelling around her feet as she walks. The breakers out on the reef are talking to her again; they sing ‘safe’ and then, the very next moment, ‘risk’.

  He will not come home in this, she knows. He cannot. So she turns and walks back up the narrow, steep street towards home and her sleeping son, thinking always of his father. Perhaps the boy has dreamt of a better future this time.

  In late afternoons she haunted Widow’s Hill, watching for his vessel; Captain Decker home from the sea with his extraordinary catch. Lucy snorted to herself at the insane fantasy of a monster straight from the Bible – or from some undreamt-of Hell. He wouldn’t find it, she knew, even with the Bishop’s ‘magic’ symbols bedecking his boat. Yet any time at sea was filled with dangers. She couldn’t decide whether the Bishop was a fool or simply evil, but she cursed his name anyway.

  From her vantage point high up on the hill, she could see the men rolling from the quayside to the taverns, never noticing as the stars wheeled into new patterns over their empty heads.

  Isaac’s first boat, Friendship, had been wrecked in harbour by a vicious storm one Autumn night. Times had been hard for them while a new one was built. No catch meant no money, but the new boat promised a fresh start.

  The Amis Reunis. The French name had been suggested to Isaac by Bishop Blackwood. Lucy disliked it and would have preferred something more traditional. “People will think you have ideas above your station, Isaac Decker!” she’d chided him. He’d sneered at what he saw as her petty concerns.

  The boat was Isaac’s own design and had a remarkable turn of speed for such a small vessel. He and his crew were always at the fishing grounds hours ahead of the other boats and were always the first to head home. The other captains failed to hide their envy at every possible opportunity.