Talking to Lila made me angry at Charlie again. How dare he have seen her ugly house, and read a novel in her presence? How could he have drowned himself? And if he hadn’t drowned, if, like stupid Terry Lennox, he’d faked his death, that would make Charlie the worst person ever. One evening in early April, I went to the liquor store and collected an armful of empty boxes. I filled a box with Charlie’s shoes; I filled a box with his shirts. I sat on the sofa doing nothing at all for a long time, then I called L. C. Spinks. I thought his number would be disconnected, and I was surprised when he answered the phone. I told him who I was, and he said, “Ah, Dr. Willett. What can I do for you?” His voice was hoarse but warm. “You talked to my husband in September,” I said. “I want to know what you told him.” There was a silence, then Spinks laughed. It sounded like a radio leaving its station. “That would take quite a long time,” he said. “Your phone bill would be astronomical.” “I have unlimited minutes,” I said. “Well, I don’t,” Spinks said. “OK,” I said, “just tell me what you talked about, generally.” “The transmigration of souls,” Spinks said. “I have some thoughts about it. Your husband seemed interested.” “OK,” I said, for lack of a better response. “Was that the last time you talked to him?” “It was,” Spinks said. Then I couldn’t help myself: I asked, “Do you have any idea where he might be now?” Spinks hesitated. “Dr. Willett, are you telling me that Charlie is alive?” He sounded almost eager. “I’m not telling you anything,” I said. “Well,” Spinks said, “in answer to your question, I don’t know. But I wonder if I might be able to help in another way. If I could share with you a few of my ideas . . .” “No, thanks!”
I got off the phone quickly and bristled at Spinks’s arrogance: How dare he offer to help? It was like the knife offering to help the wound. I wondered what was happening in his mind, and how he’d become the person he was. Some early trauma? Abuse, neglect? Then I resolved not to perform pro bono psychotherapy on L. C. Spinks’s phantom and set him aside, or tried to. I soon discovered something that Charlie must have understood a long time ago: Like certain books, certain people are hard to put down. Charlie was one of those people, and Spinks was another. Why did he talk to Charlie about the transmigration of souls? What did Charlie figure out? In the weeks after I talked to Spinks, my mind circled his mystery to the point where it became disturbing. Finally, I did the only thing I could think of: I wrote out the story of what had happened. Which brings me, novelistically, back to the present, but with an un-novelistic weight in my heart.
Charlie is gone. Looking back on what I’ve written, I see that the Daytona photo isn’t a clue to anything but the extent to which a smart person can fool herself. Either it was meant for someone else, or it was a cruel prank played by a troll who got my mobile number. I shudder to think how close I came to believing that there was more to the story: that Charlie might return. But, sadly, I do still think about L. C. Spinks. Charlie fell under his spell; he believed his lies once, and even when he knew what a monster Spinks was, he went back for a second helping. How close I came to being drawn into the same unreality! Even now, when I ought to know better, I wonder: Why did Spinks deceive my husband? As a Freudian, I’m not supposed to use words like evil; my business is with instinct, memory, and desire. Nevertheless, I’ve been wondering, lately, whether evil might exist. If it does, I’ve been thinking, it might be like what Freud called the navel of the dream, the place where all the lines of meaning the analyst has so carefully traced through the patient’s life vanish into the unknown. But where the navel of the dream is an essentially harmless phenomenon, a point where the dream’s meaning is sufficiently understood, and further interpretation would be pointless, evil is a mystery with power. It reaches up into the world and makes everything mysterious.
When faced with such a phenomenon, what can you do? For me, the answer is clear: You walk away. You get back to your life and make meaning where you can. So I’ve been trying to concentrate on my patients, whose suffering is as great as mine, or greater, but has the advantage that I can do something about it. I haven’t given up on myself, either. I’ve started seeing my old therapist again; she reminds me to be patient, no pun intended, and to accept my fantasies about Charlie’s being alive as just that, fantasies, built on the foundation of old longings, old fears. I run in Prospect Park on weekends, and I’m thinking about adopting a dog. My grandmother wants me to start dating, but I’m nowhere near ready. Let me take my August vacation, I tell her, and we’ll see what happens in the fall. I don’t tell anyone about the useless thought that I keep pushing away, but which keeps coming back, like a stick of driftwood on the tide, and I’m sorry if the simile is too spot-on: It’s late July, and Agawam Lake is as warm as it will get. But Charlie’s body has not been found.
V.
A NIGHTMARE AND A CATACLYSM
1.
L. C. Spinks’s house was larger than it looked on TV, and wilder. The lawn was a miniature prairie, through which, as I watched, a black and white cat undulated. The rusted-out frames of lawn chairs stood among the weeds like goals in some forgotten game, but the bird feeders that hung from the eaves of Spinks’s porch were full of seed. Wondering what kind of person would both keep cats and attract birds, I threaded my way up the path to the front steps, just as Charlie must have done four and a half years earlier. The gray-painted wood creaked underfoot. A wind chime hung silently from the porch eaves. I saw, with surprise, a brass mezuzah, screwed into the jamb just over the doorbell. I rang, and, not for the first time, the idiocy of what I was doing caught up with me. Why had I squandered my vacation on a trip to Parry Sound? Why had I thought for even a second that Spinks might have anything useful to tell me? Then Spinks came to the door. He looked younger than he had on television, and more vigorous. Despite the August heat, he wore a peach-colored dress shirt and brown polyester slacks. He really had been handsome, once, I thought. High forehead, strong round jaw. His nose dented like it had been broken long ago. “If you’re here about the book,” he said, “I don’t give autographs.” I was about to impersonate an autograph seeker and vanish, when Spinks said, “Dr. Willett?” “Yes,” I said. “Please,” Spinks said, “come in.”
I sat where my husband had once sat, in the kitchen, which was warm and stuffy and smelled of cat fur. Spinks fussed around, looking for a special tea which he insisted I try. There was no villainy in his fussing, no sinister aura to the chipped blue cup he set before me. Only a feeling of time having gone by. Yet Spinks had impersonated Barlow, and in the end, he’d let Charlie fall. I pushed the cup aside, and I was about to speak when Spinks asked, “Are you a Freudian?” It wasn’t a question I’d expected. “Sort of,” I said. “More like a post-Freudian.” “But you believe in talking cures,” Spinks said, “generally speaking?” “I do,” I said. “That’s good,” Spinks said. “I don’t like the doctors who try to cure everything with pills. We need words. We are words, really.” What were we talking about? I wondered. “Now, Dr. Willett,” Spinks said, “please tell me, why have you come all this way to see a very old man?” “My husband said he figured something out, when he talked to you,” I said. “I want to know what it was.” “I don’t know,” Spinks said, “I can only tell you what I told him.” “And what was that?” I asked. “Well,” Spinks said, “understandably, your husband wanted to know why I had, from his point of view, impersonated Robert Barlow. I explained that I hadn’t impersonated Barlow at all. I became Barlow. I am Barlow.” “I see,” I said. I was glad to have a therapist’s reflexes for this kind of conversation. “You don’t believe me,” Spinks said. “I’m listening,” I said. Spinks laughed. “It’s all right! Charlie didn’t believe me, either. So I told him how it happened.” “And did he believe you, after you told him?” I asked. “I’m not sure,” Spinks said. “I think he did. But it’s a very difficult thing to believe if you haven’t experienced it yourself.” “Why is it difficult?” I asked. “Let me find that tea,” Spinks said. “Where could
I have put it?” He stuck his head in the pantry closet. “Did you have a good trip up from Toronto?” I didn’t say anything. “The roads can be crowded, this time of year,” Spinks said. “Lots of people going to and from their cottages. Ah, here it is.”
From a cupboard over the stove, Spinks took down a brown paper bag and emptied some of its contents directly into the steaming kettle. He turned off the gas. “I’ll just let it steep for a moment,” he said. “Where are you staying in town?” “At a hotel,” I said. “Yes,” he said, “I meant, which one? Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m sure it’s nice. They all are, these days. Not like when I was a child . . .” He enfolded the kettle’s handle in a crocheted pot holder and poured tea into my mug. “Aren’t you having any?” I asked, suspiciously. “Yes,” Spinks said, “of course I am.” He took a second mug from the cabinet, where it hung from a tiny brass hook, and filled it. “Really, I’m becoming very absent-minded!” he said. We sat there for a while. Finally, I took a digital recorder out of my bag and set it up on the table, with its little tripod. “I’m ready,” I said. “For what?” Spinks asked. “For you to tell your story,” I said. “Aha,” Spinks said, mildly. He sipped his tea. “Will you excuse me for a moment, first? I have to take care of my old plumbing.” “Go ahead,” I said. He went to the bathroom, and I sniffed the tea. It didn’t smell like Spinks was trying to poison me, or to drug me into believing him. On an impulse, I opened one of the kitchen drawers. It contained the usual collection of string and matches and scissors; also a sewing kit in a worn red velvet case. The clutter was sort of sad, and I had to remind myself that I was not there to empathize with Spinks. All I wanted to know was what he had told Charlie, and whether it might mean that my husband was still alive.
It seemed as though Spinks was taking an awfully long time in the bathroom, but on the other hand, I didn’t know anything about his old plumbing. Finally, I heard the toilet flush, and a minute later, Spinks returned. “You must promise me that you’ll let me tell my story from beginning to end,” he said. “If you interrupt with questions, my old brain will just get tangled up.” “I promise,” I said. It was strangely peaceful in the kitchen, with butter-yellow light coming in through the chintz curtains and birds cheeping in the backyard. I took a sip of tea. It was sweet and smoky, and I was sure I’d had it before, but I couldn’t remember when. “This is a horror story,” Spinks said.
2.
I was born in Hungary, in 1922, Spinks began. My family was very rich. My father, if you can believe it, had been the Hungarian ambassador to Uruguay, and my mother’s family were bankers. We had a house in Budapest, and a vineyard near Lake Balaton, where we lived in the summertime. There was a tennis court, and a boathouse with many little sailboats. Practically the only thing I remember from that time is that I wanted to go out in a boat, but my mother wouldn’t let me. My older brother had drowned on the lake just the year before. Then, when I was four years old, my parents were murdered by thugs. I don’t know why. They were rich Jews—maybe someone envied all they had. Conceivably, it was political. My father was an adviser to the would-be king, Charles the Fourth, and he had many enemies. It doesn’t matter, they were dead, but no one thought to murder me. I was sent to Paris, then to London. A charity organization found a home for me in Canada, with a young couple who had no children of their own. Their names were Walter and Charlotte Spinks. Walter was a Quaker; Charlotte was from a wealthy family in Montreal. Her family manufactured corset stays, and like the stays, they were a little stiff. Walter and Charlotte wanted a child badly but when they couldn’t have one they decided to do something good for the world, and took in a European orphan. They met me at the Toronto train station with gifts: a German-English dictionary, which was doubly useless, because I couldn’t read, and I didn’t speak German; and a box of caramels, which were then, and remain, my least favorite candy in the world. I carried a bouquet of daffodils which had wilted on the train from Halifax, and when I saw my new family I burst into tears.
I cried again when I saw Parry Sound. It was so small! I don’t know what you think of our town, but to me it seemed like the end of the Earth. But I soon appreciated how lucky I was. Charlotte was an excellent cook; Walter was a gentle disciplinarian; and Canada, safe Canada, stretched out for hundreds and thousands of miles all around me, and beyond it was the ocean, and the people who had murdered my parents were almost unimaginably far off. I went to school in our old one-room schoolhouse, where I learned English and quickly made friends. In the summer, like the swallows and the Amazons,* we’d sail off to an island and camp, and not come back for days. In the winter we played hockey, and to everyone’s surprise, I was good at it. When I was eleven, I joined the Parry Sound Juniors as a defenseman. Which, by the way, was the position Bobby Orr played for Parry Sound in 1959, when he was eleven. The Bruins scouted him the next year; I had no such luck. What I did have was science fiction. I was thirteen when my friend Gregory loaned me a copy of Amazing Stories, with a story about a scientist who attaches human heads to the bodies of dogs. Well! It was like someone had taken off my head and sewed it onto the magazine. And I guess you’d say the operation was a success.
It was in this way that I discovered the work of H. P. Lovecraft. At the Mountains of Madness, Astounding Stories, February 1936. It filled me with weird excitement: Lovecraft wrote about aeons-old civilizations, beings that had vanished from the Earth. Well, I had been something else, too, before I was a Spinks. I knew about old worlds. Even the language Lovecraft’s cultists spoke, Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn, and so on,* reminded me of the mother tongue which I was rapidly forgetting. Also, Lovecraft’s stories were about books. The Necronomicon, the Liber Ivonis, the Culte des Ghoules, the De Vermis Mysteriis: ancient and forbidden tomes full of knowledge that drove men mad. It was just like my father! He was always locking himself away in the library of our villa, to read. Lovecraft’s stories were so evocative for me that, little by little, they took the place of my memories: the few that I had carried with me from Europe, and the many I had lost on the way. When I read Lovecraft, I felt as if I were learning about my oldest and truest self.
Weird Tales was banned in Canada on account of Mrs. Brundage’s covers,* so I wrote to fans and collectors in the States, and got them to send me the forbidden issues with Lovecraft’s stories in them. Eventually, I started a mimeographed magazine, Pickman’s Vault, in which I published lists of the stories I was looking to buy or trade for. I mailed it to the people I had corresponded with, and they passed it on to their friends, and soon my magazine became well known. I got to be friendly with Lovecraft fans all over North America, and, in fact, that was how I first heard of Robert Barlow. He was notorious in those days for having absconded with Lovecraft’s books and manuscripts. All kinds of rumors circulated about him: that he was hoarding dozens of unpublished Lovecraft stories, that he had burned those same stories, that he was queer and had disgraced himself by making a pass at Howard Wandrei.* He sounded interesting, so I got his address and sent him a friendly letter, but Barlow never replied, and I soon forgot about him.
I had other things to think about. When I was fourteen, I wrote my own Necronomicon: I filled a notebook with nonsense words and bits of would-be spells that I found in histories of religion and books by Aleister Crowley. I wrapped the book in black cloth, and for a while I kept it under my mattress, adding to it now and then as abominations occurred to me. Then suddenly that wasn’t enough; I had to go up to the attic and sit cross-legged among trunks full of Charlotte’s out-of-season clothes; I had to chant my spells softly, and see what would come. Sometimes I saw black stars dancing in the corners of my eyes; sometimes I felt a weird presence hovering just out of reach. Once I thought I saw a green light floating over Mr. Lewis’s house. All of which would have been foolish enough, but that summer, I got Gregory to join my cult by promising that it would make us rich. I spoke about the Necronomicon in such terrible terms that by the time I
allowed him up to the attic, and unwrapped the book’s black shroud, he was, I think, really afraid. We chanted and chanted, and the strange thing was, after a while, I did feel as though we had made contact with something, as though some invisible presence had heard us, and was coming closer, closer . . . Then Gregory broke off and kicked at the flour pentagram we’d drawn on the floor. “It’s not working,” he said. “This is just nonsense, isn’t it?” “No,” I said. I told him that we’d summoned a demon, and it had already penetrated the veil between worlds. It was on its way to us on giant invisible wings. Gregory went home in terror and told his mother everything.
I had to answer to Walter, who was as furious as he ever allowed himself to get. I had tricked Gregory! And my head was full of dark nonsense about creatures from beyond the stars, black magic, and doom. Hadn’t Canada, hadn’t he, taught me anything at all? He took me to Gregory’s squalid little house on River Street and made me apologize to him in front of his parents; and when that humiliating exercise was finished, Walter took me to the top of Belvedere Avenue. “Look around,” he said. “What do you see?” “Houses and the water,” I said. “Some trees.” “And what do you think, when you see those things?” “We’re in Canada.” “So we are,” Walter said. “Are you glad to be here, Leo?” “Yes,” I said, honestly. “Me, too,” Walter said. “So tell me, why do you need all that made-up stuff? All those monsters?” I thought about trying to answer honestly but I was afraid I’d hurt his feelings. Neither he nor Charlotte liked to be reminded of where I had come from. “I don’t know,” I said. “Well, think about it, Leo,” Walter said. “You’re getting a little old for made-up stories.” “I guess so,” I said. “That’s the spirit,” Walter said. Then we went home, and he took my Necronomicon and all my pulp magazines to the backyard, doused them with gasoline, and set them on fire. If Walter hadn’t done that, I might have done as he asked, or tried to. I might have gone to college and become a scientist, or an engineer, or headed north to work for the Forest Service, as Gregory eventually did. The pyre made those lives impossible. As I watched my magazines go up in smoke, all I could think was that I would never accept a life of rocks and houses and trees. I would have my old, weird world, and I would make Walter pay.
The Night Ocean Page 21