by Bob Leman
The opening paragraph to “Feesters in the Lake” (October 1980) deliberately eschews two devices favored by the horror-story writer — an atmospheric build-up to revelation on the final page and the oblique reference to horror given at the beginning that gains coherence throughout the remainder of the narrative. Leman, who realizes that most of his audience has already read either Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” or one of its many imitations, therefore opens his tale with a description of the monsters and then proceeds to tell us why their story is relevant to the human population of Goster County. As with Theodore Sturgeon’s “A Way of Thinking” and Stephen King’s “The Crate,” the human response to events turns out to be even more horrible than the supernatural one.
“Skirmish in Bastable Street” and “Unlawful Possession” appeared in the June 1981 and September 1983 issues respectively, and mix elements of the fairy tale with the kind of seriocomic approach to the supernatural displayed in Henry Kuttner’s demonic bargain stories of the 1940s and 1950s, such as “Compliments of the Author,” “The Devil We Know” and “By These Presents.” The most fascinating thing about the former tale, aside from its Moebius strip plot, is Leman’s decision to make the protagonists as unattractive a pair of squabbling drunkards as any in fiction. Like the Kuttner tales cited, “Unlawful Possession” also contains more than its share of twists and paradoxes, including the first of Leman’s unusual takes on love and affection.
Ghouls called up from the cellar are just the beginning of the events and complications that arise in “The Tehama” (December 1981), which moves outside Goster County and makes inventive use of Native American legends. The Lovecraft references are more oblique in this tale than in “Feesters in the Lake,” but the themes are not. Before the tale ends, the reader can not help but recall the warning, “Doe not call up Any that you can not put downe” in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and those horrors of which even the monsters are afraid in At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow out of Time.” As with all of the themes he uses, Leman has developed these materials independently making them his own.
Although “Skirmish in Bastable Street” and “Unlawful Possession” each nod toward Sturkeyville, “The Pilgrimage of Clifford M.” published in May 1984 marks Leman’s first return to Goster County’s evocative back country in four years, and is as much a tour de force as any of the other tales set in that vicinity. Ostensibly the revision and recasting of a technical paper, like the tales in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly, this fine tale chronicles the life of one member of a species known to folklore as the vampire from its first documented sighting as “Ossie’s Monkey” in the 1880s, through fugitive appearance in books concerning feral children, to its emergence into adult human society. The tale seamlessly melds elements ranging from Edward Lucas White’s “Amina” to Donald A. Wollheim’s “Mimic,” and even the hideously immortal Struldbrugs who appear in Part Three of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Its alternation of the dry, pedantic, clinical tone of the investigator with the increasingly human tones of the creature he is studying is masterful and increasingly poignant.
“Instructions,” which appeared four months later in the same magazine, has no room for such considerations. It is pure, merciless manipulation by an intelligence completely indifferent to anything besides its own goals. I think Clark Ashton Smith, author of “The Abominations of Yondo” and “The Maze of Maal Dweb,” would have approved of the tale’s amoral logic and the inventive malignity of its landscapes. All texts subsequent to the first magazine appearance, including this one, restore the line with which the author originally intended the tale to end.
Leman again plays against the reader’s expectations in “Olida” (April 1987), set in a degenerate insulated community residing amid the decrepit remains of a village not far from the county seat in Sturkeyville. This is home to the titular hill-country femme fatale, descendant of the ancient and decaying Selkirk family, part Lavinia Whateley and part Asenath Waite, and connected mysteriously to the Very Great. The tale contains an amazing number of echoes from “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Thing on the Doorstep,” but Leman consistently reshapes them to his own ends with surprising results.
When “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming” first appeared in Charles L. Grant’s anthology Shadows 10 (Doubleday, 1987), many expected to see a broadened interest in his work and a further outpouring of fiction, but this was not to be. Leman had this and one more Lovecraftian tale in store for his readers before he abruptly gave up fiction. This tale has nothing to do with Lovecraft, being instead the story of a man haunted by love. In true Leman fashion, the very nature of the ghost grows from reassuring to terrifying, its calm, perfect beauty as horrible as the thing that comes after Katharine Ross at the climax of The Stepford Wives.
Whereas Steven Mariconda has referred to “The Dreams in the Witch House” as “Lovecraft’s Magnificent Failure,”(8) I have always found that tale both magnificent and terrifying. It is “The Thing on the Doorstep” that has continued to give me qualms over the years. Its cosmicism is consistently undercut by inadequacies in the protagonists and their characterization so fundamental that the domestic tragedy not only fails to seem inevitable, but also succeeds in largely vitiating the tale’s wider implications. In one last visit to Goster County, Bob Leman’s final tale, “The Time of the Worm” (March 1988) negotiates similar terrain with bleakly brilliant results. The range of influence in this tale of personality displacement is now wider and the extent of control even more extreme. More important is Leman’s keen display of the phenomenon’s human impact. He replaces the self-pity that seems to be so much a part of Edward Pickman Derby’s response to his situation with terror, desperation and even self-sacrifice. Love, a major theme of Leman’s penultimate tale, and a disturbing subtext in “Unlawful Possession,” is also demonstrated here in both its natural and twisted forms. It counterpoints events with results that are simultaneously pathetic and utterly pitiless.
Fifteen tales may not seem large body of work for a man writing over a period of three decades, but the depth of each work makes up in quality what it may lack in quantity; hence this collection of marvellous tales, ridiculous only when Mr. Leman’s artistry will have it so. One can only regret that Mr. Leman felt he had “‘fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf’ ” and that “whatever creative spark I had for a while just went away” by the time this first attempt to collect his fiction was going to press.
Years ago, when I first asked Scream/Press and then Arkham House if they would consider a book of Mr. Leman’s tales, I could easily envision such a collection squeezed onto a shelf alongside such American masters of weird literature as Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, and Ray Bradbury. More than a decade passed since those first attempts. The volume is no longer printed on Winnebago Eggshell and bound in Holliston Black Novelex as I had once imagined; nor does it bear the words Window & Other Apertures upon its spine in gold. Thanks to Bob Leman, John Pelan and everyone at Midnight House, however, the book finally exists — even if its current rarity is unfortunate — and is every bit as well-made as that imaginary volume of long ago. It has finally spilled over from our dreams and into your hands where it belongs. These tales have been part of my imagination since they first saw print — you have only to open the book for them to spill into your own.
Dowagiac, Michigan
October 2001, Revised January 2012
Notes
(1) From the text reprinted in Classics and Commercials (W. H. Allen, 1951), pp. 288?–?289.
(2) Classics and Commercials, p. 288.
(3) In a letter to the present writer, dated October 1, 2001.
(4) Unless stated otherwise, this and other quoted statements stem from telephone conversations between Bob Leman and myself held on September 25 and October 2, 2001.
(5) The Vinegar Worm, Volume II, No. 11, for FAPA 125, the journal’s penultimate issue.
(7) Since thirteen of Mr. Leman’s fifteen tales were first published in this magazine, all dates of publication refer to issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, unless stated otherwise.
(8) “Lovecraft’s Cosmic Imagery,” in David Schultz and S. T. Joshi (editors), An Epicure of the Terrible (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991), p. 192.
Bait
(The Magazine of Fantasy and S.F., January 1967)
It was the last house at the end of the street, a fine old Georgian mansion built on a couple of acres of well-barbered lawn. Even under the lash of a bitter February rain it had an air of warmth and comfort. The light from its windows came softly to me through the leaden dusk as I trudged up the driveway. Water was squishing in my shoes.
The knocker was a great brass eagle which held the clapper in its beak. I gave it a genteel thump. Td had to push myself to make this last call. My clothes were sodden and my feet were as tired as they were wet. I was very cold. But I had a schedule, and nothing was going to make me deviate from it. Street by street, house by house, I was covering the city. If I let myself fall behind schedule just once, I could only fall further and further behind. Thank God, though, this was the last of the day.
I heard the knob turn, and I fixed the selling smile on my face. The door opened about eight inches. A woman's voice said, “Yes?” “Good afternoon,” I said. “I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes about the length of your life.” The door opened a little wider. “What are you selling, young man?"
“Long life, ma’am" I said. “Long life."
I could see her plainly now. She was a most distinguished old lady, a real grande dame. Her snowy hair was meticulously arranged in a vaguely old-fashioned way, and at her throat gleamed an enormous diamond on a gold chain. Her face was lined and rather stern, her manner and voice poised and cultivated. I was acutely aware of my wet, seedy clothes and the five o'clock shadow on my face.
She peered at me. “Long life? No, what is it you re selling?”
A gust of wind drove a slant of freezing rain against my back and in through the open doorway. She said, "Well, you'd better come in before we both freeze.” I sloshed into the entrance hall, and she closed the door.
She looked me over in an unobtrusive way as I stood and dripped on her carpet. She had seen my satchel first thing, of course, and now she said, looking at it, "Health foods?”
"I’m not selling health foods, Mrs.—uh—.”
"Moswell,” she supplied.
“I’m not selling health foods, Mrs. Moswell, but what I have to say does concern food. If you will give me just a few moments of your time, I’ll show you something that may change your whole life.”
“Books, then.”
She was ruining my whole pitch. I was selling books, of course, but it was too early to mention it. It's always better to have their interest running high before showing the book. There are more people than you'd think who shy away at the sight of a book.
"Mrs. Moswell,” I said, "what I'm going to tell you may seem incredible at first, but I hope you’ll hear me out. Im very serious when I say that this could be the most important day of your life.”
She smiled faintly. "No doubt, no doubt,” she said. She glanced at her watch. "May I ask your name, young man?”
"Smeed, Mrs. Moswell. Ripley Smeed.”
"Mr. Smeed, if you'll just hang your coat over there, I'll be glad to hear why this is such an important day.”
I followed her into the living room. I felt as out of place as a horse in a library. It was a long, long room, richly carpeted, hung with dark oil paintings of bearded and side-whiskered Victorian gentlemen. At the opposite end logs blazed in a marble fireplace. Lamps shed soft light on graceful, gleaming furniture. It was a beautiful room, almost impossibly rich and warm in comparison with the vile evening outside.
She seated me near the fireplace. The warmth reached out and embraced me as I settled into the great soft chair. There was a tea tray on a low table. Mrs. Moswell said, "Will you have a cup of tea? I was just about to take mine.”
“Thank you,” I said, "Id like one very much.” I hoped I hadn't sounded too surprised. To be offered tea in a porcelain cup from a heavy silver service is not a common experience for book peddlers.
“Milk or lemon?” she asked.
“M-milk please,” I said. My teeth were chattering slightly as the fire began to soak the cold out of my bones. She gave me a close look and said, “Oh no. You're cold. You'd better have some of this in your tea.” She took a decanter from a painted cabinet and poured a tot into my cup. It was a heavy, dark rum, smooth as rain water, and in the hot tea it sent soft explosions of warmth all the way to my fingertips.
She sat with patrician erectness, her teacup delicately balanced. “Now, Mr. Smeed,” she said. “Tell me what you have to sell.”
“Mrs. Moswell,” I said earnestly, leaning forward, “people don't have to grow old. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to suffer the incapacities and discomforts of old age. The hardened artery, the weak kidney, the tired heart—these need not be. Arthritis comes to the bone, dyspepsia to the stomach, sluggishness to the liver, all unnecessarily. The young have the raven hair, the clear eye, the fresh skin, while the old are grey and rheumy and wrinkled. This need not be so. Old age has been conquered!”
She gave me a quizzical, half- smiling look. “I'm afraid, Mr. Smeed, that you've come to me a little too late. I already have most of those afflictions,” she said.
“Ah, but with this method they can be made right—damaged organs made whole, tired ones brisk.”
“Mr. Smeed, that's ridiculous.” “No, ma’am, it isn't at all. Aging, you see, occurs in the individual cells of the body, not in the organism as a whole. When the cells age—and when, in their reproduction by fission, the resultant pair of cells is less viable than the original cell—then deterioration of the parts and organs of the body takes place. We call this aging.
“Now a method has been found to refresh and rejuvenate the cells of the body. It is an exceedingly easy and convenient method, and can be followed by anyone. When the individual cells remain vigorous, then aging cannot take place. And I am here today, Mrs. Moswell, to make this method available to you.”
I was well into my spiel now, rattling along at a great rate, putting real feeling into the invented sales talk. The rum had oiled my tongue very satisfactorily. My cup was empty, and without asking me if I wanted it, Mrs. Moswell poured again and added rum. She said, “And what is your method, Mr. Smeed?”
“Diet, Mrs. Moswell,” I said oracularly. “Or rather, an addition to the diet.” I sipped tea-and-rum. “It has been learned that certain common substances, taken as a supplement to one’s ordinary diet, will arrest—and, indeed, reverse —the phenomenon known as aging. You will understand that I am not speaking of so-called ‘health foods'—desiccated liver, bone meal and the like—but rather of ordinary substances found in every household. These substances, taken in proper quantities, combine with the protein molecules in ordinary foodstuffs to form something called provin. Provin rejuvenates the cells of the body. In effect, it makes you young again.
“Now this book, Mrs. Moswell, is actually a cookbook, a recipe book.” I handed it to her. “Let me show you how simple it all is. On page twenty-two is a recipe for an omelette. Will you read it please?” The book isn't much to look at. The binding is pretty sleazy, the paper is just this side of pulp, and the printing is obviously cheap. But even so, it had taken all my money to have three thousand copies printed and bound.
Mrs. Moswell looked up from the book. She raised her brows and said, “Iodine? Cream of tartar? In an omelette?”
I ventured another swallow from my cup. “You will notice, Mrs. Moswell, that the amounts used are very tiny indeed. The recipes call for the additions only in homeopathic doses. You will find, for example, that this omelette recipe notes that sufficient iodine wil
l be added if iodized salt is used as a seasoning. Nonetheless, these exiguous helpings of iodine and cream of tartar will, in the egg mixture, and at the temperature necessary to cook an omelette, cause a minute quantity of provin to be formed. It will be a quantity sufficient to activate the cells of the body for about a month. If every month you eat a dish prepared from one of these recipes, permanent youth is yours.”
“Now, really, Mr. Smeed, you can’t be serious.”
“Mrs. Moswell, will you please look at this?”
I handed her the birth certificate. It was frayed and dirty from much handling, but it legibly certified that Ripley Smeed had been born in Bagby County, Nebraska, on August 14, 1898. I said, “It’s my birth certificate, Mrs. Moswell.”
“But that would make you— mmm—sixty-eight years old.”
“That's right.”
She laughed, genuinely amused, and I found myself liking her very much. She said, “Twenty- eight would be about right, I think.” She was shrewd, that much was certain. I’d have to proceed carefully with her.
I said urgently, “Mrs. Moswell, please believe me. What I am telling you is absolutely true. I am sixty-eight years old. Provin has made me young. It can make you young!” I hoped I wasn’t overdoing the emotion. I was aware of being a little drunk. "Four years ago, Mrs. Moswell,” I said, “you wouldn’t have doubted my age. I was sixty-four and looked every day of it. My arteries were hard and my heart wheezed like a leaky kettle. I had only six of my own teeth left and there was nothing but skin on the top of my head. Just four years ago.