Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft

by Don Webb

  “They won’t go. They already belong to whatever’s in the mine.”

  It was cold outside the cabin, but warmer in the mine. I flipped on the lights they’d installed, lights powered by the wind charger. The shaft ran sixty feet, turned to the left another thirty, turned to the left again for another twenty. Slim and the captain slept on the floor—no pillow, no sleeping bag. Their scalps and foreheads were covered by angry running sores. The bloody ooze had mixed with swirls of Paris green and run down to stain the collars of their shirts. Rock dust covered them. I knelt over Slim and poked him. He opened his eyes. The eyes seemed ordinary, yet a shudder went through me. Time seemed to slow. Then he giggled, and spit collected on his lips.

  “Slim, it’s time to go. You’ve been down here too long.”

  Slim shook his head. He knocked his hand against the captain’s chest. He pointed me out to the waking captain and giggled again.

  The captain said, “You’ve come too late, Robert. You can’t get a share in this stake. It’s all ours now. You have no right to be here.”

  “Captain, look at yourself. Whatever you’re unleashing is killing you.”

  “Not killing us, Robert. Changing us. We’re much further along than Brandon.”

  It didn’t look like argument would do much good. I couldn’t drag them out. Maybe if I went to the sheriff . . . I turned away from Slim giggling and rolling on the floor. I left the mine. Just as I stepped into daylight something crashed into the back of my skull.

  My head hurt badly. It was night. I was trussed up leaning against the wall of the cabin looking toward the mine entrance. Brandon and the captain walked over to me. Brandon held a gun. “I’m sorry to use violence. Tonight we unite the opposites. I had to have you along. The planets within will join the planets without, and you and I will be transformed by their meeting.”

  I had nothing to say. He continued, “Of course, should you try to escape, I’ll shoot you. Untie him, Mr. Macphedius.”

  The captain untied me. An animal howl came from the mine. The captain said, “Slim says it’s nearly time.”

  Brandon said, “Soon you will see the first of the mysteries of the Brunckow.”

  Things stepped from the shadow of the cabin. Things misty, tall, and thin. They passed through us. When they touched us we could feel the memories. They were the ghost miners. We could feel their determination as they set out from Hamburg, their excitement as they left New York, their desperation as they left the gold fields of Alaska. There were flashes of their childhoods—seeing blue bellies overrun their plantation, shooting at a sky darkened with passenger pigeons, hearing sails flapping on a full-rigged ship. There was something else, too. The becoming aware of Something in the mine. A strange alien stretching of the mind.

  The ghosts passed into the mine sustained by that feeling.

  Slim howled again.

  The captain said, “Slim says that he’s up to the Veil.”

  Brandon said, “Come along, Mr. Lyons. I think you’ll find this more exciting than the promise of a New Deal.” He moved the gun in small arcs.

  We walked into the mine. The ghosts were less distinct under the electric lights. Each of them labored at walls invisible to us. Possibly they labored at the depth the mine existed at in their times. We skirted the ghost miners with fog picks.

  Slim stood buck naked at the end of the shaft. He’d cleared a good four feet since this afternoon. There had been gold in the rock. Gold dust glistened among blood and sweat. He held his pick high over his head, watching us with his time-slowing eyes. Brandon gave a nod and Slim turned to face the gray stone. He lifted his pick and gave a yell and brought the pick down on the stone. The pick bit into the rock and when he pulled it back the electric lights gave out. Something blue— like an alcohol flame—poured from the hole. The ghost miners moaned and began to dissolve into a mist, mixing each with each and entering our lungs. The blue light snaked out and entered Slim’s body. He went stiff. He tried to walk toward us. There was a smell of flesh burning. He fell forward, but the light streamed out of his eyes before he touched bottom. It passed into the captain, who died almost the moment it touched him.

  Brandon stepped forward. He’d unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a copper medallion thick with runes and sigils and Ute signs. He beckoned the blue light, and it hit him hard just above his amulet. He turned toward me, a soft glow coming from his skin.

  He said, “You see, I was prepared. I had made myself a crucible for the Great Work.”

  His smile left. He grabbed for his heart. “No, no. That isn’t the way. Help me.”

  I moved forward. There was a great fight going on within him. He lifted his Colt to his temple and fired. The light exploded from him. Before I could run, it was upon me. It burned with icy fire as it poured in through my nerves. It felt like a huge alien shape had been stuffed into my body. My skin would tear and my bones break under its pressure. It had radiated its strangeness into the desert here for centuries, millennia. It was trying to rebuild a world it had known. Change space and time into something it understood. It was no longer imprisoned, but this whole sector of space was bad for it. It burned. It cut at my neurons with strangely angled saws.

  I began to think of the discovery of Pluto. It paused. It had seen Pluto, seen strange beings building castles out of solid argon. I thought about Einstein’s discoveries, about rocketry and man’s desire to leave the planet, Lowell and his theories of Martian canals. It pushed itself into my thoughts, but my thoughts weren’t big enough. I thought of the Big Dipper and the procession of pole stars. I thought of the Milky Way. I thought of the vast darkness between galaxies. There. It flowed into that darkness. That darkness inside my own mind. I had found a place big enough for it. It could dwell in that darkness forever. It and I were one.

  The electric lights came back on. I left the mine. I gave one last long look at the desert. At the world. Then I lifted my arms and sailed silently into space.

  (For Ray Bradbury)

  The Doom That Came to Devil’s Reef

  Among Lovecraft’s papers at Brown University was a large manila envelope containing a school exercise notebook and a newspaper clipping. The notebook’s owner, Miss Julia Phillips, had been mistakenly identified as a cousin of American horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937). Over four-fifths of the pen and pencil entries are rather commonplace, detailing Miss Phillips’s life as a seamstress in the Providence of the 1920s, her growing depression, and her commitment to Butler Hospital. As both of Lovecraft’s parents had ended their years in the selfsame institution, Julia had been perceived as another branch of a less than mentally healthy tree. It wasn’t until Lovecraft’s biographer S. T. Joshi read the volume that it was seen as anything other than a rather dreary memento. It is in the last few pages of the book wherein Julia’s dreams or waking fancies take an amazingly cosmic tone that the book became of interest to Lovecraftian scholars. The relationship of Julia and Howard is unknown. Lovecraft had little interest in psychiatry, aside from his occasional denunciation of Freud in his letters. No one has been able to discover how Lovecraft came into possession of the book.

  What is clear is that Julia’s fantasies became Lovecraft’s inspiration for his 1931 novella “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Lovecraft’s notes in the volume are slight, but he occasionally erased Julia’s words altogether and wrote in his fictional equivalents. For example, Julia records that she is writing about the real-world Massachusetts town of Newburyport where she had spent her childhood. Lovecraft erased all but one instance of “Newburyport” and wrote in “Innsmouth.” Likewise, certain demons or gods of Julia’s delusions have been replaced with Cthulhu, Dagon, and Mother Hydra. It is tempting to speculate that Lovecraft had considered the diary as a sort of objet trouvé or ready-made to continue the mythic patterns that he begun in earlier work, especially “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926). Perhaps Julia’s rather simple style, reflecting her fifth-grade education, was too limiting for Lovecraft, or perhap
s the whole notion struck him as artistically dishonest. Given Lovecraft’s penchant for recording even the smallest details of his moods and life in his letters it seems remarkable that Julia’s diary was never mentioned.

  Inevitably that class of literalist thinker that assumes that all Lovecraft’s stories are some sort of mystic channelings have claimed that the diary of Julia Phillips is the work of a kindred soul—likewise expressing the “mysteries of the Aeon.” Perhaps Lovecraft himself, who had played with the artistic notion of art and dream coming from some sort of Otherness, was attracted to and then repulsed by the contents of this diary for that seeming. Again, unless further documentation comes to light we shall never know.

  Here is what we do know about Julia Phillips. She was the third of six children to be born to Rodger Allen and Susan Williams Phillips. Born in 1891, she was a year younger than Lovecraft. Her father was a greengrocer and her mother supplemented the family’s income with sewing, a skill young Julia excelled at. Her sickly youth kept her a homebody while her two brothers joined the merchant marine and her three better-adjusted (and apparently better-looking) sisters found husbands. When her parents died she went to live with her eldest sister, Velma, and alternated between manic periods of religiosity and depressed periods of terrible lethargy. At first she was the merely eccentric aunt, whose finical contribution was greatly valued. As time wore on, she became worrisome to her sister and brother-in-law. In 1924 Julia tried to kill herself with rat poison after months of the darkest depression. The family had her committed to Butler. She remained in Butler until 1927. For the majority of her stay she was a model patient. She repaired the garments of other patients, took part in the sing-alongs, and greeted her family in a sane and cheery tone during their infrequent visits. The entries prior to her commitment were made in pen; the hospital only allowed a No. 1 pencil during Julia’s stay.

  The last dated entry in Julia’s diary was August 7, the day the “Peace Bridge” was opened between Fort Erie, Ontario, and Buffalo, New York: “Perhaps mankind has learned to live in Peace—God bless Prince Edward and Prince Albert and Governor Smith.” In late August 1927 Julia began obsessing on a hurricane that hit the Atlantic shore of Canada. She complained that authorities were unaware of the danger the sea stood for. She warned (somewhat prophetically) of an upcoming Pacific earthquake. In early September most of her freedom of movement in the hospital grounds was curtailed when she either shaved off or otherwise removed most of her hair. It was at this time that Julia involved herself in what limited art therapy Butler offered. She painted five canvases of “disturbing maritime scenes.” These seem to have been sold at the annual art show; sadly little is known of them save that she used the (at that time) radical technique of grattage, which had been introduced to the art world by Max Ernst. Exactly how an undereducated American woman would invent the same art technique that a German surrealist had created for his series of paintings of “enchantment and terror” is more than a bit of a mystery. Perhaps the art instructor had kept abreast of the European art scene. It is likely that during this time, the “channeled” portion of the diary was written.

  On September 14, an underwater earthquake in Japan killed 108 people. The next day a “Mr. Kenneth S. Gilman” paid a visit to Miss Julia. All Miss Julia’s visitors had been the family members of former sewing clients, and it was assumed that he belonged in this category. He paid three visits and, winning the confidence of the staff, took Julia on a carriage ride. They never returned. The newspapers treated it as a major crisis—for two days. A legal notice of her being declared dead appeared seven years later; three years after that Lovecraft died of intestinal cancer. Mr. Joshi suggests that Lovecraft, having taken an interest in the case because of two articles in the Brown Daily Herald, had contacted the director of the institution. Perhaps a lack of interest or sense of shame on the part of Julia’s family had made them uninterested in the notebook. Perhaps the notebook had merely been lent to Lovecraft and he failed to return it.

  In addition to the change of narrative voice in the last section of the diary, the handwriting becomes bolder. Some of the margins are decorated with little glyphs of stylized fish reminiscent of the Rongorongo glyphs of Easter Island. The theology and cosmology of the piece seem to be a mixture of native Australian religion and a good deal of Lovecraftian musings. Since Julia’s background would seem to suggest no clear method of knowing the former, and Weird Tales was an unlikely reading material for Butler Hospital, the passages are striking.

  Here are the final words of Julia Phillips. Where Lovecraft has erased her words and written in his own we will indicate with italics:

  In the changeable world of land something dire is happening. The humans are learning to kill themselves, which is good I think, and learning to kill the seas, which would mean death to the world. The seas taste of their oil and trash. The beautiful mother-of-pearl walls of our new home Devil’s Reef is stained black. I hate this place, the waters are much too cold, and the fishing is poor. Our new home has no name, the Great Cthulhu has not dreamed of it yet. We had great hopes as He reached out to us and our weakened descendants the humans two orbits ago. He tries to bring Thought to all life here, that is why He came to this watery globe from the green star in my great-great-grandmother’s time. He is such a suffering god. The humans have recast Him as one of their own. They think He brings salvation instead of Thought. All will think here, even the plants and the fungi, if the humans do not hurt the water too much. He rose briefly two orbits ago. He will stir in a few days, but not rise. We have learned how he tosses and turns. I am not hopeful for the humans; they are too degenerate from us. Even those we have crossbred with can live only a few hundred orbits. No wonder they kill this world; they do not stay here long enough to love it. It seems wrong to me to bring self-awareness to such a species.

  The hope of Ra-natha-alene to save the human race by intermarrying with them is not held by many of us. It did not work in my youth and it does not work now. The humans are greedy for gold, so it was easy to make a deal with Marsh, but they do not profit by our Teaching. In the spiral towers of their cells we help them find the way back, we make them more beautiful, but it is not enough. On the land they hide away when their Beauty starts to show. They wear our crowns, but they do not Think, or if they Think it is as something minor—an artist or a magician. No architects. No mathematicians. No biologists.

  There was a storm recently; much cold water was disturbed to the north of our new home. We had not controlled it by Dreaming. It is not in the Dreamtime, and the hateful aurora wind from space keeps Deep Thoughts from hatching in our brains. The storm affected me badly, scattering some of my mind into human bodies. I will have to gather myself together. I hate their world with its right angles that turn thinking into sleeping. There were deaths in Canada, a cold white land. Not enough deaths I think.

  The humans of Innsmouth have learned a little about Dreaming in their Swirl, they spill blood and sexual fluids to Father Dagon and Mother Hydra, but they think in animal terms, they are too much of the life of this world. They have taken the animal needs and called them Sex and Money. Even when they become Beautiful, these two abstractions rule them. I am worried that they will subvert our goals. Some among them believe that warm-blooded animals are evolved—more progressive than we. The humans worship themselves through a demon called Darwin. If their line of faith were right I would be greater than my grandmother, my grandmother would be greater than hers, and she would be greater than Mother Hydra. Yet a few of the humans have discovered entropy. A few know the cosmos is decaying.

  Bad news has come from the Esoteric Order of Dagon: the humans of North America have spread the bloodlines beyond Ra-natha-alene’s plan. They know that when the Change comes upon humans they will seek us out. Therefore they reason that humans changing will move back to Newburyport and bring wealth and connections from their lives with them. They seek to intermarry with traveling salesmen in a ridiculous scheme to make their town more
of a center of commerce. They don’t care how this can spread out tendrils of our souls. Their belief that each being has a unique soul leads to the simple numerical argument of more of “Us” equals more power. In orbits of bad sunspot activity (such as this year) the changing humans will Dream of us, or will have parts of the Dreamtime of Great Cthulhu become parts of their foundational consciousness. They don’t understand what a strain their Change places upon us. Each new hybrid pulls at our peace, especially in places not established by the Dreamtime. Soon such humans will come to Innsmouth and we will literally be pulled to the land to greet them, our nurturing instincts taking the place of our common sense. Worse still, humans, who have not heard the Dream cantrips when they eat their mother’s slime, will know great fear. They will see their Change in terms of death, not rebirth. And as they are not conscious entities they cannot think directly of death. Death to a being that cannot remember anything before its hatching is a terrible consciousness. In the myths of the humans they dimly know what they were, they were deathless. But they see this as some sort of garden. One of the hybrid offspring in Florida is trying to re-create the Dreamtime there just as the people of Nan Madol did a few hundred orbits ago. Ra-natha-alene thinks these stirrings of true Architecture might trigger some ancestral memories on the humans’ part, but I am dubious. Some of us are having glimpses of human minds during the daytime. I have seen myself trapped in a body with disgustingly scaleless skin and hair. I fear that I will Dream myself there pushed by the aurora.