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

by Don Webb

  Suddenly the last cathedral bell rang. It was the New Year, and they were all in Barlow’s library. He sprang out of the chair. The eyes were gone; he was simply the pale haunted gringo he had been before the magic. He ran from the library back into his bedroom. They could hear him opening a bottle of pills. They could hear a faucet turned and off. They still couldn’t move. A few minutes later they could hear him lie on his bed. After an hour the paralysis slowly left them. Burroughs went into Barlow’s bedroom. On the stale dirty bed, Barlow lay fully clothed and dead.

  “We couldn’t move until he died. He held us in place by the spell,” said Burroughs. He went to the phone and called the Mexican police to tell them that they would find a dead American professor, a suicide. The three left the apartment, not closing the door behind them.

  It was two in the morning, and in certain sections of the city parties for gay ex-pats had just begun. Burroughs’s wife stirred in her sleep, dreaming a dream that humans weren’t meant to have.

  (For Nick Mamatas)

  Doc Corman’s Haunted Palace One Fourth of July

  It was the last time I shot fireworks professionally. It was the last time for many things. For my friends it was the year they started to say, “Something’s not right about Rob.” It was the simultaneous gaining and losing of certainty. In the big picture the change of the worldview of a restaurant-and-book critic in a Texas town is not very cosmic, unless it is the flap of the butterfly wings that They use to bring about a human hurricane. But I think that I am a rather small butterfly indeed.

  For almost thirty years I reviewed the restaurants of Austin and the books of its astonishingly large literary crowd for the local free paper. I bet if you look around your library you’ll find a couple of sentences on some book that bears my praise. Check out your Austin titles: Caroline Spector, Bruce Sterling, Don Graham, Neal Barrett, Brad Denton, Walt DeBill, Lawrence Person, Rex Hull, Bill Spencer. Yep, Rob Kenyon, that’s me. Of course it might just say Austin Chronicle. I also do the Day Trips section, occasionally movie and band reviews (we are the Live Music Capital of the World). And I write Ron’s Ramblings. I write about stuff I do, I began before blogging. :)

  My friend Ragan Falconer has a small-time pyrotechnics firm. He shoots little shows with his brother Clyde. You, if you live in a city of any size, have never seen a hand-lit fireworks show. Mainly they’ve gone the way of the dinosaurs. You’ve seen an electronically fired show. They’re safer. They’re faster. They cost more money, but not that much more money. Each shell sits in its own cannon (a length of black PVC pipe) and has an electric fuse that runs to its quick-match fuse. Flick a switch, it lights. The outer part of the shell explodes and flings the inner shell, the one with the stars in it, into space. Shells fly up about one hundred feet per inch of diameter. Three-inch shells go up three hundred feet, four-inch shells go up four hundred feet, and so on.

  In a hand-lit show, the pyrotechnic team buries the cannons in the earth rather than in a sand-filled trailer. A lighter walks alongside the row of cannon carrying a lit fuse, one of those red flares that come in auto safety kits. He or she lights each firework’s quick-match fuse, and bang! off it flies. As the fireworks launch, a runner from the ground crew drops a new shell in the empty (and smoking) cannon. A crew consists of lighters, runners, and folks who watch the ready boxes, picnic coolers dragooned into once-a-year pyrotechnic purpose. Ragan’s crew had shot shows for three years when he first called me to be a runner. Some cousin had the flu or some son had a headache or something. Anyway, I knew Ragan and I had always wanted to shoot a show. We had to drive to the small town of Flapjack, Texas—one of those little dying towns in the Texas hill country. Flapjack lay twenty minutes to the southeast of Austin. Most of the residents worked in Austin; those who didn’t seemed either to sell antiques to those who did or Dairy Queen frozen custard cones to one another. Decades ago, between the World Wars, Flapjack had had a minor boom as an agricultural center. The town had a few grand homes from that period, and not all of them had become bed-and-breakfasts.

  Flapjack could afford a $5,000 dollar show; that meant thirty minutes of show—“No black sky!” hand-lit. The Falconer brothers liked their shows in those days to be hand-lit. It’s exciting. It’s fun. It’s dangerous. Everyone on the crew risked life and limb for seventy-five dollars and a ton of hard work. But we would have done it for free. So would you. I am talking professional fireworks here.

  I rode with Ragan in a yellow Ryder truck. We had magnetic decals on the side warning other motorists of our explosive threat. No one ever seemed to notice. Do this for me, will you? Next time you see a bobcat truck on the highway with a Dangerous Explosives sign on the back door or the sides, don’t tailgate. Thank you.

  Ragan had joked with me on the way down about how patriotic and right-wing the Flapjackers were. I could tell he was being ironic, setting me up for something. When he pulled the truck into the city park by the little hill, I saw the joke. There were three things on the hill. One was a fabulous three-story red-brick mansion, a multi-winged gothically embellished piece of Richardsonian Romanesque. This lordly estate was the “Corman Place”—the home of a railroad baron, who had had the bad taste to get rich in the 1870s rather than the 1920s. For you non-architecture buffs, I won’t be offended if you go Google the style. Two billboards shared the hill. One had red letters on a black ground. THE US MILITARY KILLS OUR BOYS. The other shows a mainly gray and green scene of American soldiers in the jungles of Vietnam, and bore a legend in white: “Why do some people choose which fair-haired boy must die?” Both billboards faced the park; they would be the backdrop of our show. I hoped that they would not be lit at night—this proved a vain hope.

  I stared at Ragan and he grinned. “Doc Corman’s antiwar protest. Get the sheriff to tell you when he shows up.”

  There was a small artificial lake in the park. There were cottonwood trees and post oak and gray green buffalo grass. Across the lake a barbecue company was setting up next to the rows of picnic tables; beyond them were the small brick buildings that served as restrooms, a playscape full of kids enjoying the July heat, and a fenced-in tennis court.

  Clyde Falconer and his two sons had arrived in his blue Lexus. Ragan and I opened the back of the truck and took out the picks and sharpshooter shovels. We began digging the holes for the cannon. Six three-inch cannon four feet apart, six four-inch, four six-inch, and five single-shot eight-inchers. It was hot work, and we were glad when Sharon Falconer showed up with her big brown SUV that held a giant cooler of sweet tea.

  We had arrived just before noon and were finished burying the cannon by four. The sheriff drove up across the grass in his tan and brown sheriff car. He was a big man with a sweat-stained Stetson and a white handlebar mustache. He liked to talk, and we had sat out the lawn chairs by then. Following Ragan’s clue, I asked about Dr. Corman.

  He wasn’t a medical doctor. He was a teaching doctor. Specifically, he had taught anthropology at the University of Texas half an hour north. The name vaguely rang a bell; there had been some articles about him a few years ago.

  The sheriff was not a stupid man, but higher education had passed him by. He had also been in Vietnam when Randy Corman encountered a landmine. Not in the same unit, of course. The sheriff had just warmed to Randy’s story when I saw the infantryman near the base of the pictorial billboard. He was a blond-haired white guy dressed like the grunts appearing twelve or so feet above his head. But what caught my eye was the machine gun he was carrying. The bombing in Oklahoma City had happened in April of that year, and to my thinking men in combat fatigues carrying machine guns weren’t a good thing.

  I pointed him out to the sheriff, who just said, “I’m getting to that.” The sheriff was like my mother, a Southern storyteller who views his narrative as shots of bourbon to be savored slowly so that the intoxication of the tale builds up over the whole of the evening. I could see how happy he was that the solider had made his dramatic entrance.

  The
sheriff paused in his story and gave me a brief sketch of the Cormans. The founder of the line had merged two small Texas railroads and one Louisiana-to-Oklahoma railroad, making Flapjack a major hub in the world of post-Reconstruction commerce. Timber from East Texas, cotton from the Dallas area, cattle from hereabouts had access to New Orleans and Galveston ports. The manufactured goods from Europe and the East Coast could come to Texas and Oklahoma markets. He built his “palace” on the hill. I felt smart—it really had been designed by Henry Hobson Richardson just after his asylums had been in built in New York (1870) and Arkham (1872). The townsfolk hated him for his conspicuous consumption—the mansion had ten fireplaces, each of which had won a prize at a fair or exhibition. You can build great stuff if you own the railroad and shipping costs you nothing. His children were set for life. His son Markham had sold the railroad to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe at the beginning of World War I. His grandson Roger had opened the chain of markets and movie palaces across central and south Texas between the wars. His great-grandson Hiram added to the family fortune by opening savings and loans in Austin and Houston and beginning the first large-scale Texas winery, Hiram’s boy Thomas devoted himself to education, gaining a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Chicago and a further Ph.D. in Indian and Burmese Literature at Princeton. This took us to Randall. By this time the barbecue was ready. Brisket and chicken, ranch style beans, cole slaw, German potato salad. A local band was playing Willie Nelson covers. Clowns were making balloon animals for the kids, and coolers everywhere showed forth ice, Lone Star and Shiner Beer—and I knew that when the sun went down I would be running from the big yellow cooler full of three-inch shells to the first cannon line. It was great! Some locals shared watermelon with us from their own patch.

  Randall and Sheriff John Haggard went to Sam Houston High School at the same time. Flapjack had been on decline in the sixties, and the graduating class of 1972 was a mere fifteen souls. John Haggard had been captain of the football team—but of course every boy in school played on the football team. Randy had been president of the Spanish Club, leader of the debate team (“We called him a master debater. Get it?”) and even president of the Photo Bugs. Our country was four years short of its 200th birthday, one of the last Japanese soldiers had surrendered in Guam, the war had gone for decades for the poor SOB. We watched Maude and All in the Family. There were great paperbacks that year—Journey to Ixtlan and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. There was also a little something called the Vietnam War. Now simple high school boys in central Texas didn’t know that Nixon was going to end the war by bombing the pucky out of Hanoi come Christmas time; they just knew they might have to go to the unhappiest place on Earth. The graduating class of fifteen was six girls (they were safe), two black boys (they were going), one Mexican (ditto), and six white guys. The draft board had to pick two of the Anglos.

  John Haggard was born on the wrong side of the tracks, so he was an easy pick. The richest kid in town was an easy pick as well. The serfs had risen up. These choices were not only hard on the Corman and Haggard families, the boys had been dating the “Pridy twins, and boy were they pretty.” Gloria for John and Jeanie Mae for Randy. They would wait for their boys.

  Randall Hiram Corman had his leg blown off by Charlie. He was airlifted to Saigon and then on to Tokyo, and there he died of an acute infection. He had graduated Sam Houston High in May, was drafted in June, and his body was delivered home a week before Halloween.

  Randy’s mom drank herself to death in six months, so she never even heard of the Paris Peace Accords. “Southern Comfort,” a fruit, spice, and whiskey-flavored liquor, is a good drink for Southern tragedy. With a cruel twist of fate, a report that was meant only for Army brass was mailed to Doctor Corman. Turns out that Randy got very inferior care—in fact, negligent drunken care—and the Corman’s lawyers got a lot of money. So the rich get richer. Dr. Corman gave the town a library in Randy’s name. He paid for Jeanie Mae to go to school. She came back as an English teacher at Sam Houston. Then, according to the sheriff, Dr. Corman began writing them books till UT fired him. Having reported on excesses of professorial eccentricity, I knew “them books” must be something.

  At the next Halloween the Haunted Palace started. The good doctor had his mansion made into a haunted house filled with all sorts of antiwar scenes—villagers broiled in napalm, mine fields, field surgeries—as well as the standard Frankenstein’s monsters and vampires.

  Grisly and macabre, it even got a write-up in Texas Monthly. In about six years the trouble started. Reagan was president by then and we would all be saved by Star Wars “for real.” Dr. Thomas Emanuel Corman put up the anti-military billboards. Some people were so mad they wanted to move the Fourth of July festival, but the mayor said the Fourth of July was about free speech. Dr. Corman got in some kind of trouble at the University of Texas at Austin, his graduate class on East-West interaction had some kind of party with drugs or something, and the sheriff wasn’t clear on the issues.

  The sheriff’s wife spotted the first solider on patrol around the Corman place. It was just before the Fourth. Dr. Corman had hired an actor who looked like a Vietnam-era US solider to patrol the area near the billboards. Well, some people had threatened to burn them down.

  But it was worse.

  The actor looked a great deal like Randall Hiram Corman.

  It was awful hard on Jeanie Mae.

  Everyone else came back from the war. The sheriff had married Gloria; the black boys had come back black men and started a gas station/convenience store; the Mexican boy started a taco place. Everybody was settling down, but Jeanie Mae—she still waited. Jeanie got to watching the solider on patrol. She got to thinking that it was Randy. She told her sister, her sister told then-Deputy Haggard. The deputy told her that Randy was dead—they had all been to the funeral. They all knew his ashes were in an urn. It had a blue spotlight on it every Halloween. The deputy told her to get therapy.

  Jeanie Mae snuck onto the ground one night with her little cocker spaniel. The soldier made her dance naked, killed her dog and cooked it, making her eat some, and finally raped her. She stumbled into town all bloody. The sheriff and Deputy Haggard went up Beacon Hill and found no soldier. Dr. Corman said he had run off at dawn. The doctor was burning a big bonfire. He invited them to search. They searched and found nothing.

  Then a few months later, he hired another actor to impersonate a soldier. This guy looked like Randall, but there was something wrong with his face. People were mad. But there are no laws against such poor taste and insensitivity. The sheriff used these words in his narrative; I wondered what lawyer had taught them to him.

  It was time for the show. I had loaded two three-inch red shells for Ragan to light during the “rockets’ red glare” part of the anthem. Then came white titanium salutes. Super-noisy—they set off the car alarms all over Flapjack. Each shell drives the smoke into you; weeks after a show you will smell of gunpowder at the oddest times. I ran my butt off. Sharon Falconer sat on one of the white plastic lawn chairs and did the count.

  You count for duds. If 101 fireworks are lit and 100 make their flower-fire in the sky you have one dud. As I mentioned, each shell has two parts. The outer shell that explodes to lift the inner shell into the air, which ignites the stars—the pretty stuff that lights up the sky. If the inner shell should not ignite it falls to earth. It looks exactly like an oversized cartoon firework. It practically begs kids to light it and cover themselves in burning papers and salts. You have to find every dud after a show—no matter how long it takes in the dark.

  Now the Gentle Reader will think that I rode back to Austin the next day and looked up Dr. Corman. In fact, I wrote an amusing story of my night of shooting off fireworks in Flapjack. I completely forgot about Dr. Corman.

  I didn’t remember any of the shows we shot for the next three years. I moved up from a runner to a lighter. I set off the three-inchers the night that I thought about Corman again. Another of his actor-so
ldiers had made the news in a terrible way. A Vietnamese family had opened Ng BBQ in nearby Comesee, Texas. The actor-solider (at least somebody dressed as GI Joe) had torched their house. No one could prove it was Dr. Corman’s employee—but said employee could once again not be found. Corman had a little trouble on his own: a fire in one of his storage sheds had burned out of control the late the same night. The sheriff was perplexed, but relieved that Corman hadn’t hired yet another “soldier” to guard his acreage.

  But just before sunset, I saw the gleam of the burnt-orange Texas sun on the M16 barrel as Corman’s re-enactor made his martial patrol. I was gleeful. I could smell a big weird story with a big Rob Kenyon byline.