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

by Don Webb

  Then the dreams started. He dreamed of British dirigibles dropping bombs on Rome, Berlin, Moscow. He dreamed of Russian airships deploying a living light that mesmerized the enemy, who would simply and happily watch its rainbow flickers while dying of thirst and starvation. He dreamed of the French spreading a powder in the air that called up the Black Death in New York and San Francisco. He spoke less. He got fewer tips. His skin color grew pallid. He wrote his superiors in the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and asked them how they knew the aliens they sought to contact were benign.

  His Praemonstrator in the Brotherhood wrote him back and suggested that he was developing male hysteria, and that he should seek a job on the ground. No doubt the rarefied air, plus the gravitational stress of flying in the opposite direction from the Earth’s rotation, was affecting him badly.

  Ernest resolved to search the captain’s quarters. He began by exercising more and eating better. He told his superiors in the Brotherhood that his doubts had passed. He became charming. He started stealing desserts from the kitchen to give to the cleaning crew that took care of the captain’s quarters. Ernest found out that the captain did have a small safe in his room. He never opened it. The captain had even told his orderly that the safe contained “papers” that could only be inspected by a vice president of the company.

  Ernest began to suggest that the small safe contained gold or diamonds or something else small and very valuable. Surely it would be easy enough to open it when the captain was not around—perhaps the day before they were due to dock in Paris. There were places to sell things in Paris. The theft could happen and the captain would never know. He didn’t open the small safe anyway. At first the orderly disbelieved. Why should there be something very valuable that the captain had no access to? But Ernest asked the opposing question—why so much security for “papers”? Surely the item was something the captain could use in an emergency to buy the ship’s freedom. It was a big and bold lie, but Ernest had read adventure novels all his life. He raised the threat of the Yellow Peril—what would happen if they crashed in China? How could safety be bought for the rich men and women on board from a Chinese warlord? This could be believed. The orderly knew no money would be spared to save him, but vast money would be moved to save the rich from inscrutable Oriental torture.

  Ernest came up with a perfect plan. The orderly would simply act as guard one night when the captain was away. Ernest would open the safe by removing it from the wall with a saw. He would open the back of the safe with a diamond drill borrowed from the machine shop. He would take the valuables out and then replace the safe. Unless the captain inspected the safe closely, it would go undetected for weeks. They could sell the diamonds or rubies or platinum to a French fence and be on their way to the good life before anyone was the wiser.

  The night came. The captain had taken an interest in a beautiful blonde American and was visiting her in her quarters. The orderly kept watch. The tiny hand-held saw, made from one of the new metals discovered last year, cut through the aluminum wall that held the safe like a hot knife through butter. Ernest MacVeigh lifted the safe out and applied the drill to the back. It seemed to take forever; each moment he was expecting the captain to show up. Who knows? Maybe the captain would be intrigued enough by the tale at least to find out what was in the safe. How could he live with such a grueling mystery? In the objective world it took less than twenty minutes to make a hole large enough to draw the goggles from the safe. My God, John was right. Ernest put the safe back into the wall. Only the smallest of cracks showed that the safe was no longer a permanent fixture. He slipped the goggles into his pocket and began the second half of his scheme. He walked out of the captain’s quarters and told the orderly that the safe had been empty. The orderly immediately suspected that Ernest was cheating him. Ernest challenged him to search him. The orderly did so. He found the goggles in Ernest’s pants pocket, but goggles are clearly not an item of life-changing value. Ernest repocketed them. The orderly began cursing and pummeling Ernest. As expected, the noise attracted other workers. The crazed orderly was quickly subdued. He couldn’t very well say that he had been part of a plot to steal from the captain. In less than twelve hours the orderly was fired and left in Paris.

  Ernest wore the goggles every chance he could. For months he saw nothing. Perhaps John had been crazy; perhaps reading about John’s madness had merely infected his brain. Hysteria could be catching, according to alienists. Then one moonlit night as the Balmoral sailed over New York, he saw a floating city. Ernest watched through the thick quartz of an observation porthole in the lower decks. John had wisely not tried to describe the floating madness. The city bristled with waving spires of living metal in a thousand colors of gray and a dozen colors that Ernest could not name. Parts of the fliers, themselves a horrible mixture of lobster, beetle, and slimy fungus, were welded into some of the walls. The city had angular mouths with triple rows of obsidian teeth that bit at the fliers. It had exposed wiring and gears and vents that released steam, and mechanical eyes and organic eyes. It had gutters running with pulsing green fluid that bore tiny red flowers. It had living, slow-moving statues of creatures untouched by the sane symmetries of Earth. It had glaring searchlights that flashed unknown messages to the cosmos. Human parts had been welded into the living walls as well, and Ernest knew this had something to do with the myth of the twelve men and women sacrificed to the minotaur in his labyrinth—and he knew if he understood exactly he would go painfully mad. The shape of the city was a Symbol, a Hieroglyph. It would make any true sentient creature have certain thoughts, and Ernest realized that the divided brain of humans, the brain of yes and no, was NOT a brain of a truly sentient creature. Ada Lovelace’s difference engine was a sort of joke on humans—a bad binary brain to simulate bad binary consciousness. The human brain with its Evil/Good, Love/Hate, Right/Left was bad mock-up of the real brains of the crustacean Outer Ones: it was a useful device for making fear and anxiety—and his last clear thought before he tore the goggles from his face was that if humans ever became thinking creatures and correlated the contents of their mind, the pains of hell would not be myth.

  Ernest fell against the observation porthole. John must have managed because he was smarter. He had always been the stronger one. Mother’s favorite. Simple truths like the latter can keep intact minds that look upon things not meant for humans. They found him in the hallway as the Balmoral floated above the stockyards of Chicago. Ernest kept saying, “It’s all stockyards. Everything is stockyards.” They put him off the ship, and the kindly officials of the city of big shoulders put him in an asylum.

  For the first years he could not talk. He kept a pair of unusual goggles with him all the time; finally an official from the British Dirigible Company came and retrieved the glasses. When 1900 came and the great war had not come, Ernest began talking about hysteria and anxiety and the shape of human brains. When the Russians put a man on the moon in 1901, he predicted the end of the world—but everyone was making that prediction. By 1903 so many people had a paralyzing madness because of the rate of change of life and warfare capacities that Ernest wasn’t considered special enough to be kept in an asylum. There were now seven great powers instead of four—China, Turkey, and America had joined the club with the power to end organic life on this planet. Each of them had their own terror weapon. There were skirmishes. French germ warfare versus Chinese mechanical men in Vietnam. German trolls overran Greenland and renamed it Mhu Thulan.

  He took up his old job of being a waiter at a rundown cafe near Hull House. He visited mom in Kansas and his uncles in Texas. He got used to the killing summer and the sharp winds off Lake Michigan in winter. He tried to write down some of the revelations that crowded his brain when he had looked upon the floating city of the fungal fliers—and with an irony he was sane enough to appreciate, he crafted them into pulp stories. He could spot, here and there, others who knew. It didn’t matter; these fragments of truth made for more fear as well. Everything he cou
ld do served the Churning Darkness, everything anyone could do served this Force. Millions of years of breeding made the fake brains that humans have; he couldn’t change that. Laws of society and the rules of civilization laid down in the dark dynasties of shadowy Khem made humans the cattle of the gods.

  In his last year, 1913, when the British placed a military base on Venus, Ernest took to spending all his free moments in the stockyards. He would talk freely to his fellow cattle. He sang to them often—especially William Blake’s hymn “Jerusalem.” He thought for a long time that the fliers would kill him, but he had not been a threat like John. The world was far too rotten with nervousness and hysteria to note yet another fool blaming it on the powers of air and darkness. Just another cow walking up the chute to the slaughter . . .

  (For T. E. Grau)

  Casting Call

  Night Gallery, originally to be called Rod Serling’s Wax Museum, ran on NBC from 1970 until 1973. Serling as host would introduce the segments with reference to one of Tom Wright’s paintings of macabre or surreal subjects. Wright had to produce almost a hundred paintings. In the first season he worked with oil on canvas; the later years he resorted to faster-drying acrylic on particleboard. Here’s a fact you won’t find elsewhere, my little cryptlings: several artists would show up at the studio each week with their own paintings (not understanding that NBC commissioned Tom Wright for each painting to match an existing script). Their horrific art, they felt, could have inspired the writers for the glass teat. Some of it, I recall, was pretty dang horrific.

  —Tycho Johansen, I Was Rod Serling’s Bodyguard

  (North Hollywood Books, 1983)

  Felix Ramirez’s first thought when he saw it was horrible. Not bad-taste/bad-art horrible. It might have been that. The colors were perhaps a little garish. The graveyard mold a little bit too much on the slate-blue side. The ghoul’s doglike face seemed (to Felix) to be a little too elongated. Felix tried to think of the painter who did that, but Amedeo Modigliani’s name eluded him despite Art History 102 two years ago. But he certainly thought of Goya’s Saturn Devouring One of His Sons. The ghoul’s wide-staring eyes, his gore-smeared mouth clamped down on the naked figure’s thigh, seems to have a leering grin. Felix watched Rod and the big dumb Dane look at the painting. Felix thought Rod would love it. Partially because the ghoul’s staring eyes looked more than a little like Richard Nixon’s, and Rod, the “angry young man of Hollywood,” wanted to punish Nixon for the war. Felix wanted to walk over to Rod, wanted to introduce himself, but you didn’t just walk up to studio execs in NBC. Felix was waiting with other cattle for a screen test. But he clearly heard Serling say something about “Pickman’s Model” and express some regret. The great man’s elevator came and Rod and his bodyguard boarded.

  It was 1971 and big things were happening. Eighteen-year-olds could now vote as well as die for their country. We went to the moon twice. The World Trade Center was opened a few weeks ago and they’ve started building the Superdome in New Orleans. And Felix Ramirez had a plan. He is ready to be one of the first Chicano actors to make it big. Everything points to go. They’ve got that new show All in the Family. They axed Hee-Haw, Green Acres, Mayberry R.F.D., and The Beverly Hillbillies. The Lawrence Welk Show was replaced by The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour. What did you not see? Mexicans. Felix knew that at some point Mexicans were going to be interesting. So he had a plan: monsters, then villains, then heroes of his people, then finally the serious actor. He would do it for Momma. Momma had died the same week as Kennedy, so it wasn’t a big deal, not even to the nuns at school. Probably that November he had begun to hate the world.

  His cousin Guillermo had called him from Mexico City and told him to try out for Night Gallery. He figured it out; nobody will care if a monster eats enchiladas in its off-time. Then it is a clear step to villains, and then when Mexicans become commercial—there he would be.

  The trouble for the grand scheme was that Felix was not drawn to the macabre, unlike Guillermo. He tried watching Karloff stumbling along in Frankenstein. He tried his best Romanian accent imitating Lugosi. He just wasn’t scary. But the painting leaning on the guard’s desk: that was scary.

  Felix had a “call back”—he was being considered for a ghoul. He would get the paintng as a model. He almost ran to the guard’s desk. A bored African American guard reading a comic book, The Forever People. The painting was gone.

  “Excuse me, sir,” said Felix.

  “Yeah.”

  “There was a painting here.”

  “Sure was.”

  “Do you know what happened to it?”

  The guard looked up. Felix saw that one of the superheroes was black; the other ones looked like hippies. It was a sign. We were in a new age.

  The guard said, “The artist came and got it. At least she told me she was the artist. Why?”

  He sounded a little worried; maybe he realized that he should have asked the “artist” for some ID. But on the other hand, who would want that monstrosity behind their couch?

  “I thought it looked really scary. I wanted to study it. For my next role.”

  “Oh, you’re an actor. Well, I will agree with you on the scary part. That thing gave me the willies. It had been against my desk for a week. At night I would turn it against the wall.” He gestured. “A lot of people leave stuff here. They think that Serling buys art for his show. The first season we wouldn’t let them leave it. He looks the stuff over now. I think he does that to annoy the network artist. He can be a dick sometimes.”

  “He ever buy any of it?”

  “He doesn’t even run the show. Laird runs it. Serling got tired of doing everything over at CBS.”

  “So what’s he looking for?”

  “He does his thing. I do my thing.” The guard began to pick up the comic book.

  Felix persisted. “I really want to meet that artist. Maybe she can help me out with makeup tips.”

  The guard reached into a trashcan. “I had just filed her phone number.”

  He handed Felix half of a torn envelope.

  She was Mexican. She was a maid. And one of her weirdo clients had the biggest collection of science fiction and horror shit in all the world. His home was in the fashionable Los Feliz section of Hollywood. Her name was Carlotta Rotos, and the first time Felix met her was on a driveway with a sign that said, “Horrorwood, Karloffornia.” Carlotta spoke to Felix rapidly in Spanish. She had invited him here because she didn’t want to meet him first at her tiny home. Her boss had encouraged her to try and get the painting on the show. He was a little weird.

  She was dark and very pretty and in an actual maid’s outfit.

  A super-energetic man introduced himself as Forrest J Ackerman. He asked Felix what he was interested in, and Carlotta said, “Lovecraft.” Felix had no idea who Lovecraft was. Ackerman was ushering him into the house, the “Ackermansion.” At the doorway he pointed further up Los Feliz There appeared be to be a Mayan temple. “Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Maya House’—it was the exterior for House on Haunted Hill. That starred Vincent Price; some people think I look like him. Lovecraft, eh? I’ve got a postcard from him.”

  Ackerman ran to an overstuffed desk. He couldn’t find it. Then he handed Felix a copy of Dracula. “Signed first. But that’s not so rare; there are five of those. Look at the next page.”

  It was covered with signatures from Bela Lugosi to Christopher Lee. Everyone who had been the Count.

  For the next two hours there were props from TV and movies and books, books, books. And magazines. And more magazines. At one point Ackerman had shown him a copy of Weird Tales. “This was my first magazine. I kept buying them. My mother actually told me that if I was not careful, by the time I was an adult I would have a hundred of them.” The crazy laugh that followed would have done any mad scientist proud. The Unique Magazine showed an Egyptian scene; a brown man and boy were coming over an outcropping toward a crude sphinx with pyramids in the background. “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” b
y HOUDINI. Thrills! Mystery! Adventure!

  Felix was a little dizzy when he walked out into the Los Feliz twilight. Ackerman hadn’t been able to find the postcard. “Things walk out of here all the time.” He had explained to Felix that “Pickman’s Model” was a short story by Lovecraft. When he had heard that NBC was filming it, he suggested Carlotta try and submit the painting. “I’ve got a few items that Lovecraft used to own.” Carlotta looked very guilty when he said that. He showed off Lovecraft’s annotated copy of The King in Yellow. Felix could tell that he was supposed to be impressed, so he acted impressed. He was, after all, an actor. At the end of the tour, Ackerman pointed to the Maya House again. “That little number is pretty Frank Belknap Long itself. Bad angles. Bring bad things. Frank Lloyd Wright had been putting the finishing touches on it when his houseboy went berserk at Taliesin and killed seven people. It was said the house was cursed. He built it for a shoe magnate, and the man lost everything in the Depression. The next owner’s wife jumped off the parapet. Tindalos hounds, Chihuahua style if you ask me. I’ve got a book on that too somewhere. The Mexicans knew. Six owners in forty-four years.”

  Carlotta looked as if she were going to cry. When she walked him to his car, she gave him her East LA address.

  It was brown stucco, had four floors, and was on a different planet than the Ackermansion. But it was the planet that Felix had grown up on. Planet Barrio. There was a cop car parked in front of the liquor store on the corner. It was Tuesday, the smog index was high, and it was hot. He buzzed her box, she buzzed him in. Her room was on the third floor. It had horrible and fantastic studies of ghouls hung on its tiny walls. Some were scenes from Egypt or Rome, others were modern—on the easel was a mainly finished study of a human male being initiated into ghoul society at Forest Lawn. Two ghouls were painting his naked body with a blue-green liquid. A female ghoul with rows of small breasts like a dog reclined on a tombstone holding a broken human skull. Gore ran down her lips and she stared lewdly at the human. Her face was Carlotta’s.