by S. T. Joshi
These are mannerisms I acquired suddenly, after paying a visit last year to Ed’s rented house in Sac Prairie. One result of that nightmare is that the disappearance of Edward Pinckney was duly recorded. (Village police at first demurred, having themselves no suspicion of foul play, and because he was a non-resident.) All other results, I realize now, were buried.
And buried they stayed until, following a chance discovery made a few weeks ago while probing a blocked lateral, the Sac Prairie Department of Public Works unearthed the 5,000-lb. mass of fused metal, rubber, vinyl, and plastic not much bigger than a large picnic cooler, with its crest-like coat-of-arms pressed to several times its former size, still unmistakable, though now paper-thin. Here in Boston, a thousand miles away, I had been tracking every bit of Sac Prairie news, as I always did (electronically, quietly, so as never to interrupt radio-wave transmissions), and saw online the perplexed workers when they hit and the backhoe scoop broke. Within days the village served the property owner, so that engineers could dig deeper, and from two sides dig in, and then, with heavy chains, keel-haul out what they thought might be a lost relic from below the house. In the end they left the thing they’d found sitting out in the open, atop the east driveway.
It took a full week before they realized what it was they dug out, but I knew right away. It took a full month before they were done prying it apart.
Unfortunately, no human remains were recovered.
Looking back, I remember everything the day of that visit— every action, every emotion—yes, every fugitive thought. It was early June when I arrived, dropped off by a friend near the bridge on Water Street in front of the Sac Prairie Post Office. From there I walked north on the main drag, beneath old-fashioned hanging street lamps, past crows gathering on rooftops (including the town’s noisiest tavern), finally to meet the local police where they held the keys I would need, their small department cradled in the City Hall. They would have driven me the rest of the way, but I chose to walk, even as rain threatened— one block north, go west on Polk Street, another block north, go west again, to the end of Bates Street.
The little house Ed rented had the atmosphere of an earlier century about it, as did all of Sac Prairie. It leaned out from its rectangular lot facing the street, one among numerous quaint structures in that old section of the village. It was separated from its neighbors on two sides by sighing green hedges, and on the third by a lane used to park cars. Black earth and loose gravel formed a driveway that ran between Ed’s porch and the neighbor’s heavy fence, which was a bulwark of unpainted and uneven timbers too tall to see over. Loose boards creaked in the rising wind; it was an uneasy sound I would hear most of that night, even over fence owner’s dog’s frequent barrages of barking. I could not see the animal in its yard behind the fence, but did sense its alarm: not over me, I realized, but over what I could not hazard a guess.
The house itself, I remember, was glossy white, covered with thick old coats of oil-based paint and framed with green trim. There was no basement, only the one level set above ground on a rough cement foundation. There were two featureless doors, one facing the street, and the other the drive where it opened onto a pier-like stoop set against the gravel. The blinds behind deep-set windows appeared to be closed. Notwithstanding lilacs, lilies, and tulips, and despite many ferns, roses, and blood-red poppies, it was the crushed stone surface of the driveway that caught my fancy and arrested my attention as I approached, a shimmering sheen of wetness (though it hadn’t yet rained) dancing misty and mirage-like for a long moment above it.
Unlike most houses on the block, there was no garage at the end of this drive, only a line of rusty barrels emerging from the loose stone like a few bad teeth. With shining gravel inside, too, they appeared still to be sinking, which brought to mind the proverbial sailors who because of the Philadelphia Experiment were fused into the bulkheads of their ship.
I went in the front door and found the house clean and neat, well maintained, the clock giving the correct time, the refrigerator running. Pulling one lever returned hot water, pushing another flushed the toilet. And all about I could plainly see what had occupied Ed last—it was everywhere, as if he had been forced to drop everything and just leave. On a great table in the kitchen were his memorabilia of Mr. Jason Wecter (a figure of my childhood, though not one I’ve thought about in years), a man who decades earlier had been Ed’s closest friend, before he too disappeared under the shadow of a sullied reputation. In the late 1930s, Wecter had been the music and art critic here at home for the old Boston Dial, a critic whose sharp reviews wounded many reputations. Somehow Ed fell into Wecter’s circle of close associates, though at the time he was himself only a college sophomore.
Thus I began studying more carefully the materials set out. Careful not to mix things up, I noted how Ed arranged chronologically some of Wecter’s reviews on the table and across countertops, copies that he must have culled from the archives in Boston. There were pencil markings in the margins and related items strategically positioned nearby, but most of Ed’s notes were gathered in one large marbled-covered theme book.
More thought-provoking than these by far were the dozen or so stone sculptures of various weights and heights (though none over a foot) that occupied the kitchen table. Two of these had name-tags affixed with a loop of string: one was called “Elder God” and the other “Tsathoggua,” which I remember I practiced saying aloud.
“Elder God” was the more interesting of the two, a bust of sorts, carved from mottled bluish talc, equine-faced, but with tentacle-like appendages emerging from the chin. The other was a squatting creature carved from black stone, heavily muscled with mammalian limbs, but having overall slouching, toad-like contours. The larger was the centerpiece of the arrangement, but it was the “Tsathoggua” figure I found disquieting to contemplate, even difficult to look at. Surely, I thought, references to these figurines in the notes must yield a clue to Ed’s whereabouts. But first I wanted to get organized.
A shelf on the inside wall parallel to the drive, running from kitchen to side-door, is where I emptied my knapsack. I used it to stage my phone and the two-way radio Taylor asked me to bring, probably because her father had insisted. It was a powerful unit, to which Henry held a soon-to-expire license, which for the time being allowed us to broadcast. I longed for Taylor’s company, but knew she wouldn’t arrive until well after dark. Driving straight from home, she’d pull in with her father’s long-in-the-tooth DeVille, blazoned with its distinctive emblem; Henry always believed she traveled safest that way.
I opened two windows for fresh air, but only inches so as not to disturb Ed’s materials. I set out a foil packet of coffee I brought, hoping to brew it with equipment on hand, but the element was dead below a boil-marked carafe. Apparently Ed left with the coffeemaker on. My consolation was a wrapped bottle of wine I had stowed, which I wanted to open but wouldn’t, not until Taylor arrived.
There was little in the house left to explore, only a bedroom with two small windows, one facing the street, the other looking west. The westward prairie view had long been blocked, first by houses similar to the one I occupied, and then by the cloistering hedges. The closet held the meager assortment of Ed’s clothes, including socks and underwear stacked loosely on a shelf. I couldn’t help noticing how deep and comfortable the bed looked, and I found myself thinking of sex with Taylor, wondering if she’d put up with the floor. I was oblivious to the fact this would be my last carefree thought. That’s when the phone rang.
I ran to that familiar ring-tone on my cell, on the shelf where I left it. I remember glancing through the side-door window, down at the bed of gravel still glimmering in twilight, a rectangular reflection of heavens above, I guessed; a door, I imagined— fancifully, ironically—a door opening to magical places far beyond the familiar fields we know. That such a display would be impossible because of the overcast sky did not cross my mind.
Taylor’s voice cheered me up
— shut out, too, the sometimes barking dog, the straining fence, the whirl of the wind in the trees and along the eaves.
“Hi, hon!” she said. “What time do you have?”
I still see that clock-face today, how it had been already half past.
“8:30, right on the button,” I answered.
“Together at midnight,” Taylor replied. Then she laughed, which to me augured well.
“What will you need to find me?” I was ready to dole out directions, knowing the Caddy lacked GPS.
“Nothing,” she returned. “Got my map already, your town’s only a few blocks wide.”
“So in my arms at twelve,” I insisted.
“Uh-huh!”
And in my bed at 12:01, I tacked silently on, thinking myself so clever that I winked at “Elder God.” Later I moved that stone fellow onto the counter to watch out the door.
Now . . . let me repeat myself: I’ve had all year to mull over everything that happened that night, though nothing did immediately. I waited for Taylor so that together we could parse Ed’s notes and Wecter’s reviews. Besides, I was strangely reluctant to rummage through Ed’s papers, because being in his home and seeing their careful arrangement made it easy to fear his impending return, how he might step suddenly through one of the two doors and demand my explanation. I was restless, too— painfully aware I couldn’t link the disparate facts of a little house bordering the Wisconsin prairie, a missing old man, and a collection of odd carvings—in fact, restlessness seemed already to be in everything that night. But the alternative was to do nothing at all while suffering the hours. And so I began.
I discovered how Ed was marshaling every detail he could discover about the stone figures into the theme book. It is true that they, not Wecter, had become the primary focus of his studies. And indeed those monster-figurines were unusual; even then, from the table where they silently stood, the carvings conveyed substance and weight far exceeding their diminutive size.
It was easy to see why they fascinated Ed. The artist, according to a biographical note, was Clark Ashton Smith, whom Ed and Wecter knew personally, but who I knew only as a formative science fiction writer. Ed’s entry explained how Smith discovered in California’s abandoned copper mines the minerals used, materials that were soft enough for a knife to carve, before baking them hard in a kitchen oven.
According to Ed, “Tsathoggua” and “Elder God” had belonged to Wecter, prized in his collection when Ed knew him, but had been returned to Smith in the months following Wecter’s disappearance. Smith later sold these and newer carvings to the publisher of his fiction books, living right here in Sac Prairie. Unfortunately, nothing in those notes suggested any specific reason why after so many decades Ed got interested in these again; but the sequence of events made sense: With Smith’s publisher now deceased, Ed necessarily completed his work here, in the town where the collection resided, using pieces still owned by the publisher’s children.
With that, I moved to sit in the front room, because it had the only soft chair near a window, and because I could look out between the elms as far as the street. There I tallied what little I once knew of Ed’s history: When the Great War threatened, Edward Pinckey already lived near Jason Wecter in Boston’s tiny Bohemian district, which was close to being overwhelmed by unemployed, avant-garde students waiting to be called into service. Perhaps trading on his name, Ed infiltrated Wecter’s small circle of associates and before long became his closest friend and confidant.
Wecter’s reputation in those years grew so that it soon overshadowed famous contemporaries based in New York City. But then something unexpected happened. Wecter’s disposition changed radically, his reviews became gloomy and pessimistic and hurtful, often wandering far afield from their reputed subjects. So caustic did Wecter become that others warned he should fear retaliation. It was big news when Wecter disappeared off the face of the earth in 1942. Believe me if I say that cliché is most apropos: Wecter’s fate to this day is a mystery.
But I did find in Ed’s jottings a coda to the story involving his hobby. Apparently it is true that Wecter lost his mind, though it was kept a well-hidden secret from everyone except his closest friend. Ed’s biographical entry records plainly how Wecter during that period began suddenly speaking with authority about “border dimensions” and “planes of existence,” as if sure those concepts were real. He claimed to know where the points of contact lay between these and our world: there are doorways, he said, that would open and shut. Then, just before he disappeared, Wecter began to fear a wooden carving he had in his art—artifact collection, claiming he could perceive it existing on two planes at the same time, here physically as the merely three-dimensional if monstrous carving, but also multi-dimensioned, a miles-high thing interweaving the mundane world.
Ed shared these delusions with Smith, the writer-artist; only Smith seemed to play along. Perhaps he was mad too, for I found stapled to the catalog a clipping with a transcription of an interview he gave (in affected English but otherwise straightfaced) about the “Tsathoggua” carving: “Most certainly this palaeogean eidolon dates from a past anterior to the existence of any life-principle native to this earth or to our three known dimensions; & it carries in every line & angle the spirit and mysteries of its extra-cosmick artificer.” In fact, one listener pointed out how it was a mystery Smith carved so ably, without model or previous knowledge, the Great Old One of a primitive cult. Based on post-interview written comments, that same coincidence bothered the interviewer: “How came it that the modern sculptures of Clark Ashton Smith bore such a resemblance to it?—and was it not more than a coincidence that Smith’s figures created out of the stuff of his weird fiction and poetry should parallel the art of someone removed many hundreds of years in time and leagues in space from him?”
I, of course, had been a young child those years and had no interest in anything involving Ed; but I did recall how on occasion he would defend Wecter in front of the family, often following some catty remark.
In the end, time passed quickly, because I fell asleep. And for a while, perhaps for hours, I slept peaceably, until the frantic sounds of a barking dog began to invade the margins of my awareness, remote at first, but drawing closer, and then suddenly becoming much louder. I knew the animal must be the neighbor’s dog, but it seemed then a definite part of a dream, a tenebrous connection with another world, more real than the house I awoke into. As I did so I drew myself up, cognizant of foulness in the wind against my body that came forcibly through the partially opened windows. Words don’t suffice, but I sensed everywhere mounting oppression, crushing despair, unwholesomeness settling about the house; it was a cloying, infiltrating loathsomeness that was nearly tangible.
Then suddenly the real dog was slavering at the window, threatening to hoist itself into the opening. It was the neighbor’s, a basset. And either by breaking through or by flanking, it had found its way past the fence into Ed’s front yard while I slept. Nearly beside itself, the dog alternately nosed the window or fell back in a fit of whining and growling.
But the savage display was not meant for me; the animal’s hostility was leveled toward the back yard east of the house. I could at these intervals plainly see the dog’s imploring eyes through the small opening. Between us was manifesting a curious, almost palpable, empathy.
With apprehension—not because of the dog, but against whatever was unhinging the animal—I hoped fervently it could sense my intention to open the side-door and come into the kitchen. Don’t ask me to explain, but for no good reason I feared for its life.
I looked back. The dog did not move, but stood there whining through bared teeth. As I moved further toward the kitchen, passing the side-door, I again saw dirt and gravel outside gleaming hellishly. I glanced all the way back, in time to see the dog disappear below the sill, telling me she chose that instant to make her move; she’d be rounding the corner, so I swung the door to receive her.
>
I heard one of those prehistoric animal-screams (the kind you’d expect to hear close by, at midnight, if you camped in the Amazon); this was punctuated by a bone-shattering crack, but it was too dark near the house to see any more than that something had loomed up tall before quickly sinking away. Then burst forth a hot gust of wind, which with unintended finality slammed the door closed.
Of course I realized I should go out, but providentially the blessed phone rang. I never saw or heard the dog again.
“Wake up!” Taylor sounded excited. “I’m almost there.” Then she too was gone.
Twin circles of warm lamplight provided the only contrast against the terror and loathing caused by the evil I could sense invading the prairie house, pouring up the walls like invisible fog. I backed away from the door, into the hallway—it was the same out there; further then, into the bedroom—nothing was different. Inside everywhere, but along the east wall especially, there brooded this malign and terrible evil.
I returned to the kitchen, grabbed my cell. Face to face again with “Elder God” I hesitated, shaking. Did I see in those stone eyes a hint of alien life? Or was it headlights outside? I dialed.
Taylor answered, but set down her phone saying, “Hon, wait just a sec.”
I heard the engine. I knew she was just about to tease the big Cadillac onto the small driveway.
“Pull far to the right!” I screamed into the cell, loud enough for her to hear no matter what. “And go out the passenger door, straight onto the grass, touch only the grass. Do you understand? Grass . . . only!”
Twin beams passed the window, smoothly, lighting up the sill. Then they jolted around.