Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  There is a Russian writer who said we must not lie to ourselves, because we may come to believe our own lies and be unable to distinguish between the truths in ourselves and the world around us.

  I think he is not very far from being a Buddhist.

  Time passes strangely in Laos, where the falang call us ‘lotus-eaters’, as each day seems little different than the last to them. News travels of melancholy Legionnaires, suicides who’ve fallen to la cafard, a peculiar malaise exacerbated by the heat and depression from viewing the vast stretches of jade leaves and peaks of our realm. Monsieur Masie, a French consul in the city, had been among the more prominent men to meet such an end. The falang priests called for more faith.

  There was a day when I intended to come to the Guillaumes’ villa to discuss the ancient legends that Monsieur Guillaume was so driven to unearth, but Madame Guillaume’s gardener informed me that she had disappeared without a word in the night. There wasn’t a trace, a hint, a single clue that might explain her departure. I asked among the boatmen, the merchants of the morning market. No one had seen her. She had not taken a thing with her, but, as if she were a phantasm, it was as if she had never been here at all. I was questioned, but no one openly accused me of anything. After a few weeks, an official declared she had wandered into the forest and doubtless been devoured by some savage beast, or run afoul of Black Flag bandits. There is no evidence to support any of these explanations.

  The servants kept the villa in order for several weeks before they grew bored. With no sense of their masters’ returns, they scavenged what they could and sold the valuables discretely among their compatriots, discarding the rest, particularly the library of the Guillaumes, left in a sad disarray of tattered pages upon the floor. I, too, salvaged what I could.

  My recent dreams occasionally figured a strange, howling woman, and images of blood and flight across space like some bird or fiend. But I do not believe there was any message from beyond, any cryptic signal to bring to the fortunetellers of the city.

  Months passed and the villa was still abandoned. It was in a state of disrepair from unscrupulous vandals and a rumour of inauspicious spirits pervading the space. Accounts of a ‘presence’ spooked the neighbors, who did their best to ignore the house and move on with their affairs. But there was a night I felt compelled to go. I found the door ajar and heard something rustling within. I entered.

  I saw a shadow fumbling, squatting, shifting about, but not wholly panicked. It sensed me and called out, “Who are you?”

  “It is only I, Saeng,” I replied. The shadow moved partially into the moonlight. It was a falang, with a long, disheveled beard, and I soon realized it was a very changed Monsieur Guillaume. He had a glint in his eyes like some savage creature. But he smiled.

  “You know of our journey?”

  I answered in the affirmative.

  “No one else has returned?”

  “No. No one.” It was the truth, turning into a legend here.

  “Not even Khampha?”

  “Not even my cousin,” I said. “What happened, monsieur?”

  “He fled when we needed him most,” the man answered. I asked him to give me a full account.

  He shuffled towards a far wall and slumped down before he began. I could still feel his eyes on me. The room was fragrant, like the deep jungle.

  “All of my life, they have mistaken me for something I am not,” he began. “They think me a fool; they think me a rogue or some dilettante. Don’t think I don’t hear the whispers in the darkness, the snickering, the chortles and sneers, young man. But I have always sought true wisdom. It is true I traffic in objects for eclectic tastes, for those who could not bear the travails of retrieving their shiny, little baubles themselves. But I always recover the true valuables. Here, around the world. It sustains me.”We are animals. We are meant to sweat and, for millennia, every day was a challenge of life and death for humans. To explore and civilize, in this, we must send those who can still deal with uncertainty and risk, and emerge undaunted. You live in your world of demons and fear, but there is such light to apprehend. You fall so short of what you can be. Of what you can change.”

  “Did you find the temple?” I asked, fearing for his sanity.

  “The mystery is fundamental, you know. Most people are nothing but zombies – somnambulists stumbling through life in some sad, dreaming haze – but if we can wake up a soul, we have accomplished something. I don’t know if we found the temple we sought. We found a temple – far, far from where Khampha believed we would. Our bearings were lost and the journey was arduous.

  “We came, prepared as civilized men. Thirteen of us in all. For the last several kilometers, we’d finally had a breakthrough from clambering over all of that brush and stone. We were following an ancient trail of unknown origin, barely anything at all. The centuries had done a profound job of reclaiming it. What we found had the logic of a human trail, moving with obvious purpose; it was not some meandering animal track. We were heading for a steep ravine.”

  It is difficult to describe his breathing. It was as if it no longer came naturally to him. He cocked his head curiously at me, as if to see if I was still listening to him. His voice lowered.

  “Khampha told us that the people ascribed death and savagery to forest spirits among these hills. The narrow trail walled us in by brush. All of us noticed that the jungle, always overflowing with the sounds of life, was distressingly silent. There was a presence in the brush that we could not hear or see. It was merely felt. If only you could have seen it. It was all so primordial. This was surely untouched Laos. The leaves were thick on every side, the trees grown close together over centuries. An occasional breeze pushed past us down the remnants of the ancient trail, making the leaves whisper. It was haunting. The stones were slick and we had to be careful with our footing. But at last, there it was before us. It was beautiful. How could the living have left it behind? There, something beyond words.

  “We found the temple, the ‘wat’, as you call it. It was built against a sheer stone cliff, in a valley no one has ever mapped, an enigmatic range thought inaccessible to explorers. Truly, it was crafted from stones we’d never seen before, not even on the Plaines Des Jarres. The structure was overgrown and it was so weathered I could not reliably guess its age.” He coughed violently.

  “There were ruined cyclopean blocks, that conformed to where we might expect to find the kuti, and a primitive, crude structure equal to a massive thaat. Who knows how high the thaat must have originally been, but it would have loomed over us. I calculate it may have been at least four hundred and forty-seven meters tall, from its base to its pinnacle, when it was pristine,” he recounted with awe.

  “We found columns near the facade, jutting like shattered tree stumps scattered by some gargantuan terror. You could almost imagine them grinning at those of us who remained, like some withered hag. But, though the exterior was in such a sad state, we found it easy enough to remove the brush sealing the massive doors of the central hall. We lit our lanterns and proceeded forward, pressing into the massive main chamber. What a space it was. The floor was made of great squares of dark stone. At the end of the chamber, there was merely a huge, curiously carved block of the same stone. There was a massive door, and we pried it open.”

  From this point, his narrative became so vague that I had difficulty following him. I speculated that the tropic sun had affected his mind.

  He told me that he had opened the door, but in its opening, induced a bad effect on the men in his employ. They refused point-blank to follow him any further through that gaping opening. Something shook even the strongest among them, except Khampha. So, the two entered alone, Monsieur Guillaume with his pistol and flickering lantern, finding a massive, rough-hewn stair that wound its way down into the innards of the earth, apparently. He followed this and came into a broad corridor, in the shadows of which his tiny flame was utterly engulfed. As he told me this, he spoke with strange annoyance of a crimson serpe
nt which slithered ahead of him, just beyond the circle of light, all the time he was below ground.

  Making his way along dank passages that were wells of unearthly blackness, he at last came to a heavy door fantastically carved, which he felt must be where the worshipers hid the riches of the ancients. He pressed against the door and it fell open to them. Even Khampha fled then, but it was of no matter.

  “The treasure?” I interrupted eagerly.

  Monsieur Guillaume laughed ruefully.

  “Rien. Nothing. Not a flake, not a stone or gem – nothing at all.” He paused reflectively. “Nothing I alone could bear away.”

  He broke again into a terrible, ragged-sounding cough. Again, his tale lapsed into vagueness. I gathered that he had left the temple hurriedly, without searching any further. The men had fled into the darkness and he could not catch up with them. It took all of this time to return.

  “You have your life,” I reminded him. “Surely, it is valuable.” I could not bring myself to tell him of the disappearance of his wife.

  He shook his head. He seemed lost in thought for some moments.

  “Alors, sleeping things we are,” he muttered, “What is life but reconciliations with regrets? We should have shut the door when we left ….” He began to snore strangely, so I took my leave.

  When I returned to my home, I was troubled by the conversation and intended to return in the morning to speak with him of these matters with more clarity. I was startled to discover my cousin Khampha in my home, his clothes torn and ripped, his eyes fearful. He signaled me to be quiet, whispering angrily, “Where have you been?”

  “I went to visit the Guillaumes,” I replied quietly. A panic overtook him. He pounded his fists fiercely against his body and shook his head.

  “What did you see?” he asked accusingly. “What did you see?”

  I told him of what I had seen, and what I had been told. He again shook his head, fear within his eyes.

  “That’s nothing even close to what happened, cousin. Nothing at all. Never return there! Never return! Forget any jewels, any gold you think you might find there. It’s nothing.”

  He was almost frothing, incomprehensible, as I pressed him to explain. He glanced again and again at my doorway, before finally intimating the truth as he saw it. A journey plagued by misfortune and lost bearings, as he’d never endured.

  “He didn’t need me. Not really. He didn’t need any of us. It was as if something unnamable called him, summoned him from some distant, monstrous shore to complete his terrible work.”

  “You exaggerate,” I protested.

  “I do not! At every turn, he countered my words, ignored my advice, forsook me as if I were some ant. He stared instead at his devices, things I’d never seen before in the hands of any falang. He pointed and barked at us, demanded we obey him at the most impossible turns.”

  “We took two boats a certain length up the river and disembarked with our equipment. We had to cross a particularly treacherous ridge. Guillaume’s man, Etienne, lost his footing, plummeting nearly one hundred meters down, shredded apart by the jagged limestone jutting below us. Guillaume made no remark, no request to recover the equipment or his companion. He grunted and ordered us to be more careful.

  “The weather? Miserable. I was no more than a slave to his ravenous quest. I saw his eyes and I knew my place in his world. But I found the manuscript! I did. But we weren’t partners. We weren’t equals in any respect. We found ourselves among a fierce people, bold as any. But none would come with us. Another of our men fell into a pit of bamboo stakes the villagers said were meant for tigers and we were down to 11. One of my friends suggested we kill Guillaume and the remaining falang – we’d blame Black Flag bandits – but I think he heard us. We had walked no more than a half-hour when my friend was bitten by a viper the colour of a bright ruby, as I’d never seen before. It slithered away before I could avenge him. I’ll never forget his scream and you know we’ve seen many die. This was like no death we’ve seen, Saeng.

  “It’s impossible to reach the clearing Ajan Somnung spoke of without us getting bloody and tangled up in thorn and brush. We cut our hands and back and heads, so much of our flesh left on the vines. We were all in such misery that it was as if we were entering a gate of Hell.”

  He spoke fearfully of the sinister carvings in the temple, of strange creatures the carvings suggested had crafted the complex and abandoned it, the horrifying dreams that plagued the men in their time there.

  “Is it true you abandoned Monsieur Guillaume?” I asked, trying to restore rationality to the conversation.

  “It is,” Khampha said. “But I stayed as long as I could. I swear. More than any reasonable soul would stay. But we’re forbidden there. This was a place for legends to die – to remain forgotten, perhaps. I don’t really know, anymore. Humans were not meant to be there. But he insisted on opening every passage and I followed his descent into the very bowels of the world, until that last, terrible door.

  “When he opened it, not a ray of light could penetrate beyond it into the room ahead. And when he touched the shadowy edge of the darkness, something touched back and stepped forth like a reflection, a perfect reflection that devoured him for his curiosity. Whoever or whatever is in the villa is NOT Guillaume as I left him in that temple ….”

  A bird shrieked from my roof. Khampha screamed and fled into the night, eyes wild with terror.

  On my floor, I saw the last tatters of the manuscript of Ajan Somnung, broken past restoration.

  Perhaps it was only my imagination that heard a scream, a howl, a laugh outside.

  Now I hear something scratching, rustling restlessly beyond my thin door. I know it remembers why some things were meant to stay forgotten ….

  Bryan Thao Worra is an award-winning Lao American writer based in Minneapolis. An NEA Fellow in literature, his work appears internationally in numerous anthologies, magazines and newspapers, including Tales of the Unanticipated, Innsmouth Free Press, Astropoetica, Illumen, Outsiders Within, Dark Wisdom and Mad Poets of Terra. He is the author of two books of speculative poetry, On the Other Side of the Eye and BARROW. You can visit him online at: http://thaoworra.blogspot.com

  The author chortles: Set in the mid 1890s in northern Laos, “What Hides and What Remains” draws from the history and supernatural traditions of Southeast Asia, during an era of French colonialism and a global thirst for the industrial and the exotic. Much of the setting remains today, little changed from over a century ago in many areas.

  BLACK HILL

  Orrin Gray

  That place was still called ‘Black Hill’ when I come there, though it was as flat as a plate and nothing stood taller’n a man’s shoulder far as the eye could see, ‘cept the shacks and the derricks. Not a tree nor a lick of grass to be seen, everything stomped dead by the men and the horses and the trucks.

  My first day there, I asked Burke why they called it ‘Black Hill’ and he laughed and stamped his foot on the bare, brown dirt. “The hill’s unner there,” he said. “Not a lake nor a river, like they say it, but sure enough a hill, all piled up an’ waitin’, pressin’ up on th’ ground, clawin’ ta get out. Nothin’ but the dirt ‘tween it an’ us. We poke a hole in th’ dirt an’ up it jumps!”

  Burke had been out there from the beginning. He was there when they drove the Stapleton #1, and he saw the black gold just well up from the ground and come pouring out. Enough, it seemed, to make any man rich.

  He bought up a parcel of land out west of El Dorado with the money he made and started the Black Hill Oil Company. By the time he sent for me, the Black Hill field was already putting up more’n three hundred thousand barrels a day.

  I didn’t know why he needed me and I said as much, though I was thankful for the work. He just shook his head. “This here’s only th’ beginnin’,” he said. “There’s another world down there, Smith. Things the like-a-which Man ain’t never dreamed, let alone seen. If all I wanted was ta be rich, I coulda quit by n
ow, but there’s somethin’ more down there. Somethin’ else. I cain’t say what, exactly, but I aim ta find it.”

  Burke and I had worked together in Iowa for a spell, years back. I wasn’t nothing but an amateur geologist. I’d delivered the mail, ‘fore I ruint my leg, and I’d taught a bit of school. I had a wife and two girls back in Iowa, but there weren’t no work for a man like me in those days anywhere but in the fields, so the fields was where I worked. And when Burke called for me, I came because the money was good and I knew him for a man I could put my back against.

  I lived in the shacks, like most everyone else who worked the fields. As field geologist, I had one to myself, but it still weren’t much more’n four walls and a bed. There was a desk against the wall, under the one window, and I sat there and wrote letters to Matilda and the girls when I could.

  Burke worked the men hard but fair. He strode about the field, barking orders and working with ‘em side-by-side. He was as tall and rudely constructed as a derrick hisself, and his hair and beard were as bristly and red as an oil fire. He was missing two-and-a-half fingers on his right hand, lost to one of the walking boards. His left ear was gone and half his face a mess of scars, owing to a mishap with some nitroglycerine.

  He’d been married back when I knew him, but his wife had since passed and left him with a pretty little dark-eyed girl who, I gathered, lived with some spinster aunt at the hotel in town. Whenever I rode in with Burke on one errand or another, he’d always insist we stop by the hotel so he could buy her a root beer or an ice cream, and pick her up in his long arms and spin her above his head. It was a sweet sight, seeing how he doted on her. The only thing it made me regret was my own girls being so far away, and how I was missing watching them grow up.