by Nick Mamatas
In a flash, Colleen considered her options. The Summer Tentacular theoretically had a sexual harassment policy, or at least a code of conduct. Did this interaction qualify? To her, yes, but given the paucity of women at the convention, who knew how an official policy would be interpreted. But, he was being nice to you, offering free use of a corset… She could just make an excuse and extract herself, since this guy would be stuck in the dealers’ room during the day. But then there’d be the evening parties, where people got drunk and inhibitions evaporated. If she left now, he’d just follow her around, demanding the attention he clearly believed he deserved.
Or she could wreck him. The options there were two: hard or soft. She chose soft. Colleen lifted her thumb, placed it in the web of flesh between his thumb and forefinger and pressed hard. The pirate winced, then yelped when Colleen didn’t stop. Finally he let go.
“No thanks,” Colleen said. “I packed clothes for this event.”
“Jesus Christ,” the pirate said. He carried on too much for how little the pressure point trick hurt. “You’re like a crazy person! I was just trying to be friendly.”
Colleen thought to use his name, and glanced around for his name tag. Then she saw that he had tucked the lanyard into his pants, so that the badge dangled near his crotch.
“I’m a friendly person too,” Colleen said. “I just like having both my hands free at all times. It helps me to be friendly. Anyway, good-bye.” She turned to cross the room again, and, thankfully, the froggy man was bothering someone else already.
Norman, the Chief Shoggoth, entered the room, still in his robe, and extended his arms, nearly completely filling the wide double-door frame. He declared, “Five fifty-five! The dealers’ room closes in five minutes!”
Colleen was surprised to hear a chorus of groans, like a teacher had just announced that recess was over.
3. The Outsider
I never made it to the dealers’ room, which is sad for me, as I do love books. I did love books, I should say. Even with amazon.com and ebooks, and my old life down in Cambridge, Massachusetts—a town with a number of independent bookstores—there was still something special about the tables in a Lovecraftian convention dealers’ room. Books with print runs in the low triple digits, old stapled-together fanzines with the sort of cover art that could otherwise only be found in the doodles of a bored eighth-grade boy, and even some interesting titles.
Of course, nobody ever wanted to talk about writing. Publishing, sure. Who actually got a mass market paperback deal for one of their books, which editor was looking for short stories for yet another anthology about Cthulhu—he’s going to rise one day and destroy the world for no reason, you see—and whatever happened to that author who seemed so hot just last year.
Part of why I wanted to head to the dealers’ room and gossip a bit was to show that I wasn’t just last year’s fad.
There’s a saying, usually whispered in the committee meetings of convention runners, those Secret Masters of Fandom that run everything on a volunteer business, with no thanks to show for it except for the narcissistic pleasure of being in charge.
Fandom is the social network of last resort.
It’s true. Lovecraftians in particular are a bunch of misfits and social defectives. It started with the old man himself, who was crippled by neuroses so huge that he had no choice but to become a genius at what he did. Lovecraft’s short stories, so widely distributed in grade school libraries because they contained zero sex and only the merest suggestions of violence, were like cheese in a mousetrap. Boys, almost all boys, too fat or awkward or arrogant for sports, and not actually bright enough to achieve top marks, find their ways to the darkest corners and dustiest shelves, and there Lovecraft is waiting. And if those traps don’t get sprung, there are others. The Internet in-jokes, the role-playing games, the video game levels that end with great green tentacles reaching out from a swirling vortex, they all perform an initiatory function.
Lovecraft chooses his own.
One of his most famous stories, “The Outsider,” even explains how it all works. Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness, it begins. The climax of the story is a hoary old cliché, but the story is from 1926. There’s a poor ugly ol’ guy wandering around a suitably gothic castle as he narrates, all alone as he has been for his entire life. He encounters a party, but when the revelers see him, they scream and run. He stumbles around the room, half-Quasimodo, half-Frankenstein’s Monster, trying to find out what happened when he sees a hideous creature lurching at him. He raises a hand, but too late, and he actually makes contact with the monster. Of course, the creature was himself, and he had come across a mirror.
What makes “The Outsider” special isn’t the climax, it’s the denouement. There’s a misunderstood word. Ask one of the poor dears over at the Summer Tentacular and he’ll likely tell you that in a story’s denouement the writer’s job is to tie up loose ends. But the word means the exact opposite—it means to unknot. What’s being unknotted is the emotional tension created by the climax. “The Outsider” wouldn’t be worth reading for anyone over the age of nine if the story rested on the dumb twist that the narrator was the monster all along. Instead, after fleeing from his own horrible visage, the narrator makes his escape from a lonely life of fear and sadness. Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. He has friends! He somehow got his ugly ass to fucking Egypt! And life in Egypt is a big party too—he has found his home among the freaks, and the freaks don’t run from fellow freaks. I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid.
Then I remember that I’m dead. No feasts, no pyramid, just a body in a shoebox talking to nobody while I wait for my brain to decompose sufficiently that whatever is left of me finally just turns off. Is time passing, or are all these cogitations just one last burst of activity, every synapse blazing at once since I no longer need to breathe, since my heart no longer beats. I’m an echo of an echo, the ultimate outsider.
In Lovecraft’s fiction, the outsider becomes the insider. That’s the appeal. The bookish little nerd, often with aesthetic inclinations if not exactly artistic talent, figures out what is really going on. Ancient languages are deciphered, inexplicable phenomena examined, myths so obscure they can only be discussed in terms older than mankind are discovered to be the literal history of the universe. And the texts themselves provide all sorts of insider jargon and references for the initiated. And like all initiatory regimes, there are levels of enlightenment, ever more complex signs and tokens, layers of occult truth. It’s easy to see where L. Ron Hubbard got his inspiration for the Church of Scientology from.
The dust-up at the opening ceremonies was basically a conflict between literary critics and fans, to name two of the more ridiculous sets of people in the world. What’s a critic but a reader who can neither stop re-reading the same thing over and over, nor shut up about it? And what’s a fan but a reader who has stopped reading, and still can’t shut up about it? Fans resent critics, and critics disparage fans. What a great idea to get everyone together and provide inexpensive booze.
This year, though, someone found a better target than fan or critic—me.
They took my face, you know.
That’s why Colleen Danzig was brought in the first time, to identify my body from the clothes I’d worn when she last saw me. After my death, the flesh of my cheeks, all of my nose, my lips, my forehead, were all peeled off by...I presume by my murderer. I couldn’t feel it per se, but I knew. It felt the way it does when you suddenly realize that you’re not wearing your glasses.
It took some time for me to arrive at the state I am in now: posthumously conscious. When you first die, or at least when I first died, it’s like being in a lit room, and someone flips the switch. And like
being in that now dark room, eventually your eyes adjust and you can make out objects and figures to a certain extent. And then, I guess, you fall asleep, forever. But my face is gone. I’m the outsider as outsider after all. If I had a mirror to look into, eyes to look out with, I’d see a hideous monster and I’d run screaming. And then, only later, would I realize that the crimson mask I’d seen wasn’t someone, it was me. The real me, the real me under the skin.
It has occurred to me that this is hell. I’m not religious; I grew up in the Armenian Apostolic Church, which basically just meant long liturgies in a language I didn’t really understand, and Christmas in January. My father will be growing a beard until I’ve been dead for forty days. Only then will he shave again. Will I still be here, in some other box and aware of it, counting off the days, imagining him at the mirror, solemnly cutting and shaving, and maybe even crying a tear or two? Or will he keep the beard, and shave it quickly, just for the sake of appearances? I couldn’t even explain my book to him when it came out, much less get him to read it. And now the book killed me, and he has nothing: no grandchildren, no legacy. One thousand years of Panossians ground to a halt in a laundry room in Providence, Rhode Island.
Lovecraft’s outsider says I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage, but he, and Lovecraft, were fucking fools. That’s the problem with literature, you have to be alive in order to write it.
4. Cool Air
There were three types of parties thrown during the Summer Tentacular. The first were book launch parties of various sizes and intensity. “The more terrible the book,” Barry explained to Colleen, “the better the party.”
“It’s true. There’s some sort of romance anthology called Lovely Craft: True Confessions of Women in Love with the Unspeakable. There should be pink cupcakes and lots of booze,” R.G. said. “The book looks awful.”
“Don’t you have a story in that one?” Barry said.
“Of course I do,” R.G. said. The elevator doors opened and the trio walked out onto the hotel’s dedicated party floor. A slight buzz of activity came from the far end of the hallway. “They had a Kickstarter and paid six cents a word.”
“Twenty percent raise over the pro rate,” Barry said. “Nice.”
“What are the other types of parties?”
“There’s the non-book launch party, usually by some fan group,” Barry said. “They’re just like the book launch parties, actually, except that there’s no little book table in the corner. So, more surface area for booze and snacks.”
“But they are fan parties,” R.G. said, suddenly a bit agitated.
“Aren’t we all fans?” Colleen asked.
“Not after you meet the hardcore fans, you won’t be. They’re the worst.”
“I disagree,” Panossian said. He’d just emerged from some room and fallen into line with the group. “The professional writers are much worse than the fans. The pros want to have fans, and to no longer be fans. Ambition is a hell. We are the worst.” Then he added, “Hello. Where we are going?”
“Cob’s party,” Barry said.
“Shit, man,” Panossian said.
“This is the third type of party,” R.G. said to Colleen. They had made it to the closed double door of the suite at the very end of the hall.
“It’s not a sex party, is it?” Colleen asked.
“If only,” Panossian said.
The room was dark. Well, it seemed dark for a moment, then a green light swept over the room. People were leaning against the walls, taking up the bed and spots on the ground. Colleen found herself standing alone as the others wandered off into the depths of the suite. Hagman and R.G. had paired off, so Colleen trailed after Panossian, who found a corner and planted himself in it.
“What’s going on? Where’s Cob?”
“The game is to figure out what story the environment represents. But it’s a total abstraction. It starts when the flashing green light goes off.”
“So we just sit around?”
Panossian pointed to one of the tables. “The Skittles are drugs. The M&Ms are drugs. There’s probably also drugs in the diet soda.”
“Well, what kind of drugs?”
“Acid, mostly. Other hallucinogens.”
“Is it safe?”
It was dark, and Panossian was still wearing his thick wool coat, but Colleen could see a shrug.
“Would you like anything?”
“Nah, I don’t do drugs anymore.”
The green light flashed across the room once more, then clicked off entirely.
Colleen shouldered her way through the crowd to the snack table, which was illuminated by a few glow sticks scattered between the bowls and cups. She hesitated for a moment, then turned to the man next to her.
“Are there drugs in these?”
In response, the man tipped his fedora, and then grabbed a handful of Oreo cookies and shoved them into his mouth. He chewed them noisily, contemplatively, and then gulped them down.
“Hmm,” he said. “Drugs, eh?” He took off his hat and shook free a mass of bright red hair—the roots were natural, but the bulk of it was dyed to match the shade found primarily on fire trucks. “I hope not. I mean, I don’t think so. Why would someone put drugs in the food?”
“Well, Panossian said…” Colleen said.
“Oh, that guy. You can’t believe a word he says about anything other than writing. He’s not bad, pretty good actually, but he’s some kind of pathological liar.”
“He is?”
“My name’s Ginger J,” the man said. He plucked a cookie from the bowl and held it up to Colleen’s mouth. “Try one, you’ll see.”
Colleen brushed away Ginger J’s hand. “I’ll get my own, thanks.”
“Say, wanna come to Lovecraft’s grave later?”
“Uhm…with you?” Colleen said. “I don’t even know you.”
“Not just with me. Lots of people are coming. Bhanushali arranges it every year. She invites one person, who is allowed to invite one person, who is allowed to invite one person. We usually end up with ten or so people. It’s a Summer Tentacular tradition.”
“Huh.”
“Panossian comes.”
Colleen raised an eyebrow. “Oh yeah, he didn’t mention anything.”
“You talk to him?” Ginger J’s tone changed. He was a bit more excited now. “Did he ever mention me?”
“I don’t talk to him much, and no, you’ve never come up.”
“But...” Ginger J said. “He said he’d look at my book, maybe give it a blurb.”
Colleen hiked a thumb over to the corner. “He’s right there, sulking or meditating or something. Go talk to him. Excuse me, okay?” She turned a shoulder to Ginger J and started loading a small paper plate with snacks from the table. When Colleen glanced over at where Ginger J was, she saw that he hadn’t approached Panossian. Instead he had pushed his way out of the party and was in the doorway, speaking with that mostly bald girl, Chloe, and making some broad gestures with his arms.
“Crowded, eh?” Panossian said when Colleen came back. R.G. was next to him now, squatting, while he had folded his legs under him to sit.
“Yeah, it is.” Colleen said. “I don’t really see how this is different than any other party, except that the lights are out, so there are more opportunities for people to elbow me in the gut, or cop a feel.”
“Are you warm?” R.G. said.
“No, it’s fucking freezing in here, actu—oh!” Colleen said. “‘Cool Air,’ is that the story this is supposed to be? Man, they must have pulled the knob off the AC or something.”
Colleen had something else to say but then three large men pushed their way into the party and roughly shouldered past her.
“Does every man here have no sense of personal boundaries?” Colleen asked R.G.
“Yes!” Panossian answered for her. Then he added, “Heheh, get it?”
“Lovecraft’s grave at midnight is the corniest thing around. I can’t believe you go every year, Panoss
ian,” R.G. said.
“Oh, this’ll be my last year.”
“Why?” Colleen asked.
Panossian just shrugged.
“I’ll come along,” Colleen said. “I should get the full Summer Tentacular experience. Who normally goes?”
“A veritable ‘Who’s That?’ of horror fiction,” R.G. said.
Panossian stood up, walked to the corner of the room and leaned down to confer with someone. At first Colleen thought it was a young boy, but quickly enough she realized it was a little person. The man nodded enthusiastically, patted Panossian on the shoulder, and handed him something, which Panossian stuffed into one of the pockets of his woolen coat.
When he returned, R.G. asked, “Did you win? ‘Cool Air’?”
Panossian smiled. “Nope. ‘The Whisperer in Darkness.’ We’re supposed to be inside a Mi-Go brain canister.”
“How did you know?”
Panossian pointed to his ears. “I can’t hear well, but some things I hear better than others. There’s a little beeeeep-type thing, like from a theremin, going off in the corner. Most people guessed ‘Cool Air’ from the air-conditioning and the smell…”
R.G. wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, I guess the smell was incidental.”
“Who is that? Was that Cob? Are we going now? Is the party over?”
“Yes, no, yes,” Panossian said, “but those answers aren’t in order.” And then he walked out of the party, hand still in pocket, clutching his prize.
5. The Thing on the Doorstep
One thing I didn’t think when I realized I was about to die was Oh God, why me? Honestly, I’m surprised that it took as long as it did. It’s a little late to confess one’s sins posthumously, and honestly I’m not sorry. But let’s just say I was a jerk to a lot of people. A lot of very mentally unstable people. I don’t think anyone deserves to be murdered, except for terrible bestselling authors—that is, all of them—and I never did anything a reasonable person would kill me, or even just shove me, for. I insulted some people, made little jokes with a sufficiently deadpan affect that I was widely believed, went public with secrets everyone already knew about except the more obtuse, and thus easily enraged, fans.