by Nick Mamatas
The next troubling word was swarthy. I asked my teacher, Mrs. Vaz, but she just blushed and turned away. I went to the school library during lunch period—I was one of those kids with no place to sit in the cafeteria, surprise surprise—and asked the librarian, who never identified herself to students for some reason. She snorted and walked around her desk and put her hands on my shoulders. Then she spun me around and pushed me toward the door. Was this assault? Was it legal? Was swarthy a bad word—something like shitty?
The door to the library happened to have a window in it; the school was one of those old brick urban numbers with transoms over the classroom doors and a pair of large stone arch entrances with the words GIRLS over one and the word BOYS over the other. I thought I was being pushed out into the hallway, but the librarian stopped and peered over the top of my head. She was a thin woman with a shock of dyed black hair and long fingers like tree branches in a window. She looked at the window, not through it, at my reflection.
“That is swarthy,” she said. “You.” Swarthy, as in the throngs of people that seethed through the flume-like streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes about them… That’s from “He,” one of Lovecraft’s worst and most racist stories.
I wanted to pull off my eyebrows right then and there. I figured that’s what swarthy must mean—a thick brow—since it was one of the things the kids in school made fun of me for. The librarian had nothing else to say to me; she opened the door and with a rude shove sent me back to the hallway.
I became a bad boy.
Why not? Even the librarian didn’t seem to like me, and I actually read books and asked questions. I kept my grades up but other than that I lolled about in my chair, read comic books in class, tore sheets of looseleaf paper in thirds and slowly chewed on the strips, and made fun of the dumber, bigger kids, till they tried something physical. I had a swift foot thanks to weekend soccer games with my zillion crazy Armenian Sunday School friends and I planted it frequently in the crotches of the people I decided were bullies. As far as being bad went, I wasn’t all that good at it. I still used my model airplane glue on model airplanes, for Christ’s sake.
I kept reading Lovecraft, but at a distance. I was one of the bad people in his work, who terrified the good people just by existing. We all ended up dead at the end. As far as role models went, it was a pretty shitty thing for a kid to glom on to, but I eventually grew up and out of it. I wasn’t a hardcore Lovecraftian. I mean, I had other interests. I read other books—novels about middle-class people having affairs and such. Mysteries, science fiction, the Beats, you know. Whatever was around and people were reading. My first encounter with Lovecraftian fandom, with the whole messy world born from Lovecraft’s fiction, came at Tower Records in Cambridge, which once upon a time had a decent little magazine and ’zine section. Fuck Tentacles was a zine in the Xerox and staple mode, its cover image a collage: an Easter Island statue with Lovecraft’s face over the statue’s head, and a pair of tits from a porn mag over the stone pillar. Lots of doodles and five-pointed stars and a ransom note aesthetic to the cover copy. Five bucks for twelve pages, and that included the front and back covers, but I bought it.
I couldn’t get enough of Fuck Tentacles. I read and re-read it till the ink smeared and the pages fell apart in my hands. It was funny. There were jokes, and little cartoons. A short story comprised of photocopies of fortune cookies that somehow expressed both whimsy and foreboding. There were also a few capsule reviews of straight-to-VHS movies, and of small press horror publications. (This was all before the Internet got big and everything went digital. I was too shy and disorganized to sit down and write a letter to the P.O. Box on the back cover of the magazine. Plus it was a Providence, Rhode Island address, and I thought it might have been yet another coy reference that I didn’t quite understand.) The stories and cartoons and essays and reviews were all broad-church Lovecraftian, and the anonymous zinester took none of it too seriously.
Then came college, and Internet access, and the World Wide Web. Let me tell you that even in the 1990s, going to some search engine and typing the words “fuck tentacles” into the text bar was a terrible mistake. But there was plenty on Lovecraft—fan pages, USENET newsgroups, a giant floating multimedia conversation about the author’s racism and the importance of his wife’s secular Judaism. It was easy to get involved. To get sucked in.
I started reading some of the stories, small press novels, chapbooks, ’zines I’d heard about. And just through the act of sending away for this material, I became a part of the community. An email notification that I’d won an eBay auction would come with a chatty note, and the book would arrive with extra stuff—stickers, an extra chapbook, a handwritten poem. It was almost as though I had to begin corresponding with Lovecraftians. The Internet, where I mostly just lurked except for the occasional gnomic comment here and there, was one thing. Someone would fume, “Lovecraft was not a homosexual!” and I’d respond, “He should have given it a whirl—Panossian,” but would then ignore the flame war that followed. Pen and paper, though, really enthralled Lovecraft fandom. Lovecraft himself was a dedicated letter-writer, and so the zinesters and booksellers aped him. I never got around to making a ’zine of my own, but I wrote a bunch of one-page letters to people. That was my thing. Whether I had 250 words worth of content or 3000, I’d fit it on one page by shrinking the font, expanding the margins, or just printing my letter on an 11x14 piece of paper.
Lovecraftiana was something to engage in that for the most part did not involve women, which was another reason why I found it compelling. I liked women fine, I was straight, but I was poor and swarthy—a word that echoes, even here in this cold drawer in the morgue—and had a generally bad attitude, so no luck in the romance department. Sex was a rare and confusing way to end an evening only very occasionally.
Human beings have a lot of spare brainpower we don’t use. You might say we’re not allowed to use it. If we were, maybe we’d have fewer problems. Good-bye, cancer! Hello, moon colonies! Or maybe our minds would shatter. The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... like the old man said. Lovecraft has a way of filling a head, commandeering its surplus cognitive power. Colin Wilson even wrote a book about the phenomenon, The Mind Parasites. This was the thesis of many of my 3000-word broadsheets; I was obsessed with obsession.
I started writing just to show that I could. It’s not that hard, really. In any genre, there are virtuosos and there are hacks, and everyone who keeps submitting gets published eventually, by someone. In the world of Lovecraftian fiction, where reputation is the currency, there’s always some dipshit with a settlement check from tripping and falling in the supermarket burning a hole in his pocket, and what better way to spend it all than to start a small press?
So I wrote my book. I picked Salinger as a model because The Catcher in the Rye was short. I worked on it over a summer, and posted a chapter on my blog. Then I sent the link to various bulletin boards and websites run by some of Lovecraftiana’s stupidest and most reactionary nitwits. When the hate mail—Panossian is an effete faggot, Panossian is a pretentious poseur, Panossian is a fraud for appropriating Lovecraft without honoring his work, if Lovecraft were alive today he’d spit on Panossian—came rolling in, I saved it and posted that to my website as well.
After about three days, I got a note from the assistant editor at a small press who explained that he was leaving to become the top editor of his own even smaller press, and that he would like to see my complete manuscript. Two weeks later, I had a book deal, and a whopping two hundred and fifty dollar advance, plus the promise of five personal copies I could sell on eBay once the three hundred thirty-three hardcovers were all snapped up.
As it turns out, there is no such thing as bad publicity, as the book did sell out in a week, despite not even having been edited or published yet. Despite the f
act that I was a nobody. People were literally pre-ordering the book in order to burn it, and put the video of the fire on YouTube. I didn’t even bother dreading the post-publication reviews, since it wasn’t as though there were any more copies to sell.
When the book came out, there was a little burst of excitement in our corner of social media, a couple reviews, an invitation to the Summer Tentacular, and that was it. Except for the occasional blog essay, an abortive haiku cycle that topped out at three, and two short stories of fewer than 2000 words each, I’ve produced nothing. I did turn my novel into a cheap ebook on Kindle and that does generate some money. I wonder where it will go now.
Colleen asked, “What’s going to happen to him?”
Not a lot, I thought.
The police officer—I presume it was a police officer anyway; it was a new voice, male, with the sort of accent I associate with Italian-Americans from New England—let the question hang for a long moment. “We’ll contact his family. They’ll make the decisions.”
“Can I go back to the hotel now? Do you have any more questions for me?” Colleen asked. Then to herself she said, “I just want to go home.”
“You’re going back to the hotel.” There was steel in the cop’s voice now. “Nobody involved in your, uh, little literary conference is going anywhere right away.”
“But—”
“Murder,” the voice I decided was the medical examiner said. “Murder, mutilation, and...”
“And a hotel full of, you know. Satanists or something,” the cop said.
“We’re not Satanists,” Colleen said.
“You’re all persons of interest,” the medical examiner said.
“Interesting persons,” the cop said.
“You can’t keep us in the hotel forever,” Colleen said. “The reservations all run out on Sunday. People have jobs, families...”
“We’ll do our best to get questioning out of the way, but if we don’t want you or anyone else leaving town, you won’t be leaving town,” the cop said.
“Plenty of room in holding, upstairs,” the medical examiner said.
“Are you suspecting me of...doing this?” Did Colleen gesture toward me, point to my ruined face? Why was I still out on display? This wasn’t neat like on television, where the drawer slams shut and we cut to another scene of two detectives walking briskly down a hallway. “I barely even knew this guy!”
“Yeah, you were sharing a room. Do you often share hotel rooms with guys you barely even know?” said the cop.
“No.”
“So this was a special occasion?”
“I don’t feel comfortable answering these questions,” Colleen said. “Am I a suspect? I want a lawyer.”
Maybe the cop shrugged. There was a shrug-sized gap in the conversation. “You’re free to go for now. We’ll see you back at the hotel.”
“Aren’t you going to give me a ride back? I’m not from Providence. I barely even know where I am.”
Then the rollers under my tray carriage started moving. As I was pushed back into the drawer, the medical examiner muttered, as if he knew I could somehow hear him, “That makes two of us.” Then, finally, the door closed and the black got blacker.
What was the last thing I saw? Literally saw, I mean, not just sensed. I see black, a black that feels cold, but even this blackness is just my decaying mind trying to give me something to look at, since I spent forty years looking at things. The last thing I saw was...
A man. He was old, older than me anyway. White. A great wrinkled hand. There was something in it. Not the knife, but something. It had to have been somebody from the con—we had the run of the house, and thanks to whatever the opposite of political correctness is, all the hotel staff were Hispanic, except for the pretty young girls and sharp young men at check-in and the concierge desk.
Nobody would bother to attend the Summer Tentacular from the outside world just to kill me and cut my face off. I remember every stupid little thing I’ve done or said so clearly, except for the last three minutes of my life. Trauma, or my brain trying to protect me even as it runs out of air and electrochemical juice and dies?
Who was that, looming over me in the hallway? Why couldn’t I run? Who had blocked the doors? Who had held me down?
8. The Unnamable
Back at the hotel, dawn was breaking and Colleen was at liberty to move about freely. Police—detectives obvious from their bearing and suit jackets, and plenty of uniformed officers—prowled outside the dealers’ room, in the lobby, and even by the restrooms, interviewing various con attendees about what they might have seen or heard. Panels were cancelled, hastily relaunched somewhere else, and then cancelled again when police officers stationed themselves by the doors, notepads in hand. One man was led away in cuffs, shouting about his wrists and his rights, but he had just been selling pirate DVDs under a table holding pewter dragons and faux basalt Cthulhus.
Colleen had nobody to talk to.
She opened her phone and checked Twitter for the hashtag #sumtent—it was the usual mix of in-jokes, announcements, and pictures of smiling people in black t-shirts until about two hours prior, when all the activity stopped. With some semi-frantic thumb action, Colleen followed a number of the fans and writers who had followed her back when her avi was of her face, and then sent out some Direct Messages reading MEET ME AT INNSMOUTH.
Colleen took the stairs down to the hotel basement, and its pool. She stopped at the door, frozen for a long moment. A killer on the loose, a girl headed down to a pool alone. What slasher flick isn’t like this? A glance around the large room revealed nothing that could be immediately made into a weapon, but Colleen experienced a brainwave and grabbed a towel and a five-pound dumbbell being used as a doorstop, then wrapped the latter into the former. A few practice whirls over her head were enough to satisfy her. She set up a deck chair, pulled out her phone again, and waited to see who would figure out where “Innsmouth” was supposed to be.
The first person to arrive was someone she didn’t quite recognize at first. He was an older man, with a Santalike beard, and unlike many con attendees he dressed nicely, if inappropriately for the pool area, in a suitjacket, suspenders, and tie. When he spoke, Colleen recognized him—he was the Christian fellow who had been dressed as Cthulhu during the opening ceremonies.
“It’s tragic, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Colleen said. Then she pursed her lips and asked, “Is tragedy the right word? That makes it sound like a natural disaster.”
The man retrieved a deck chair and had a little trouble unfolding it. “To be perfectly honest, I was speaking of the disruption to the convention. I thought you were summoning people down here in order to launch a guerilla panel on ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth.’ It is my favorite of Lovecraft’s stories. I’m Ronald Ranger—are you familiar with my fanzine, Dreamlands?”
“Is that still...going? I saw some issues for sale in the dealers’ room, but they all seemed pretty...”
“Oh, I stopped publishing it years ago,” Ranger said, leaning back onto the deck chair and crossing his ankles. “But it is that for which I am most famous.” He threw out his hands, embracing the empty room and smiling. “And look at me now!”
“Did the police talk to you yet, Mr. Ranger?” Colleen asked.
Ranger snapped his head toward her. “Is that what this is about? Are you wearing a wire?”
Colleen put up her hands, and immediately regretted it. Her loaded towel was on the floor, just out of immediate reach. “Whoa, whoa, take it easy. They interviewed me; I had to identify Panossian’s body and everything.”
“Knew him well, did you?” Ranger said, without even a hint of a question.
“No, but we were sharing a room,” Colleen said. “Platonically.”
Ranger hmmphed and made to push himself up off the deck chair when Asparagus Head poked his head into the room and asked, “What’s going on?”
“Charles!” Ranger called out to him. Then he turned back to Colle
en, and said, “Have you met Charles yet? He’s an artist, an editor, a bookbinder and dealer in rare artifacts, and an incredible weird poet. Not incredibly weird poet mind you, but a poet of the weird.”
“Yeah, I get it,” Colleen said.
“This isn’t a bad location for the Innsmouth panel,” Charles said. “Especially given last year.”
Another pair of con-goers were loitering by the entrance to the pool area, and Ranger waved them in, his smile wide and gestures full of fellow-feeling. “Come in, come in! We will have the panel after all.”
“There’s an Innsmouth panel every year?” Colleen asked. “I’m afraid to ask how much there could possibly be to say about it, or what happened last year.”
“Oh, we had a heckler. Two, in fact,” Ranger said over his shoulder as he rolled his hands about, drawing people to pull up chairs around him.
“I was trying to show off my latest work—a set of chapbooks actually bound in dried, flattened squid—and I kept being interrupted by people making dumb jokes,” Charles said.
“And I was constantly interrupted by dumb intellectual commentary,” Ranger said.
“This will work out better without Bhanushali,” Charles said, smiling at Colleen. Somehow the skin on his face was so taut that when he smiled, the point of his asparagus-shaped head rose a centimeter or two. “She just needs to be on every panel, and when she’s on a panel, suddenly she’s in charge. She made a few of us uncomfortable as well. I love her to death, but she ain’t for everyone, ya know?” Charles was one of the few Tentacular members not from New England or at least the Northeast. Somewhere between Virginia and Tennessee, Colleen decided.
The room was filling up quickly, though Colleen didn’t recognize most of the people, not even from Twitter. Ranger was on his feet shaking hands and patting backs, like someone who had seen a large number of television shows about unctuous politicians. He made his way back to the entrance to the pool room and slid the doors shut. The crowd, about a dozen people, all white and mostly male, settled down instantly. Colleen stood up and Ranger nodded to her, and she nodded back.