by Nick Mamatas
Cob and Ginger J sat next to one another in the front row, and after an empty seat there was Hiram, his backpack now on his lap. Raul and Barry were two rows back; they had an empty seat between them, presumably for R.G. Norman sat across the aisle, surrounded by various black-clad minions. Colleen almost didn’t recognize Robert Goddard, who had finally changed out of his pirate outfit and wore a gray suit, with a bolo tie. R.G. marched to her seat, and squeezed between Barry’s knees and the back of Hiram’s chair to fit in. Colleen was worried for a moment; she could feel Armbruster’s gaze upon her. But Hiram caught her eye, smiled, and moved over, patting the seat next to him. She had no choice but to take it.
“Listen,” Hiram said, “I’m glad you came to this. I have something for you.” He unzipped the backpack on his lap and fished out one of the spiral-bound copies of his novel. “I want you to have this. It’s a complimentary copy. You don’t need to tweet about it or anything, but please, give it a read.” He pressed it against her chest with a force just short of a shove. Colleen took it, wary that resisting would just bring Armbruster down off the stage and start another conflict.
Ranger stood up and approached the mic stand near the easel. “I would like to begin with a moment of silence,” he said. Next to Colleen, Hiram muttered something to himself about the impossibility of beginning with a moment of silence if one begins with asking for a moment of silence.
After a pregnant pause, Ranger began. “Friends, our community has been grievously harmed this year. When we speak of horrors, we generally speak of the cosmic, of ancient beings stretching their tentacles across the inky blackness of space, of dead civilizations and cyclopean ruins, of witch-haunted New England. But we now are called upon to understand that sometimes evil is human, all too human.”
Hiram leaned over to whisper in Colleen’s ear, but Colleen turned to him and spoke before he could: “Nietzsche, yes I know.” He virtually flinched back into his own space.
“As the philosopher once said,” Ranger continued, “‘At the sight of a water fall we may opine that in the countless curves, spirations and dashes of the waves we behold freedom of the will and of the impulses. But everything is compulsory, everything can be mathematically calculated. Thus it is, too, with human acts. We would be able to calculate in advance every single action if we were all knowing, as well as every advance in knowledge, every delusion, every bad deed.’”
Ranger spoke seemingly extemporaneously. No notes, no smartphone, no gesticulations.
“‘The acting individual himself is held fast in the illusion of volition,’” he said, as though he was coining the sentence rather than reciting it. “‘If, on a sudden, the entire movement of the world stopped short, and an all-knowing and reasoning intelligence were there to take advantage of this pause, he could foretell the future of every being to the remotest ages and indicate the path that would be taken in the world’s further course.’”
Ranger let that sink in for only a moment, and then added, “But as we know from Lovecraft, we cannot correlate the contents of the universe. And this is a mercy, as our minds could not handle a complete understanding of the universe, and our place in it. So we are left with two poor options, you see. We can find ourselves terrified by the inexplicable attacks on our fellows, or we can face the utter mental annihilation that comes with complete understanding.”
Ranger peered down at Colleen as he intoned the final clause of that last sentence. She remembered his lengthy takedown of Panossian’s book, and stared back at him.
“Charles Cudmore was a friend of mine,” Ranger said. “He was struck down in the darkest part of the forest as he sought to understand more about H. P. Lovecraft and his world.” He finally tore his eyes from Colleen and instead looked over his shoulder at Bhanushali, who kept her hands on her lap and stared straight out into the audience.
“We may know who did it, but we may never know why. I don’t understand why Phantasia and Tracy—pardon me, Chloe—behaved the way that they did, but allow me to suggest that some people take our hobby and our community a little too far.”
Colleen murmured to Hiram, “You mean, like trying to dig up Lovecraft’s cat?” but it was Hiram’s turn to rebuff her. Instead, he just tapped the cover of the book on her lap.
Ranger’s speech took a strange turn into mainstream Christian sentiment. He brought up ISIS and immigration into the United States from Muslim-majority nations. Colleen could feel the crowd’s attention evaporate. Phones were slipped out, yawns ostentatiously proffered, a susurrus of conversation bubbled up throughout the large room.
Colleen opened Madness of the Death Sun. She’d read worse. Hell, considering Norman’s story at his ritual the night before, she’d read worse this weekend. There was an adjective for every noun, and the Last Goddess wished to “sup on sweet meats and pears stewed in honeywine under the velvet dome of the crepuscular sky,” but it was still skimmable, which Colleen did. Madness was a murder mystery of sorts—the Last God and the Last Goddess had concerned themselves with the murder of a satyr by a group of “rawboned freemen” on a tiny island named Mahkra—Arkham backward.
She began flipping through the book as quickly as she could without attracting undue attention. The story was only nine pages long; it was just repeated several times to bring the book up to a reasonable length. But that made no sense—Madness of the Death Sun had been published, for real, back in the 1980s, and Hiram was just hawking these homebrew copies because he couldn’t find a new publisher.
It was a message, for her. She skimmed it again, looking for typographical oddities, secret notes, hints in the margins. She glanced up at Hiram, but he was sitting, ramrod straight amidst a sea of slouchers, and seeming to play close attention to Ranger’s speech. “The nihilism of the Arab Muslim is distinct from Lovecraft’s cosmic pessimism,” Ranger said. “Lovecraft clung tightly to traditional values, to conservatism in politics, culture, and even architecture, because he had caught a glimpse of the writhing darkness that awaits us when we abandon...”
Colleen craned her neck back to murmur to R.G., “I just zoned out. Is this, like, some sort of racist speech?” R.G. glanced at her, and without even a twitch of the lips, returned her gaze to the stage.
Ranger launched into a eulogy of Cudmore, explaining his hardscrabble beginnings in South Carolina, his love of the films of John Carpenter, especially The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China, how warm and friendly he was and how the Lovecraftian community should be pleased with its own ability to open wide its tentacular arms to strangers and newcomers.
Hiram whispered in Colleen’s ear, “Let’s leave!”
“What?”
“Let’s go to my room and make love!” he said.
Colleen gasped, almost ready to roll up the book and smack him across the face with it.
“You don’t like it,” Hiram said, suddenly angry, “then why don’t you leave right now?”
He reached out and pushed her on the shoulder. “Go! Now!” He looked desperate, Colleen realized, not angry. And a little afraid.
“I believe that ultimate justice is in the hand of the Lord. But what of a Lovecraftian universe, a world with many gods, and many worshippers, but whose prayers always go unanswered?”
“What’s going on, Hiram? What’s with this book?” She gasped. “It’s a clue!”
“What if there was such a thing as Lovecraftian justice?” Ranger said, raising his hands high. “Oh, if only we could cast a deadly spell!”
“Okay, get her,” Raul said, and then hands were all over Colleen, pulling her limbs straight. Hiram fell to the floor next to her, crying.
15. The Evil Clergyman
It’s gone beyond a cliché—a couple centuries from now “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” will be some sort of turn of phrase utterly divorced from its origins. By then, the Internet will be so well-integrated into our homes and clothes and furniture that there will be no distinction between it and what we now call real life. You kno
w, the thing I had until two days ago. And in a few hundred years, there probably won’t be dogs anymore. No birds flying under the ash-gray skies, no fish in the scalding seas, nothing but men and maggots and machines, and precious few of those first two categories left.
That’s one of the attractions of Lovecraftiana. The future is written, the present disregarded, and the past…oh, the past. We all wanted to live there, back when a story in a pulp magazine paid five cents a word, and Manhattan landlords were charging twenty-five bucks a month to rent an apartment. Today, a studio apartment in Manhattan costs a thousand times that much—and good luck finding a vacancy at any price—and pulp magazines still pay five cents a word. We don’t even rate garrets anymore. Everyone in Lovecraftiana was either born rich or has a day job they never ever discuss.
The past is omnipresent, pun intended. The same old ’zines from the heyday of the 1970s are sold and resold, century-old stories are pored over anew with every generation of essayists and bloggers, the men dress in overcoats and the women corsets. Pronounced cor-say, naturally. When I put the word “fuck” in my book, just as Salinger did, I literally got nasty letters from people complaining about “foul language” just as Salinger did. Even my third stalker, who constantly used curse words in his anonymous missives, complained: Hey Panossian you think you’re a tough guy for putting the f-word in your POS (pece of shit!) novel? Mama showd wash your mouth of with soap. I’ll do it soon if she doesnt.
If I flatter myself, I never really fit in with the Lovecraftians because I was interested in the present more than either a sepia-toned past or an apocalyptic future. A handful of us could do things like watch sitcoms on TV, or name who won the previous World Series, or read a Jonathan Franzen novel without throwing it aside after ten pages because none of the architecture the characters (actual characters!) inhabited was described as cyclopean.
If I don’t flatter myself, I never really fit in with the Lovecraftians because I could fill my plate at a buffet without anxiously narrating aloud to whomever was in earshot about all my selections. “Ooh, pork loin! But those sausages and peppers will make me gassy. Is that kale? Ugh, what am I, a bunny?” Quite an achievement, being able to keep one’s mouth shut.
When I spoke up, it was by design and toward a particular end, and honestly, my end was most often to rile the clueless. In one subject or another, everyone is clueless. The difference is that in the nerd milieu, being quiet or, God forbid, saying “I don’t know,” is virtually impossible for most people to manage.
Ronald Ranger was always well known for holding court on all sorts of topics: Lovecraft, Christianity, Bollywood musicals, physical fitness (he was a bodybuilder in his younger days), and why Panossian is a terrible writer. Even now, getting colder in this box, with my muscles unwinding and my organs wilting, I have a reflex to say, “Nice guy, but…” But really, I have no idea one way or another. Every interaction I ever had with him ended with me escaping into a fantasy of pulling out a gun, swallowing the barrel, and pulling the trigger. Other people seemed to like him though.
Or maybe they just wanted good reviews.
At Yuggoth Days in Vermont two years ago, he gave a long speech about the role of Christianity in Lovecraft’s fiction, which was impressive in that Lovecraft barely bothered with Christianity in fiction. Imagine a three-hour talk on the role of the soup spoon in the film The Matrix. There’s a couple in there, and one is even memorable, but…
Anyway, his thesis was that as an Anglophile who was also influenced by the Gothic, which in turn had an abject relationship with Roman Catholicism, Lovecraft found Christianity to be useless as a weapon against the Elder Gods and thus left it out of his stories for the most part because he, Lovecraft, could not decide which Christian sect was actually correct. Ranger then went through a variety of Protestantisms—the Anglican and Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Northern Baptist, Methodist—and Catholicism as well, describing what he imagined Lovecraft would think about every sect, in what he imagined Lovecraft’s voice was. (A reedy mid-Atlantic accent, which was probably close to right.)
Finally, Ranger declared that thankfully, despite Lovecraft’s interest in the Arab world, he never took Islam seriously. “Could you imagine a narrative universe in which your local al-Qaeda cell worshipped, or worse, contested against the Great Old Ones? It would be the pulp equivalent of Nazi propaganda!”
“Hitler,” I said, using the same reedy voice. I stood up. “There is a great and pressing need behind every one of the major planks of Hitlerism!” Ranger glared at me as I recited Lovecraft’s view on Hitler, from his 1936 letter to Donald Wandrei.
And then came the applause. It was just a scattering, but we were both unnerved. Ranger thought I’d turned the crowd against him. I thought that the Nazis in the audience had just revealed themselves. The applause was too sudden, its rhythm too quick. I decided to finish anyway. “The major planks of Hitlerism–racial-cultural continuity, conservative cultural ideals, and an escape from the absurdities of Versailles. The crazy thing is not what Adolf wants, but the way he sees it and starts out to get it. I know he’s a clown, but by God, I like the boy!”
There were, I was sure of it, two sets of applause. The excited burst from the fascists, and a second, larger but less passionate counter-clapping from a few others who got what I was trying to do.
“Also, you left out all of Eastern Christianity, which has a very different view of sin than everyone in the West.” Then I sat down to silence.
I was seated in the second row, and it is introvert tradition that nobody ever sits in the first row, so I couldn’t see who had clapped for me, and who had clapped for Adolf Hitler finally getting his due. Of course, most people kept their hands on their laps. Ranger was pretty important in Lovecraftian fandom, after all, since he had access to a photocopy machine and made his little ‘zine, Dreamlands, with it sometimes.
Ranger sneered at me for a long moment, then made the usual excuses. On his deathbed, Lovecraft recanted his affection for conservatism, and at any rate al-Qaeda is a very different kettle of fish than the Nazis. I opened my mouth and he literally held out his palm to stop me from speaking. “You have had your turn,” he said. He then decided to add an asterisk to his discussion of Catholicism to include all “theatrical, liturgical Christianity.”
“Do you mean,” Barry said, “that the Gothic in literature was a way for Protestants to deal with Greek and Russian Orthodoxy in the West, because that…makes no sense.”
I clapped, three times, in my lap, then stopped when nobody joined me.
Ranger bellowed, “No, I did not mean that!” and then asked the audience if anyone had any sensible questions.
Then fucking Cudmore raised his hand. “Say Roger, I just wanted to tell you that I saw a work print of Charles Band’s adaptation of The Evil Clergyman and it’s a real hoot,” he said before he even finished standing up. “He made it in the 1980s, but the distributor went bankrupt, but my friend Dennis, an editor who worked on several important movies, had a little party and I got to meet Charles and his brother Richard. He’s a great composer. The bit where Jeffrey Combs hangs himself is on YouTube. It’s pretty intense.”
“That is not even a question!” I said. That got a few laughs.
“Yeah, your little Hitler speech wasn’t a question either, was it?” Cudmore told me.
“I was making a point.”
“So was I,” Cudmore.
“Yeah, what was it?” I said.
“The point is that people don’t want to hear obnoxious political garbage, P,” Cudmore said. A smattering of applause followed. “We’re here to talk about we enjoy. En-joy. And want to make professional contacts, not just try to win Best Knee-Jerk Liberal of the year, Two Thousand n’ Twelve.”
And then there was a lot of clapping, and even a single “Hear, hear!” Even Barry applauded.
I was thinking of a comeback, I almost had one formulated, then Ranger said, “All right, it’s 2 p.m. We’re already over time.
Next up is an interpretation of the music of Erich Zann on the theremin by Tracy McKendrick. So, do stick around for that unless you have a better offer.” He walked immediately to the door and left the conference room, instead of hanging around to chat in the interstitial period between events. Ranger was fucking pissed.
That evening, the first of several reviews of my book appeared online. He started with Amazon.com, then did an extended review in his own ’zine, and also mentioned the book in a Buzzkill.lit listicle on bad Lovecraftian fiction, twice: #4, Worst Attempt at Multi-Author Pastiche in Lovecraftian History and #16, Worst Value on a Per-Page Basis, Limited Edition.
Funny thing is, he didn’t seem to have read it.
They say that Lovecraft’s racism was simply because Lovecraft was “a product of his times.” It’s a weak apology for Lovecraft, and self-damnation for Lovecraftians. The problem with Lovecraft’s admiration for Hitler is that bad people like me keep bringing it up.
Kept.
The problem with Lovecraft’s admiration for Hitler is that bad people like me kept bringing it up. That was the locus of the controversy over Lovecraft’s racial views. You could agree with Lovecraft, be an actual racist and admirer of Hitler, and float along on the fringes of the subculture for decades. Make a repeated stink about it, and you end up on a slab.
I mean, that seems to be one reason why someone might have wanted to kill me.
It might be a case of attempted ratiocination in the absence of sensory input, or it might just be that my brain is finally starved out and is disintegrating, but I just cannot figure out what happened. I don’t recall my death, and I don’t understand why I was targeted. Did Cudmore, the author or at least the manufacturer of Arkham, actually like me, or did he literally go through the trouble of skinning himself and sending me a book just to lure me into a fatal trap?