I am Providence

by Nick Mamatas

  The cops think it was Phantasia who did me and Chloe who did Cudmore. They could have been working in tandem, but without anyone else. Phantasia has a bad hip; the whole cloak thing is to cover up his limp. He is also the most conspicuous person in any room he is in thanks to the make-up and the cape—I’m reminded of that book that was so famous twenty years ago, in which some baddies within the Vatican send a seven-foot-tall albino spy off to commit some fairly public murders.

  Who was that big shadow? Norman is pretty big, but I suspect I would have smelled him coming. Sweaty feet wrapped in an old sweater. If you’ve ever been to a “gaming store,” you know the scent I mean.

  Could Norman be a murderer? Absolutely, but I always imagined that if he ever killed someone, it would be a woman. Norman had had a girlfriend once, in college. To hear him tell it, it was a chocolate-and-roses relationship. He held open doors. He honored her by sleeping on the floor while she tossed and turned in bed. Norman was a real Galahad, kissing hands and attempting to write poems about his love’s “apple-tinted cheeks.” I don’t know what that means either, but the first draft included had the typo “apple tinned-cheeks.”

  Norman also paid for what he called “multiple dinners” and I wasn’t above saying, “Yeah, but what did she eat that night?”

  Ultimately, though, Sarah was a “bitch” who left him to marry “some rich fag—literally” who was in the closet in order to maintain access to his trust fund. It was all very old-fashioned, like something out of an undistinguished novel from the 1930s, except for the Internet. Norman still loved Sarah, and they were friends on social media. He basically treated Sarah the way Tracy treated me. Always “liking” or “faving” something, entering every conversation she had in Uncle Dad mode: “You know, Sarah, Pennsylvania’s gun laws are even more free than Florida’s; Pennsylvania even allows for open carry outside of the nanny city-state of Philadelphia. You need to get out more!” And “If you haven’t read the original Thanos Quest, and don’t know who the Elders of the Universe are, you really can’t expect to be taken seriously when you discuss the Collector scenes in Iron Man 3 and Guardians of the Galaxy.” Thanks to the peculiarities of Facebook, I got to see virtually every TED Talk-length lecture he offered Sarah, without even being friends with her.

  He’s had other girls since then, but he never met any of them. They were all online-only relationships, all based around having met on some bulletin board or IRC channel. His girlfriend of the moment, and there had been five or six of them, were all involved in the occult and throwing horror conventions—movies and junk, not Lovecraft. In the same way some women are attracted to serial killers who are safely behind bars, these girls were all into Norman so long as there was a continent between them and plenty of opportunity for online drama.

  One of them, her name was Drusilla VanShreck (I suspect a pseudonym!), tried to read Catcher and didn’t like it. She wrote a long blog post about how it was unfair to expect that horror fans might be familiar with Salinger’s work, as it’s “literary” and thus not “in the mainstream” of fiction. I didn’t even bother responding to the review; it’s a bad idea in general, and nobody that stupid can be reasoned with. R.G. swooped it, and even Bhanushali did, to explain that Salinger is a very popular author, or at least very widely read thanks to classroom adoptions. She wasn’t having any of it, and suddenly she was the victim of Lovecraft fandom’s own “Mean Girls,” as she put it, so of course Norman had to waddle in to defend her and explain once again that Bhanushali was just an “Affirmative Action scholar” who was only taken seriously because people were so upset by Lovecraft’s racism that they needed an “Indian lady” as “the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.” Yes, Mary Poppins.

  He then wrote his own blog post, friends-only, forgetting that I was among them, in which he wrote a long, ridiculous fantasy about cornering Bhanushali in an elevator at a convention, and pissing on her sari.

  It all sounds so stupid and petty when I summarize it, but this little tempest in a teaspoon consumed a summer of my life.

  The storm of blogging, tweets, Facebook status updates, and even quickly dashed-off and mailed paper ’zines ended with Norman going out to see VanShreck in Arizona to claim his woman, only to be left stranded at the bus station after a four-day journey when she refused to leave her house to come get him, and refused to give him an address so he could call a cab. Drusilla just wasn’t ready to consummate her liaison of ultimate darkness.

  After that, Norman really went bonkers. He’s never been married, never came close to having a kid, but he started supporting men’s rights, even going so far as to picket a courthouse in his hometown to protest alimony and bias in custody. He got himself on the news and stammered through ten seconds of talking points. He put up a YouTube video in which he burned an all-woman anthology of Lovecraftian fiction, The Thousand Young, and followed it up with an article in which he claimed that Lovecraft’s own work belonged to the “meninist canon” because he did the right thing by all but eliminating women from it. As a reward, Armbruster put him on the annual women’s panel at the Summer Tentacular for three years running. He was thrown out of a horror convention once for standing by the elevators with his arms crossed, glaring at every women who entered or left a lift, and muttering either “fertile” or “dead end.”

  So yes, Norman could definitely kill someone. But I don’t think it would be me.

  Barry Hagman is pretty large, but we’re friendly.

  There’s Cob. Like Phantasia, he’s into the goth thing—or maybe he’s just a New Yorker. He dresses all in black, wears big boots, and he walks with the sort of easy confidence that athletes do. Good posture, rolling shoulders. Rumor has it that he played football in college, and the fact that college sports is grist for the rumor mill should tell you a lot about Lovecraftiana’s relationship to sports and physical culture. Lovecraft’s own gauntness and habit of splurging on ice cream after weeks of eating moldy bread and beans from rusty tin cans is virtually aspirational for this crowd.

  Cob and I, I thought, always had a relationship based on mutual respect. We never had very much to say one another, but I loved his books and he liked my own little novel, I think. He didn’t tell me that he disliked it, anyway. Cob was the sort that if he were a little more together, socially, he could have been a tenured professor and public intellectual. Instead, he wrote strange fiction at right angles to traditional Lovecraftiana and practiced any number of affectations—a kooky mid-Atlantic accent, aikido-style forward rolls down hallways “to keep in practice,” drinking nothing but the Taylor cream sherry he always carried with him, wearing a big woolen coat and pince-nez glasses everywhere, and his theme parties.

  The longest talk we ever had was three years ago, after I pegged the story his party was based on—“Pickman’s Model.” It’s an odd story with a pretty neat premise; Pickman, an artist, is painting all sorts of monstrosities in his little studio. As it turns out, he’s painting the creatures depicted from life. As a climax goes, it’s a bit of an eye-roll; the achievement of the story to my mind was this almost conversational horror from the middle pages:

  Listen- can you fancy a squatting circle of nameless dog-like things in a churchyard teaching a small child how to feed like themselves? The price of a changeling, I suppose- you know the old myth about how the weird people leave their spawn in cradles in exchange for the human babes they steal. Pickman was showing what happens to those stolen babes- how they grow up...

  That’s pretty freakish! Lovecraft rarely got so sentimental as to involve children in his stories in any way, and this minute reference is powerful because of it.

  Cob’s party that year was a big deal because he offered real food, instead of just snacks. Specifically, raw beef and chicken, to be prepared yakiniku-style on a series of grills he had set up around the suite. Where Cob got the money for this sort of thing, I still don’t know, but scuttlebutt was family money.

  I first noticed that the smokeless gr
ills weren’t set up on the suite’s coffee tables, but had been placed atop planks of wood directly on the carpeting. He didn’t bother laying down a tarp, so the party quickly became a bit of a mess, with slimy strips of chicken everywhere. The few con-goers who were adept at using chopsticks helped the clueless use the grills, but for the most part even cooking was a struggle. Hot beef melted against the grills, a few geniuses tried to use their fingers to retrieve their dinner and yelped in pain and embarrassment, and not a lot of meat was making it to anyone’s mouths.

  At first I thought Shoggoths, those “shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light” that, in Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” took to “crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.”

  Fucking penguins, man. Anyway, while a bunch of mostly dudes mostly in black clumsily hunching over hot plates and struggling to eat was somewhat reminiscent of shoggoths, ultimately the shoggoths were clean. What was before them, they crushed and absorbed into themselves. The party-goers mostly just spilled things on their shirts. The ones who managed to get some meat into their gullets ate like wolves. From there, it was easy. Any wolves in a Lovecraft story? Probably but…maybe dogs?

  Then that chilling line about dog-faced monsters raising feral children and training them how to eat in a churchyard came to my mind. The presumption is that the doglike creatures are ghouls, teaching the kidnapped children how to eat corpses. The implied connection between the charnel house ghoul and the otherworldly fae is the most compelling thing about “Pickman’s Model,” and that’s what I told Cob when I finally got to him. I was fifth in line, and the other guesses were pretty far off.

  “Not bad, toots,” he said. “You win.”

  “All the raw beef I can consume?”

  “That as well,” he said. He didn’t smile. He almost never smiled, except at his own jokes, or his own private thoughts, but responding to a joke with a joke was as good as it got with Cob. “You win this.”

  He leaned down—another big guy, another possible identity for the great shadow in the laundry room—and whispered my prize. Cob knew someone in Hollywood, which was strange to hear given that his own fiction was relentlessly nineteenth-century. It read like Kafka, but translated via Google. The Hollywood man was looking to put together an anthology TV show along the lines of The Twilight Zone and Tales from the Dark Side, and was actively soliciting published short stories to adapt.

  I had three or four stories, maybe, that I could polish up and get published in some little fanzine or glorified Blogspot or other, and then forward on to the producer, who might take it, and who might actually be a real producer and not just someone with a business card and a Burbank-area post office box. A thin reed, but all I did to get the break was correlate the contents of Cob’s mind.

  I guessed something else too—he had different prizes for different people. “So,” I asked him as the party wrapped up, “what would the reward have been if a poet had won, or if just some normal fan had won?” I was raised to be a good boy, so I had snatched up a Hefty bag and was shoveling paper plates and half-filled Solo cups of soda and Two-Buck Chuck into it while Cob leaned against the kitchen counter. A couple of other people had also decided to stick around and help pick up.

  Cob…didn’t smile. “What’s a normal fan?” he asked. Then he waved a hand, swatting at his own inferior rejoinder like it was a bothersome fly. “You’re right. I thought one of your broadsheets, stripped of all the interpersonal discussions, might make for a decent episode of a television program. There may well be no program, but perhaps my friend will option it for several hundred dollars, which is money you don’t have now, isn’t it?”

  It was a dig, but Cob wasn’t perfect. He spoke too loudly, and the other afterparty helpers dropped what they were doing and demanded to know what Cob was talking about. What TV program, what was his friend’s name, why couldn’t they submit their work?

  “I don’t even know your names,” Cob told them, and out came the name badges. One woman, her name was Alyssa something-or-other, even started pitching her idea to Cob. It was about aliens with a cosmic message of the oneness of all religions coming down to Earth on silvery cloud-shaped starships. They had been watching us all along from these “false clouds,” waiting to see if we could prove ourselves as a species, which we did after 9/11.

  “And then the twist is that 9/11 proved us to be an incorrigibly violent species, right, and the cosmic assistance program of the aliens looks just like the Book of Revelation. Did I guess that right too?” I said. Alyssa sneered at me, and Cob mouthed the words “Thank you” at me, over her head.

  When we were alone, Cob made me drink some of his cream sherry and told me that I had a strange knack for guessing what other people were thinking. “That’s why I won’t insult you by telling you which of your missives I thought would be perfect for my friend. You know exactly the one I loved most of all.”

  I looked up into his eyes, which is something I rarely do as eye contact is unnerving to me, and I realized that I had no idea which of my broadsheets he meant. I was desperate to ask him, desperate to trick him into telling me, but he gave me nothing, except for this:

  “Panossian, it’s important that someone like you is involved in this ‘community.’” He didn’t twitch his fingers to put quotes around community, but instead just made a single stroke mark with his right pinkie finger. “You’ll shake things up. You’ll be a good chum to some, and simply chum to others. Many writers find a tiny success with the most minute of audiences and then spend most of their creative energies justifying their failure to reach a general readership. Except for Raul, that tall skinny fellow you know, nobody at the Tentacular even has a literary agent. When I find a Lovecraftian novel on the shelves in a bookstore, I want to take a photo and send it to The Society for the Preservation of the Passenger Pigeon, just to give them something to do.

  “Don’t think of this as career advice; I have nothing of that sort to offer. It’s simply an observation: anything involving literature, especially Lovecraftian literature, is darker than you think. Lovecraft’s own fiction was essentially an extended suicide note. Be careful what you decide to write, Panossian.”

  “Well, Cob,” I said. “You’re extremely creepy.”

  “Stay out of my head,” he said. “I’d recommend spending as much time staying out of your own as you can manage without causing your autonomic nervous system to shut down.”

  “Is that advice won from experience?” I asked.

  “From...observation,” Cob said.

  I can’t say I took his advice, or even understood it. The TV thing evaporated as well. I sent the story I thought Cob meant to the email, got an excited response and a promise that it would be read in two weeks, and then after two months of one-sided follow-up emails from me, I shoved the hope out of my mind, willing myself to stop daydreaming about a four-digit check or my name on the credits roll of a TV show just as the local news shoves it to the side. As it turns out, the show never came to fruition, so at least I got to live as a citizen of the republic of disappointment along with the producer and everyone else who had been a part of the abortive project. Better that than being lord of the kingdom of jealousy had the show actually made it on air without me.

  Cob’s advice to spend as much time as possible outside of my head was lost on me, clearly. Even now, trapped in my head and ruminating, I get a little charge out of being defiant. No, I’ll stay in my head!

  It is not so much that I think Cob had a reason to kill and mutilate me as it is that I wouldn’t put any behavior past him. Not murder, not suicide, not traveling off to Tanzania to found a Mennonite orphanage, not joining al-Qaeda. Though I had some superficial insight into his mind when he laid it all out in front of me at his parties, he was still frustratingly enigmatic. After our first encou
nter, he basically stayed away from me. We exchanged increasingly subtle nods as we passed in the hallway. If we found ourselves at a table together, we sat at opposite ends and independently held simultaneous, parallel courts.

  There’s a video online of an isopod among sharks. It begins with a shark swimming across the bottom of the screen. Then, thrashing into view is a hideous agglomeration of flesh—an isopod attached to the face of another shark, the shark’s tail whipping about and struggling for freedom. The first shark simply floats off in the corner. That was me and Cob. Two sharks, ignoring one another. I guess I’m the second shark now.

  One time, at yet another Lovecraftian event, I saw him drinking a beer. Not his sherry, not some weird concoction, a beer. He was hiding too, in a little picnic area behind the motel we were all staying in. He saw me and smirked and either dropped his fake FM Radio Announcer Voice or adopted for the first time an old-fashioned Brooklynese accent. “Whut?” he said. “I needit.” He held out a hand and shook it, mimicking the DTs.

  “Go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.”

  “That shit doesn’t work,” he said, sounding nothing like himself. Not the Cob I knew at all. It was unnerving, like finding your father lounging around the house in a little pink negligee when you make the mistake of coming home from school twenty minutes early.

  “It doesn’t have to work. You just have to go, if you really need booze to get through one of these weekends. Your mind will start working, it’ll solve the problem for you, if you admit to having a problem in a way that you can’t deny. That’s the power of ritual. Take part in a ritual and your brain will start working to make it reflective of reality,” I told him. It was just some bullshit designed to flatter and placate the old Cob. The one who never drank beer, and who didn’t sound like Ralph Kramden.