Letters to Lovecraft

by Jesse Bullington

  At last we come to Molly Tanzer’s “Food from the Clouds,” which takes its inspiration from Lovecraft’s opining that “much of the choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast.” Taking this as an open invitation to spread a wider net, Tanzer goes on to provide a quote that sounds like it was lifted directly off of a tombstone in Arkham Cemetery but actually has a far humbler pedigree. After this preamble, we are rocketed not into a hazy past or a shimmering parallel dimension, but straight ahead into a dismal future London where society has cycled back around, rather than progressing forever forward. The easy tone and warm demeanor of her narrator coaxes us into peering down rabbit holes we should have left well enough alone, and, before the end, everyone will learn a hard lesson on the perils of poaching…

  Which, really, is what we’re all doing here — jumping the fence at that point in the hedge where the oak tree of Public Domain crashed down, clearing the way for amateurs and professionals alike to run riot in Lovecraft’s private estate. Some are here to take aim at something very specific, others just want to stuff their game bags with everything they can catch, and for others still it’s all about wandering around, taking one’s time and admiring the old growth, seeing what pops out of the underbrush. Nowadays Lovecraft’s Mythos has the character of carefully landscaped, manicured grounds that have been given totally back to nature and allowed to grow wild, with invasive species choking out certain strains that once dominated the terrain, old earth made fertile again by the clawing of hungry animals and curious hands, the borders of the original territory long overgrown with foreign flowers and toxic vines, until there is no telling how far one might travel and still find both feet planted in the nigh-boundless garden he left for us…

  So to speak.

  Love or loathe Lovecraft, one cannot ignore him — he simply looms too large over the landscape of modern horror. Regardless of your opinion of his fiction, I encourage you to pick up a copy of “Supernatural Horror in Literature” and engage with him at his most scholarly. That’s what the authors assembled here have done, continuing the conversation with a man who loved his letters every bit as much as his fictions.

  Lovecraft cautioned us not to expect “startling mutations” in the evolution of literary horror. I leave it up to you, dear reader, to determine from the following stories just how accurate this prophecy has proven. I will leave you with this parting rumination from his essay’s conclusion, for like so many sentiments on the subject, none could voice it better than Lovecraft himself:

  “Whatever universal masterpiece of tomorrow may be wrought from phantasm or terror will owe its acceptance rather to a supreme workmanship than to a sympathetic theme. Yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx.”

  Jesse Bullington

  March 13, 2014

  Past Reno

  Brian Evenson

  “Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure…it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore… [U]ncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities.”

  What I like about this particular Lovecraft quotation is the emphasis it places on uncertainty and the unknown, which for me is what I like most about his work: the way nothing really happens in “At the Mountains of Madness,” for instance, but he still manages to build up a genuine and haunting dread. The story below began with that, and with my memory of a trip my wife and I took through Nevada where small, strange things kept happening, things that didn’t really add up to much and that, for the most part, didn’t bother her, but slowly began to accumulate for me, making me feel like the world was off a little bit, a nagging in the back of my mind making me feel I’d entered into a Nevada that wasn’t on any sort of map. Living in Providence, Lovecraft’s town, where people generally seem to drive as if they’d just taken a painkiller and a shot of whiskey and where, even after ten years, I still find it all too easy to get lost, I’ve come to feel that some places are, for a lack of a better term, weird. This story tries to capture the particular and peculiar weirdness of the West.

  I.

  Bernt began to suspect the trip would turn strange when, on the outskirts of Reno, he entered a convenience store that had one of its six aisles completely dedicated to jerky. At the top were smoked-meat products he recognized, name brands he’d seen commercials for. In the middle was stuff that seemed local, with single-color printing, but still vacuum packed and carefully labeled. Along the bottom row, though, were chunks of dried and smoked meat in dirty plastic bags, held shut with twist ties, no labels on them at all. He wasn’t even certain what kind of meat they contained. He prodded one of the bags with the toe of his sneaker and then stared at it for a while. When he realized that the clerk was staring at him, he shook his head and went out.

  I should have known then, he thought hours later. At that point he should have turned around and driven the half mile back into Reno and gone no further. But, he told himself, it was just one convenience store. And it wasn’t, he tried to convince himself, really even that strange. It just meant people in Reno liked jerky. So, instead, he shook his head and kept driving.

  It was the first time he’d left California in a decade. His father had died, and he’d been informed of it too late to attend the funeral, but he was driving to Utah anyway, planning to be there for the settling of the estate, whatever was left of it. He was on his own. His girlfriend had intended to come along and then, at the last moment, came down sick. What it was neither of them were quite sure, but she couldn’t stand without getting dizzy. To get to the bathroom to vomit, she had to crawl. The illness had lasted three or four hours and then, just as suddenly as it had come, it was gone. But she had refused to get in the car after that. What if it came back? If it had been bad while she was motionless, she reasoned, how much worse would it be if she was driving? He had to admit she had a point.

  “Do you even need to be there?” she had asked him. “Won’t they send you your share wherever you are?”

  Technically, yes, that was true, but he didn’t trust his extended family. If he didn’t go, they’d find a way to keep him from what he deserved.

  She shook her head tiredly. “And what exactly do you deserve?” she asked. Which was, he had to admit, a good question. “And didn’t your father tell you never to come back?”

  He nodded. His father had. “But he doesn’t have any say,” he said. “He’s dead now.”

  But in any case she had not come with him. And maybe, he thought now as he drove, his girlfriend’s illness — miles before Reno — was the first indication the trip would turn strange. But how could he have known? And now, well past Reno, already having gone so far, how could he bring himself to turn around?

  ♦

  Back at the beginning, just past Reno, he drove, watching Highway 80 flirt with the Truckee River, draw close to it and then pull away again. Then he hit the scattering of houses called Fernley, and the river vanished too. For miles there was almost nothing there, just a ranch or two and bare dry ground. He watched a sagging barbed-wire fence skitter along the roadside, then, when that was gone, counted time by watching the metal markers that popped up every tenth of a mile. After a while those disappeared, too, leaving only the faded green mile markers, numbers etched in white on them. He watched them come, his mind drifting in between them, and watched them go.

  He thought of his father as he had been when Bernt was young: a man who wouldn’t leave the house without ironing a crease in his jeans. His boots he made certain were brought to a high polish before he left, even if he was just going to the back acres, even if he knew they’d be dirty or dusty the moment he stepped off the porch. That was how he was. Bernt hated it. Hated him.

  He
remembered his father lashing a pig’s hind legs together and running the rope over the pulley wheel screwed under the hayloft floor and winding the rope onto the hand crank. His father had made him take the crank and said, “You pull the bastard up and hold it and don’t pay no mind to how it struggles. I’ll get the throat slit, and then that’ll be the worst of it done. Your job’s nothing. You just keep hold to it until the fucker bleeds out.” Bernt had just nodded. His father said pull, and he had started cranking. There went the pig up, squealing and spinning and flailing. His father stood there beside it, motionless, knife out with his thumb just edged over the guard and touching the side of the blade, just waiting. And then, with one quick flick of his arm, he opened its throat from ear to ear. The pig still struggled, the blood gouting from the wound and thickening the dust. Bernt couldn’t understand how his father didn’t get blood on his boots or his pants, but he just didn’t.

  It was always that way, every time he killed something. Never a drop of blood on him. Uncanny almost, it seemed to Bernt, and he had spent more than one sleepless night as a teenager wondering how that could be, why blood would shy from his father. The only possibilities he could come up with seemed so outlandish that he preferred to believe it was just luck.

  ♦

  He shuddered. He watched the mile markers again — or tried to, but they simply weren’t there anymore. For a moment he thought he might have left the highway somehow, by accident. But no, he couldn’t see how he could have, and whatever road he was on had every appearance of a highway. Then he flicked past a sheared-off metal stub on the roadside and wondered if that wasn’t what had once been a marker, if someone had been systematically cutting them down. Bored kids, probably, with nothing to do.

  He gauged the sun in the sky. It seemed just as high as it had been an hour before, not yet starting its descent. He checked the gas: between half and a quarter tank. He kept driving, wondering if he had enough gas to get to the next station. Sure he did. How far could it possibly be?

  He opened the glove box to take out the map and have a look, but the map wasn’t there. Maybe he had had it out and it had slipped under the seat, but, if it had, it was deep enough under that he couldn’t find it, at least not while driving. No, he told himself, there would be a gas station soon. There had to be. He couldn’t be that far off of Elko. It was less than three hundred miles from Reno to Elko, and he’d filled up in Reno. And Winnemucca was somewhere in between the two. Had he passed that already without realizing it?

  He had enough gas, he knew he had enough. He shouldn’t let his mind play tricks on him.

  ♦

  His father had told him that if he was going to leave he should never come back.

  Fine, Bernt had said. Wasn’t planning to come back anyway.

  And then he had left.

  Or wait, not that exactly. It had been so many years ago now that it was easier to think that that was how it had ended, but it hadn’t been quite so simple. He hadn’t said Fine. He hadn’t said Wasn’t planning to come back anyway. What he had said: “Why in hell would I want to come back?”

  His father had smiled. “Thought you’d never ask,” he said. “Come along,” he said, and made for the door, waving to Bernt to follow him.

  ♦

  Perhaps an hour later — maybe more, maybe less, it was hard for him to judge time driving alone — he called his girlfriend to tell her that she had been right, that he shouldn’t have come after all. He was hoping that maybe she would talk him into turning around, inheritance be damned.

  But she didn’t answer. Or no, not that exactly: the call didn’t go through. It seemed like it was going through — he dialed the number, he heard it ring a few times, and then the call disconnected. His phone had no reception.

  Well, what’s strange about that? a part of him wondered. He was out in the middle of nowhere: of course service was bound to be bad. He’d have to wait until he was near a town, and then he’d try her again.

  All that sounded right, rational, correct. And yet another part of him couldn’t help but worry that something was wrong.

  ♦

  The radio, too, faded in and out, the same station one moment seeming quite strong and the next little more than static, and then quite strong again. Not strange, a part of him again insisted. Must be the mountains, he told himself, the signal bouncing around in them. He told himself this even though it seemed to happen just as regularly when he was in open country as when he was skirting a mountain or when one had just hove into view.

  There were moments, too, when there was nothing but static. When he turned the knob slowly but found nothing. When he could press the search button, and his tuner would go through the whole band from beginning to end without finding anything to settle on, and would start over again, and then again, and again, and again. It might go on for five minutes or even ten, and then suddenly it would stop on a frequency that, to him, still seemed to be nothing but static, but it stayed there. After a while he became convinced that there must be something beneath the static, a strange whispering, that surely would slowly resolve itself into voices. Though it never did, only stayed static.

  ♦

  He checked his gas gauge. It read between a half and a quarter tank. Hadn’t it read that before? He tapped on it with his finger, softly at first and then harder and harder, but the reading didn’t change.

  When he came to Winnemucca, he would stop for gas, just in case the gauge was broken. He probably didn’t need gas to make it to Elko, but he would stop anyway. He tapped the gauge again. Had he already passed Winnemucca? He felt like he should have, but surely he would have noticed?

  ♦

  He watched his father check the crease of his trouser leg. He watched him stop on the porch and raise first one boot and then the other to the rail, quickly buffing them with the yellow-orange cloth draped there, and then he stepped off and went down the path leading out to the road.

  Bernt followed.

  “This here is all mine,” his father was saying, gesturing around him. “This, all of this, belongs to me.”

  But of course Bernt knew this. His father had been saying shit like that ever since Bernt was a child. It was not news to him. When his father turned to see how Bernt was taking it and saw his son’s face, his lips curled into a sneer.

  “What in hell do you know about it?” he asked Bernt.

  “What?” asked Bernt, surprised. “I know you own the land. I already knew that.”

  “Land,” said his father, and spat. “Shit, that’s the least of it,” he said. “I own anything that comes here, plant or animal or man, including you. If you leave, it’s because I let you. And if I let you, you sure as shit ain’t coming back unless I say.”

  Almost before Bernt knew it, his father’s hand flashed out and took his wrist in a tight, crushing grip. Bernt tried to pull away, but his father was all sinew. He nodded once, his mouth a straight, inexpressive line, and then he cut off the path, toward the storm cellar, dragging Bernt along with him.

  ♦

  No, he should have reached a town by now. Something was wrong. The sun was still high. It shouldn’t still have been high. It didn’t make sense. The gas gauge was either broken or for some reason he wasn’t running out of gas. He tried again to call his girlfriend, and, this time, even though his phone didn’t have any bars, the call went through. He heard it ring twice, and then she picked up and said Hello, her voice oddly low and almost unrecognizable — probably because she was sick, he told himself later. He said, “Sweetheart, it’s me,” and then the call disconnected. He couldn’t get it to reconnect when he called again.

  ♦

  His father took Bernt across the yard, pulling hard enough on his arm that it was difficult for Bernt to keep his balance. Once he stumbled and nearly fell, and his father just kept pulling him forward, and he had to struggle to stay upright. He got the impression from his father that it didn’t matter to him if Bernt stayed upright or not.

  T
hey went past the barn and around to the back of it, to where the storm cellar was, a single wooden door set flat into the ground and kept closed with a padlock. Bernt had always known it was there, but he had never been inside. His father let go of his arm and thrust a key out at him. “Go on,” he said to Bernt. “Go and look.”

  II.

  Just when he started to panic, he came to a town. He didn’t catch the town’s name: perhaps the sign for it had been vandalized, like the mile markers. He came over a rise and around a bend, and suddenly saw the exit sign and the scattering of buildings below, windows shimmering in the sun. He had to brake and slide over a lane quickly, and even then he hit the rattle strip and came just shy of striking the warning cones before the concrete divider. But then he was on the ramp and going down, under the bridge and into town.

  He drove in to the first gas station he saw. He stopped at the pumps and turned off the car and clambered out, only then realizing that the place was abandoned and empty, the pumps covered with grime, the rubber hoses old and cracked. He got back into the car and turned it on again, then drove through the streets of the town looking for another station. But there didn’t seem to be one.