Letters to Lovecraft

by Jesse Bullington

  ♦

  What had he seen in the storm cellar? He still wasn’t quite sure. He unlocked it and went down, his father standing with his arms crossed up top. It smelled of dust inside, and of something else — something that made him taste metal in his mouth when he breathed the air. It made his throat hurt.

  He went down the rickety wooden steps until he came to a packed earth floor. There was just enough room to stand upright. Even with the door open, it took a while for his eyes to adjust, and once they had adjusted, he didn’t see much. The floor was stained in places, darker in some places than others — unless that was some natural property of the earth itself. He didn’t think it was. There was, in the back, deeper in the hole, a series of racks, and there was something hanging on them. He hesitated and from up above heard his father say, “Go on,” his voice cold and hard. He groped his way forward, but, because of the way his own body blocked the light, it wasn’t until he was a foot or two away that he realized that what he was seeing were strips of drying meat. Hundreds of them, sliced thin and sometimes twisted up on themselves, and with nothing really to tell him what sort of animal they had come from. Though it was a large animal, he was sure of that.

  His mouth grew dry, and he found himself staring, his eyes flicking from one strip to the next and back again. He almost called out to his father to ask him where the dried meat had come from, but something stopped him. In his head, he imagined his father answering the question by simply reaching down and swinging the door shut and leaving him in darkness. The feeling was so palpable that for a moment he wondered if he wasn’t in darkness after all, if he wasn’t simply imagining what he thought he was seeing.

  He forced himself to turn around very slowly, as if nothing was wrong, and climb up the stairs. His father watched him come, but made no move to reach out and help him as he scrambled out of the shelter.

  “You seen it?” asked his father.

  He hesitated a moment, wondering what exactly his father had meant for him to see — whether it was the strips of meat or perhaps something else, something behind the racks, even deeper in. But almost immediately decided that it was safer to simply agree.

  “I saw it,” he said.

  His father nodded. “Good,” he said. “Then you understand why you have to stay.”

  Bernt made a noncommittal gesture that his father took as a yes. His father clapped him on the shoulder and then began walking.

  Why his father felt he understood, what his father thought he’d seen, what he’d thought the storm cellar had done to him, Bernt couldn’t exactly say. Indeed, he would never be sure, and ultimately felt it might be better not to know. He went after his father back to the house and retreated to his room. From there, it was a simple matter to wait until dark and then pack a few things, climb out the window, and leave for good. He had never been back.

  ♦

  After a while he gave up looking: the gas gauge read between a half and a quarter full still; probably he had enough to make it into Elko.

  He parked in front of a diner on Main Street and went in. It was crowded inside, all the tables full. He sat at the counter. Even then, it took a while for the waitress to get around to him. When she finally did, he asked her about a gas station, felt it was par for the course when she told him there wasn’t one. Used to be one, she said, but gas here cost too much. Nobody used it, not with Elko nearby. No, the nearest one was up the road at Elko.

  “How far away is that?” he asked.

  The question seemed to puzzle her somehow. “Not far,” she said.

  He asked what she suggested, and she recommended the soup of the day, which he ordered without thinking to ask what it was exactly. When it came it was surprisingly good, a rich orange broth scented with saffron and with strings of meat spread all through it. Pork, probably. It made his mouth water to eat it. It seemed a sign to him that his trip was finally becoming less strange, or at least strange in a way that was good rather than bad. When he finished he used the edge of his thumb to scour the sides of the bowl clean.

  He sat there, far from eager to get back on the road. At the end, the waitress brought him a cup of coffee with cream without his asking for it, and before he could tell her he didn’t drink coffee she was gone again, off to another customer. He let it sit there for a while and then, for lack of anything better to do, took a sip. It was rich and mellow, different from coffee as he remembered it, and, before he knew it, he had finished the whole cup.

  It’s okay, he told himself, and found he more or less believed it. The strange part of the trip is over. Everything will be all right from here on out.

  ♦

  He had written twice to his father from California. The first time was maybe a year after he’d arrived. He’d wanted for his father to know that he was all right, that he’d landed on his feet. He’d also wanted to gloat a little. Perhaps, too, he had still been curious. What exactly was it that you thought showing me the storm cellar would do? What was it in there that you thought would keep me?

  For a month, maybe two, he had waited for a reply. But his father had never answered the letter. The only way he knew for certain his father had received it was because when his father died his aunt had written to let him know, saying that they’d finally gotten his address off a letter he’d written his father.

  The second letter, years later, had been more measured, calmer. It was, as much as he could bring it to be, an attempt at reconciliation. It had come back to him unopened, Return to Sender written across it in his father’s careful block writing.

  ♦

  Everything will be all right, he was still telling himself when he got up from the stool and made his way to the bathroom. He peed and flushed, then stretched. While he was washing his hands, he noticed the mirror.

  Or mirrors, rather. There were two of them, one suspended over the other, a larger one with a small one screwed in over it so that the larger one looked almost like a frame around it.

  He looked at himself in it, his haggard face, but his eyes kept slipping to where one mirror ended and the other began. Was it meant to be that way? Some sort of design scheme? Was the center of the larger mirror cracked or foxed, and the small mirror had been hung to cover that? Was there some kind of hole that the second mirror was hiding?

  He reached out and grabbed the edges of the top mirror. It was affixed in each of its four corners by a screw that went through the corner of the mirror and then through a thin block of wood and then through the mirror behind it. He could just get the tips of his finger in the space left between the mirrors. He tugged, but it was bolted firmly in place.

  When he let go, the tips of his fingers were black with dust. He washed his hands again, more slowly this time. His face, when he looked up this time, looked just as haggard. He turned off the taps, dried his hands, and left the bathroom.

  ♦

  A moment later he was back in. He had the penlight on his keychain out and was shining it at the gap between the top mirror and the bottom one. He pressed his eye close, but no matter where he looked, no matter where he shone the light, the mirror behind it looked whole and complete.

  III.

  At first, he lied to his girlfriend, claiming he had gone to Utah and to his father’s ranch for the reading of the will, but had received nothing. But then, when the box came, he finally came clean. It was an old box, starting to collapse, and smelled dank. It was very heavy. The words “Bernt’s Pittance” were written on the side of it in his father’s careful hand.

  He left the box sitting on the table for a day and a half. The evening of the second day, they were both sitting in bed, both reading, when she asked him when he was going to open it. He had put the book down on his chest and had begun to talk. She had let him, had interrupted only once, and when he was done she had curled up beside him one hand touching his shoulder softly, and said nothing. That had surprised him — he thought she might be angry that he had lied to her. But if she was angry, she kept it to herself. />
  Of course, he told her, nothing was really going on, it was just my imagination. It was just an ordinary trip. I was just noticing the things that under normal circumstances I wouldn’t notice. But as he told the story, moved bit by bit across the landscape between Reno and the small town whose name he had never quite figured out, it was all he could do not to panic again. He didn’t believe it had been a normal trip. He believed it was anything but. And he believed that, somehow, his father was to blame.

  The hardest part was explaining why seeing that, seeing the one mirror placed atop the other mirror, had been the thing that had turned him around and made him drive back to Reno, made him stop and rent a hotel room and drink himself nearly blind until he ran out of liquor and sobered up enough to realize enough time had elapsed to give his girlfriend the impression that he had gone to Utah. There hadn’t, he had to admit, been anything really wrong with the mirrors — but that, somehow, had been exactly what was wrong with them.

  That had been the one time she had interrupted him. “Was it like what you saw in the storm cellar?” she asked.

  But what had he seen in the storm cellar? He still didn’t know, and never would. Was that like the mirrors? No, that had been a hole in the ground containing curing strips of dried meat. How could twinned mirrors be like a hole in the ground and strips of meat? No, the only thing they had in common was that he felt like he couldn’t quite understand what either one was telling him. That he felt he was missing something.

  He left the café, climbed into the car, and drove. His intention at first, despite the way he was feeling, was to keep driving, to continue on to Utah, to see the trip through. But as he took a left out of the parking lot and headed down Main Street, he felt like he was being stretched between the mirror and wherever he was going now. That a part of him was caught in the mirror, and the link between that and the rest of him was growing thinner and thinner.

  ♦

  And so instead of getting back on the highway, he circled back to the café. He took the tire iron out of the kit nestled beside the spare tire and walked into the café and straight into the bathroom. He gave the top mirror a few careful taps with the tire iron and broke out each of the four corners, and then lifted it down and set it flat on the floor. The mirror beneath was complete and whole. This mirror he simply broke to bits, just to make sure there wasn’t something behind it. There wasn’t. Only blank wall. So he broke the first mirror as well. And then he left just as quickly as he had come, the waitress staring at him open mouthed and the burly cook hustling out of the building and after him, cursing, just as he turned the key to his car and drove away.

  Even then, he might have kept going, might have kept on to Utah, he told his girlfriend. But the trip — all of it, not just that last moment of finding himself doing something he’d never thought he’d do — seemed to him a warning. It was a mistake, he felt, to go on. So, he turned around.

  And indeed, almost before he knew it, he was back in Reno, the car all but out of gas. He found a gas station, then found a hotel and settled down for a few drunken days to wait. Both because he was ashamed that he hadn’t gone all the way to Utah and because, to be frank, now that he was back in a place that seemed fully real to him, he was afraid to get in the car again.

  ♦

  But then at last, head aching from a hangover, he had climbed into the car and driven. A moment later he had crossed over the state line. He wound up into the mountains, went past Truckee, skirting Donner Lake, through Emigrant Gap, and then slowly down out of the mountains and into more and more populated areas, ever closer and closer to home. By the time he had pulled into their driveway, it almost seemed like he had made too much of it, that he just wanted an excuse not to go to Utah after all.

  The more he talked, the more he tried both to explain to his girlfriend how he felt and to dismiss it, to relegate it to the past, the more another part of him felt the event gather and harden in his mind, like a bolus or a tumor, both part of him and separate from him at once. He did not know if speaking made it better or made it worse.

  ♦

  When he was done, he lay there silent. Her girlfriend was beside him, and soon her breathing had changed, and he could tell she was asleep. He was, more or less, alone.

  There was the box still to deal with, he knew. He knew, too, that he would not open it. He did not want whatever was inside it. In his head he planned how to get rid of it. Just throwing it away did not seem like enough.

  Careful not to wake her, he got up. He slipped into his jeans and found his car keys. He put on his socks and a shirt, and at the door he slipped on his shoes.

  No, he needed to get it as far from him as he could. He would take it back to Utah, back to where it came from.

  ♦

  Or maybe not, he thought a few hours later, well into the drive and recognizing nothing as familiar, completely unsure where he was. Maybe not as far as Utah, but certainly somewhere past Reno. That would have to be far enough.

  Only Unity Saves the Damned

  Nadia Bulkin

  “The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain.”

  Like Lovecraft, I’m not a big fan of clanking chains or, in this case, urban legends about dead witches. Politics teaches us that we fear what we don’t understand, and simplistically scary stories, lodged in our preexisting understanding of the world, keep us tucked safely into our comfort zones. Genuine dread takes us beyond this zone and into the sublime. But there’s a point at which I humbly diverge from Lovecraft: as horrific as outer, unknown forces are, I think that up-close-and-personal forces — the devil that knows your name — are actually the most dreadful. And I don’t mean empathy. I mean that twinge of familiarity that lets you know that you were chosen, you were hunted — and you know very well what’s coming.

  ♦

  “Dude, are you getting this?”

  Rosslyn Taro, 25, and Clark Dunkin, 25, are standing in the woods. It’s evening — the bald cypresses behind them are shadowed, and the light between the needles is the somber blue that follows sunsets — and they are wearing sweatshirts and holding stones.

  “It’s on,” says the voice behind the camera. “To the winner go the spoils!”

  They whip their arms back and start throwing stones. The camera pans to the right as the stones skip into the heart of Goose Lake. After a dozen rounds, the camera pans back to Rosslyn Taro and Clark Dunkin arguing over whose stone made the most skips, and then slowly returns to the right. Its focus settles on a large bur oak looming around the bend of the lake, forty yards away.

  “Hey, isn’t that the Witching Tree?”

  Off camera, Clark Dunkin says, “What?” and Rosslyn Taro says, “Come on, seriously?”

  “You know, Raggedy Annie’s Witching Tree.”

  The girl sounds too shaky to be truly skeptical. “How do you know?”

  “Remember the song? ‘We hung her over water, from the mighty oak tree.’ Well, there aren’t any other lakes around here. And First Plymouth is on the other side of the lake.” The camera zooms, searches for a white steeple across the still water, but the light is bad. “‘We hung her looking over at the cemetery.’”

  The camera swings to Rosslyn Taro, because she is suddenly upset. She is walking to the camera, and, when she reaches it, shoves the cameraman. “Bay, shut up! I hate that stupid song. Let’s just go, I’m getting cold. Come on, please.” But Clark Dunkin is still staring at the tree. His hands are shaking. Rosslyn Taro calls his name: “Lark!”

  The camera follows Clark Dunkin’s gaze to the tree. There is a figure standing in front of it, dressed in a soiled white shift and a black execution hood. The figure reaches two pale, thin hands to the
edge of the hood as if to reveal its face. And then the camera enters a topspin, all dirt and branches and violet sky, as the cameraman begins to run. Rosslyn Taro is heard screaming. Someone — the cameraman, or possibly Clark Dunkin — is whimpering, as if from very far away, “oh, shit, oh, shit.”

  And then the video abruptly cuts to black.

  ♦

  They called themselves the LunaTicks. Like everything else, it was Bay’s idea: he named them after an old British secret society, supposedly “the smartest men in Birmingham.” There were ground rules not only for their operations, but for life as a whole: if one got caught, the rest would confess or expect to be ratted out; where one goes, the others must follow. Only unity saves the damned, Bay said.

  Roz’s father thought the boys were a terrible influence on her. These slouching undead fools had metastasized at his front door one day when Roz was in sixth grade, with their uncombed hair and unwashed skin and vulgar black T-shirts. He’d made the mistake of letting the vampires in. Under their watch, his daughter’s mood swings escalated from mild distemper to a full-blown madness. The charcoal rings around her eyes got deeper; her silver skull necklaces got bigger. She was vandalizing the elementary school; she was shoplifting lipstick. He’d tell her he was locking the doors at midnight and in the morning he would find her sleeping, nearly frozen, on the porch — or worse, he wouldn’t find her at all. So he excavated her room, vowing to take the Baileys and the Dunkins to court if he found a single pipe, a single syringe. He gave up when she failed to apply to community college. The screen door swung shut behind her and he thanked God that he also had a son.

  He was not alone. Bay’s parents hated Roz and Lark as well; their hatred of the two losers who hung like stones around Bay’s neck was the only thing the former Mr. and Mrs. Bailey still shared. They tried, separately, to introduce Bay to different crowds: the jocks, the computer geeks, the 4-H club. Bay said he hated them all (too dumb too weird too Christian), but the truth was that they had all rejected him. Eventually Bay’s parents gave him an ultimatum: get rid of your friends, or we get rid of the car. So the responsibility of driving down bedraggled county roads — and all roads lead to Goose Lake, the old folks said — fell to Roz and Lark.