Letters to Lovecraft

by Jesse Bullington

  Guy reached for the railing and followed their gaze.

  It was pandemonium. People, tiny people, ran back and forth across the mosaic floor of the cathedral. Some collided and fell, either getting up to continue their run, or remaining on the floor, curling up and hugging themselves into a ball. A small group of people knelt in front of the chairs and seemed to be praying. One man was splayed out with blood pooling around his head. Maybe he’d jumped.

  The music and singing continued to soar.

  “What’s happening?” Guy whispered to himself, and a disembodied voice answered.

  “This is it,” the voice soothed. “This is the end. Now we all know the truth, and we can’t be allowed to live.” The speaker laughed. “What a load of shit!”

  Guy looked directly across the wide dome at the man standing opposite, his head back as he guffawed.

  “You believe a word of this?” the man asked. Guy could barely see his mouth moving from this distance, but the words were crystal clear. Even over the shouting. Even above the singing, and the laboured breaths of the organ.

  “I don’t know,” Guy said, surprised at his doubt. “I don’t even know what’s happening.”

  “Go up,” the man said. “See. See if you believe. I still… I…” Then he started walking around the gallery, and his words faded away.

  Guy moved to the left, heading for the route up to the next level on the dome. He ran, passing people sitting silent and still, and others who were speaking softly. Maybe they were praying, but Guy didn’t stop to listen. It had always been a private act for Marie, and he had respected it in others ever since.

  The stairs to the next level were much narrower, stone treads worn down by a million footsteps over hundreds of years. Time weighed heavy. He hurried now, feeling a pressing need to discover what might be happening, even though he was quite certain he wouldn’t want to know.

  The choir’s song and the organ’s lament accompanied him on his climb. Where is everyone else? he thought. Why isn’t everyone climbing these stairs? He paused to listen but heard only those haunting hymns, exultant one moment, screeches of terror and torment the next. That had always been Guy’s problem with religion — the ecstasy and the horror.

  He walked on, enjoying the feeling of exertion. He was sweating and panting. This felt good and right, and he only wished that he and Marie had come here together.

  He reached the top of the staircase and emerged onto the external balcony surrounding the dome. To his left was the tall railing, heavy bars offering a partitioned view out across London like an old zoetrope. To his right, the dome, still exuding warmth from the day’s sun.

  And everything, and everyone, had changed.

  ♦

  “You’re so bloody stubborn!” Marie said. There was a lightness to her voice, but he had known and loved her long enough to know that she was also frustrated.

  Welcome to my world, he thought, and he said, “I’m not! Just because I don’t suffer from blind, blinkered faith, you say that —”

  “Blind and blinkered?” she asked.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Well, no, not really, ’cos like if you’re blind, why bother being blinkered, ’cos if you —”

  He leaped across the picnic blanket, rolled her over an open foil packet of uneaten sandwiches, and shut her up with a kiss. She fought him off, but he pressed his mouth to hers. She was tough and strong, but he could also feel her starting to giggle.

  Birds sang around them. A gentle breeze whispered secrets through the tree canopy. This was their place, or, when Marie spoke about it, it sounded like Their Place. They’d come here on three occasions to spend time in the woods, and they did their best to ignore the scraps of litter and broken vegetation around the clearing, shoving aside the fact that other people probably also knew this spot as their own.

  Their Place.

  She pushed him off at last and peeled a flattened sandwich from her butt. She held it up, and it flopped down limp. She raised an eyebrow, and Guy burst out laughing.

  “I believe in the god of limp sandwiches,” he said. “I’ll worship him forever, and sacrifice every third sandwich to his most glorious and —”

  “Oh, fuck off!” she said, lobbing the bread and catching him perfectly across the nose.

  They stopped talking and started kissing, and that suited them both just fine. In Their Place they found proof of love.

  ♦

  London danced and sang. From all across that great city, voices rose, crying and chanting and singing, rippling over the built-up landscape like an ocean’s tides. They sang of joy and wonder, delight and ecstasy. Down below he could see people in the streets around St Paul’s, dancing and relishing this momentous, amazing moment. Most vehicles — cars, taxis, buses, and motorcycles — were motionless. London was still but for the people, and the birds that swooped and swerved along streets and around tall buildings. He knew London so well, and the feelings he usually experienced when looking out over the city from a high vantage point had changed. Usually he thought of the millions of people hidden away in the sea of grey buildings, working and striving to earn their keep, stressed and traumatised by whatever lives they had chosen or fallen into. A smog of desolation constantly smudged the city in his eyes, however clear the weather. He never liked that feeling, but struggled to work his way out from beneath it.

  Now he thought of every beautiful, complex mind, every cheerful thought, each wonderful story of every single person he could spy down in the streets and the many more inside the buildings. They were no longer grey lives. It was no longer an anthill of workers edging towards extinction, but a sea of hope and potential.

  In Guy’s mind it was a moment of pure revelation.

  But also a time of pain.

  Here and there across the great city, he saw the flickering signs of small conflagrations. A couple of miles to the south, great flames reached skyward, much taller than should be possible, flexing and stretching in majestic slow motion like the fingers of a fire-giant being born from the earth. Smoke rose around them, deep black and almost oily against the sky, as if extensive piles of fat sizzled and burned beneath them. What he had taken to be musical accompaniment to the joyous ululations were the coughs of thousands of windows bursting out beneath terrible heat.

  The Thames flowed red.

  Guy grasped the railings and pressed his face to a gap. The feel of cool metal framing his face pinned him to reality, and he tried to blink the sights away. They would not go. Neither would the sounds of ecstatic song and breaking glass, nor the smells of jasmine, rose petals, and burning flesh. He was a man who trusted his own senses, and he did so now more than ever before.

  Do your worst. Do your best. Just do anything, he’d said, glibly challenging the beastly god he had never believed in. And whatever Marie had believed, he had always attempted to keep an open mind.

  “Marie!” Guy shouted. He talked to her often in his mind, but this was the first time since she died that he had cried her actual name aloud. “Marie!” It felt good. It felt right, and he started to run around the circular walkway looking for her.

  Surely if this was some divine demonstration, a sliver of proof for a world slipping into doubt, then Marie would be with him once more?

  That was what he required to believe and care. That would be his proof.

  So he ran, calling her name, circling the balcony that skirted around the dome. There were others up here too. They were doing their own thing, and he ignored them as they ignored him. This was a personal time — whatever they saw, smelled, tasted was all their own. He saw one man praying and one woman hiding her eyes, and he wondered what he might be doing when this day was done.

  “Marie! Where are you?” He ran on, and a transformed London lay all around. Eventually he came back to where he had begun, his route blocked by the entry lobby out onto the balcony. So he turned around and ran back again, calling his dead wife’s name. Senses could be fooled. A mind could
be tampered with, cajoled, distorted. But he would know Marie.

  He circled around to the lobby, pressed his face to the railings once more, and London blurred in his tears.

  “What is this?” he screamed. Voices sang in answer but he could not understand their words. You never did, Marie might have said, but that was only in his mind, a precious memory of her face and voice, her sweet smile and gentle touch.

  The singing continued, a million voices rising in celebration, setting the cathedral behind him shimmering and crackling with an amazing energy. The flames rose in unison, dancing to their tune. It might have been proof undeniable, belief unstoppable. But in any world where Marie remained dead — in the face of any bastard god who could push her into the path of a foolish, drunken driver — Guy remained immovable.

  He turned his back on everything, entered the dome, and started back down the winding staircase.

  ♦

  On that journey down the first staircase to the Whispering Gallery level, he met no one coming up. He was on his own. He moved quickly around the outer edge of the stairwell, using the wider part of the stairs so that he didn’t trip and fall. He watched his feet, saw the steps passing below him and the core turning as he descended, and, for some reason, he came to believe that the drop below him was far, far deeper than it really was, and that if he fell he might tumble forever. It was dizzying and hypnotising, and he trailed his fingers along the outer wall where a million people had touched before. He brushed fingertips with every one of them.

  He reached the Whispering Gallery level and moved out onto the inner balcony. All was silent. There was no one there, and looking down he could see no people on the cathedral floor below. The singing had ceased, the organ had breathed to a halt.

  He felt completely alone.

  “Hello?” he asked. He closed his eyes, and for a loaded moment that seemed to stretch forever, he firmly believed that he would be answered. But his voice whispered away to nothing.

  He circled the balcony and started down the wide staircase that led to the cathedral floor. Every thirty steps or so he paused to listen. For voices, footsteps, singing, screaming, anything. Only his heavy, fast breathing broke the silence.

  Moving faster, the steps speeding up beneath his feet rather than feet accelerating down the stairs, he finally tripped. A blade of fear sliced into his core, and in panic he held out his hands to break his fall.

  He hit the steps and rolled.

  Down… down… forever.

  ♦

  When Guy was in his late twenties, a year after falling in love with Marie, he’d gone on a business trip to Scotland. He’d just started his own web consultancy business, and he was investigating the possibility of a partnership with another young, forward-thinking entrepreneur. He and the man had gone out on the town in Edinburgh, and Guy had learned his most important lesson of the day — never drink whiskey with a Scotsman.

  Several pubs and a dozen single malts later, he was paralytic. He’d made his excuses and stumbled back to his hotel room already fearing the next day’s hangover. His head had felt like the only fixed point in the universe, with everything else in a state of turmoil. He fell twice on the stairs up to his room. Once in his room, he took a piss, drank a pint of water, then fell on the bed and went to sleep fully dressed.

  He woke in the early hours. The headache throbbed in first, consuming his entire body, and then he heard someone groaning. He stirred quickly, fumbling for the bedside light, missing, rolling from the bed. Hurt his shoulder on the floor. Then he realised that the groan was his own, and he climbed slowly back onto the bed and turned on the light.

  It melted his eyeballs to the back of his skull.

  Squinting, slowly stripping off his shirt, he hobbled to the bathroom. Here he stripped naked and propped the door open so that he didn’t have to turn on the harsh light. His head throbbed. His stomach churned. He burped and smelled whiskey, and groaned all over again.

  As he took a piss, he stared at his darkened reflection in the mirror, and then he saw Geraldine. She was Marie’s mother — funny, intelligent, a widow far too young, Guy got on with her amazingly well. He was already starting to think she might one day be his mother-in-law.

  But now she was in pain. Her reflection was much hazier than his, as if in a much darker room, but he saw her features twisted in agony, her body shivering, and he pissed all over the floor.

  Rushing back into the bedroom, his hangover seemed to have vanished instantaneously. Without stopping to think — how stupid this was, how unlikely, how bloody annoyed Marie would be when he phoned her in the middle of the night because of some weird just-surfacing-from-a-drunken-sleep dream — he dialled her mobile. He told her that there was something wrong with her mother, and, when Marie asked how he knew, he said he didn’t know. Yes, he was still in Edinburgh. Yes, he’d been drinking, but no, he was sober now. No, he didn’t know how, but could she just…?

  Half an hour later, Marie rang from her mother’s flat. She’d fallen down the stairs and broken both legs, and was suffering from concussion and shock.

  Next morning Guy’s hangover landed with a vengeance, and he spent the whole morning in his room puking, sleeping, and vowing that he’d never drink again.

  Marie called it a miracle. Guy, who had time to think about it on the long train journey home, and who could not really remember if he’d actually seen Geraldine, or whether he’d been anything other than drunk when he called Marie, shrugged his shoulders.

  “Just one of those things,” he said.

  ♦

  He was lying on the cold stone floor, head lower than his feet, arms splayed out. He was still on the shallow staircase, but, ahead and several steps down, he could see the arch of the doorway leading back into the cathedral’s cavernous interior. Light flickered in there, a thousand dancing candles. But it shifted slowly, almost sensuously, as if the air was almost still.

  Groaning, Guy rolled onto his front and pushed down, lifting his upper body from the step beneath him. The stone was speckled with a few droplets of blood. He swung his legs around and sat on a step, then put a hand up to his face. His cheek was sore and bruised, nose a little bloodied. He looked at his watch — almost six p.m. He can’t have been out for long.

  Breathing softly, Guy stood, hand against the wall in case he was woozy. A dull headache thudded against the inside of his skull, each pulse matching the beat of his heart, but he did not feel unsteady.

  Something had happened.

  He started to shake, but it was nothing to do with the fall. This was uncertainty and fear. It was worry and confusion. The silence was wrong, the stillness was something that should not be. He walked down the final few steps and then stood in the arched doorway.

  The cathedral was deserted. High windows let through a rainbow of light, subdued now that evening was falling. Dust motes drifted in the light, and tides of colour shadowed across the cathedral’s interior. Around the central area, directly below the huge dome, giant candles burned in tall braziers, their flames almost motionless.

  It looked like a place that had not been disturbed by human presence for years.

  Guy took a tentative step out from the staircase enclosure and looked around. It was truly deserted. The choir stalls were empty. No songbooks were present, and the anglepoise lamps were all off and aimed down. The curve of seats where visitors could sit — where he had sat, head back, staring up at the mosaics of the four disciples and inviting something in — were empty, cushions hanging from small hooks on the seat backs. He turned and looked along the cathedral to the giant doors, only used now on occasions of high ceremony. Down there, close to the entry and exit, a rack of candles lit by visitors burned gently. Some of them had already sputtered out, and, as he watched, one more died a smoky death.

  “Hello?” Guy whispered. His voice was quickly lost to the massive, motionless space. He thought of calling louder, but he was suddenly terrified of what might answer.

  This was n
ot a space meant to be so empty.

  He started walking towards the exit, a hundred metres away. He looked around constantly as he went, not sure what he expected to see, not wishing to see anything. He passed the tombs of forgotten priests and looked away, catching stony movement from the corner of his eye. He walked across a solid brass grating that looked down into the crypt, but it was fully dark down there now, and anything might be staring back. He felt the air moving around him as he walked, but, when he looked behind him, he could see no sign of the disturbance he had made. It was as if he wasn’t really there at all.

  Guy paused and listened, head cocked on one side. Maybe everyone had abandoned this place when they saw what was happening outside. Maybe they’d vacated the cathedral to leave room for what might come next, or perhaps they had fled in terror.

  He could hear nothing. In a space like this, there should have been echoes, whispers, the groan of memory or the reverberation of the building’s great weight settling for another long night. But other than the frantic beating of his heart, there was utter silence.

  He lit a candle. He should have felt ridiculous doing so, but it was all for Marie. He held the wick against another candle until it caught, then placed it gently in the small holder. Its flame shifted for a moment, as if excited at being given life, and then it settled into a steady burn, mimicking all the others. If he turned around and then turned back, he might even forget which flame was his.

  The exit was close. He took slow, gentle steps, listening for any sign that the cathedral knew he was there.

  “Oh, I thought I was the last one,” the voice said, and Guy screamed.

  The old man stood from behind the reception desk, hands held out, an apologetic smile on his lips. He looked so human.

  “Sorry, mate, hey, didn’t mean to startle you.” He came out from behind the desk, hobbling with arthritic pain. “Where’d you come from, then? I thought everywhere had been checked.”

  Guy stared at the old man for a few seconds, certain that he’d see something horrible or terrifying. But the man’s smile only faded into a troubled frown, and that made all of Guy’s stress drain away. His shoulders slumped, and he chuckled, shaking his head.