They were an example. A warning to other Mongoloids and Negroids and heathen who would think to move to Eddyville to corrupt the people there. Corruption was just another word for sin. The shadows were vivid, loud and demanding, that morning. They screamed unimaginable things in his ears, condemning him, mocking him.
Edgar and his family took the buggy into town instead of walking the seven miles. This was a special occasion, and his mother didn’t want to get her good clothes dirty in the muddy streets. His father pulled the buggy into an empty spot directly opposite the prison. Edgar jumped down from the carriage and then helped his mother down. He stared at the giant building as if he hadn’t seen it before.
Called Castle of the Cumberland, the prison sat high on the hill overlooking the Cumberland River. The giant had taken more than six years to finish and had killed many workers helping to build the structure in record time. Everyone knew the old state penitentiary in Frankford had been a disgrace. The conditions had been called “inhumane” by the newspapers, and had forced lawmakers to quickly find another solution.
That solution was Eddyville and its new castle.
The building stood over the top of the trees, staring up like a vengeful child. When he had been small, the children all told stories of the old, narrow cell house, which led underground from the prison proper, into the hills. They called it “the dungeon,” and said that was where the guards chained unruly inmates. They said that you could sometimes hear the cries of the hopeless men at night, their wails calling out over the waters of the Cumberland.
In town, people were gathering around the prison, waiting for the show. The shadows lay at their feet, as if they were ordinary, normal vestiges from the sun’s radiant glare. They were not. They were evil. They sought the souls of every living being in attendance. Perhaps they would get them.
Thunder broke the quiet, and Edgar looked up, hoping that the rains wouldn’t come the way they had the night before, and the day before that. A thin cloud passed in front of the sun, and he realized that no rain would be forthcoming that day. He said a quick prayer, thanking God for that.
The thunder had come from the massive building, as if the walls themselves were moaning. The giant steel doors swung open, releasing the doomed from their temporary cages into the arms of their final embrace — the ropes around their necks.
Edgar and his family crossed the street, and narrowly avoided getting run down by a grand four-horse buggy that raced toward the prison. On the other side of the road, a woman carrying a small child pushed past them, trying to get closer to the gibbet. She smelled of old, dirty things. Tears streamed down her face as she looked away from the show that had begun to unfold.
Three guards and a tall man in a top hat led the condemned man and girl out from the prison gate. The woman beside Edgar let out a loud gasp, reaching absently for the pair whom she would never embrace again. Her family, Edgar reasoned. Somehow he had not thought that there would be people to mourn them. As he watched them, he was surprised to see how tiny the girl looked. She couldn’t be older than twelve, although she was small even for this generous estimate. The girl followed her father, silently to her death. She knew what would happen to her, he could see the look of resolution on her young face.
The terrible, terrible whispers of the revolting shadows filled his ears, his head, his thoughts. He could hear them mocking him.
The doubts rushed back to him: Will you testify? Will you?
The crowd of people was thick toward the center of town, and people were talking and laughing as if they were there to see a Broadway show in New York City. Several more thunder-like sounds rose over the crowd from the state penitentiary. Every time, all conversations would pause, and people would stare at the building hoping things were getting started.
Finally the man with a top hat and suit of clothes that were years out of fashion appeared over the high stone wall. He waited a moment for everyone to quiet down before he spoke.
“Good evening, everyone. As you all know, I’m the commissioner of Lyon County, Saul Williams.” People began clapping and shouting the man’s name. Smiling, he said, “Now quiet down, folks. We’ll be getting this show underway here soon.” Everyone laughed and clapped for a long time. Edgar just stared. “Also, when we’re finished, we’ll have a viewing. You’ll all be able to see the bodies for yourselves. No pictures now.”
Suddenly the father dashed forward, nudging his child to the side, behind him. The crowd jumped, afraid that he’d come for them. Edgar stared, he wasn’t afraid. “I confess.” The man’s daughter broke down, crying. He turned to look at her, then back to the crowd. “I did it. I did it. I took that money. It wasn’t mine. And I took it…” He looked down, glanced for a moment at his child. “My daughter. Did nothing. She didn’t know. She’s fourteen. A child. Spare her.” No shadows stood beneath his feet, only beneath the crowd’s.
The woman beside Edgar held her breath for a moment. No doubt that she was torn between wanting her daughter to be spared, but not wanting the man who had spawned her to die. Edgar turned to look at her for a moment. He saw her, as if for the first time. Her face was red from the tears and the emotion. Her gown was worn and caked with dirt at the bottom, though this was probably her best dress. She had a scar down her left cheek, from a lashing, perhaps. It had healed wrong, thickened. Her eyes were swollen from the tears, but clear. She would watch every moment, remember. Most of the people there would have forgotten within a week’s time. Edgar wasn’t sure if he could forget.
For a very long time, there was silence. Complete silence. Even the shadows surrendered to the moment.
“No,” the girl spoke loud enough for everyone to hear her. “No. He didn’t.”
With nothing left to say, the man in the top hat spoke: “Now, if we can have those who will testify step up? Speak your piece before the good people of this town so that they know the crimes that have been committed by both this man and his offspring.”
One by one each of the people who had been at Charlie’s that day told what they saw, as they saw it. The father and daughter were a gang of roving thieves by all accounts. They were vestiges of an undeveloped people who needed to be extinguished from the earth, or at least from Eddyville. This was the day to begin the purge.
After the others had spoken, Edgar stepped forward. He looked to the girl and then her father and then back to the girl again. Too small. Sick. Unhealthy… Unclean. After a moment, he opened his mouth to speak his truth. The shadows and the people of Eddyville were there to receive it.
♦
Jesus wept for man in the Bible.
Edgar never fully understood why.
Lovecrafting
Orrin Grey
“The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life.”
When I was rereading Supernatural Horror in Literature prior to writing this story, I was expecting to find more of Lovecraft’s weird racial essentialism than I remembered, and I did. But I also found this odd streak of proto-geek pride running through it, with his continued insistence that there was something unique and special about people who could appreciate a good supernatural tale. That’s what stuck with me, and the seed of this story, which had already been germinating in thematically appropriate ways in my head, came to full flower from there.
♦
It’s a scene straight from the pages of one of Gordon’s earlier, more lurid stories. The graveyard scene. Dana and Conner as the latter-day resurrection men, tramping across the swampy ground in the pissing rain with a battery-powered lantern and shovels that they picked up at Home Depot.
Dana’s hoodie is pulled up against the weather, her glasses spattered with drops that she can’t wipe away completely because her sleeve is too damp. She wears black leggings under her jeans for warmth, but you can only tell in the places where her jeans are worn through. The shock of purple in her o
therwise brown hair is hidden by the darkness and the wet.
Conner is a good foot taller than Dana, wide at the shoulders. If he were a character in a movie, he’d play basketball or football, be wearing a letter jacket. Instead, he plays chess and video games, can’t stand most sports, though he’s been known to do Frisbee golf on occasion. He wears a leather jacket that repels the rain, and one of the shovels is over his shoulder, while Dana carries the lantern and the other shovel. His jacket hangs unevenly due to the weight of his father’s Colt .45 in his right pocket.
The lantern’s light is golden and seems very small in the graveyard, picking out just the edges of tombstones that seem to lurch out of the darkness in its uneven light, leaving everything else to shadow and rain.
DANA: Fuck Gordon for this, y’know?
From the tone of her voice, and from Conner’s non-reaction, you can tell it’s not the first time tonight that she’s said these words.
DANA: Fuck him for leaving this to us, and fuck him for convincing us to do it in the first place. And you know what? Fuck him twice for knowing that we would do it.
Conner doesn’t say anything, just trudges on ahead while Dana stops to wipe off her glasses again, this time taking them off and fishing under her hoodie for the edge of her relatively dry T-shirt.
DANA: He really is the Danny Ocean of this little trio, and no mistake.
CONNER: Frank Sinatra or George Clooney? Not that it matters much, I just call dibs on not being Sammy Davis Jr.
DANA: Not really any good parts for me, though I’d take Julia Roberts over Dana Phillips right about now.
CONNER: Maybe that’s what the next one of those movies oughta be about. Grave robbing.
DANA: It’d be a change.
Both of them stop, the banter dead on their lips. They’ve come to wherever they’re going, now. The lantern swings in Dana’s grip, the radius of light moving up and down, revealing the inscription on the stone before them, then hiding it again. In the light the stone is fresh, smooth and unblemished, and the name on it is clear: Gordon Phillips.
CONNER: I guess this is where we start digging.
DANA: Roshambo to see who goes first?
from “The Transition of Jacob Cutter”
by Gordon Phillips
His own hands began to disturb him. When he looked at them now, he no longer saw them as hands. To him, they appeared to be something else, pincers or tendrils or things with sucking pads. The hairy claws of an ape, the digging appendages of a mole. He knew that he was wrong, that they were still just hands, and, when he concentrated, he could still see them as he knew they must look to others, but the other image was always there, superimposed, like a double exposure in an old film.
They still worked like hands, he could still grab and manipulate things with them. Before Catherine left, he could still hold her hands in his, still touch her skin, but he always knew that the other hands were lurking there, beneath the surface, itching to break free as soon as he let his guard down.
And worse, they no longer felt like his hands. Not just that he could feel their wrong texture, shaggy or squamous or chitinous or gelid, but that they never seemed like he was really in control of them. Oh, they made no overt move against him, but he still felt that it wasn’t he who governed them. It was like watching the hands of your reflection in the mirror, or, closer still, watching some stranger mimic your every movement. The stranger may do everything that you do, just as you do it, but there is always the knowledge that at any moment they may stop. That thought carried with it a subtle menace, somehow more frightening than if his hands had suddenly leapt up of their own accord to strangle him.
He grew to hate his hands, and everything that he relied on them to do. He could no longer bring himself to type, and so deadlines came and went. He stopped using his phone, stopped checking his email. His computer sat dark and silent. He imagined cobwebs gathering on it. He lay in bed, curled into a ball with his hands clasped between his knees to still them, though he knew they weren’t moving. He thought about movies that he’d seen with possessed hands in them, and about the carving knife in the kitchen drawer, but he never went to get it, because he knew, even then, that cutting off his hands wouldn’t help.
It was in him everywhere…
A cheap-looking hotel room, two weeks earlier. Less a setting from Gordon’s fiction, but maybe a crime scene in a low-budget television police drama. There’s only one bed, with a confetti-colored comforter, and Conner sits on it, almost lounging, his foot hanging off, his sneaker brushing the carpet as he kicks his foot back and forth, back and forth. The light inside the room is buttery and dull, the light that creeps in from outside is cold fluorescent blue, the kind of light that makes you think of morgues in movies. That’s the association that’ll stick.
Dana paces in front of the big double window. The thick hotel drapes are pulled closed, but they hang slightly askew, letting the blue light in around the edges. Her circuit takes her from one taupe wall (the one with the TV and a generic painting of nightingales perched on branches) to the other taupe wall (with a matching painting, whip-poor-wills this time, and lamps screwed into the wall above the bed, casting that yellowy light). Back and forth, back and forth, like a mannequin on rails, like Conner’s foot.
DANA: Why would he break into a cemetery?
It’s the first time in a while either of them have spoken, they’ve been inhabiting their own frustrated silences, each doing their own mental pacing, but the question doesn’t seem to startle the quiet. Instead it’s so expected, it feels almost rhetorical.
CONNER: You know why.
DANA: Because of some stories? That doesn’t make sense.
CONNER: Gordon never made a lot of sense.
DANA: More than this. Did they tell you how he got hurt?
Conner shakes his head, not long, just a brief motion, one side to the other, not interrupting the rhythm of Dana’s pacing, or of his own swinging foot.
CONNER: Just that he fell, somehow, getting over the fence. A night watchman caught him, I guess, scared him off. Gordon ran, and the guy went after him. Gordon was trying to get over the fence, and then at the top, he must’ve just fallen. They think maybe he hit his head.
DANA: It doesn’t make sense.
CONNER: It made sense to Gordon. Sense enough for him, anyway. You read his email. He was going to prove something to himself, one way or the other. If the body was there, if everything was as it was supposed to be, then great, he was wrong, he was crazy, high-strung, over-imaginative, like everybody always said. If not, if he found what I guess he was expecting to find, then he was right, at least, and he had proof. Maybe not that anybody else would buy, but maybe enough for him.
DANA: Did he actually think he could do it? Dig up a body without getting caught? Especially that body?
Conner is quiet, just the swishing of his shoe on the carpet. Back and forth, back and forth. It calls to mind a pendulum, a metronome, the ticking of a clock, the inevitable passage of time, the grinding approach of death. As if it’s triggered by the association, the ticking of the clock on the wall becomes audible in the silence between the two friends, measuring out every beat of time that passes before Conner replies.
CONNER: I don’t know what he thought. I talked to him last, what, a week ago? I drove by his place. It was a mess. Old containers of takeout food, the whole bit. Cluttered, like it got when he was working, but different too. Not just junk. He had these books. Library books, some of them, and others books from his collection, pulled down off his shelves and stacked everywhere. Lovecraft, Bierce, Poe, Machen, that lot. Biographies of them, too, collected letters.
DANA: Not unusual reading for him…
CONNER: No, but it was different, like I said. He had it all marked up, Post-it notes stuck to everything, highlighters out. All these notes on legal pads. He must’ve used up half a dozen of them, all stacked next to his desk. He was working something out, working something up.
DANA:
Doesn’t sound all that much different than anytime he was working on a story.
CONNER: I know it doesn’t, but it was somehow. I can’t really explain it. It just felt different. You know in movies when they go into the room of someone who’s been working out a conspiracy theory, and there’s a big board with newspaper clippings and whatever else all connected up with pins and yarn? This felt like that, though not on some big board. Just, kind of all over the room.
DANA: And whatever it was he was working on, he thought he could work it out by digging up Lovecraft’s body?
CONNER: He kept talking about how they all died. He had them memorized. Lovecraft dead of cancer. Poe of “congestion of the brain.” Blackwood of cerebral thrombosis. Leiber of some unspecified brain disease of his own. Hodgson killed by an artillery shell in Belgium, Howard by a self-inflicted bullet to the brain, and Bierce unaccounted for somewhere in Mexico. But who knows what would have become of them had nature been left to take its course?
Dana stops pacing. She’s standing by the air conditioner unit, the blue morgue light from outside catches half her face, throwing the rest into shadow.
DANA: But Gordon didn’t think that’s what they really died of?
Conner doesn’t answer right away. He looks down at his foot, going back and forth, and he seems to become aware of the ticking of the clock, and from outside in the night the sound of cicadas, rising up suddenly. He stops moving his foot, leaves it frozen in the air, and looks up at Dana as he answers.
CONNER: No. He said that something was growing inside them.
from “The Mimic Rout”
by Gordon Phillips
When I venture out of my apartment now, which I do only rarely and by the gravest of necessity, I no longer see the people around me as I once did. They appear to me not as they look to each other, nor as I had always imagined them before, but as they truly are. Maimed mannequins, their crumpled faces merely pallid masks from which vacant sockets gaze.
Letters to Lovecraft Page 19