Letters to Lovecraft

by Jesse Bullington

  As I broke in the door of the cabin in my haste to enter, I marveled at my strength. The door had resisted me no more than a dried twig might. Forgetting this I all but ran to the larder. Within, a rank smell assailed me as I flung the contents around, too desperate to wonder how cured meats might have spoiled so quickly, intent only on the quest for anything palatable. Everything in the cabin sickened me with their noxious smells, but I was so hungry I forced some pemmican in my mouth. I chewed it voraciously, but, before I even swallowed my first mouthful, I vomited forth vile bluish-black phlegm and lay shaking violently on the floor.

  After a time the sickness passed, and I noticed a smell so delicious I nearly wept. I realized the smell was coming from my own arm, which I had sliced open in my thrashings around the cabin. It was a shallow cut, barely more than a scrape, but I silently rejoiced as I gnawed at the wound, tasting the very essence of my soul…

  I came back to myself, then. I realized what I was about for the first time since coming to the cabin of Francois, and a terrible horror came over me. What was happening, I wondered, then I thought of the warning of George Red Foot…

  I had noticed how much smaller the cabin seemed, but only now saw that it was I who had grown. No fire burned in the hearth, but the heat in the room was sweltering. I knew then that I had become doomed by whatever curse had afflicted Francois. I despaired momentarily on my lost future, on my lost humanity… and then became resolved. An abiding hatred began to rise up within me, for myself, for Francois, and for that unhallowed voice that spoke to me of the frozen abysses in the north.

  I knew then that I must end my own life before I killed an innocent or, worse yet, caused another to follow me into this icy hell. I resolved to put a lead ball in my head, but first I must complete this record… It is a warning for those who might find my body, yes, and also a testament as to why a true Christian would commit such a sin. I have no choice. This is not my fault.

  So here I am at the end of my tale, and my hunger has only increased with each word. I can smell a scent in the air as I write these final words. I hear the jingling bell of one of the Jesuits’ ponies coming through the yard — Brother Dunn, perhaps, capitalizing on the unseasonably good weather to acquire some new furs for the mission.

  The pistol is beside the inkwell on the desk, waiting to end my life… but I am so hungry.

  Now his feet are tramping through the snow, approaching the cabin. His voice quavers as he calls through the ruined door, “Is anyone there? Sabian? Andre?”

  The pistol looks so heavy, and my arm is so tired from writing all this down. I will eat just once from this visitor, so I will have the strength to kill myself. One last meal and then oblivion, I am sure whoever has arrived will understand. I could never end my life with a hunger so great, and this visitor smells so appetizing. A scent that causes my teeth to ache and my mouth to water with anticipation.

  Yes, one last meal for the condemned, and then the end.

  There Has Been a Fire

  Kirsten Alene

  “Just as all fiction first found extensive embodiment in poetry, so is it in poetry that we first encounter the permanent entry of the weird into standard literature.”

  Lovecraft is one of the first authors to obliquely and obtusely communicate monsters, villains, and the ultimate source of psychological and supernatural horror as female. Big, fat vagina monsters are all over the place, and, if a woman appears, she’s either evil or she’s bringing evil with her.

  He’s a product of his time and place, and so are his ideas, or whatever. But that specifically, it’s not an indication of sexism, it’s an indication that he is a participant in a trend that starts, as he states himself, in poetry. The things that lurk unseen in the darkness, the things that watch you with cold indifference from the woods/ice/mountains/space/ocean are by far the weirdest, the most terrifying of all.

  The trend of verse historically is toward the alienation of people, things, and ideas that threaten society. Verse functions as a very basic way of teaching people what is good for them and what is bad, what is safe and what is dangerous.

  And when, in poetry, women suddenly become separate enough from the functioning world of men that their actions and motivations are mysterious and unknown (when they enter, really, the realm of the weird), they quite quickly become terrifying.

  ♦

  I have been growing bats in the attic of the faculty hall for a long time. The warm, humid atmosphere suits them, and they appear to flourish under my care. Sometimes I take their soft, fat mammalian bodies in my hand and press their chests against my cheek. They are paralyzed by the smooth softness, and the only part of them that moves is their heart, which beats as fast as the vibrato of a piccolo. The morning that the sun rises orange through the rosary window on the fourth floor of the faculty building, I am tending the bats in the attic, and I miss what transpires on the first floor, in the faculty lounge.

  Someone rushes up the stairs to tell me, “Anna Beth, there’s been a fire. Anna Beth, there’s been some sort of fire.”

  Downstairs the hallway is blackened and crumbling, but the walls are all intact. Teachers and students, a few aids, and a school nurse are walking around the place, expressing their dismay and despair by guttural emissions, which together add up to a general monastic hum.

  Under the remains of a light fixture, which sparks benignly overhead, is a small blonde thing with ashes fluffing out from her head in a halo. She’s very dirty, and the other faculty members do not approve. Who does she think she is, running around setting fires and then becoming blackened by them? She’s just ruining the whole atmosphere of tragedy, standing there getting everything dirty where there wasn’t any dirt before.

  The host of helpful faculty members who supposedly appeared when the explosion sounded are closing in on me, relaying information they think must be relevant in catlike whispers near my ears so that no one else will hear and take credit for their powers of observation.

  “A sign like a snake and a cross,” says one.

  “And the smoke was a bright reddish green, Anna Beth, tinged, a chemical reaction of some sort.”

  “I was, of course, preparing for my lecture and then the sound… like an elephant trumpet.”

  “Like a bassoon.”

  “Like a man screaming.”

  Then, the only really relevant piece of information comes from Peabody, a professor of Japanese ceremonial dress: “I think a man was inside.”

  The little blonde child turns slowly to face Peabody. My first instinct is to remove her from the nurse’s claws, which are grasping at her, searching for wounds. But when she opens her mouth to speak, she no longer looks vulnerable at all.

  “There was a man inside,” she says, “I saw him run out. He ran out.”

  Quiet descends over the assembled disaster response. Then another rumbling hum as whispers race like snapping synapses from head to head.

  The girl is installed in my office. When actual firemen arrive, followed closely by insurance lawyers and a foreman, I return to the attic where my bats are swaddled in their wings. They rustle softly, sway together and whisper as I close the door. My feet are sore from climbing up the stairs and back down and up again. Smoke from the fire is beginning to seep through the rafters and up into the attic. If they smell a whiff of smoke too strong, they’ll all fly out the window in a second.

  I sit for a moment, waiting for them to smell what I smell. There’s a mouse sound, the creak of the stairs to the attic and then they smell it and, in a frenzy of leathery wings and soft, hot bodies, they rush over and past me, bursting through the window and down clumsily like a landslide.

  When I inherited the office fifty years ago from a retiring astronomer named Getz, it was hung with papier-mâché planets, all in rows and spirals. They weren’t mine, and they didn’t have much to do with medieval rhetoric, but I liked them, so I kept them. The girl in my office is turning the planets around with one hand, inspecting them or making the
m turn. As I expect, she knows nothing. Is confused. Her hands shake, but her voice is not small or weak. To others, this behavior is not alarming.

  I give a lecture on a poem by John Donne. I read it to the class in a deep voice, but it still sounds a little ridiculous coming from my mouth, which is lined and creased like crumpled silk now. “‘I’ll undoe the world by dying; because love dies too.’” These words mean a little less than they ever did, which was never very much, now that no world could ever be undone by me, nothing annihilated by my inaction, nothing invented by my action. The chance for any teaching or making is past.

  The culprit is not caught. No one is in hand. At the faculty meeting, held in the fourth-floor restroom, above the sounds of construction below in what was once the faculty lounge, Peabody is enraged. “Something must be done,” he says.

  “Hear hear!” they shout.

  “Must be done!” they shout.

  “Something!” they shout.

  On a morning when I am in the bat room, watching other bats fly back in through the open window, each giving me a look as it passes that says: “Yes. Hello. Here again? Yes hello, we recognize you,” someone calls from down below:

  “There’s been a fire,” they call, then add, almost as an afterthought, “there’s been some other sort of fire.”

  I release my current bat and say goodbye.

  The fire is a tree. It has exploded from the inside out. It has been struck by lightning. I try to explain to Hammer, the professor of meteorology. “This looks like lightning,” I say. “Doesn’t it look a lot like lightning, like it was struck by some sort of… like it was lightning.”

  But he doesn’t see it. “Foul play,” he mutters, and the others take up the phrase.

  “Foul Play.”

  “Fow-el Puh-lay.”

  “Fowl.”

  “Fowel.”

  “Fow-el Play.”

  “This is the second fire,” says Professor Peabody later as he is sitting beneath Saturn, sipping a cup of tea and thumbing through a treatise on the invention of balloons as a fashion accessory.

  But this is not the second fire. It is the fifth. And the third fire is the sixth. Someone is setting fire to the campus, circling closer to the center. The ghostly girl from the faculty lounge has not been seen. She is setting the fires, says Peabody, “It’s definitely that girl. What was her name?”

  “I don’t remember,” I say. I do. It was Lys.

  “What did she look like, again? I can hardly remember.”

  “I don’t remember.” But I do.

  “We should put up a notice. What did she wear?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  I do. She was blonde and small, with huge penetrating eyes, a vacant stare, and a snake-like, up-curved mouth which, when open, said only frank and honest things.

  There were no lines on her face, not even a crease across her closed eyelids.

  She was either a ghost or a skeleton. Maybe a mummy. Maybe a witch.

  She was dressed in a modest white skirt. She wore a furry sweater with a shape knitted clumsily on the front. The silhouette of a spider or a moth.

  From my office I can hear my bats fluttering above. Peabody sighs. “That’s just too bad,” he says. “I’m up for review, and I’d like to be the one that catches her.”

  When he says “catches,” it sounds very exciting. I feel a little thrill. I feel like a fox who is about to start running. Waiting for the sound of the horn and the first patter of hounds’ feet in the brushes.

  At night, stretched out under Venus with my toes tapping Betelgeuse, I can hear the building moan. And beneath the building sounds there is another sound, like a monastic whispering again: the sound of many voices saying different things together.

  Against the gooey inside of my eyelid, Lys is pressed, her face growing lined and crumpling, her eyes sinking back into grey circles like my circles. Her voice falling in pitch until it is low enough for a poem to make sense, but not low enough to make it sound powerful.

  Then she grows young again, from a pile of dust, she rises up new and shimmering, with an infant alabaster softness, then slick like a sea creature, and moving quickly.

  Waking from my half dream, with a sheen of nervous sweat seeping from my creases, I peer down the hall. Lights flicker in the work zone that was once the faculty lounge. Outside, through the glass front doors, I can see the burned tree, still smoking slightly, and beyond that another plume of fresher smoke curling up angrily into the night. It is a new moon, and my bats are sleeping, fat from feasting last night, snoring gently and rocking themselves in their sleep.

  The night without any bats in it feels empty. I am alone in the building, alone on the campus, alone watching a few things burn outside.

  I turn around to close the door to my office and catch a flicker of movement. Lys is standing there, at the other end of the hall. Her hands are clasped in front of her. My heart jumps, while my lips part and I am about to say hello. She bends a little, takes a step forward.

  There is no Lys at the end of the hall. Just a lingering film over my vision from the dream. Still, I say, just in case: “Hello?” She turns and runs down the stairs at the end of the hall.

  I am reading another poem, but the class is a council of shadows spread around me in the basement of the faculty building. “She is all states, and all princes, I,” I say, but again the words sound strained and small pushed from between my leathery lips, bolstered by only an asthmatic breath after climbing down all of the stairs. Once again my feet are sore, and Lys has reappeared as a simple addition to the shadow council wreathing around me.

  “‘Thy duties bee to warme the world, that’s done in warming us.’” We set it all on fire.

  In the morning, my back is as sore as my feet. I’ve slept all night on the couch in my office, my left foot on Betelgeuse, my right foot under Mercury (a tiny granite-colored ball with a chip out of one side).

  Peabody is at the door, knocking gently. “I remember when this was Getz, he’d be in here every morning, just getting up for a shave when I arrived.” He sighs. “I guess it’s the planets?”

  For weeks I am nightly hunted by dreams of that shadow council, as pieces of the world burn around me. Here and there a desert fire, here and there a house burned down. The only other men likely to have noticed anything at all are the firemen, muted by the demands of their business and their heavy fire helmets. Fires in the sewer under the chemistry building. Fires under the cafeteria. Spontaneous combustion, oven fires, gas leaks, burning paper, burning cloth, the library, the groundskeeper’s cabin. Dream fires and real fires are interchangeable.

  “‘I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.’

  “Fear of the unknown,” I explain, my hands folding in on themselves like a dying insect’s wings, “Fear of the unknown arises with segregation. The expression of fear and horror is blankness. Through poetry comes the first real rhetoric of alienation.”

  No one is listening. Again, I am not sure which students surround me. Ah, I think, glimpsing the narrow shoulders of the lineless Lys. It is the shadow students.

  Back in the attic with the bats, their little grasping fingers end in talons like a bird’s. Their faces are expressionless where before they were welcoming. When I hold a body to my cheek, warm and soft in my shaking, gnarled hand, it seizes, tremors pouring through it, and it dies.

  The body slips through my fingers to the floor, a little crumpled form in a plume of dust. I feel disgusted, ashamed, small, and I climb back down the ladder. Lys is standing there, her eyes wide and hot. She has been waiting for a century, and fires are already snapping behind me. Smoke fills my lungs, and I cough, wretch, and vomit on the ladder.

  Bats are silent when stirred by fire, as if they do not want to be followed. As if to disappear obscurely is not horrible to them, to blink out of the world of the living without so
unds or protests, without waking a person, is an admirable aim.

  Bats fall through the open attic door, accompanied by soot and ashes, which cling to the white skirt of Lys and the laces of my orthopedic shoes.

  All the bats are dying. I can hear their soft bodies thumping against the latched attic window.

  Lys is muttering witch-like behind me.

  Peabody will find me in the office in the morning, one foot on Betelgeuse and one under Mercury, my head in the crook of my arm, too old and beauty-less to launch a ship.

  We are sitting in the office. Lys’s hand is on the earth, turning it sideways. She is imagining the earth’s axis shifted, gravity reversed, sloughing off the occupants into the void and cluttered space of the office. She is smiling, her skin creaseless.

  “They sometimes speak, you know,” she says, “but in foreign tongues and not to ears that hear the things that escape their lips. They waste away when they fail to divert the objects of their attention. When they do not produce obsession, they do not affect the world of man. Like the white lily pitching herself from the balcony into a shallow river when Lancelot decides he’s not interested in all that.”

  She shakes the earth, little specs of dust blow out. “It is a good way to do what you want. It is how I have transcended the basic function of my gender and become an open gateway to an amoral paradise. Was I expected to waste away from lack of reciprocal attention? Was I expected to perform that ancient function of servitor? Was I expected to transform into the match for another terrible face, when I had already been molded by desire, into the object of the first one? To invent, and practise this one way, to annihilate all three.

  “When he said that I — in that pinkening garden as the sun was setting to the triplicate harmonies of church bells, birdsong, and the highway — when he said that I was beautiful, was all the momentum of my body created or abolished?”