Letters to Lovecraft

by Jesse Bullington

  Eventually the smoke clears. Shook loose from the papier-mâché earth, I am drifting fast away. But the office is full of particles, not like empty space, and friction slows my momentum enough that I drift off to sleep.

  In dreams the soft, warm mammalian bodies of the bats are pressed up against all the skin of my face, bleeding their softness and youth into me with the whir of their heartbeats like the engines of music boxes. Lys is not slighted but loved, and I am not old but young. I feel their little bat eyes on me, greeting me and recognizing me, and they are all soon fat and slumbering in the rafters.

  I wake later to sirens, screams of outrage, and the monastic whisper-hum that happens when many people say different things together.

  The Trees

  Robin D. Laws

  As maddening as it is influential, Lovecraft’s essay shows the hazard of the writer turned critic. He takes his own vision and preoccupations and prescribes them as essential to his genre:

  “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 — a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”

  Lovecraft’s horror is invasive: it comes from the Outside, from the reaches of space, or from the long list of ethnicities he counts as the Other. When it comes from within us, we discover that we were the Other all along — an ape- or fish-man, not the mystic yet noble Northerner we thought we were all along.

  An alternate conception of horror would find that the unknown force is within us. Not an entity from the outside, but what we decline to acknowledge about ourselves.

  The essay’s influence arises from his establishment of a weird horror canon, and his practical writerly assessment of its members’ works. Among the writers who owe their current reputations to it is William Hope Hodgson. I thought of him, and of the opening of The Boats of the “Glen Carrig,” as this story took shape.

  I do not assume that either Lovecraft or Hodgson would have wanted to read this story.

  ♦

  Contrary to what his uncle told the crimp, Will Dowland had never been to sea. For this reason it did not strike him as remarkable that nearly all of the Dido’s crew had sailed on her before. As a shipwright, Dowland knew the vessels but not the men upon them. Because Uncle Edward lied to get him added to the manifest, Will imagined it a difficult matter to gain admission to a ship’s crew. Only during the voyage, as he heard the men’s stories of press-gangings and fraudulent recruitments, did he discover otherwise. Most captains hungered for men, and left port shorthanded. It was not until months later, on the island, that Dowland came to fully realize why the Dido would be different, why so many who had crewed her previous mission, which left England three years prior, would so avidly arrange their affairs to do so again.

  He did, however, detect a tension among the men even before they left the Portsmouth docks, reminding him of his drinking days. Specifically, of the pregnant interval when all could tell a fight brewed, before the first blow was struck.

  Will asked his uncle about it.

  “We expected our old captain,” Edward said. “The captain makes all the difference. This new one, this Codrington, who’s to say? Sailors resist uncertainty.”

  Will watched the men, as they went about preparing the ship to haul anchor, watching Captain Codrington. Tall, thin, Roman-nosed, the captain stalked across the deck like a raven.

  Though they stood well out of the captain’s earshot, inspecting the masts for signs of disrepair, Will spoke quietly. “The old captain, what was it they liked about him?”

  “Clement,” Edward said, “showed flexibility.”

  He ended the sentence with a finality that told Will to stop asking questions. They had to maintain the deception at least until the ship left port. Once underway, the Dido would not turn back to put off a carpenter’s mate who lacked experience.

  The Dowlands had already checked the state of the vessel the day before, and the day before that. But when shipping out, it was well to look busy, if only as a show of respect for those who did have work to do. Overall the Dowlands had found the Dido in good order, though they’d referred several spots in the hull to the attention of the caulker. Their jobs would not begin in earnest until the ship hit its first squall. Until then, Edward, who as ship’s carpenter held the rank of warrant officer, superior even to the bosun, would project serene confidence in the condition of the ship. If Will stuck by his uncle’s side and did not embarrass him, he could by stages assimilate the details of shipboard life. He regarded himself a quick study, a judgment his uncle shared. By the time the Dido faced the treacheries of the Horn, he would be ready, not only in appearance, but in fact.

  A muttonchopped man, his reddened, bulbous nose preceding him like a figurehead, spotted Edward and hastened beside him. Edward introduced him to Will as the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Lynas. Lynas assessed the younger Dowland with hazy disinterest.

  “Any word on what went awry with Clement?” he asked Edward.

  “Fell off a horse,” Edward said.

  Lynas shook his head. “Damn fool.” He peered at Captain Codrington, a stray, rheumy tear gathering in his left eye. “What have you heard of him?”

  “Very little. Jackson’s brother served with him briefly, on the Centaur, where he was a lieutenant. He made scant impression.”

  “We’ll have to take his measure,” Lynas said.

  “Naturally,” said Edward, declaring the subject closed.

  Lynas turned to Will. “Your uncle has done you a great favor, shouldering aside that ox Hannan to install you as mate.”

  “I thought he might benefit from distraction,” Edward said.

  Will gazed back at the red roofs of Portsmouth. “I am a recent widower.”

  Emotion came easily to Lynas’ voice. “So young. A terrible pity. Childbirth?”

  Will nodded. “We were expecting our first.”

  The doctor gripped Will’s shoulder. Up close, he reeked of rum. “Trust in Edward, dear boy. He does right by you.”

  ♦

  Ever since his uncle announced his plan, Will had worried for his sea legs. If he fell too deeply into sickness he would reveal himself as a tyro. As the Dido hugged the African coast, others fell wretchedly ill, supposedly hardened tars included. Aside from the odd bout of dizziness, Will held steady.

  For whole hours each day, he did not think of Elizabeth or of the baby. Then it would occur to him that he had forgotten his grief, and it would double back on him. In his solitude it did not occur to him that the crew did not seek his company, that he, like the captain, was held at an arm’s length of suspended trust.

  One, other than his uncle and the doctor, took pains to befriend him. This was Wearn, youngest of the three hydrographic surveyors aboard the ship. He fixed on Will as being of similar age and station, master of a skill that put him above the common sailor. Soon Will learned more than he cared to of sounding lines and channel depths. Gradually he came to value the whey-faced surveyor’s gift for prattle. In its soothing dullness, it bore Will away from morbid thinking. In return, Will showed Wearn how to smack a biscuit on the side of the ship, dislodging its resident weevils. This trick he passed off as his own, although he had learned it from his uncle only days before.

  At Cape Verde, the Dido left African shores for the open ocean. With nothing but water in all directions, and sky above, Will let himself fall into an automatic state. At night he might briefly be visited by the urge to sob, and, in dreams, Elizabeth once or twice came to him to remind him that she once had lived. But all in all, the spell the voyage was meant to have on him took hold. It blurred time for him as they reached South America, paralleling its coast from Brazil down south to the Horn. As they approached this place of fabled navigational peril
, Edward, who as protocol demanded had been keeping company with his fellow warrant officers, resumed his presence in Will’s daily routines. Lazy days would end when they hit the storms. Booms would bend and shatter. Masts could fall. Lynas was the ship’s doctor, but the Dowlands, uncle and nephew, were doctors of the ship. On its health, the lives of all depended.

  Yet the Horn, in its caprice, withheld all but the mildest of its assaults. The Dido sailed up South America’s western coast after only three days of repair work.

  After the ship turned at Peru into the open Pacific, a shift in mood intruded on Will’s isolation. The tang of coming violence Will perceived at Portsmouth resurfaced. Throughout the voyage Codrington had conducted himself as any sailor could wish, neither cruelly punitive nor dangerously lax, yet the men regarded him with increasingly sullen apprehension. Crewmen whispered together, stopping when Will neared. He thought to go to his uncle, but needed greater grounds for it. As a warrant officer, Edward would be obliged to report the obscurest hint of mutiny.

  Halfway between Peru and the islands, fever swept the ship. A third of the crew, the Dowlands luckily excluded, fell ill with it. Rumor spread that it was the plague; Dr. Lynas called all hands on deck to assure them otherwise. A landsman died and was buried at sea. The other victims were laid up for a week or so — except for Codrington, who could not shake it and remained abed, ceding command to the main master, a taciturn man named Tozey.

  Lynas caught Will staring at the captain’s closed cabin door and startled him by sneaking up behind him and breathing a rum fog into his ear: “Worried, young Dowland?”

  Will made an awkward spectacle of himself, turning toward the surgeon even as he backed away. “Hoping the captain recovers, doctor.”

  “As am I, surely. It blots a surgeon’s résumé, to lose his captain, no matter how arbitrarily.”

  “Could it be something in addition to the fever?”

  “You’re a medical man now, Dowland?”

  Will couldn’t understand why he was still talking, but he was. “Nothing was… for example, introduced into his food?”

  “Are you asking me, young Dowland, if the captain has been poisoned?”

  “Just a funny hunch. Maybe I have a touch of fever myself.”

  “I’ll come round later to examine you,” said Lynas, as Will slipped away.

  About an hour later, his uncle came to him, features stony. “The doctor tells me you think Codrington has been poisoned.”

  “I have no cause to think that,” Will stammered.

  “That is good. Because he hasn’t. Coincidentally. Simply lingering fever, nothing more. Which is as fine a sign that Providence smiles upon us as any I could foresee. For his sake, Will, hope he stays that way. For yours, wait and see. Soon you’ll receive the gift I brought you all this way for. And then you’ll understand. Until then, be smart and wait and watch.”

  ♦

  Two weeks later, Codrington died in his sleep. During the funeral, Will could tell that his uncle and the doctor were both studying his attitude. Recalling pale Elizabeth in her coffin, he wept. If they took that in some unkind way, he did not care.

  Tozey, now ranked as captain, ordered a quick sail to a place he only called “the island.” The others clearly knew what this meant. They sprang to action with a ferocious joy.

  Three days after Codrington’s sea burial, an atoll hove into view. Palm trees densely covered all but a crescent-shaped sliver of beach. Tozey issued orders to drop anchor, but these were superfluous, the men complying before he gave them. The crew clambered into the boats. Edward shouted for Will, who stepped quickly to his side, as affected as any by the excitement running through the crew. Edward directed him to join him, Lynas, and half of the other warrant officers. Then he handpicked a group of strong rowers to take the oars. After some confusion and bustle their boat was lowered into the water and they were off for the island.

  “It’s beautiful,” Will said, stepping onto the shore. Warm, fragrant air blew through his hair.

  Some men threw themselves into the shallow water around the island, splashing and hooting. Others set themselves firmly on land, jumping up and down on it, delighted by its solidity. Still more rushed into the stand of palms, pressing themselves up against the trees’ smooth, green-barked trunks.

  Scarlet fish, two hands long, teemed unsuspecting around the splashing men, who reached down to grab them up barehanded. Sailors produced baskets from the boats to hold the wildly flapping fish.

  Midshipmen Enticott and Moore supervised the construction of a bonfire. Keech played on his flute; Rudge, on his drum.

  Expectant gazes fell upon Dr. Lynas. He pointed to the sky. “We’re here ahead of schedule. The moon has to be right.”

  “How far ahead of schedule?” demanded a black-bearded foretopman, who Will had never before heard speak.

  Captain Tozey stepped up beside the doctor. “Two weeks or so. We made the cape faster than hoped.”

  A discontented mutter rumbled through the crew.

  “The moon will reach the necessary phase sooner than that,” Lynas said. “As long as it is waxing, we shall be set. So we can try in eight days.”

  “Should we cut them now?” The foretopman again.

  Lynas shook his head, waving his hands for further emphasis. “No, no, no. Leave them for now. They have to be fresh. We cut them the day of.”

  Edward saw the question forming on Will’s face. The day of what? Edward clapped his poor, sad nephew on the back. “You’ll see soon enough.”

  The rest of the crew shared in the amusement. Over the next eight days they made a special point of smirking at him, reveling in his ignorance, and the change that would come when it was lifted from him. Every time he sought to wring from one of them the secret of this inexplicable stop in this isolated place, their amusement grew. As they poked at him with their elbows and made references that meant to mystify him even further, they treated Will with a previously absent camaraderie. He had never sought it, but now welcomed, in this hidden paradise, the pleasure of their fellowship. For the first time, they invited him to smoke with them, in the custom of friendship that united all English sailors.

  “I wish it was my first time,” he heard Keech say to Rudge, clearly about him. “Can’t wait to see his expression.”

  The days passed in a sort of suspension, both elongated and without time. Again Will detached from his sorrows, now with bliss in place of numbed dullness. He swam. He ate fire-roasted fish till his stomach bloated. He drank deep from a heretofore unrevealed rum reserve. As never before, he broke free of his reserve, joining the men in the bawdy songs of his youth.

  Will awoke one morning to a series of not-so-hesitant prods from a naked big toe. Wearn towered over him, grinning. “The doctor says it’s time to start.” Will tottered to the shore, discreetly relieved himself, then loped on bare feet to the doctor and his uncle, who stood at the treeline’s edge. Edward patted the trunk of a palm, which they surveyed with admiration. “We picked a fine one for you.”

  Lynas crouched down to draw an invisible line with his finger, near the base of the trunk. “You must be careful to cut above the root line, but not too far. Make the cut as even as you can, all the way around.”

  “An even cut renders the pleasure all the more sublime.” Edward handed him an axe.

  “But why?” Will asked.

  “You’ll see,” said Wearn.

  “Do you know what this is?” Will asked him.

  He nodded.

  “The senior surveyors let it slip,” Lynas tut-tutted. “You’re the only one left to surprise.”

  “So I cut down the tree, and then what?” Will saw that the other men were ready to cut their own trees, one apiece. Each had an axe of his own.

  “Every man must take his own tree,” said Lynas. “Or that’s how it was taught to me.”

  “What are you on about? Taught by who?”

  “A native fellow, from the islands hereabouts, who we saved
from his people. A sorcerer, they called him.”

  Trees began to fall. At Edward’s urging, Will got to work. The wood’s green softness made an even cut difficult, but as a capable carpenter he did better than most.

  “Now,” said Lynas, “you must with ever more perfect care cut the tree’s hair.” He led Will to the leafy top of his felled palm. “Pare away each frond as tightly as you can. For this, it is better to use a knife.”

  Will did as instructed, whittling down the stubs where the fronds radiated out from the treetop. Lynas produced a stone bowl, decorated by a circular pattern from which swirled a stem of snake-like forms. In the vessel a hot paste steamed, giving off a heady odor of sweat and rotting flowers.

  “You paint this on the cuts, both at the base and at the top. Thickly, as you would applying a healing salve.”

  “Never have I been party to such an elaborate jape,” said Will.

  “Do it,” said Edward, and he did.

  “Now take one of the fronds to the fire and set it alight. Then bring it back here,” the doctor said.

  When he had done so, Lynas directed Will to set the paste alight. A choking black smoke arose from the gluey spots where the cuts had been made. The flame consumed the paste but not the wood. “Like cauterizing a wound,” said Lynas. “Now, the step on which all else turns. Do this well, and you’ll thank yourself for it. Using the knife, bore one hole about this wide…” With thumb and forefinger, he made a circle just under the diameter of a crown coin. “About six to seven inches deep, let’s say. But be careful not to drill all the way through, because after you’re done, you’ll turn the trunk over and do the same on the other side.”

  Will flushed and threw down the knife. It landed point first in the sand. “This is a joke. And a filthy one, at that.”

  The doctor uncorked a rum bottle, took a swig, and wiped his mouth. “It’s anything but, dear boy. So you’ll do it, and do it right.”

  “That’s what they’re all so excited about? Knocking down trees and carving them into dirty statues?”