Letters to Lovecraft

by Jesse Bullington

  Edward pulled him aside. “Will, you have trusted me this far. Humor me for just a few hours, and do as the doctor asks.”

  Will crossed his arms. “All of you have entered into a conspiracy against my dignity.”

  Edward pointed to the rest of the crew, knives already boring into their tree trunks. “You think I could impel all of those layabouts, and the officers and captain too, to such extraordinary lengths, merely to play a prank on you? What effort does it cost you to play along? A little carving? And who do you think these old tars are, that any immodesty on your part could possibly strike them as worthy of a second glance?”

  “Explain your purpose, uncle, and I’ll gladly obey.”

  Edward moved closer to him. “They’ve only now come to like you, boy. Show some fellowship. Or you’ll learn what it’s like to be confined to a ship for month upon month with forty nail-hard men who think you a prig and have little to occupy their idle time.”

  The hot sensation in Will’s neck and cheeks had only intensified. “Pretend to be amused by this then?”

  “Put on whatever show you like but do as the doctor says. Or you’ll force me to turn my back on you.”

  Will knelt and began to carve. The wood gave way easily to his blade.

  “At more of an angle,” said the doctor.

  When Will had finished with the two holes, Edward leaned down to inspect his work. “We are all men here,” he said. What this statement explained, Will did not deign to ask. Edward’s shrug suggested that Will’s work, if not his best, would prove sufficient. “Now lie down next to it,” Edward said.

  Will began to compose an objection, but saw that others of the men were already doing so — embracing their trees from a prone position.

  “It is for purposes of measurement,” Edward said. He turned to Wearn. “You’d best start on yours, boy.” Bobbling his head in compliance, Wearn bounded off. “I also do not have all day to supervise you, Will.”

  Suppressing a sigh, Will laid alongside the tree trunk. With the tip of his own axe, Edward cut a mark into the bark, at about the level of Will’s mouth.

  “Now cut another hole here,” Edward instructed.

  This too Will did, at which point Edward and Dr. Lynas went off toward other trees.

  “What now?” Will called after them.

  “Patience, boy,” Edward replied.

  ♦

  As the sun fell, turning the western sky a golden orange, the doctor called for the men to drag their trunks together onto the beach. They arranged them in a circular pattern, with the top ends pointing inward around the fire. Lynas had doffed all clothing save for his breeches, which he had retied into a loincloth arrangement, and also his hat. In other circumstances, Will might have considered the result comical.

  The men heaped the bonfire with the slats of empty barrels. Burrows, the surgeon’s mate, stripped as Lynas was, held a squirming burlap bag. He reached in, hand trembling, and snatched out a rat — undoubtedly taken from the ship. It reared and flailed, trying to bite him. Burrows stabbed it with his pocket blade. When it had completed its death throes, he slit the creature’s throat and handed it to Lynas, who let the blood dribble onto his back, his shoulders, and down his torso. The doctor flung the dead rat aside; Enticott kicked its body into the sea.

  Lynas threw back his head and cried up to the new moon. He spoke in a lilting tongue Will did not recognize, its rhythm, however hoarse and shouted, recalling the lapping of the waves. The others stared up at the moon along with him. Across its bright surface a dark shape briefly pulsed. The men hollered and clapped. Lynas silenced them with a snap of his fingers and continued his invocation. Only when he reached a note of crescendo did he step back, bow his head, and signal to the crew that they could now disperse.

  The men pulled their felled trees from the circle, dragging them to various points throughout the isle. They reassembled for more drinking and singing, accompanied by Keech’s flute, and sometimes Rudge’s drum.

  Gradually each stumbled away to lie beside his tree.

  Will, who had left his tree by the fire, remained busy of mind and fell asleep on the shore only as dawn glimmered in the east.

  By the time he woke noon had nearly arrived. A quiet had settled on the men. Even those who were catching fish did so with a settled determination, the only sound they made the plashing of water as they waded through it.

  Will wished to unburden himself. Thinking better of approaching either Lynas or his uncle, he found Wearn, still sprawled beside his tree.

  “The surgeon has called the devil down on us,” Will said.

  Wearn smacked the glue of sleep from his lips. “What are you blurting at me, Dowland?”

  Will crouched over him, “What would you call that, last night, but the worship of Satan?”

  Wearn sat up, forcing Will to inch back. “It’s nothing of the kind. The doctor explained it all to me.”

  “Blood sacrifice?”

  Wearn waved dismissively. “Of a rat? We’re up to our neck in them.”

  “Chanting in an indecipherable tongue?”

  Wearn eased himself to his feet. “It’s the native tongue, from around here.” He ambled for the shore, Will dogging his heels. “Nothing to do with the devil. Ask the doctor, he can explain it better than I. Out here, the laws of God and Satan don’t apply, as they would on Christian shores. Here we are ruled by moon and sky and water. All Lynas did was ask a gift of the moon.” Wearn reached the water’s edge, dropped his drawers, and loosed a healthy stream of piss. “I look forward to collecting that gift. Let yourself enjoy this, this… period of exemption. Who deserves that more than you? Your sorrows will still be waiting for you on the pier at Portsmouth.”

  As he stalked away from Wearn, Will thought he saw twin whorls forming over the slitted mouth carved into Burrows’ tree trunk.

  Will found a place of privacy at the island’s northern tip, a jut of unstable sand surrounded by placid water. He went back to the fire only to cook his fish. The men hewed to their new silence. If they took note of his worried demeanor, they did not see fit to approach him about it.

  That night, Will considered sleeping on the sand jut, but abandoned the idea for fear of rolling off it into the sea. For want of a more favorable spot, he wandered back to sleep beside his crude joke of a native idol.

  He jolted awake while it was still dark. Low grunts and exclamations sounded all around him. His vision adjusted to the faint light cast by the coals of the dying fire. All around him the sailors of the Dido had mounted their fallen trees. They thrusted into the holes they had carved, bared arses convulsing in the tropical air. Will blinked, thinking himself dreaming, but this did not dismiss what he saw and heard. He flattened himself into the sandy soil and tried to ignore the obscene exclamations.

  When morning finally arrived, he headed for the sand spit, where he intended to pray. Strewn in his path lay snoring men, trousers at their ankles, wrapped around the tree trunk idols.

  These had changed in the night.

  The idols had ill-formed faces now: round swirls for eyes, slight protrusions of the bark where noses ought to be. Raised, bumpy lips surrounded the mouth slits. Further down a pair of nipples manifested itself at approximate breast height. The shapes of the trunks themselves had altered, narrowing to form a waist then swelling again into a pair of hips around their carven cunnies.

  Will turned back to look at his own trunk. It too had undergone the changes, though to lesser extent. The eyes had only begun to take definite shape. The nipples were but dots, the widening of the hips barely detectable.

  Will lurched for the nearest axe. Raising it above his head, he rushed for his idol. A powerful force intersected with his jaw. He went flying onto the sand, landing on his tailbone. The axe lay a yard from his landing point. It was the black-bearded foretopman who had laid him low, and stood over him, ready to pummel him further.

  “Fool!”

  Edward and Wearn ran to intervene. The foret
opman held off. Not wanting to provoke him, Will stayed down. His jaw throbbed; never in his life had he been hit that hard. This man could beat him to death with a few well-placed blows.

  “We’ll see he doesn’t distress them,” Edward told the foretopman.

  “I’ll not give him no second chance,” the tar growled, moving away.

  Wearn pulled Will to his feet. Edward jabbed him in the chest. “Take this blessing or leave it alone, but do no harm to your woman.”

  “Woman?” Will managed.

  “The magic links them. When harm is visited on one, the others become distressed, and lose receptivity.”

  “Receptivity?”

  “Don’t ask any more questions,” Edward said. “Fit in.”

  Will looked past his uncle to see that the entire crew had gathered to observe them. He could not mistake their presence for anything other than a threat. “I am sorry,” he said. “I didn’t expect this. If I understood more…”

  Edward raised his voice for all to hear. “You’re not to harm your woman, and especially not the property of any other man in this crew. Your lapse was borne of sudden shock, and will not be repeated. Correct?”

  “Yes sir,” answered Will, also projecting his words.

  The group of men broke up, but, underlining the point, the foretopman and three others remained in threatening conference. Glances shot his way communicated what would happen if Edward failed to control him.

  “I misjudged you,” said Edward. “I did not think you the sort to recoil when presented with man’s earthly heaven.”

  This island was rather the opposite of heaven, Will thought, but did not say.

  “I never loved a woman as you did Elizabeth,” said Edward, “I admit to finding greater peace among whores than in the sitting rooms of respectable ladies. Always have done. So seeing you so dreadfully pained, I put myself in your position and asked what I would want. I reckoned you would see the magic of this place as I did. No whore is as pliant and yielding as these girls here. Now it is plain: I could not have been more mistaken. I am not asking you to forgive me, because I meant well. Many a shit deed is performed with good intention. I beg you, though, don’t let my mistake lead to the shedding of your blood. That I couldn’t bear. Take your gift or leave it alone, but don’t interfere.”

  “I promise,” Will said.

  With the so-called women to consort with, the sailors no longer drank quite so much rum. Nor did they keep so careful a note of each man’s share. Will could thus sneak more than was his due, and keep himself soused throughout the day. This retreat into drunkenness, as far as he could tell, dulled the concerns of his watchers.

  By the afternoon some of the ordinary sailors allowed themselves to copulate with their idols in the day’s full light. Some concentrated purposefully on a single hole, while others athletically made the rounds. Will saw that the others had a way of looking through them when they did this — a privacy based entirely on pretense. Aping their discretion, he sank down next to his tree and hoped that sleep would take him early.

  On the next day, his idol had transformed by degrees. Its face had gained detail; its outline had shifted further toward the feminine. Those belonging to the other men, who had been so assiduously fucking their tree trunks, displayed pronounced alterations. Wood and bark had fallen away from their faces, giving them dimensioned features. With blank, staring eyes they beheld the heavens. Their mouths opened and gaped. The beginnings of hands appeared at the sides of the trunks. Lines of separation, suggesting legs, ran down from their clefts of Venus.

  Will went straight to the rum barrel.

  The foretopman lay nearby, his member hanging limp from his unbuttoned trousers, his arm wrapped around his tree’s plump wooden breasts.

  “Get too drunk and you can’t perform,” he said. “Don’t want to disappoint her.”

  Will lifted the barrel lid to skim its contents into his tin mug. “I have forgot your name.”

  “Veasey.”

  “Well, Mr. Veasey, do you care what I do or don’t do with that thing, if I don’t get in your or anyone’s way?”

  Veasey patted his idol. “Lucy don’t like to be called a thing.”

  Will, afraid he would make a face at this, drank from the mug. “Lucy, is she?”

  “It’s more like loving if you give ’er a name.” It might have been a trick of the light, but it seemed Lucy’s face shifted from one unreadable look to another.

  “I will consider that, Mr. Veasey,” Will said, tottering.

  Despite himself, he overheard enough to learn the names of other men’s trees. Wearn called his Marie; his uncle, Charlotte. The doctor’s was Rachel, which Will gathered was the same name he had given his idol the last time the crew of the Dido anchored on the island. That gave rise to other questions, which he both did and did not want the answers to. He drank more.

  Three more nights passed, and three more days, in which the trees steadily took on more of the outward aspects of women. They might have been easier to take if their expressions showed any softness or accommodation. Instead they retained their original blind, gaping stares.

  “How can you do it?” he asked Wearn.

  Wearn laughed, as if they discussed nothing more than a preference for sherry over ale. “How can you not?”

  “This is madness.”

  “You haven’t tried yours yet, have you?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Try her, you’ll understand. Never with a woman back home will you feel such perfect ecstasy.”

  “How can that possibly be?”

  Wearn caressed the trunk of his idol, which they sat by. “Your wood girl, she exists because of you. And for you. Only for you. You feel that when you’re, you know, inside of her. Her each and every movement, it is exactly right for you, at the moment she does it, so fine and so exquisite.”

  “They move?”

  “Yes, they move, you dolt. That’s why until you have her, you cannot understand.”

  Will studied Wearn’s statue, wondering if it could tell what they were saying. “How can you, Wearn? Such grotesque visages!”

  Wearn regarded his tree nervously. “Sssh. Don’t say that.”

  “See? You’re afraid of them. They’re not girls. Not women. They’re monsters. They’re waiting until our… activities have completely transformed them, given them enough shape to get up and walk about the island. And then slaughter us.”

  Wearn clamped a hand over Will’s mouth. “If you say that again around Marie, I’ll have to do you as Veasey did.”

  ♦

  Late that night, as the men on either side of him pumped into their wooden girls, Will heard a soft voice in his head.

  Why haven’t you named me?

  He hit himself on the back of his head, to stir himself from the nightmare.

  The voice kept on: My sisters all have names.

  Shut up, he thought.

  What have I done to offend you?

  I’m going mad.

  What about Elizabeth? You could call me Elizabeth.

  There was a rock in his hand, ready to smash its face, before he remembered the danger of such an act and let it drop into the sand.

  Please love me so I can be like my sisters.

  He ran to the shoreline and dunked his head in the water. When he came back, his tree’s face had gained delineation. Or it was his mind tricking him. With hardly any light, it was free to invent.

  I won’t call you Elizabeth, he thought at it. To stop you from calling yourself that, I’ll dub you Nancy.

  He heard nothing more from the voice, so he immediately marked it as a drunken hallucination.

  In the morning he awoke naked from the waist down. Milky issue spilled across the idol’s hips. Shame came over him like a nausea. He wobbled to the shoreline to throw up, but couldn’t, even after sticking his finger down his throat.

  He had, after all his resistance, done the terrible deed. He’d been drunk and perhaps acting in his
sleep but it didn’t matter. The same crime the others had committed was now his, too. He imagined himself with a pistol at his temple, pulling the trigger. “I’m so sorry, Elizabeth,” he said. Then he recalled his nakedness and rushed to put his trousers on.

  The next night he lay next to Nancy, heart thumping. He had already done it. He could not now be further damned. He should at least then understand what he had done to himself. He waited until the sailors around him fell quiet and silently climbed onto his idol. He would not redouble his sin by using the mouth or arse.

  As soon as he entered her, a jolt coursed through him. He came without stopping. He tried not to cry out, but it was useless to suppress it.

  He pulsed until he ached. An unthinking peace washed through him. He would not let it take him, as it was a falsehood, and he, a weakling and a coward, whose promises to himself held neither substance nor value. He rolled off of Nancy and soundlessly wept.

  ♦

  The bosun’s mate clanged a bell. He shouted for the men to rouse themselves and ready for departure. They had already overstayed. Any longer and the bad weather would start. It was time to say goodbyes.

  Veasey, among others, shouted in protest. The doctor settled them down. If they made trouble now, they wouldn’t be allowed back the next time.

  The men took their idols and again dragged them to the beach. Numbly, unnoticed tears wetting his cheeks, Will followed suit. Not until the torches came out did he apprehend what saying goodbye entailed.

  “Now form a tight circle,” Dr. Lynas, himself a touch weepy, declared. “This is where it went bad, the last time.”

  “What are we doing?” Will heard himself asking.

  Veasey stood beside him. “You can’t want your Nan to die slow and painful.”

  “Nan? How do you know that?”

  “They talk to each other,” he said. “Now show some respect.” He tossed Lucy into the central pile of tree trunks. Cracks had appeared in her drying bark.

  Edward put his hand on Will’s shoulder. “Steady now.”

  “How can we do this?”

  “What do you mean?” his uncle asked.

  “We’ve been calling them women. And now we’re… we’re to do this?”