Letters to Lovecraft

by Jesse Bullington

  The phrase “Everything happens for a reason” has always annoyed me though, and I’ve often wondered what it would take to get the phrase banned from the English language. And who can think about the actual concentrated essence of evil without thinking about the Holocaust? And then I started writing…

  ♦

  There were other groups all over the world, or so the members of the group would have liked to think. It wouldn’t be fair if they were all alone, all alone with the unbelievable truth.

  And statistically, it was impossible that the four people in this room — two women, two men — were the only ones who had noticed the great change. And if there were others, it stood to reason that they would have found one another, formed groups. Met once a month, to talk about it, three months running, like this group had.

  Maybe one of the groups was comprised of important people. Philosophers and scientists, poets and soldiers. People dedicated to getting to the bottom of what had happened, to setting the world aright.

  This group, with its two women and two men, was not that group. It was, when all was said and done, more of a support group.

  “So, anything?” Lurlene asked. The group met at her house, because she kept it neat and always offered snacks and soft drinks — diet soda pops and lemonade from a powder mix. Her husband kept guns, and that made the two men feel safer. They met in the basement for the same reason. It was hard to feel safe in a room with windows these days.

  “I like these blondies,” Nashawna said. She licked her fingers. She only felt safe, irrationally so, when Lurlene’s black cat jumped into her lap and made himself comfortable, and purred. Which he did at the start of every meeting. He was there now, so Nashawna held her blondie in a napkin with her left hand.

  Aaron looked at Nashawna, and the black cat, and the blondie, and said, “Ha, that should be a brownie.”

  “Don’t,” Nashawna said.

  Lurlene glanced back and forth between the two of them, and then stared meaningfully at Stewart. “Forget that, Aaron. Just tell them what you recall.”

  “The crawling chaos,” Aaron said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Egypt lately.”

  “It’s in the news, darling,” Lurlene said. She always tried to calm Aaron down, since, if she didn’t, then Stewart would start fuming and arguing. The worst thing to do with a paranoid schizophrenic is to simply disagree.

  “All sorts of things are going on in Egypt,” Nashawna said. “That’s nothing.”

  “Don’t the Egyptians hate the Jews?” Aaron asked. His eyes glanced from Nashawna to some empty space off to the left, above his head. He was asking the entities for a refresher on the geopolitics of anti-Semitism.

  “The Egyptians,” Stewart said, his jaw clenched, “were the first to make a peace treaty with Israel. But of course that was years ago. Many things have changed.” He looked at Lurlene, then Nashawna, then he exhaled sharply through his nose. “But I wouldn’t say that Egyptians — as a people — hate the Jews — as a people, again — especially.”

  Stewart and Aaron had similar noses. They were brothers. Aaron was about eighty pounds overweight, and an unruly beard sprouted from his neck. Stewart was muscular under his tight shirt, like a swimmer, and his knee twitched nervously.

  Lurlene was a slow thinker. A slow speaker. Not unintelligent in the slightest; just extremely careful. “The crawlin’ chaos. You said it came from Egypt before, right? Before the news started over in Egypt.”

  “But what does that have to do with —” Nashawna started. It was hard to believe even now. “The change.”

  That’s what they called it. In the great scheme of things — and there was a great scheme of things, everyone in the group was sure of that now — it was a little change.

  During the Second World War, which was still called the Second World War, Hitler, who was still widely considered the most evil man who had ever lived, began a campaign of extermination against European Jewry. As part of this program, he had built many concentration camps, and above the gates of several of them was emblazoned a slogan.

  And that slogan was Nichts geschieht ohne Grund. Nothing happens without reason. Or, in the American idiom, the idiom of this quartet of seekers, “Everything happens for a reason.”

  These four remembered, they knew, that until recently, all the history books, all the pop culture references, all the eyewitness accounts had been different. Arbeit macht frei. Work will make you free. But now, that phrase had been erased. Erased and replaced.

  Aaron snorted. Maybe snorting was a genetic predisposition. “It has everything to do with the change. Everything.” Nashawna sat back, biting her lip. It was going to be a long meeting. Aaron launched into his monologue, gesticulating and pointing at an imaginary whiteboard in the air, connecting all the dots. The crawling chaos out of Egypt; oil as the black blood of the earth, not from dinosaurs but from other… creatures whom had been erased and replaced by the dinosaurs as part of the great trick.

  “Wait one minute now,” Lurlene said. “Are you saying that when the change happened, dinosaurs were introduced as well? Do you know about something other than dinosaurs, from out of the distant past?”

  “Well, don’t you?” Stewart said. His hand was up, in front of Aaron’s face. When Stewart took charge of a conversation, he committed entirely. Lurlene wanted to tell him to mind his manners in her house, to remind him that she called the meetings, that she ran the group.

  “I do,” Nashawna said. “The devil. The devil put the fossils in the ground to fool us, to convince us to turn our backs on God and follow Darwin and secular humanism.” She petted the cat, picked it up and nuzzled it. “And now look at where we all are.”

  Stewart had found Nashawna via her church newsletter — it had made a local stir when she dared headline a column about the good and bad news of the congregants “Everything Happens for a Reason.” He had sent her an email of support after she became a social media laughingstock. Lurlene had found Aaron at the local Wendy’s when she bumped into him and caused him to spill his pop all over his shirt and sweatpants. He said that it must have happened for a reason, and Lurlene had forgotten to act offended. Aaron wore sweatpants everywhere. Always navy blue. Lurlene hoped that he had lots of pairs.

  That was where they all are. A group of four. Lurlene was the leader because she made the calls to bring everyone together; she wanted answers.

  “The dinosaurs,” Aaron said, “aren’t a lie per se. I mean, even ‘Everything happens for a reason’ isn’t a lie per se. Yeah, I know. No, I don’t wanna…” He muttered a few other things. More arguments with the entities he was sure bedeviled him.

  “He means,” Stewart said, “that even before the change, some concentration camps had similar slogans over the gates. Jedem das Seine, over Buchenwald’s gates for instance.”

  “That means ‘To Each His Own,’” Nashawna said. She let the cat down finally, and he ran off into the shadows of the basement, behind the washer-dryer. “I got Rosetta Stone,” she explained.

  “Yes, but it means something like ‘Just deserts,’ okay,” Stewart said. “And —”

  “Nyarlathotep!” Aaron squawked. His hands started trembling. “The God of a Thousand Forms! Dinosaurs, pharoahs! And you’re talking of, of, of…”

  “Have a blondie,” Lurlene said. She leaned over with the plate, and made a point of showing off her cleavage a bit. She was no psychiatrist, but she knew Aaron well.

  He took the blondie and muttered, “Desserts, just desserts. I’m trying to tell them something and I get a blondie.” He chewed. “Okay, okay, I’ll eat it.”

  “Anyway,” Stewart said, annoyed. Arch disgust was set into his frown now. Maybe he would have strangled his brother, killed him, if not for Aaron’s occasional burst of signal amidst all the noise of madness. Since the change, it was easy to get away with doing all sorts of crazy things for no reason. Murder, riots, rape of babies, cleansing the countryside of the neighboring peoples — nobody even asked why.


  But only because they knew the answer: there was no why. A shrug. Eh, no reason.

  Maybe that’s why Stewart didn’t kill his brother. He actually had reason to.

  Aaron’s beard was flaked with blondie crumbs. He cleared his throat and said, “I bet there’s a group in Egypt. There’s a fuckin’ group in Egypt.” Then he peered at Nashawna. “Hey, Rosetta Stone, you know Egyptian now too? Eh? Eh? Wanna go with me, get lost under a pyramid?”

  “I am getting real tired of this,” Nashawna said. Her face was locked, expressionless. “Real damn tired.”

  “We need him,” Stewart said, quietly.

  “Why?”

  “Look, whoever, or whatever, did the replacement for lack of a better word, they changed perceptions all over the world. They rewrote history. Or it rewrote history. Aliens, the Devil, who knows.”

  “The crawling chaos,” Aaron said.

  “Anyway, the issue is a matter of perception. We know it already. Nashawna, you think God protected you. Fine. Lurlene, you had that car accident, you were in a coma when it happened. And I, well, I was just convinced by my brother. But he knows something. He knows it, and he can find the others out there, or convince other people too.”

  Aaron tittered, scratched himself. It wasn’t accidental. He was putting on a show.

  “There’s an article I just read about human consciousness,” Aaron said. “Scientists don’t know where it comes from, but it has to come from neuron activity. We’ve all been short-circuited in a way.”

  “God short-circuited me?” Nashawna asked.

  “You know — you say it yourself. You’ve been slain in the spirit. It’s like having a fit.”

  Nashawna stood up quickly, her legs strong and thick. “It is not like having a fit. Don’t blaspheme. I can take it from him —” she pushed her palm in Aaron’s direction, “and the Lord can take it from anyone, but I can’t take it from you.”

  “It’s neurological. Like a seizure. Fine, believe that God made that neurological ‘god part’ of the brain, like a phone jack installed in your head. I…” he trailed off.

  Nashawna stepped up to him, her hand raised high. “You keep talking about things happening for reasons. I don’t need a reason to slap you silly, but I’ve got one —”

  “Nashawna, please,” Lurlene said. She stretched her arm and took Nashawna’s hand, gave it a squeeze. She stood from her chair and put her other hand on Nashawna’s shoulder. “I need you here. I can’t do this group otherwise.” She shifted her position so her shoulder and broad back were to the men in the room and mouthed, Don’t leave me alone with them.

  Things were quiet for a long moment, then the cat padded upstairs.

  “I don’t like this anymore than anyone else,” Stewart said. “Aaron’s probably immune because he’s schizophrenic and, well, schizophrenia is genetic. Partially genetic. Maybe I’m persuadable because I was partially immune. Partially…schizophrenic. Schizotypal. But I think that’s the key.”

  “To what?” Lurlene asked, turning to face Stewart. The basement seemed so small, and dark, with the two women standing. Like an interrogation room, but everyone was simultaneously the cop and the suspect.

  “Finding other groups.”

  “Oh yeah, is everyone in Egypt schizophrenic?” Nashawna asked, her tongue acid.

  “No, but a lot of them are devoutly religious. Muslims and Christians.”

  “And a lot of them are dead!” Aaron said. “The dead know!”

  “Well, certainly there have been head injuries, trauma, people knocked into a coma by tear gas and police beatings.”

  “And,” Lurlene said slowly, “Aaron has been talking about a pharaoh at every meeting. Maybe there’s something to it.”

  “Egyptians worshipped the cat!” Aaron declared.

  “There definitely is,” Stewart said. He dug out his smartphone. “I just found this, this afternoon.” He stood up and held the phone out to the women. If Aaron was interested at all, he didn’t show it in his posture or attitude. His head was slumped over, and he was looking at a mark on the poured concrete floor.

  “The media isn’t going to air this, for the obvious reason.” Stewart winced at his word choice, then pressed a button on the smartphone screen. It took the video a few seconds to load.

  It was a protest video. A familiar one, at first. A crowd of mostly men, mostly bearded, mostly dark-skinned, chanting and pumping their fists. There were some women too — some in Western garb, others in veils of various lengths and cuts and fashions. The camera, probably one from a smartphone much like Stewart’s, snaked through the crowd to the center of the protest. A young woman in a thick black robe was bound, in barbed wire, to a young man in khaki pants and a torn shirt. They were alive, groaning and wincing, and the man, whose face was not obscured by a cloth, was even occasionally calling out, looking at the camera.

  And the chant was in English: “Reason! Reason! Reason!”

  Aaron giggled. “Just like Romeo and Juliet,” he said, his voice a piping squeak, like he had swallowed a little toy of himself and was letting it speak from inside his barrel frame.

  “He’s a Copt, she’s a Muslim. They tortured them for hours. Both sides that is. Sectarian solidarity. The comments under the video, as best Google Translate can tell me, are that everyone was relieved to agree that something should be done, that these kids should be punished for, uhm, ” — Stewart considered his immediate audience — “stepping out across religious lines. And there was this guy, some holy man from out in the desert, who suggested chanting in English, to get the attention of the world media.”

  “Not that that’ll happen! It can’t ever be allowed,” Aaron said from the corner. Lurlene swore she saw the outline of an erection stirring in his sweatpants.

  “So what do you want us to do?” Nashawna said. “How can we contact this guy? Email the person who put up the vid?”

  “Tried that!” Aaron said. “Bounced!” He giggled again, and bounced himself, the aluminum folding chair straining under his weight.

  “Well, I have some money saved. Maybe, Lurlene, you can take an equity loan out on the house, and we can all take a trip, do some research. Just meeting here isn’t helping.”

  “Take out a loan? What would I tell my husband? In heaven’s name, why? What possible reason could I give him for —”

  “You don’t need a reason,” Nashawna said. “Remember. Nobody needs a reason to do anything anymore. It’s like nothing happens for a reason. That’s why everything is so darn crazy out there. But do banks even give loans to people anymore? My bank shut down last week. I didn’t have much, but it was my savings, and I ain’t getting it back.”

  “Please, we have to do something. Try to find the others,” Stewart said. He was hollow-voiced, practically about to cry. “I think I’m going crazy.”

  “Oh, honey,” Lurlene said. She didn’t say anything else for more than a minute. Nobody did, except for the rioters shouting “Reason! Reason! Reason!” through the tinny speaker on Stewart’s smartphone.

  “I’m going to go upstairs for a second,” Lurlene said, finally. “For some lemonade refills. And a beer for you, Stewart. I even went to the liquor store, and you know I don’t like that awful place. The boys who hang around on the corner say such awful things to me. We have to talk more about this. Maybe we can have an emergency meeting after the weekend. But we can’t make any rash decisions now.”

  “I’ll help,” Nashawna said, but Lurlene shot her a pleading look. Someone had to keep an eye on the men. They were both degenerating so quickly.

  Once upstairs, Lurlene quickly grabbed her big quilt and hung it over the basement door, from hooks she had drilled at the top of the frame. She grasped a large and most peculiar switch bolted into the wall and was about to give it a turn when the cat meowed.

  “Oh,” she said. “Hello there, Nigger-Man.”

  “Hello,” Nigger-Man said. “Did the meeting go well?” His voice was like a toddler’s im
pression of a cat, or a cartoon character.

  “Oh, definitely. Just about to gas the lot of them,” Lurlene said. She cranked the switch.

  “Did they come very close to figuring it out?”

  Lurlene nodded, chewed her lip. “Oh, pretty close. The crazy fat ones with the mother born of a motherfucker often do.”

  Nigger-Man, lacking the organs to laugh properly, just schhz-schhz-schhzed.

  “They wanted me to take out a second mortgage on the house, to fly to Egypt with them,” Lurlene said.

  “Speaking as your husband, I certainly wouldn’t allow that,” Nigger-Man said. “I keep my pussy close to home.” He nuzzled up to Lurlene’s ankles, and circled them, purring deeply, his tail tall.

  “My little puss-puss,” Lurlene said, bending over to stroke him. “It’s like our job is never done. There are always a few rats to kill. And you tried to make everyone so happy, with your little adjustment.”

  “Some people feel better when they have something to worry about,” Nigger-Man said. “A big ol’ meanie setting up the universe like a billiard table.”

  “Yeah, knockin’ ’em right into the corner pocket.” Lurlene scooped up Nigger-Man and gave him a bunch of belly kisses, then a tongue kiss, the tip of her fat human slug of a tongue pushed into his little mouth, his needly teeth drawing blood.

  Finally, she put him back down. “Tuna casserole for dinner?”

  “My favorite!”

  Nigger-Man turned and made to walk away from the basement door, Lurlene obediently on his heels. Then they heard a great yelp and a pounding on the door.

  “Halp!” It was Aaron. It was probably Aaron anyway. It sounded like most of his throat was already gone, as it was. “Ev’ryone, dead! Halp!” The room shook. He was throwing his whole fat body against the door. Lurlene worried that he might upset the quilt, and then she’d really have to sell the house. The gas would melt the paint off the walls, get into the carpets, everything.