by Paula Guran
Ada looks up to the vestibule, sees the old woman staring down at her from the door, like some creature requiring permission to leave. The woman presses a blackened palm against the glass of the door. More than anything Ada wants a needle for this compass, she assumes it’s Luke – how couldn’t it be? – but what comes will have to come from this center in which she’s standing.
She feels the answer pulling at her from the woods. Halfway along the tree line she sees an open notch of deeper shadow. He’s watching her from behind the low-hanging branch of a red maple. She goes to him, her true north. He fades back into the trees and she stops, waits. The opening looks natural, as if the forest gave itself an entrance. A sundial stands to the right, long-weathered marble, in a place where it could rarely feel the sun and its purpose. She drags her fingers around every corner, across the carved letters.
“Horas non numero nisi serenas,” she reads, remembers. And in a voice that sounds cracked to her, like Gram’s voice, “I do not count the hours when they are dark.” As a girl Ada checked the sundial every morning in the back yard, where the dawn first peeked over the Smoky Mountains at her little world. The slow swing of the blade of shadow, the way it changed its shape to a fan, the way it fell into everything else when night came. Sometimes Gram would whisper those words and Ada would think to herself that time had gone someplace where it could never find its way back to her. She’d be stuck there, forever guarded.
Looking at the inscription now, she senses that Gram might have had the translation a touch wrong, but the sentiment feels true as ever. Has this sundial always been here, or is it another sign given by Luke? She turns back to the church, the windows now filled with watchers. Two shapes crouch on the roof peak, steeples regarding her. Back to the inscrutable trees and their velvet dark, she can’t step anywhere but inside charge.
A path opens before her. There’s the shush of water somewhere close, and before long she begins to hear movement in the trees on either side of her, the shuffle and crack of leaves.
“We’ve looked for you,” someone says from her right, and overlapping from the left is another voice, a lower register, “Many have come far for you.”
Staggering, words stepping on words all around her:
“We settled here for you—”
“The light of stairs—”
“Between stars—”
“Through cracks—”
“Planted our roots for you—”
“You’re glad you’ve found us—”
Ada walks faster, calling Luke’s name and getting the same nothing back she’s gotten for so long now. But the voices withdraw, or were never there.
A clearing spreads out in the near distance, one she saw lit with flashes not two hours ago on her computer screen. No figure stands in wait and now even the light of the incomplete moon is hidden from her. The obscured mountains give everything an extra weight. And the trees open around her, uncurtaining the hole in the ground, a low and devastating sweep of strings comes from it, two violins again, one cello again. It’s nothing and everything like music. It’s the most dreadful, pristine thing she’s ever heard. The earth falls asleep in its wake, an absence of sound.
She steps forward, one of her shoes gone missing somehow, and peers over the lip of the pit, ten, a dozen feet down. The mouth of it stretches twice as long across. Three figures sit inside, draped in ragged black sheets, placing their instruments aside. The ground is shifting around them, until she realizes the carpet of leaves is alive with moths. They’ve eaten holes in the sheets. Ada looks for the mannequin, trying to complete the picture, but doesn’t see it.
“And she comes,” one of them says, the tallest, and all three chuckle. It’s a woman’s voice, but also the sexless whisper from the film. There’s the lightest modulation. “We’ve looked for you.”
“Where’s my husband?” Ada says, feeling the air pull at the hairs on her arms, smelling its sharp tang of rain on hot asphalt.
The first draped figure – it’s Emma, she thinks, even taller now, and how did she make it through the woods ahead of her? – cocks its head, says, “Ada, your marriage cannot concern us, but I understand. I remember the sentiment. He is close, so don’t fear. He’s arranged for you to be with us, as bitter as his work has become. But he’s been kept safe, as a gift.”
“What do you want?” Ada asks, but she finds there are not many questions. None burns in her with a particular heat. She watches the moths rise in brief, spiraling clouds and settle again on the leaves around these – cultists, she supposes that’s the word – and catches herself squeezing the neck of her viola, wanting, almost, to play it. “Is your name Emma?”
“It is a name. Emma. And yet we have no name. This we’ve dug is a bowl, you can see,” she says, that flat voice holding the edges of a vibration. The head tilted toward the left shoulder. “This land is a bowl, rimmed by its mountains, and they are old mountains. We are a bowl. So are you, Ada, a bell that’s waited long to be struck. It’s that tone you will wrap with ours. Bowls are for filling. You’ve known this, but now you can hear it.”
“I don’t know any of this. Or any of you. I only saw your name written on something.”
“Bowls,” the one to her left says, in a deeper but more feminine range, “it’s a matter of greater acoustics.”
“Resonance,” the third whispers.
Ada breathes out. “A door.”
“Yes,” Emma says, “but not in a way that will open your Earth.” She sighs, and there’s a thread of static in it. “It’s a pretty thought, isn’t it, our beloveds dreaming long under these perfect mountains, rising up from the roots of them. But no, they’re coming from older doors, through cracks in spectrums you can’t imagine. Their light swallows itself, and us into their embrace. The light we’re all seeking, even the insects are drawn to it.” Her hands creep out from under the sheet and brush across the moths. Dust coats fingers that have too many knuckles. “The three of us were found, like you have been.”
“Was that you playing in the church?”
“By some measures, yes. By others, they are our personal acolytes, our skins. A wardrobe for when we want to look, shall we say, nice. You’ll have your own very soon. But what you heard them play is very little to do with us. We are mostly silence, as you heard in the footage we made for you. We, and only we, here, have found the right note. The rest is only artifice. No name wears us, but there is a symbol, like a rune, but it’s a notation more arcane. We’ve spent lifetimes learning it. Turning it to sound. We first sequenced its true threads in a machine, in 1968, but it seems to require the intricacies of a human wrist, a human fallacy, perhaps. And since then we’ve looked for the last thread. Before, only a man named Erich Zann had come close, but he bent his studies to a different resolve. We first heard the true thread, the seed of it, when you were a child crying yourself to sleep, still smelling of your parents’ blood. Such a pure frequency, we rejoiced. And when it was cultivated, we rejoiced. You, Ada, you could even hum it over ours.”
The other two figures speak a word, a monosyllabic incantation. Their voices are perfect mirror images of one another, coupling, and the sound crusts in Ada’s ears, wet and painful.
“The name of the beloveds,” Emma says. “The very fact you can hear it means, oh, Ada, such great things. You’ll find it interesting that if one could sand offall its burrs and tongues, it might translate, poorly, as ‘grandmothers.’ Over the river and through the woods.”
Grandmothers. Ada feels no surprise, only the old confused warmth. She hears the rustle of leaves, amplified in her pressurized ears, and Luke is here at last, just inside the trees, hiding behind his best camera. It’s pointed at her, and she remembers how long he saved up to buy it. Across his shoulder is a black sheet. She recognizes it as hers, somehow, he must have gotten it from her car. Even behind the camera he’s still handsome, though he’s all sagging skin and bones, he’s lost so much weight. His face is ravaged with beard stubble.
&n
bsp; “I’m sorry, Ada.” He crosses to her, stands there first-date nervous. “I knew you weren’t strong enough to come here unless you thought I was in trouble. So they felt you’d respond to film as a way to prepare you.” He lowers the camera to smile at her.
“Strong enough? You chose all this over me,” she says, and the dam’s barely holding now, what’s behind it is surprising her. “You chose this over starting a family. This is the past year? Two years, how many years? This is you hitting me? This is what we were?” Shouting – has she ever shouted at anything? – and somewhere the last bird in the forest screams back and bursts into a ruffled flight.
“Please don’t – at first I couldn’t stand it, that they wanted you. I’m just the glorified cameraman, your – acolyte. I should have accepted it was about you. I should have made our life about you all along.” He’s crying, she hasn’t seen him cry since his father died. “But I’m trying to get it now, it’s only you. You have such an honor. And there can still be an us, tell them that.”
She’s never wanted anything but him, almost from the moment she first found the idea of what wanting could do. Through these trees sits the old place, but she only found him here, in this older place. Gram always said she would do great things, but it’s not Gram’s voice that’s speaking to her now. Gram’s voice never let her be. This isn’t a voice at all, it’s something more atavistic and naked, tipping its head back to where the moon appears in its frame of treetops, waiting for a god to finish it. This is strength, this is what strength is.
“I came here to help you,” she tells him. In the video, this is the part where she drapes the black sheet over herself like some widow’s veil, it’s when she goes to him. What is there to mourn, now? “I wanted to be strong for you, to be not like Ada for you. That was stupid. I’ll choose what you chose, but for my music. For me,” she adds, and his eyes get wide, “not for you, and not for us.” She snatches her sheet from his shoulder, turns away from her name on his lips. She walks over to the hole and drops the sheet on the ground.
Below, the three figures pull theirs off in harmony, revealing thin, over-jointed bodies. Bleached white and hairless, heavily endowed, composed of blunt hominid angles. Their thin tongues are almost translucent. Emma’s farthest along in this anthropomorphosis, the shape of her skull in flower, the bones petaling out around the mouth. The black symbol curves up around the heave of her right breast. A beauty that could be appreciated, if given an age. Or by a grandmother, Ada thinks.
From behind comes the sound of Luke’s sobs, and another sound, like the interminable ending of a deep kiss, but she doesn’t turn. Her eyes crawl over Emma’s body, all the ripe firmness.
“You’ve grown these last days,” Emma says, “found your own mettle. We are proud. It gives our gift to you a different flavor, perhaps. Look,” and her elongated finger points.
Ada glances back now, reluctantly, to see her husband removing his skin, a costume two sizes too large. Under it there’s little blood, little muscle, fewer tendons than seems possible. He’s a weak serpent of a thing, young and gasping at the air, folding himself over his arm like a coat.
“He is your own acolyte,” Emma says. “A true one. He will be allowed to evolve into a lower form of us.”
“He is yours to wear,” the second says.
“When we visit here,” the third says.
“You always wanted him closer,” and Emma laughs.
Ada sees faces appear in the trees, at a discreet distance, most human and lit with expectance, a few sunken and bled white. Ada turns back to the hole. Now the cello is squeezed between Emma’s powerful, spindled thighs. The violins are seated under those strange chins. The three of them play, the three tones uncoil, neither major nor minor, cold nor warmth, and the ground absorbs a thick, silent thunder. The sky flashes a negative of itself, it’s filled with vast things, endless drifting strands and appendages. Arriving, converging, dwarfing the Appalachians in every direction. Immense limbs like cities, a pulsing architecture, reach down and reduce the Earth’s majesty. Ropes of sinew orbited by wan stars. The sky goes moonlit again and they’re gone. Ada feels it: that note, the one that has built in her.
The sky burns that non-white a second time, the filaments of gods hanging down from wherever their great eyes blink and gaze. She feels those eyes roll downward, each wet socket a galaxy, tipping toward her, her. Dark again, absence again, with them just behind it. They wait for the sky to stay on.
Ada lowers herself to all fours and climbs down into the hole. The finished quartet doesn’t commune. The three, waiting for her, begin threading their frequencies into a cord. She realizes she’s left the viola above her, the ghost of her mother still in its bones somewhere, and she smiles. She decides to sing instead. She cracks opens her mouth.
The late Michael Shea Michael Shea invented a character, “Cannyharme,” whose genesis lay in Lovecraft’s story “The Hound.” “The Hound” involves the exhumation of a ghoul who had lain buried five hundred years in a Dutch churchyard. An amulet – found in surprisingly good condition – is stolen from the skeletal remains as they hear the “baying of some gigantic hound” in the distance. The upper-class grave robbers return to England, but very bad things – accompanied by the hound’s baying – happen. It is decided the strange occurrences are connected to the amulet, and the narrator returns to Holland intending to return it to the tomb. The amulet is stolen, but he re-excavates the grave anyway, only to discover the skeleton “not clean and placid as we had seen it [before], but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom. And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, sardonic bay as of some gigantic hound, and I saw that it held in its gory, filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade.”
In the short poetic tale here, you can gather much about the nature of Cannyharme, but the fact he is writing to Edgar Allan Poe, dead at least a century before this correspondence is supposedly penned, has another significance. Lovecraft saw Poe as his major influence, his “God of Fiction.” “The Hound” is an attempt to emulate Poe, but in retrospect, HPL felt his story was “a piece of junk.” Author Lin Carter later agreed, stating it was “slavishly Poe-esque in style” and “a minor little tale. Steven J. Mariconda, although acknowledging HPL’s debt to Poe, sees the story as “written in a zestful, almost baroque style which is very entertaining.”
Michael Shea first wrote sword-and-sorcery and supernatural/extraterrestrial horror, primarily in the novella form (collected in Polyphemus and The Autopsy and Other Tales). In the last decade or so he added homages to H. P. Lovecraft to his novella work (as in collection Copping Squid.) His novel Nifft the Lean won a World Fantasy Award, as did novella “The Growlimb.” His most recent novels are dark, satirical thrillers The Extra and Assault on Sunrise. Shea passed away on 16 February 2014.
An Open Letter to Mister Edgar Allan Poe, from a Fervent Admirer
Michael Shea
——
Optissime! Best of the Best!
It is with reverence and reluctant challenge I unfurl my banner to you herein. Great Poe, of all your peerless poems, it is The Conqueror Worm I’ve cherished most. I have sipped the ichor of its icy truth again and again, amid the dark business of this recent century. The Worm, you see, has long been my metier. The Worm has been my very medium, for longer ages than even your great spirit can conceive.
I write, Sir, to apprise you of my apotheosis. For I must, by the law of Majesty, proclaim and present myself a mightier Monarch than King Worm himself. Until I find you, Sir, I produce this document, that you may know Who seeks you. It is with deep regard that I unfold to you this declaration of myself, my Work, my Way.
Ever since your meteoric crossing of the skies – so bright, so brief! – like steeds your melodies, your Stygian rhapsodies have lofted me and borne me worlds away. You must forgive, oh metric Master
, the imperfect measures of my fledgling songs. What grace they have, they’ve learned from you. One of these songs reports my recent rebirth and present course thus:
In Netherlands did old Van Haarme
A vasty boneyard till and farm,
Did plough and plant a funeral field
Where gnarled lich was all his yield,
And parched cadaver all the crop
That e’er the Ghoul did sow or reap.
But it’s Carnival Row in latter years
That the canny Hound now scythes and shears.
The boggy graves of his natal feif
He’s quit for the Carnival’s shadow-strife.
It’s Poortown’s streets that he seeds now, and tills,
Where the shambling shadow-folk drift without wills.
You who have rendered so well the psychic fecundity of cities will appreciate, I know, the giddy translocation I experienced, from the foggy churchyards of the Lowland, to the human Roil within a maze of pavements. And so, perhaps, you commiserate for what might have been a grave upheaval of my mode of life. But it has not been so! I have blundered upon Powers unforeseen – undreamed! I command a legion here, and have found my own wings in the wills of my living prey.
My ancient lust was to enslave the dead
And up the brittle ladders of their bones
To climb to zeniths thick with stars bestrown,
Against vast, cold Eternity to spread
My sinewy wings; to press my taloned tread
Upon the very pinnacle of Time.
But now it is quite otherwise I climb.
For, not long past, my lust did learn to know
Through living flesh a readier way to go
To oversoar the mortal phantomime.
Now I empower those who would be mine
To imbibe a deathless vintage, red as wine,
And – ever unentombed – run wild at will,