He heard Professor Roosevelt drop his Ph.D. “You ain’t shittin’.”
He agreed. All that and more. This discovery would free him. It would bring money, maybe some fame, and there’d be interviews and features in the press, and, he was willing to bet, down the road documentaries and movies. If he let it, this could release him from the past where Nic took the full measure and killed herself. He might be able to get some of himself back, or maybe avenues he’d never considered would greet him with some kind of guiltless redemption. No vague to the mind-bending impressions they stood admiring; it was all right in front of him waiting to pull him from anger and grief. Eyesight for the blind.
Jeanrenaud slapped him on the back. John-Claude was glowing, as if he was eight and it was Christmas.
Didn’t hear the dogs growling.
None of them did. Too busy bringing out instruments to assist their intensity—spot to spot, artifact to artifact—“If we sequentially connect the complex growth shown in panel one, any analysis would lead to a discussion of heightened—” abandoning philosophy with physical fact—they wouldn’t let them break the spell.
Didn’t. For hours they guarded the brilliance of their new flame, let it nurture them. Until the harsh blows of long-forgotten hunted—
Understanding, enthusiasms, deeds, impetuous pride, gone in an aggressive gesture …
BLACK FIRE.
He ran to survive.
Ran from bestial … From the corpses scrawled on the calendar of death …
Pushed the dogs.
Screamed.
Begged for fast and miles.
Then he lost a mitten.
And the first dog died …
No camp. No biscuits. No cigars with Connelly and Jeanrenaud.
No New York.
No steaks and quiet laughs in O’Reilly’s with Fred and Derrick …
Strolling the Park …
Pleasantly arguing with Tom after the Yankees game over which Ray’s was Ray’s, then off to try slices in both to, maybe, determine a winner … or just have another cold one and laugh …
He would never see Grandpa Charlie’s little white porch in Danbury again—the flowers, the clover, the rocking chair on the deck of the whaler where fish stories sailed …
Absent. Warm in a ditch with no ramp to the road of attaining.
Fingers numb freeze the sentence of cold’s law.
Nose. Frozen.
Cheeks frozen.
Feet beyond the acid throbbing, cold marble forever closed on the cream of warmth’s hospitable.
Skin chilled beyond any desperate command to reach or move in the cutthroat stronghold of clenching COLD.
Blood couldn’t get to the heart of the matter.
Looks at his fingers. Imagines warm. Tries to. But there’s no lust in it.
Looks again. Fails to grasp the myth.
All of him shivering, stammering, and paying dearly for the unstructured and unprepared flight—you better run his only thought.
Took the empty sled. Less weight, faster his only reaction to the absolute at his heels.
“Asshole.” More heat leaving.
He wanted a cigarette. Wanted a fire—wildfire or inferno, size mattered to his momentary lust.
“Grandmother Spider.” The myth of fire. There and gone from the page of desire. There were no spiders in this frigid waste. Hadn’t seen a clay pot either. Another myth with no basis.
Wanted a weapon that could repair the landscape. But the cold that was eating him told him those doors were locked.
Wanted his mind back. Wake up. Home. In bed. Bare feet on the hardwood floor to the bathroom mirror. Yawn. Mutter. Stare. Looking at days of little town blues.
Coffee. “Stayin’ Alive” on the kitchen radio.
Nowhere.
Nobody would come and help.
Nobody was left.
Chained.
Out of growing. Load bigger. Colder.
One hundred years ago. That expedition. Ridicule and disbelief dropped, true, no madman fantasy. Even the horrors.
Out of the storm of screams and viscera into this white hell. Screamed insane. Screamed fuck. Fuck!
White fire. Monster. Biting, burning. Unrelenting.
No God.
Why? Would it have hurt to have one? Or a dozen? Savior—vessel, passage—compass—easing with bells and psalm. Just one rooted in light to grant beginning and Earth as a house of warmth. Someone to take the words of mouth and footsteps of pray and build a firmament and vineyard of soft and secure above the alone carved by the worm in this enormous illusion.
Why not?
He’d give up temptations and misfortune and heathen soul for just one.
Would have …
Would.
Cracked lips forced into existence. “Sun goddamnit.”
No sun.
No God. Wind. With no mend, pushing white with its current of suffering. Wind stretching, etching grieve, condemning head and hand.
Cold the true devil.
The white fire burns. Burns slave, passed shuddering and whimpering with swift horrors, besieges dazed with lost.
Wants a god to summon up and kill the devil with Bible. Wants a god to grant Icarus wings and fly away Home. Away from the white world.
One hundred years ago. The white fire. That black fire. That tore off their clothes. That tore up their souls. Tightrope. Ice. Fire. No saving net of soft landing in Heaven.
Was true—terror, despair, knife-edge severing all. No hiding place.
Make it gone.
No keep on truckin’—out of chants. Out of weeping. Lost the word Mom. Others too. Almost, almost had a lock on meadow. No need to recall bleak. It’s there, uprooting him. So few fragments of communication to embrace.
Sits. Silent. He’s drifting, beyond sorrow, beyond hopes. An animal lost in the wilds of now.
Now. Succumbing to the bludgeon of cold.
No sailor. No adventurer. No one along to survive. No one could there be.
Silent.
Now.
Degraded, every nerve, every instinct. Sleepy depths beyond half-mad, stripped of sensibilities, and can’t hang on to the touch of human.
Now.
Only the cold white fire.
Alone.
One hundred degrees below zero. Wind that left no whisker of a trail.
“Wind.”
Whip with no thrift. Blowing all bare … and dumb.
“Cold.”
Greater than any god. Blind to pleas for once, or curses to circumstance. COLD. Burns cheeks. Closes the pages of hands. Cultivating nothing. Pressing on. Sledgehammer. Fangs in the cloister of flesh and within. Cold that reads no crucifix or scripture. No pity. No melt. Tide that paralyzes rhyme and fact, nulls accuracy.
Loose gone.
Breast hollow of need. Parts of him, no more take it to pour over tortured, stiff after the negative of give up, barred from the dance of sensation.
Dreamlike in this grave, his few starts and shapes and all worth gone from his tongue. Nothing resonant, nothing to depend on.
Cracked, but didn’t surrender. Tried to press on until his heels couldn’t release him from hobbled, from the blinding white construction.
Bombarded and denied. He never endorsed this with syllables, or thought. Frenzy, fear, and grieve as the thief left no room for next. As it took.
A little at first. Lips and toes—got in and under, the prowler moved block to block. Increments. Thighs. Inner, deeper, the cannonball warlord leapt. Took away wings. Took sense. Wasted. Froze nature’s order. Grew.
Coming apart. His streets, once round as sacred sun-choir calling, now quiet of even halfheartedly, some now dead, the others dying, but not quick enough.
The white fire burns.
White blinds.
Melted from the external world he can’t see the sled. Can’t tell if the dogs are still there.
Cold holds. Takes skill from the hand. Takes little plans from the mind. Replace
s got with slavery.
No next. No possible.
Whirlwind pulled awareness’ oars from the water.
“Fucking … cold.”
Mom believed in a Loving God. Eternal love too. Compassion. Gently …
Her cherry pies. Oozing. Still warm … Wasn’t even stern when I brought the bees in the kitchen … Butter … Make your tongue soar on songs of bliss.
America.
There was a sundial in Nic’s dad’s yard.
Big yellow moon too. That wasn’t a mirage … Was a masterpiece.
I. I … “like tomatoes.”
Little salt … mayo. On toasted rye.
Put your feet up and climb into sleep in front of the TV.
Fifty trillion cells in this shell and each feels like a crystal of ice.
Ice.
WHITE. Pure white.
No strength for desperate. Nothing out loud.
Knew he’d never survive without shelter.
Nothing left to concede.
blurry
blinking
Doesn’t change the throttling WHITENESS.
pain
curling up
End this.
Called them shoggoths. They came out of the door. Rushed—no snarling. Took. Took Sinclair and Dickey. Both. Panic. Seized. Yelped. Screamed, started to, as their consciousness was gnawed by madness … Lost toes, desire—They all screamed as they died …
Shoggoths.
One of the few things they knew from the documentation.
So little they understood. Fragments, not the magnitude, no time to take it all in. Barely enough time to begin to calculate. Jammed—they shot—ran—dropped every rule mother and science and church had instilled—scattered—tried to retreat—shot and shot and cursed chance and risk, the mistake that spilled blood, at the terrible fury that did not growl as things were shred—ran—dropped the guns that had no strength left in them—ran—but not fast enough—lost their heads—
Died.
Connelly … And Jeanrenaud—John-Claude’s broad shoulders—his equations and procedures—”Glory, my friend”—no face …
Shoggoths—
Pitiless wind stops. Dead hush.
Still snowing too hard to allow sky.
Drowned in the stampede of cold and ice-blind he does not notice the absolute silence. Thrown far from the nest of sober reason sees no chance.
Drowsy.
Can’t—the burn violently ending another thought before it becomes whole.
Sputtering.
Disabled. Running out of things for yearning to reach for. One hand dead. Useless after losing its mitten.
Cold. Empty and it will not change the mountain that barred any escape.
Head down. Beyond madness, wrecked by a thing with no philosophy. Explain with no place to stand. Body out of hill and breath, fields that cannot paint color as they shrink under bitter. Horse standing in the rain, waiting for it to pass, but he knows cold and its inferno will not pass. Not while his shell—a crumb of error, numb—and all it contained burns to rubble.
Caught in finished. Over soon, then he won’t have to care, won’t be torn by fool. Will never stare at ruin again.
Ruin. Blackened prison reducing all to rubbish.
Looks at the brittle hand of an inmate, never hold a cigarette again … Just a thing now. An appendage.
Frozen meat in a land where meat was scarce.
“Do they eat?”
Dark power from the deep crypts. Dark forever—
Black. Things.
Shapeless.
Unrelenting—
Coming.
One shot left in the rifle. His fingers, like his eyes and the corners of his mouth, are thick with ice. Can’t position it to finish things.
“Call them.”
Let them come.
Silence the white fire. Put an end to the irrevocable.
Worn out. Snowblind. One scream would call them.
Opens his mouth—
Let the BLACK FIRE consume him
(after Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”)
A QUIRK OF THE MISTRAL
JONATHAN THOMAS
HERE’S HOW SECLUDED THE PROFESSOR WAS. FROM THE AIRPORT outside Marseille I took a taxi to the mid-city train station, and there I bought a ticket for Arles, where I boarded the Avignon-bound bus, from which I disembarked on two-lane blacktop between parched alfalfa fields. The driver, who had a postcard of a cicada taped to his dashboard, was adamant that Domaine St. Jude was two or three kilometers down the unpromising byway before me. I never did resolve whether the road was paved or not, because nothing but rounded tips of tawny stones broke the monotony of pale impacted dust. Let the record moreover state, I had to negotiate this trying geography under the handicap of stupefying jetlag, after eight-hour flight from JFK.
Before I’d trudged the first kilometer, I was pleased as ever I’d been with my dedication to traveling light. A backpack tidily under the weight limit for carry-on was it for these two weeks abroad. All the same, the straps were chafing my shoulders raw, and sweat had fused the flimsy cotton shirt to my back. Sycamores and pines and a smattering of palms flanked my route, though arid drainage gullies on both sides kept shade at a maddening remove. And the August sun was merciless, like a scouring pad abrading my scalp. Worse yet, mean, sporadic gusts whipped road grit into my oily face, like drafts from a cindery furnace.
The cicadas, at least, liked the climate, to judge by the welter of buzzing that waxed and waned in the foliage like phantom power tools sawing through one phantom branch after another. It made a fitting soundtrack to my fatigue and dehydration, and on the verge of cursing the heat aloud and deliriously, I plodded into a crossroad and found my second wind. Ahead on the right was a rusty wrought-iron crucifix atop a truncated brick pyramid, just as the fax had described. This ordeal was near its end! A scant hundred yards would bring me to the dilapidated gaggle of several farmsteads dignified as Domaine St. Jude, a name absent from Rand McNally atlas and highway signage. The closest village on Institut Géographique National maps was Boulbon, where the épicerie must have put a fax machine at the professor’s disposal.
In the year since his retirement and retreat to native precincts, he’d forsworn phone and e-mail and even pen and paper, so when the secretary at the department called about his message for me, I was elated, although his excited mélange of French and English also mystified and worried me a little.
Someone he claimed I had to meet was “à la maison,” and he beseeched me to come “vite! Aussitôt que possible!” This someone he then referred to as “quelque chose incroyable,” and with me alone was he comfortable sharing this incredible something. Henceforth he would be incommunicado, but guaranteed he’d always be home to welcome me, and “don’t fail to catch the soonest plane you can. Une farce cosmique! The dogma has exploded.” He signed off, as was his custom, “Take care. Do not hope too much. I’m sure it will be all right.”
And here I was, silently mouthing those words at the head of his bramble-lined driveway, drawn by friendship and concern and, yes, some twinge of obligation. Thanks to his influence at the Life Sciences Department I’d stepped into his tenured shoes, and couldn’t very well repay him now by ignoring his urgent summons.
I was punchy to the point of mistaking an oversized shed for the main house, understandably insofar as it boasted a residential-looking tile roof and mortared walls and green louvered door. I knocked twice before noticing a more substantial candidate for a home up ahead; and unlike the shed, it had windows, from one of which a pair of goggle eyes, distinctly not the professor’s, was studying me. A querulous voice, also not the professor’s, loosed a babel of syllables toward the interior of the house.
I hadn’t marshaled the strength to move when Hervé Bayard bounded outside, in cool vanilla linen shirt and trousers, sensibly seasonal but almost alarmingly loose, as if he’d shed too many pounds. With his perennial vitality he shook my hand and hugged me and
thanked me profusely for indulging an old coot. I was still hemming and hawing a semicoherent reply in French as he staggered backward and turned aside to expel a slew of wracking coughs. He waved away my concerns for his health, which only grew upon observing twin inflamed swaths, of a finely granular texture, along his ocular orbits.
I was in no shape to comment on these tactfully, and anyway the professor was escorting me to a side yard and a rickety square table, with a hole drilled into it for a parasol. He put up the parasol, of the same buttery yellow as the table, and bid me sit while he disappeared into the house and dispensed instructions about readying dinner and guestroom, to which he received the somber Provençal assent, “Très bieng.” He reappeared with a tray containing a bowl of reddish olives, a liter of pastis, a pitcher of water, and a pair of shot glasses.
“Relax and be refreshed,” he prescribed, and though hard liquor after roughly twenty-four hours on the go sounded counterproductive, what the hell. I was running on fumes already. Adding distilled fumes might even help. Hervé clucked in mock reprimand as I raised the drink to my lips without remembering to add water. Then he quizzed me on my arduous journey and stateside current events and a year’s worth of campus gossip. Baffling how my explosive reason for crossing the Atlantic had apparently slipped his mind, but I was tired beyond bringing that up, and the pastis hadn’t even begun to hit me yet.
Presently the sturdy owner of the goggling eyes addressed the professor from the doorstep. She was dressed in modest, stifling black woolens, and a black Spanish comb clenched thin gray hair away from coarse-grained face. I garnered from the decipherable snatches of her idiom that dinner was served. To me she remarked, in plainer French, “It is always better the second night.” She ducked back inside.
“That is Clairette,” Hervé explained as he set our half-empty glasses beside the untouched olives on the tray, and picked up the tray. “She was here when I signed the lease. I cannot find a way to dismiss her.” He shrugged resignedly. “And why should I, really?”
We ate cold pork roast and stewed apricots with reheated ratatouille at a worn oak table in the kitchen. It was sweltering, and I wished in vain for the wherewithal to ask politely if this house didn’t have a better-ventilated dining room.
The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 Page 27