by Neil Gaiman
It’s hardly the most romantic of settings, but under normal circumstances it might make an adequate background for meditations in the past tense. “I’m still here,” the writer says, adjusting to the tone. (I’ve even stuck the requisite pipe in my mouth, stuffed with a plug of latakia.) “It’s over now,” he says. “I lived through it.”
A comforting premise, perhaps. Only, in this case, it doesn’t happen to be true. Whether the experience is really “over now” no one can say; and if, as I suspect, the final chapter has yet to be enacted, then the notion of my “living through it” will seem a pathetic conceit.
Yet I can’t say I find the thought of my own death particularly disturbing. I get so tired, sometimes, of this little room, with its cheap wicker furniture, the dull outdated books, the night pressing in from outside…. And of that sundial out there in the yard, with its idiotic message. “Grow old along with me….”
I have done so, and my life seems hardly to have mattered in the scheme of things. Surely its end cannot matter much either.
Ah, Howard, you would have understood.
2.
That, boy, was what I call a travel-experience!
—LOVECRAFT, 3/12/1930
If, while I’m setting it down, this tale acquires an ending, it promises to be an unhappy one. But the beginning is nothing of the kind; you may find it rather humorous, in fact—full of comic pratfalls, wet trouser cuffs, and a dropped vomit-bag.
“I steeled myself to endure it,” the old lady to my right was saying. “I don’t mind telling you, I was exceedingly frightened. I held on to the arms of the seat and just gritted my teeth. And then, you know, right after the captain warned us about that turbulence, when the tail lifted and fell, flip-flop, flip-flop, well”—she flashed her dentures at me and patted my wrist—“I don’t mind telling you, there was simply nothing for it but to heave.”
Where had the old girl picked up such expressions? And was she trying to pick me up as well? Her hand clamped wetly round my wrist. “I do hope you’ll let me pay for the dry cleaning.”
“Madam,” I said, “think nothing of it. The suit was already stained.”
“Such a nice man!” She cocked her head coyly at me, still gripping my wrist. Though their whites had long since turned the color of old piano keys, her eyes were not unattractive. But her breath repelled me. Slipping my paperback into a pocket, I rang for the stewardess.
The earlier mishap had occurred several hours before. In clambering aboard the plane at Heathrow, surrounded by what appeared to be an aboriginal rugby club (all dressed alike, navy blazers with bone buttons), I’d been shoved from behind and had stumbled against a black cardboard hatbox in which some Chinaman was storing his dinner; it was jutting into the aisle near the first-class seats. Something inside sloshed over my ankles—duck sauce, soup perhaps—and left a sticky yellow puddle on the floor. I turned in time to see a tall, beefy Caucasian with an Air Malay bag and a beard so thick and black he looked like some heavy from the silent era. His manner was equally suited to the role, for after shouldering me aside (with shoulders broad as my valises), he pushed his way down the crowded passage, head bobbing near the ceiling like a gas balloon, and suddenly disappeared from sight at the rear of the plane. In his wake I caught the smell of treacle, and was instantly reminded of my childhood: birthday hats, Callard & Bowser gift packs, and afterdinner bellyaches.
“So very sorry.” A bloated little Charlie Chan looked fearfully at this departing apparition, then doubled over to scoop his dinner beneath the seat, fiddling with the ribbon.
“Think nothing of it,” I said .
I was feeling kindly toward everyone that day. Flying was still a novelty. My friend Howard, of course (as I’d reminded audiences earlier in the week), used to say he’d “hate to see aeroplanes come into common commercial use, since they merely add to the goddam useless speeding up of an already over-speeded life.” He had dismissed them as “devices for the amusement of a gentleman” —but then, he’d only been up once, in the twenties, a brief $3.50 flight above Buzzard’s Bay. What could he have known of whistling engines, the wicked joys of dining at thirty thousand feet, the chance to look out a window and find that the earth is, after all, quite round? All this he had missed; he was dead and therefore to be pitied.
Yet even in death he had triumphed over me….
It gave me something to think about as the stewardess helped me to my feet, clucking in professional concern at the mess on my lap—though more likely she was thinking of the wiping up that awaited her once I’d vacated the seat. “Why do they make those bags so slippery?” my elderly neighbor asked plaintively. “And all over this nice man’s suit. You really should do something about it.” The plane dropped and settled; she rolled her yellowing eyes. “It could happen again.”
The stewardess steered me down the aisle toward a restroom at the middle of the plane. To my left a cadaverous young woman wrinkled her nose and smiled at the man next to her. I attempted to disguise my defeat by looking bitter, as if to say, “Someone else has done this deed!” —but doubt I succeeded. The stewardess’s arm supporting mine was superfluous but comfortable; I leaned on her more heavily with each step. There are, as I’d long suspected, precious few advantages in being seventy-six and looking it-yet among them is this: though one is excused from the frustration of flirting with a stewardess, one gets to lean on her arm. I turned toward her to say something funny, but paused; her face was blank as a clock’s. “I’ll wait out here for you,” she said, and pulled open the smooth white door.
“That will hardly be necessary.” I straightened up. “But could you—do you think you might find me another seat? I have nothing against that lady, you understand, but I don’t want to see any more of her lunch.”
Inside the restroom the whine of the engines seemed louder, as if the pink plastic walls were all that separated me from the jet stream and its arctic winds. Occasionally the air we passed through must have grown choppy, for the plane rattled and heaved like a sled over rough ice. If I opened the john I half expected to see the earth miles below us, a frozen grey Atlantic fanged with icebergs. England was already a thousand miles away.
With one hand on the door handle for support, I wiped off my trousers with a perfumed paper towel from a foil envelope and stuffed several more into my pocket. My cuffs still bore a residue of Chinese goo. This, it seemed, was the source of the treacle smell; I dabbed ineffectually at it. Surveying myself in the mirror—a bald, harmless-looking old baggage with stooped shoulders and a damp suit (so different from the self-confident young fellow in the photo captioned “HPL and disciple”) —I slid open the bolt and emerged, a medley of scents. The stewardess had found an empty seat for me near the back of the plane.
It was only as I made to sit down that I noticed who occupied the adjoining seat: he was leaning away from me, asleep with his head resting against the window, but I recognized the beard.
“Uh, stewardess—?” I turned, but saw only her uniformed back retreating up the aisle. After a moment’s uncertainty I inched myself into the seat, making as little noise as possible. I had, I reminded myself, every right to be here.
Adjusting the recliner position (to the annoyance of the black behind me), I settled back and reached for the paperback in my pocket. They’d finally gotten around to reprinting one of my earlier tales, and already I’d found four typos. But then, what could one expect? The anthology’s front cover, with its crude cartoon skull, said it all: Goosepimples: Thirteen Cosmic Chillers in the Lovecraft Tradition. On the back, listed among a dozen other writers whose names I barely recognized, I was described as “a disciple.”
So this was what I’d been reduced to—a lifetime’s work shrugged off by some blurb-writer as “worthy of the Master himself,” the creations of my brain dismissed as mere pastiche. My meticulously wrought fiction, once singled out for such elaborate praise, was now simply—as if this were commendation enough—“Lovecraftian.” Ah, Howard, your triu
mph was complete the moment your name became an adjective.
I’d suspected it for years, of course, but only with the past week’s conference had I been forced to acknowledge the fact: that what mattered to the present generation was not my own body of work, but rather my association with Lovecraft. And even this was demeaned: after years of friendship and support, to be labeled—simply because I’d been younger—a mere disciple. It seemed too cruel a joke.
Every joke must have a punchline. This one’s was still in my pocket, printed in italics on the folded yellow conference schedule. I didn’t need to look at it again: there I was, characterized for all time as “a member of the Lovecraft circle, New York educator, and author of the celebrated collection Beyond the Garve.”
That was it, the crowning indignity: to be immortalized by a misprint! You’d have appreciated this, Howard. I can almost hear you chuckling from—where else? —beyond the garve….
Meanwhile, from the seat next to me came the rasping sounds of a constricted throat; my neighbor must have been caught in a dream. I put down my book and studied him. He looked older than he had at first-perhaps sixty or more. His hands were roughened, powerful looking; on one of them was a ring with a curious silver cross. The glistening black beard that covered the lower half of his face was so thick as to be nearly opaque; its very darkness seemed unnatural, for above it the hair was streaked with grey.
I looked more closely, to where beard joined face. Was that a bit of gauze I saw, below the hair? My heart gave a little jump. Leaning forward for a closer look, I peered at the skin to the side of his nose; though burned from long exposure to the sun, it had an odd pallor. My gaze continued upward, along the weathered cheeks toward the dark hollows of his eyes.
They opened.
For a moment they stared into mine without apparent comprehension, glassy and bloodshot. In the next instant they were bulging from his head and quivering like hooked fish. His lips opened, and a tiny voice croaked, “Not here.”
We sat in silence, neither of us moving. I was too surprised, too embarrassed, to answer. In the window beyond his head the sky looked bright and clear, but I could feel the plane buffeted by unseen blasts, its wingtips bouncing furiously.
“Don’t do it to me here,” he whispered at last, shrinking back into his seat.
Was the man a lunatic? Dangerous, perhaps? Somewhere in my future I saw spinning headlines: JETLINER TERRORIZED… RETIRED NYC TEACHER VICTIM… My uncertainty must have shown, for I saw him lick his lips and glance past my head. Hope, and a trace of cunning, swept his face. He grinned up at me. “Sorry, nothing to worry about. Whew! Must have been having a nightmare.” Like an athlete after a particularly tough race, he shook his massive head, already regaining command of the situation. His voice had a hint of Tennessee drawl. “Boy”—he gave what should have been a hearty laugh—“I’d better lay off the Kickapoo juice!”
I smiled to put him at ease, though there was nothing about him to suggest that he’d been drinking. “That’s an expression I haven’t heard in years.”
“Oh, yeah? “ he said, with little interest. “Well, I’ve been away.” His fingers drummed nervously—impatiently? —on the arm of his chair.
“Malaya?”
He sat up, and the color left his face. “How did you know?”
I nodded toward the green flight-bag at his feet. “I saw you carrying that when you came aboard. You, uh—you seemed to be in a little bit of a hurry, to say the least. In fact, I’m afraid you almost knocked me down.”
“Hey.” His voice was controlled now, his gaze level and assured. “Hey, I’m really sorry about that, old fella. The fact is, I thought someone might be following me.”
Oddly enough, I believed him; he looked sincere-or as sincere as anyone can be behind a phony black beard. “You’re in disguise, aren’t you?” I asked.
“You mean the whiskers? They’re just something I picked up in Singapore. Shucks, I knew they wouldn’t fool anyone for long, at least not a friend. But an enemy, well… maybe.” He made no move to take them off.
“You’re—let me guess—you’re in the service, right?” The foreign service, I meant; frankly, I took him for an aging spy.
“In the service?” He looked significantly to the left and right, then dropped his voice. “Well, yeah, you might say that. In His service.” He pointed toward the roof of the plane.
“You mean—?”
He nodded. “I’m a missionary. Or was until yesterday.”
3.
Missionaries are infernal nuisances who ought to be kept at home.
—LOVECRAFT, 9/12/1925
Have you ever seen a man in fear of his life? I had, though not since my early twenties. After a summer of idleness I’d at last found temporary employment in the office of what turned out to be a rather shady businessman—I suppose today you’d call him a small-time racketeer—who, having somehow offended “the mob,” was convinced he’d be dead by Christmas. He had been wrong, though; he’d been able to enjoy that and many other Christmases with his family, and it wasn’t till years later that he was found in his bathtub, facedown in six inches of water. I don’t remember much about him, except how hard it had been to engage him in conversation; he never seemed to be listening.
Yet talking with the man who sat next to me on the plane was all too easy; he had nothing of the other’s distracted air, the vague replies and preoccupied gaze. On the contrary, he was alert and highly interested in all that was said to him. Except for his initial panic, in fact, there was little to suggest he was a hunted man.
Yet so he claimed to be. Later events would, of course, settle all such questions, but at the time I had no way to judge if he was telling the truth, or if his story was as phony as his beard.
If I believed him, it was almost entirely due to his manner, not the substance of what he said. No, he didn’t claim to have made off with the Eye of Klesh; he was more original than that. Nor had he violated some witch doctor’s only daughter. But some of the things he told me about the region in which he’d worked—a state called Negri Sembilan, south of Kuala Lumpur—seemed frankly incredible: houses invaded by trees, government-built roads that simply disappeared, a nearby colleague returning from a ten-day vacation to find his lawn overgrown with ropy things they’d had to burn twice to destroy. He claimed there were tiny red spiders that jumped as high as a man’s shoulder—“there was a girl in the village gone half-deaf because one of the nasty little things crawled in her ear and swelled so big it plugged up the hole”—and places where mosquitoes were so thick they suffocated cattle. He described a land of steaming mangrove swamps and rubber plantations as large as feudal kingdoms, a land so humid that wallpaper bubbled on the hot nights and Bibles sprouted mildew.
As we sat together on the plane, sealed within an air-cooled world of plastic and pastel, none of these things seemed possible; with the frozen blue of the sky just beyond my reach, the stewardesses walking briskly past me in their blue-and-gold uniforms, the passengers to my left sipping Cokes or sleeping or leafing through copies of InFlite, I found myself believing less than half of what he said, attributing the rest to sheer exaggeration and a Southern penchant for tall tales. Only when I’d been home a week and paid a visit to my niece in Brooklyn did I revise my estimate upward, for glancing through her son’s geography text I came upon this passage: “Along the [Malayan] peninsula, insects swarm in abundance; probably more varieties exist here than anywhere else on earth. There is some good hardwood timber, and camphor and ebony trees are found in profusion. Many orchid varieties thrive, some of extraordinary size.” The book alluded to the area’s “rich mixture of races and languages,” its “extreme humidity” and “colorful native fauna,” and added: “Its jungles are so impenetrable that even the wild beasts must keep to well-worn paths.”
But perhaps the strangest aspect of this region was that, despite its dangers and discomforts, my companion claimed to have loved it. “They’ve got a mountain in the cente
r of the peninsula—” He mentioned an unpronounceable name and shook his head. “Most beautiful thing you ever saw. And there’s some real pretty country down along the coast, you’d swear it was some kind of South Sea island. Comfortable, too. Oh, it’s damp all right, especially in the interior where the new mission was supposed to be—but the temperature never even hits a hundred. Try saying that for New York City.”
I nodded. “Remarkable.”
“And the people,” he went on, “why, I believe they’re just the friendliest people on earth. You know, I’d heard a lot of bad things about the Moslems—that’s what most of them are, part of the Sunni sect—but I’m telling you, they treated us with real neighborliness… just so long as we made the teachings available, so to speak, and didn’t interfere with their affairs. And we didn’t. We didn’t have to. What we provided, you see, was a hospital—well, a clinic, at least, two RNs and a doctor who came through twice a month—and a small library with books and films. And not just theology, either. All subjects. We were right outside the village, they’d have to pass us on their way to the river, and when they thought none of the lontoks were looking they’d just come in and look around.”
“None of the what?”
“Priests, sort of. There were a lot of them. But they didn’t interfere with us, we didn’t interfere with them. I don’t know as we made all that many converts, actually, but I’ve got nothing bad to say about those people.”
He paused, rubbing his eyes; he suddenly looked his age. “Things were going fine,” he said. “And then they told me to establish a second mission, further in the interior.”
He stopped once more, as if weighing whether to continue. A squat little Chinese woman was plodding slowly up the aisle, holding on to the chairs on each side for balance. I felt her hand brush past my ear as she went by. My companion watched her with a certain unease, waiting till she’d passed. When he spoke again his voice had thickened noticeably.