by Rick Dakan
“I guess that’s pretty sweet,” I said. Actually, I thought it was very sweet. “I hope people fall in love over my grave someday.”
“You and Shelby both have a very weird sense of sweet,” Conrad said. “All those horror games twisted your sense of the romantic. I mean, Jesus, the way you two obsessed over The Crow… ”
“I was young,” I said, laughing. “I didn’t know any better!”
“Come on, honey, it was kind of sweet,” Lauren said. “And it seems to have worked out for them. Apparently Kym was only in town for the weekend and was heading back to Brooklyn that night. They stopped by Shelby’s room long enough to pack his bags and he went back with her.”
“Any hint as to where her money comes from?” I asked, still assuming the Kym was paying for the house and everything else since Shelby certainly didn’t have any money.
“I tried to dig into that a little. The money has to be coming from somewhere, but they both deftly avoided noticing my hints, and I was too polite to ask right out. When I asked what Kym did, she said that she was a sculptor. Unless she’s Rodin reborn, I can’t imagine that’s where she got her money.”
“And we’re sure the money’s hers, not his?” I asked.
“It must be,” Conrad said. “Can you believe his luck? He finally settles down with someone and she turns out to be loaded. Hell, maybe that’s what Shelby was waiting for the whole time. And now they’re starting a church, which has to be a great way to make some money tax-free if it works. If it works being a big, huge ‘if’ in this case.”
“Well,” said Lauren. “They didn’t seem too worried about money at lunch or when I told them how much my firm bills per hour. They could probably get the paperwork for becoming a church done much cheaper with someone less well known. I told them that, but Shelby insisted that he wanted to keep it all in the family, so to speak.”
“What does it take to start a church anyway?” I asked. The idea had never occurred to me, being as irreligious a person as one is likely to meet, but now that I was getting used to the idea that Shelby had done so, it was starting to make some things click into place. Like why Conrad had thought that the other people living at Shelby’s house treated him like some sort of guru. It seemed that that’s exactly what he wanted to be to them. They were his acolytes and he could preach his Lovecraft-inspired philosophy to them as a priest. Unlike at the house on Indian Point Drive, where he was just the oldest roommate in the bunch, here he was setting himself up as the guy in charge, the leader they all looked up to. Or I imagined that’s what he must have thought. I myself had a hard time seeing who this new religion would actually appeal to.
“I’ve never set up a church before, so I had one of the paralegals dig into it when I got back to the office,” said Lauren. “It turns out that either it’s pretty easy or rather complicated, depending on who you ask. Some people, churches mostly, maintain that churches are automatically tax-exempt and don’t have to file any special paperwork with the IRS. As a lawyer, I wouldn’t recommend it. If the state has paperwork pertaining to something you want to do, it’s much less hassle down the line if you fill out said paperwork. So the basic thing you’ve got to do is file for 501c3 status as a religious organization and then you can operate as a non-profit and people can send you donations that are tax-deductible. But there’s a catch. If you do that, then you can’t take a stand on any number of political issues directly, specifically in elections. You can’t directly support a candidate or things like that. Lots of churches have been getting in trouble over this one lately.”
“So you just file the paperwork and you’re a church?” I asked.
“Don’t underestimate the paperwork. There’s a lot of it — budgets, legal organizing documents, details about the group’s planned activities and programs, and so on. After all that the IRS still has to approve your status, and that can take six months unless you get it expedited. And you can only do that if you’re either trying to help with some disaster relief like after a hurricane or if you’re about to receive some big grant of money that’s going to comprise most of your budget for the year and you need for that donation to be tax-deductible. I’m not sure how serious they are about funding their church or what they plan to really do, but I’m going to advise Shelby and Kym to claim the big donation. Unless they want to look around for some disaster to help out with.”
“So do you think they have a pretty good chance?” Conrad asked. “They’re really going to be able to start a church just like that?” He snapped his fingers.
“I don’t see why not. People form non-profits and churches all the time. I don’t see them having any problems with it.”
“Tell him about the car,” Conrad said. “About their SUV.”
“Oh come on, I’m not even sure… ” Lauren said.
“You’ve got to hear this. This is really weird. She walks with them back up into the parking garage there, right? And they come to Shelby and Kym’s car first… ”
“It’s an older Toyota Land Cruiser,” Lauren said. “Rundown and scratched and dented. We stop and say our goodbyes and I notice that their SUV is kind of rocking back and forth, just a little bit. Rolling forward and back on its tires just enough to notice. I asked if they had a dog in there or something.
“They both just laughed and asked me why I would ask that. At this point the car stopped moving and I wasn’t sure what to say. I mumbled something about thinking I saw the thing moving. Then we all just stare at it for a few seconds and I felt really silly. I laugh and finish with the goodbyes. Shelby opens the passenger door to get in and I hear this kind of muffled sound, like a growl maybe, but not really. I can’t describe it, and there’s this weird, cloyingly sweet smell that comes out of the car. I couldn’t help myself and I asked what the smell was. Shelby claimed it was just incense, but I don’t see how they could drive around in that with it smelling as strong as it did.
“So I kept on walking up towards my car, but I looked back over my shoulder when I heard them pull out. Kym was driving, and I could see Shelby through the rear window and he was leaning back over his seat really far — he must’ve been on his knees in the front seat, and was messing with something in the back. I don’t know what.”
“Isn’t that weird?” Conrad asked. “Shelby always hated pets.”
“It’s not that weird,” Lauren said. “I’m sure they were just embarrassed that they’d locked their dog up in the car. It was in a shaded parking garage on a cool day so the dog wasn’t in any real danger, but you know how people get at the idea of locking a dog in a car. That SUV of theirs is bigger than some apartments my friends lived in when we were at Columbia.”
“I still think it’s weird,” Conrad said.
“Maybe the weird incense is some holistic thing to help Shelby with his pet allergies,” I suggested, although that didn’t sound right either.
We didn’t come to any conclusions that night about what or who might have been in the SUV or where the smell was coming from. Later of course these small facts would come to seem significant clues as to what Shelby was really up to, and Conrad would lament that we’d not seen the warning signs at the time. But in the moment our conversation wandered on to other topics as we ate pie and drank coffee. I went home pleasantly full around 10:00 p.m., thanking my friends for the meal and promising once again to someday actually have them over to my place for dinner.
As I drove home I wondered for the hundredth time why Shelby still hadn’t asked me over to his new house or introduced me to Kym. I didn’t even have a phone number yet (nor did Conrad for that matter). But I’d gotten his address from Conrad and I knew the first of the books I’d purchased for him online would be arriving soon, so I’d have the perfect excuse for dropping by unannounced. Maybe I too would get a chance to witness some of this odd behavior Conrad and Lauren had been telling me about.
Chapter 6
The FedEx guy always has a hard time finding my townhouse within the nonsensical layout in
my condo complex. I’d forgotten to tell Sinclair to put the building letter on his mailing label and so the delivery man had to call me to guide him in. I met him at the door and signed for the large box —larger than I would have thought. I sat it on my dining room table and used a steak knife from the kitchen to cut away the double-thick layer of tape that sealed it shut. Styrofoam packing peanuts wafted up as I opened it, and I had to dig through them to find the books and magazines. Each was sandwiched between two pieces of cardboard cut to be just slightly larger than the book itself and then wrapped in plastic bubble wrap and more tape. It took me close to half an hour to carefully cut all of them free, but I felt more than confident that they’d suffered no sort of damage during shipping. No wonder Sinclair had such a high approval rating on eBay.
The most expensive and prized books were two first-edition Arkham House collections of Lovecraft’s work (the first time his stories had ever been collected in book form): The Outsider and Others from 1939 and Beyond the Wall of Sleep from 1943. I’d paid just over $1000 of Shelby’s money for each of these two books, and I knew Sinclair was actually cutting me a decent deal at that price. They weren’t in perfect shape by any means, but the wear and tear was minimal and mostly on the edges. I flipped through them carefully, breathing in deep the old-book smell. I didn’t want to give them up to Shelby now that I had them in my hand. The simple age and rarity of them drew me in. I opened up The Outsider, the earlier of the two, which contained many of Lovecraft’s most famous stories, and started reading the first tale in the book, “Dagon.”
“Dagon” is one of Lovecraft’s first short stories, originally published in 1917. Just a handful of pages in length, it is a perfect encapsulation of many of the aspects that make Lovecraft’s fiction so unique and compelling. An unnamed narrator escapes capture by a German U-boat during World War One and ends up adrift in the ocean. After days without sight of land or other ships, he passes out and has disturbing dreams only to awaken and find himself on a seemingly endless mud flat covered with dead sea creatures. He surmises that the land must have been heaved up by some volcanic activity and sets out to find where it ends. He comes across a great abyssal crevasse in the moonlight and, compelled by curiosity, descends into its depths. There in the moonlight he spies a towering monolith, obviously built by intelligent hands. The stone edifice is covered with strange hieroglyphics and the images of half-man, half-fish creatures. Knowing these carvings must’ve been underwater until the recent upheaval, he begins to lose his grip. But just as he’s consoling himself that the fish creatures are probably just the ancient gods of some lost tribe, the monster appears — a gigantic, bipedal sea-creature that wraps its colossal arms around the monolith and howls at the moon. Driven mad at the sight, the narrator flees into the night and back to his boat where he passes out. He awakes much later in a hospital, having been found at sea and rescued. But now he’s obsessed with what he saw, all the more so because he knows no one will ever believe him. And so, as his supply of mind-numbing morphine ends and the madness takes over, we know he will soon take his life.
It took me maybe five minutes to read, ten at most, but the story held my imagination tight in its grip. Here was the first, early taste of the sea creatures that would play so prominent a role in Lovecraft’s later masterpiece, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” And here too was the brilliance of Lovecraft’s macabre imagination — the hints at an ancient, undersea civilization of sea creatures that humanity has never known existed; the huge, mind-blowing monster that transcends human scale and understanding; the drive by the narrator to learn more even if it costs him his sanity. And then there is the simple, most basic fact of the story’s true horror: the monster, Dagon, never even really notices the narrator. It certainly doesn’t give chase. And yet it utterly destroys the man’s mind and ultimately his life, just by the mere fact of its existence. Just knowing that such a monstrous behemoth exists in the world ensures that the narrator will never sleep well again. That is the truth of Lovecraft’s horror: once you realize just how terrifying the universe really is, you can’t help but go mad.
I didn’t have all these insights at that moment as I sat at my dining room table. I just knew that the story was more powerful and compelling than I remembered Lovecraft being during my first, gaming-inspired encounter with him. I’d never read “Dagon” before, although I knew exactly what he was in game terms — one of the lesser alien gods, a servant of Cthulhu, progenitor of the Deep Ones. Not the kind of monster who shows up at the grand finale of a game, but maybe a nasty threat to up the ante around the halfway point. It was a weird feeling to view the old monster through what were for me new eyes, but what was in fact Lovecraft’s original vision. I flipped ahead in the book to one of the most famous stories, “The Call of Cthulhu.” I had read this one back when we were playing the game it inspired, but I only really remembered the ending scene with Great Cthulhu himself rising up with the “stench of a thousand open graves” (a line that had stuck with me all these years). But before I could start, the phone rang. The caller ID was blocked, but I picked it up anyway, thinking it might be a call from a PI friend of mine in New York who always called anonymously.
“May I speak to Mr. Dakan please?” asked the voice on the other end in precise, slightly nasal tones. He’d pronounced my last name correctly (rhymes with bacon), so I doubted he was a telemarketer.
“This is he,” I said.
“Hello! This is Calvin Sinclair calling. I sold you the Lovecraft pieces.”
“Yes, of course,” I said, surprised. “I just got them a little while ago.”
“Wonderful, wonderful,” Sinclair said, sounding relieved. “I saw on their Web site that Federal Express claimed to have delivered them to you, but I wanted to call and make sure that you were the one who actually signed for them.”
“I am the one. Thanks for checking up on them. You did an amazingly thorough job of packing them up for shipping.”
“They are rare books, and important ones. They need to be preserved and pampered as such. I hope there was no damage. It was hard to part with them of course, but I do have slightly better preserved versions of all those pieces, and I need to fund my little hobby somehow. I’m sure you know what I mean. Have you been collecting Lovecraftiana long?”
“Actually they’re for a friend.”
“I see,” he said, his voice even, although I inferred some disappointment. He’d probably been looking forward to talking with a fellow enthusiast.
“But I’m tempted to keep them for myself,” I said, my tone light. “These are amazing books. I just read “Dagon” before you called.”
“An excellent place to start,” Sinclair said, sounding pleased. “Have you not read any Lovecraft before?”
“I have, but mostly a long time ago. My friend… ” I started to say Shelby’s name and stopped, remembering he wanted to stay anonymous for some reason. “He’s gotten me interested again. I used to play the game back in high school, you know, the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game?”
“I’m aware of it of course, although I’ve never partaken myself. I glanced through one of their volumes in a bookshop once but it held little interest for me. Although I do credit the same publishing company, Chaosium isn’t it? They’ve done more than their part to keep Lovecraft’s legacy alive and printed a great deal of ancillary Mythos material in their short-story anthologies.”
“I’ll have to check some of those out,” I said, making a note to do just that.
“In due time of course. For now, you should concentrate on Lovecraft’s own work. The pieces in The Outsider and Others make for an excellent start, including most of Lovecraft’s most important achievements. May I ask how long it took you to read ‘Dagon’?”
I felt like I’d wandered into an English Lit class and was being given homework all of a sudden. “I don’t know, ten minutes or so?”
“I know it’s a short piece but Lovecraft’s work deserves to be savored. Spend some time with each s
entence and let his vision suffuse your own. Try and smell the stinking of the dead fish on that endless island and imagine the horror of Dagon himself appearing under a gibbous moon.”
“OK, um, thanks for the advice.”
“I might add that while I do laud Chaosium and others for spreading a general knowledge of Lovecraft to the wider public, these kinds of things do bring in a certain type of enthusiast who is not very serious at all.”
“Not serious collectors, you mean?”
“Not exactly. They can be quite serious about their collecting, which, to be honest, irks me even more because they are not serious about their scholarship. They view Lovecraft’s oeuvre as a collection of cheap tales about tentacled monsters.”
“Well, yeah. Isn’t that what they are? I mean, sure, they’re darn good cheap tales about tentacled monsters, but isn’t that their appeal? It certainly was for me when I was younger.”
“I suppose some share your view, but there’s really so much more to Lovecraft than that. I don’t think things like that game are in very good taste, and I’m sure Lovecraft would have been horrified to see some of the myriad ways in which his vision has been perverted.”
I didn’t have any response to this, and felt strangely chastised for my own youthful tastes and inability to see Lovecraft as a literary genius. “So I take it you’re a serious scholar of his work?” I asked.
“I like to think so, yes,” he replied with a hint of pride. “I’m working on a biography of Lovecraft right now in fact.”