I pushed past him into the threshold. And froze there. When he tried to move around me, I gave a strangled sob. “No...no...please don’t.”
But my father was strong, and wrenched me aside, yet he too froze, too afraid and in awe to cross that threshold.
Ng sat at her little table, back straight, one hand on its surface, where a sheet of paper lay. She was, as I had feared, dead. And although I had passed her a plate of supper only the evening before, it was as though she had sat dead at that table since the reign of the pharaohs. For she was little more than a mummy, little more than a skeleton, her long glossy hair turned gray and straggly. And her skull – her poor face, that I remembered smiling shyly at me in the market, a lifetime ago...its crooked teeth now a death’s head rictus was riven down the middle straight through the bone so that even the hole of her nose was a part of that yawning pit. Only the black of emptiness showed within, now.
Webs covered her; webs growing down from the ceiling, up from the table and floor, webs of peculiar thickness and a strange yellowish color. Again, as if she had sat here in this tomb of my making for an eternity.
I might have broken down into sobbing, consumed by grief alone, if that was all we had found. But my grief was mixed with a kind of terrified wonder...
At some point she had turned her cot on its side, laid it up against the wall, and shoved her bureau aside, all to make room for what took up nearly half of her tiny little apartment. And that was a great stone head, that would seem to have risen up from the floor, the cement of which was shattered around its thick neck. Sculpted from some black rock, it put me in mind of both the solemn heads of Easter Island (its ears were similarly long lobed) and the Asian visages at Angkor Vat. Its slant eyed, blind staring face was similarly shrouded in a caul of yellow web. How far down did it extend into the earth; was there an entire titan body beneath our house? If so, how many thousands of years had it waited to rise? Or had it risen not so much from beneath our world, but out of some other?
I noted that in the center of the statue’s forehead there was a third blind, stone eye of sorts resting in a vertical opening.
“Jesus!” my father suddenly blurted, and he pushed me aside so violently that I fell. I saw him lunge between the table and the sculpture, holding the crowbar back like a harpoon he meant to jab into a whale’s flank.
But the animal I saw scramble out from behind the great head, when I propped myself up on my elbows, was small. Black, rubbery, waddling awkwardly on two flipper like feet, small as a human toddler. But it had no arms, and on its sides were pink gill slits that fluttered and wheezed, and it had no head...just a whipping mass of medusa like feelers. It had only got a little closer to the door – horribly, lurching toward me – when father dashed back the other way and brought the crowbar swinging down upon it, again, again, until it fell with a terrible squeal. Father stopped clubbing it, skewered it straight through instead, and after it flopped convulsively for a few seconds the tiny monstrosity curled up like a fetus, and lay still.
Later, we burned the diminutive carcass in our yard.
I got to my feet, stared down at the thing in its pool of sap thick clear ichor. Looked back up at the wide hole in the dried out husk of Ng’s body. In her cloak of yellow filaments, I was put in mind of the shell of an insect in a spider’s web.
My eyes lifted to the boarded up window behind her. Mounted below the window was a contraption I had never seen in here before. I can only assume that she had possessed it all along, had spirited it away from the burning warehouse inside her bag of belongings. It was little more than a crystal lens the size of a shaving mirror, set in a tarnished metal frame which sprouted a few odd knobs and levers. She had wedged the prong of its base into a crack in the wall, so that the lens was on level with the window; in particular, I would find, with a small slit between two boards of the window which I feel she herself had widened a bit for the purpose.
Afraid to near the wall, and thus Ng’s corpse, I had to steel myself...but I approached the lens, pushing through the ghastly, clinging webs. For even from across her room, and at an indirect angle, I thought I saw blurry movement in the glass.
If only I hadn’t looked through it! But then, I wouldn’t have been inspired to shatter that lens (with difficulty, using a hammer) afterwards. I can only hope that the telescope, as such it was, was not merely an instrument for viewing, but for summoning, as I suspected it to be. I can only hope that in smashing it, I prevented more of those Outsiders from coming here. It has been many years since that terrible day, and perhaps I was successful. But who knows what mysteries, what horrors, lurk behind the innocent facades of old houses, here in this haunted town, and in every town?
My first impression was that it was a magnifying glass, trained on several beetles or slugs...a sort of microscope. These creatures I observed in the grain of the wood boarding the window were hideous, and all the more so for their familiarity. For they were black rubbery things, loosely bovine in their general outline...their blocky forms moving with great slowness. Only the nests of tentacles moved quickly, these seeming to feed from the ground, perhaps on creatures as tiny to them as these things were to me.
The creatures – one in the foreground, two further back moved across a jagged bed of irregular dark crystal. In the background there was a forbidding sky of molten orange and dark brown cloud.
I looked up from the lens sharply. The mysterious instrument was not trained on the wood, but on the sky outside, seen through the crack. And yet...and yet...the sky outside was blue and clear. What sky was this I was seeing?
I realized, of course, that it was the sky of some other world. Some world separated by space, perhaps dimension, perhaps dream.
And I also realized that those were not tiny, microscopic monstrosities (those things that resembled the creature my father had killed, except for that creature having been bipedal, as if mixed blasphemously with human genes)...they were, instead, immense beyond anything that had walked on Earth, or God willing, ever would. For it was not a bed of dark crystal they strode upon, and crushed beneath their bulk, and fed from...but a city, an alien city, as great in size as New York...greater...but no more protected, no less vulnerable, for all that.
The creature in the foreground lifted the nest of worms that was all it owned for a head, and seemed to gaze back at me through the glass. I backed away from it with a cry of terror, and swatted the instrument out of the wall with the sticky crowbar that I seized out of my father’s hands.
Panting, tears streaming down my face, I again regarded the shell of what had been my lover. Then, finally, I noticed the sheet she had written on. It was, I saw, a final message to me.
That note was the only thing I removed from her room before I sealed it up. Yes, even now, decades past her death, Ng sits in her chair in her room below me, much as she had in life. Her presence gives me comfort, and sometimes I sit on the cellar stairs, and talk to her through the wall.
When I decided to entomb her there, I wondered what the next owner of the house would think if they ever tore out that wall and found her...and the colossal stone head. But shortly before I sealed the room, I discovered that the head was gone, presumably sunken back into the earth or other world that it had risen from, leaving only a broken place in the cement, like a wound clotted with dirt.
I still don’t know for certain, entirely, what Ng meant by her note. But I think she was apologizing for having followed the call of her kind, for having attempted to perform her chosen duty, despite her feelings for me and my family. I don’t think she really wanted to do what she did. I must believe that.
But I also think she was apologizing for causing me worry and pain, over the years. And it caused me more pain to think she might not have realized that I had no regrets about our relationship. That I had loved her deeply, and would have wanted no other wife.
To the end, she was cryptic. To the end, a mystery. My mystery.
For the note she had left me said only,
“I am sorry, Grayeyes” – and no more.
When I decided to entomb her there, I wondered what the next owner of the house would think if they ever tore out that wall and found her...and the colossal stone head. But shortly before I sealed the room, I discovered that the head was gone, presumably sunken back into the earth or other world that it had risen from, leaving only a broken place in the cement, like a wound clotted with dirt.
I still don’t know for certain, entirely, what Ng meant by her note. But I think she was apologizing for having followed the call of her kind, for having attempted to perform her chosen duty, despite her feelings for me and my family. I don’t think she really wanted to do what she did. I must believe that.
But I also think she was apologizing for causing me worry and pain, over the years. And it caused me more pain to think she might not have realized that I had no regrets about our relationship. That I had loved her deeply, and would have wanted no other wife.
To the end, she was cryptic. To the end, a mystery. My mystery.
For the note she had left me said only, “I am sorry, Grayeyes” – and no more.
Back to Top
Interview with Jeffrey Thomas
What was your first exposure to the work of H. P. Lovecraft?
I’d heard his name over the years, but it wasn’t until 1985 that I first read him. I had read a short story by Stephen King called “Jerusalem’s Lot,” and I loved the feel of it. It was my favorite short story of King’s to that date. When I realized it was a pastiche and owed its feel to Lovecraft, I decided to check out the man himself. I started out with some stories I found in anthologies at the town library. The first Lovecraft story I read was “The Call of Cthulhu,” followed by “The Statement of Randolph Carter” and “In the Vault.” Luckily Del Rey came out with a series of books collecting all of Lovecraft’s fiction, so through the late 80s I devoured those—which was like a profound religious experience. In terms of horror reading, it’s an experience that’s never been equalled for its intensity of pleasure. In the following years I read much of his collaborations with other writers, and once in a while I’ve returned to reread various of his stories, though with all the literature abounding in the world I tend not to revisit what I’ve already read.
What is the greatest challenge for contemporary authors in utilizing Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos?
That would be not imitating Lovecraft’s plotlines or prose voice, just using his ideas as a jumping point for their own imagination and style. Many a Lovecraft fan, including writers who are now very famous and respected, started out by perhaps imitating Lovecraft too closely, until they found their own approach and moved further away from the Mythos. Another trap might be only writing Mythos stories. Just as I would never want to read only Mythos stories, I certainly wouldn’t want to only write Mythos stories, either. How limited, how boring that would be for me! I love sirloin steak, but I wouldn’t want to eat it for every meal. One critic complained that I stray too far from what Lovecraft did. Lovecraft didn’t focus on human relationships, he complained, there is too much use of guns in my stories, according to him, and Lord forbid I’ve used some of August Derleth’s interpretations of the Mythos. Ah, God. What can I say; I’m not one for rules and restrictions. And I am unapologetic in my focus on my characters’ humanity. (Presumably even that critic himself is human.) If you don’t want to read Jeffrey Thomas, just go and read the same Lovecraft stories over and over and good luck to you. I am not trying to rehash Lovecraft. I should hope I am writing stories Lovecraft wouldn’t have written. What’s the point, otherwise—for a writer or his/her readers—if we just tell the same stories in the same manner?
You began your writing career prior to today’s rage of digital publishing. So what was the road to publishing your first book like?
A long and winding road led to that door -- upon which I knocked long and hard. After years of rejections, soliciting work both with and without the help of an agent, in the late 80s I finally started getting short stories published in small press horror publications. Once in a while I placed a story in a bigger publication, too. Gradually I built a reputation, so that by 1999 I finally had a few small press publishers approach me asking me to do a book for them. (My case is unusual in that ever since then, publishers almost always come to me with a request for a book, as opposed to me soliciting publishers.) My first book was the short story collection Terror Incognita (Delirium Books, 2000), followed closely by my science fiction/horror collection Punktown (Ministry of Whimsy Press, 2000). In 2002 I sold my first novel, Monstrocity (Prime), which went on to be a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel.
You’ve frequently used Lovecraftian elements in stories set in your far-future world, Punktown. Now, a Punktown role-playing game series is underway. How did that come about?
It was suggested to me by Michael Tresca—author of the nonfiction book The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games and the novel The Well of Stars, among others—that my milieu of Punktown would make a great setting for a role-playing game. He started constructing a set of “core rules” based on his extensive reading of my Punktown material, devoting chapters to game mastering, character types, powers, weapons and technology, aliens and creatures, etc. All the aspects of Punktown that make my stories set there so varied: now at a gamer’s disposal. Once we had these core rules to present, Mike took them to Tom Lynch, president of Miskatonic River Press, and Tom was sold on the project. Tom then invited writers Brian M. Sammons and Glynn Barrass onboard, based on their experience with gaming and their enthusiasm for the Cthulhu Mythos, to write game scenarios. A Kickstarter campaign was launched to finance the book, and the goal was exceeded. The game book is the last project to be released through Miskatonic River Press, unfortunately, but game publisher Chronicle City has stepped in with the aim of continuing the game into a series of further books. Note: I’m not a gamer myself, but that doesn’t mean I’m not terribly excited by all this. The game is compatible with both the BRP and Call of Cthulhu systems, and there are definitely plenty of Lovecraftian elements to be experienced in the game.
Besides Lovecraft, who are your favorite authors?
I admire so many authors, but some of those I’ve read repeatedly are Thomas Hardy, Yukio Mishima, Martin Cruz Smith, M. R. James, J. G. Ballard, Vladimir Nabokov, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Clive Barker, Kathe Koja. They take whatever they’re doing to a level of art, of real literature. I recently read the novel Dimiter by the great William Peter Blatty, and it’s an inspiration that the man can still write so brilliantly in his eighties. All nepotism aside, another top favorite writer of mine is my younger brother Scott Thomas, author of the novel Fellengrey and numerous short story collections. An indication of his skill is that two of his stories were reprinted in the St. Martin’s Press anthology The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror #15. Scott and I helped instill in each other the love for writing that we share today.
Back to Top
About Jeffrey Thomas
Jeffrey Thomas is an American author of weird fiction, the creator of the acclaimed milieu Punktown. Books in the Punktown universe include the short story collections Punktown, Voices from Punktown, Punktown: Shades Of Grey (with his brother, Scott Thomas), and Ghosts Of Punktown. Novels in that setting include Deadstock, Blue War, Monstrocity, Health Agent, Everybody Scream!, and Red Cells. Thomas's other short story collections include Worship the Night, Thirteen Specimens, Nocturnal Emissions, Doomsdays, Terror Incognita, Unholy Dimensions, Aaaiiieee!!!, Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood, And Encounters With Enoch Coffin (with W. H. Pugmire). His other novels include Letters from Hades, The Fall of Hades, Beautiful Hell, Boneland, Beyond The Door, Thought Forms, Subject 11, Lost In Darkness, The Sea of Flesh and Ash (with his brother, Scott Thomas), Blood Society, and A Nightmare On Elm Street: The Dream Dealers. Thomas lives in Massachusetts.
Also by Jeffrey on Kindle
Punktown
Monstrocity
Letters From Hades
<
br /> The Fall of Hades
Encounters With Enoch Coffin
Blood Society
Connect with Jeffrey Online
Website: www.jeffreyethomas.com
Blog: http://punktalk.punktowner.com
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Thomas_(writer)
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Punktowner
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jeffrey.thomas.71/about
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Jeffrey-Thomas/e/B000APMJZ4/
Back to Top
The Locked Door
Brian M. Sammons
The follow short story originally appeared in Dreaming in R’lyeh #3 and was later reprinted on Lovecraft eZine.
He sat there, a handsome man in his mid-fifties, dressed in a fine suit, smelling of expensive cologne, and with a gold watch on his wrist that was worth more than three month’s rent to Miranda. He had made the appointment by phone, calling himself ‘Mr. Jones,’ and from the start, the itching in her brain had told Miranda that the name was a lie. Not that such things were uncommon, many people felt foolish the first time the consulted someone proclaiming to be psychic. Still, it was a credit to Miranda’s authenticity that even before the tall, good-looking man sat himself at her table in her modest apartment, she had known that he was hiding something. Now she knew it was more than just his identity, for that was obvious.
"Well, Mr. Jones, what brings you here?" Miranda said with just the slightest hint of incredulity in her voice.
The man smiled before replying, “I guess I can drop the act, I’m pretty sure you recognize me.”
Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013 Page 5