Lovecraft Country

by Matt Ruff

  But Montrose had no intention of leaving empty-handed, and it would have been rude to refuse Winthrop’s hospitality, so he accepted the cup placed before him and one of the shortbread cookies Winthrop also offered. The tea and the cookie were remarkably bland—flavorless, to be honest—but when swallowed they produced a mild intoxication, a torpor of reason that allowed him to embrace a parley with a dead man as part of the natural order of things.

  “Henry Winthrop,” the dead man said. “It’s been a long time since anyone’s called me that. You say Braithwhite sent you? Samuel Braithwhite?”

  “His son, Caleb. Samuel Braithwhite is dead.”

  “Really?” Winthrop said. “I hadn’t heard that.” He looked distractedly out the window. “We don’t get much news, here.”

  “No,” Montrose said, his own gaze straying to the calendar above the mantelpiece. “I don’t suppose you do. But about my son, Mr. Winthrop . . .”

  “Braithwhite has designs on him, you said. What sort?”

  “I don’t entirely know. Braithwhite’s father wanted to use Atticus as a sacrifice in a ritual. Caleb’s more subtle—for now he wants to keep Atticus around, I think as a sort of trophy to impress his other sorcerer friends. But in the long run, I expect he’ll come up with some ritual of his own. I want him gone before that happens.”

  “You want to kill him?”

  “I would if I could. But he’s charmed, somehow, and I can’t raise a hand against him. Braithwhite calls it immunity.”

  Winthrop nodded. “My father had that, too. It was frustrating.”

  “Is there a way around it?”

  “A number of ways,” Winthrop said. “But I don’t know what any of them are.”

  “You know anyone who does?”

  “No one living.”

  “What about your father’s notebooks?” Montrose said. “That’s what Braithwhite sent me here to get, and he was very particular about not wanting anyone else to have them. Could there be something in them, you think, about revoking immunity?”

  “There might be.”

  “Would you be willing to part with them?”

  Winthrop shrugged noncommittally. “I suppose I could let them go. God knows they aren’t doing me any good. Of course,” he added, “there would have to be a fair exchange.”

  “I have money,” Montrose said. “It’s back in my car—”

  “No, not money. Money’s no use to me.”

  “What, then?”

  “Feeling,” Winthrop said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Winthrop looked out the window again. “It’s not just news we lack for, here,” he said. “It’s everything. All that sunshine . . . But I’m never really warm.” He turned back to Montrose. “Or cold, either. And this—” Gesturing at the tea and shortbread. “Unsatisfying. No sweetness in the sugar. No savor, in salt. And it’s the same with emotion. Oh, we can pretend, but it’s just faded echoes. To really feel something again, to experience strong emotion, even for a moment . . . That would be a good trade.”

  The look of naked craving on Winthrop’s face reawakened that inner voice. Get out, it told Montrose. This ain’t a man, it’s a vampire and it’s starving, get away from it.

  “I still don’t understand,” he said. “How can I make you feel something?”

  “Tell me a story,” Henry Winthrop said. He raised his head up like an animal scenting prey. “Tell me about your father.”

  “No,” said Montrose. “No, I won’t do that.”

  But the dead man wouldn’t hear no.

  “Rowland, was it?” he said. “Was that his name? Dick Rowland?”

  Montrose shook his head, that inner voice saying: Run. “My father was Ulysses.”

  “So who was Dick Rowland?” Winthrop demanded.

  Montrose tried to get up then, but the torpor had settled in his legs, trapping him in the chair.

  “Who was he? Tell me.”

  Nothing for it but to answer. “He was a bootblack,” Montrose said. “A shoe shiner.”

  “Did he and your father work together?”

  “No. My father had his own store. He and Rowland didn’t know each other, not to speak to anyway.”

  “But there was a connection between them,” Winthrop insisted. “What was it? What happened?”

  “Rowland was accused,” Montrose said, after trying once more, unsuccessfully, to stand.

  “Accused of what?”

  “The usual,” Montrose told him, and with the sudden kindling of anger in his breast he lost his reluctance to speak. “It was Memorial Day, 1921,” he said. “Dick Rowland went into the Drexel Building in downtown Tulsa to use the colored restroom on the top floor. He stumbled and fell against the elevator operator, a white girl named Sarah Page. She said he attacked her.”

  “And did he?” Winthrop asked.

  Montrose threw him a look of disgust. “Broad daylight in a public building on Main Street, he’s going to attack a white girl? How suicidal would a man have to be? But it didn’t matter: She screamed and he ran, and from that moment on he was guilty.

  “Cops arrested him early the next day. That afternoon, the Tulsa Tribune ran an article about the ‘attack,’ claiming the girl’s clothes were torn. They admitted later they’d made that up, but of course as soon as the paper hit the street, the lynch talk started.

  “The sheriff had Dick Rowland in the jail at the county courthouse. By nightfall there was a huge mob of white people gathered outside. But the Negroes who lived up in the Greenwood section had heard about the lynching too, and some of the men decided to get their guns and go down and put a stop to it. My father was one of them. I never got a chance to ask him what happened, but the story I heard later was that one of the whites at the courthouse tried to take a pistol away from one of the Negroes. War broke out.

  “The Negroes were outnumbered something like twenty to one, so the ones who survived the initial gunfire fell back towards Greenwood. The whites followed after, but they stopped along the way to get more guns and ammunition. They broke into hardware stores and pawnshops, took everything that wasn’t nailed down.

  “My father got back to our house around eleven o’clock. His arm was cut and there was blood all down his sleeve, but I don’t think he even knew it. He told my mother to start packing the car with anything she couldn’t bear to lose. He said he was going back out—the Greenwood men were setting up a defensive line at the railroad tracks, to turn back the white mob—but if that failed, we had to be ready to leave in a hurry.

  “My mother didn’t want him to go, but he didn’t see there was any choice. He said: ‘They’re looting their own people’s property, what do you think they’re going to do if we let them get up in here?’

  “I told my father I wanted to come with him to help defend the neighborhood. Seven years old, I thought I was a big man already. My father said no of course, and with him, one no was all you ever got. But I got excited and tried to argue, and that’s when he gave me this.” He tilted his head and pointed to a scar by the corner of his left eye. “Cut me with his ring.

  “My father had a reputation as a violent man, and he could be violent, but it was always controlled. He’d hit me if I needed it, but he never left a mark on me before, and he didn’t mean to that night. When I felt the blood trickle down my cheek, that’s when I realized how scared he was. How bad a fix we were in.

  “And then,” Montrose said, “my brother George stepped up and said he needed to go out and get my great-grandmother’s book . . .”

  “Her book?” Winthrop said.

  “An accounts ledger,” said Montrose. “It was in the safe at my father’s shop. My father told George if worse came to worst, he’d save the book himself, but George insisted it was his responsibility. I expected George to get smacked down too about then, but my father said OK. I couldn’t believe it—when my mother jumped in and tried to forbid George to go, my father told her to be quiet.

  “So my father and Ge
orge went out together, and after that my mother was all business. She had me and my sister running around the house, gathering things together. Packing wedding dishes. I was so mad. George gets to go to the front line, I get wedding dishes.

  “As we were bringing things out to the car, we could hear gunshots off in the distance. My mother got real agitated and I did too, but for different reasons. We got the car pretty well stuffed, and then there was this moment when my mother and Ophelia were inside the house trying to decide what else to take, and I was outside, alone, listening to those gunshots, and I couldn’t hold myself back anymore. I’d just put my father’s toolbox in the car, so I grabbed this big old claw hammer and started running towards the battle.

  “When I got to Archer Street I could barely recognize it. The Greenwood defenders had shot out all the streetlights and they had snipers up overlooking the railroad tracks. The whites couldn’t see the snipers, but a few of them had managed to sneak across with oil rags and lighters. All the shanties on the Greenwood side of the tracks were on fire, and some larger buildings too.

  “So I was out there in the street with my hammer, with the fire and the smoke and the darkness, bullets flying by in both directions. Men were shouting at me to get the hell out of there, but I just started wandering down the street, in a daze, looking for my dad.

  “I saw a car full of white men drive across the tracks and come under fire. The headlights and the windshield just exploded. The driver threw it into reverse and backed out in a hurry. I was jumping up and down, hollering—we were winning! Then my father swooped out of nowhere and grabbed me. He didn’t hit me this time. He picked me up and shook me”—Montrose raised his hands above his head—“like this.

  “I heard a big bang like a bomb going off. My father stopped shaking me and he hugged me to him and he started running. And you know, it’s funny, but once we got away from the smoke and the flames, it was almost nice, him carrying me like that . . . I dream about it sometimes, and in the dreams there’s no gunfire, it’s just an ordinary spring night and my dad’s carrying me home, like from a movie or a ball game. Like he should have been.

  “We must have been about halfway home when a car came up behind us, moving fast. As it got close I saw it was all shot up, bullet holes in the hood, glass all knocked out, and I opened my mouth to say something, but there was no time. A white man leaned out of the back with a pistol and fired two shots. Then the car was past us and gone into the night—I never knew what happened to it, or who that man was.

  “I thought the shots had missed us. I knew I wasn’t hit, and my father didn’t break stride. He ran on for another block or so and then he just stopped. He put me down, careful, put a hand on my shoulder like to steady himself. Then he fell over.

  “We were on the grass in front of someone’s house. The people inside heard me yelling and the porch lights came on. I saw my father had been shot in the side and there was blood coming out of his mouth. He had this look on his face. Horror. Horror at the universe. I was too young to understand it. I thought he was afraid because he was dying, but that wasn’t it at all. It wasn’t until I had a son of my own—a son who wouldn’t listen—that I understood what he felt.

  “He wasn’t afraid for himself. He was afraid for me. He wanted to protect me. He had: He saved my life, getting me away from that gunfight. But the night wasn’t over and he knew he wasn’t going to be there to see me through it. That’s the horror, the most awful thing: to have a child the world wants to destroy and know that you’re helpless to help him. Nothing worse than that. Nothing worse.”

  Eyes suddenly wet, Montrose looked up, as though waking from a trance, and saw the woman in the kitchen doorway with the boy held tight in her arms. Seeing her stricken expression, Montrose wanted to apologize for bringing such a tale into her house, but her husband leaned forward, still hungry, and determined to lick every last crumb from this particular plate.

  “And then he died?” Henry Winthrop said.

  “Yeah,” said Montrose. “Then he died.”

  Outside the window it was still summer, but the color of the sky had changed to pink and gold and the shadows on the grass were growing long. Montrose, still lost in the burning night of Tulsa, did not find it strange that evening should already be drawing on here.

  Henry Winthrop said: “I wish I had a father like that.”

  “I don’t have a father like that,” Montrose said. “That’s the damn point.” He swiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. “So what’s your story? What was your father like?”

  “Curious,” Winthrop replied. “There are other words I could use to describe him, but to understand him you’d have to start with that: his insatiable curiosity. He wanted to know everything about everything, which is a lot to know. Much more than could be learned in a single human life span. So to give himself the time he needed, he decided to become immortal—and as close to omnipotent as it was practical to get.

  “On one level it was comical. The men my father associated with thought of themselves as rationalists. Scientists. Natural philosophers. To speak of the supernatural was a sign of simplemindedness. They wanted to become gods, but rejected the concept of God as vulgar superstition.

  “My father was less orthodox than most. He didn’t mind vulgarity if it got results. It’s what led him to my mother. She was a witch,” Winthrop explained. “Called herself that, unselfconsciously. She believed in gods, and miracles, and magic, and she showed my father that what he wanted was at least theoretically possible. She paid for it, too—first with her health, then with her life.”

  “The story is she had polio,” Montrose said.

  “That was the story,” Winthrop agreed. “But it wasn’t a disease that put my mother in a wheelchair, it was a mistranslation. A cosmic pun. Are you familiar with the language of Adam, Mr. Turner?”

  “Acquainted with it,” Montrose said cautiously.

  “There’s a line in Matthew’s Gospel that says if you ask God for bread, he won’t give you a stone,” Winthrop said. “That’s because the God of the New Testament is a person—a father—who cares about you. But when you invoke the language of Adam, you’re addressing nature, and nature doesn’t care, it just does what it’s told. If you garble your instructions—transpose a letter, stress the wrong syllable—you’ll get what you ask for, but it might not be what you want.”

  “What did your mother ask for?”

  “A doorway,” Winthrop said. “One challenge my father faced in understanding the universe was that most of it was beyond his reach. With my mother’s help, he set out to find a means of bridging distant points in space. They succeeded, but one of their experiments left my mother crippled. She asked nature for the power to walk between worlds, and nature gave her legs of stone.

  “After the accident, my father became more cautious. He had a deep respect for technology and already employed machines in the pursuit of his art. He began to invest more heavily in their use. He wanted to insure that in future mishaps, the harm would fall on something other than himself. Machines made good surrogates—and for situations where they weren’t sufficient to absorb the risk, he also cultivated a pool of young, overeager apprentices.

  “My mother continued to help my father with his research, but their relationship changed. At first she’d thought it was just bad luck that she was the one who’d gotten hurt. But seeing how he used his new assistants to shield himself from danger, she began to wonder.”

  “These apprentices,” Montrose said. “Were you one of them?”

  “No. My mother was adamant about that. She made my father promise never to involve me in his work, and because she was still very useful to him, he kept his word. Of course, I wanted to help him. What boy doesn’t want to work with his father? But she made me promise, too. And any time I started showing interest in natural philosophy, she’d uncover her legs.”

  “How’d she die?”

  “Trying to fix herself,” Winthrop said. “When I was fifteen,
she decided to leave my father—but in order to get free of him, she first had to get free of the wheelchair. I was away at boarding school when she performed a ritual of regeneration. She asked nature to give her her legs back; nature gave her legs. I don’t know the exact count, but it was more than her heart or her nervous system could handle. My father claimed she didn’t suffer for long.

  “The funeral was closed casket. Afterwards we went home to a new house. My father talked about making a fresh start. He said he wanted to make me a partner in his research. But it was too late by then. While he’d been off chasing the ancient mysteries of the universe, I’d been studying a different, more modern sort of philosophy at school. My father was furious. He said he hadn’t paid all that tuition to have me turned into a socialist. He blamed my mother, who’d chosen the school, for deliberately corrupting me. He was right about that.

  “What he didn’t know was that my mother had written me a letter before she died. She knew she might not survive the ritual. She wanted to make sure I survived my father. So she sent me detailed instructions on how to run away: where to get the money I’d need; how to forge a new identity; and how to hurt my father, for her, on my way out the door.

  “It was another year before I left. I needed time to get ready, and I was afraid. My father was keeping a close eye on me. He refused to let me go back to school. Instead he hired a tutor, this crusty old Prussian . . . I spent months cooped up in our new house. That’s how I got to know Pearl. We would sneak up to the roof together when I was supposed to be studying.”

  “It ever occur to you,” said Montrose, unable to help himself, “that involving a maid in your family drama might not be right?”