by J K Ishaya
Howard's face, for the first time, expresses a look of awe, as though some little piece of him has woken up inside. "Come this way," he says.
Chapter Two
His bedroom is a meager box, with a narrow bed partially made. There is a telescope on a folded tripod leaning in the corner behind a bulky roll top desk that sits crowded with papers, stacks of Argosy and other such rag publications. A scattering of natural artifacts is collected around the papers: seashells, pieces of antler, a quartz crystal, a beetle husk. The roll top is positioned permanently up to allow for a boxy Remington typewriter that overfills its compartment. A few old framed photographs sit along the top board over the typewriter along with a bookstand in which are crammed easily portable titles by the likes of Poe, Bulfinch, and Doyle. A few old Baedeker Guides to London and Egypt and other such exotic locations are lined up together with their faded red spines cracked and flaking. My gaze then takes in a familiar, battered two-volume set of War and Peace and without thinking, I gasp softly, drawing Kvasir’s attention to the titles.
Are those what I think they are?
Yes, I reply, Winfield’s volumes. He carried those everywhere.
Well, at least the boy has something of his father’s besides old clothes.
That our attention is briefly fixed on the titles goes unnoticed by our host. Unaware that both of his guests can see clearly in the room's darkness, Howard hurries to strike a match and light an oil lamp over the desk and another on a plain dresser with a mirror that sits beside the bed.
As he proceeds to fidget the room into some orderly shape and push the bed covers up to hide the pillow, I step before the dresser mirror to look upon what we've unveiled. My clothes are still the same: a black suit and long coat that hides my body, and my facial features in general still have the same human base canvas that Howard has been looking at since he opened the door. But in reality, long hair, wavy and too uncivilized for Providence, cascades to my shoulders. Upon my face sits a series of thin and intricate runic scarification patterns, pearl white and running down from the sides of my forehead to my temples, over the upper rises of my cheek bones and into the hollows where they disappear under my beard. They appear again on the sides of my neck before retreating under my collar. Under my clothes, they persist over my shoulders and down my arms, while two more branches run down each side of my chest, and another two over my shoulder blades where they conglomerate around their source, the sigil on my back which serves the greatest of purposes.
"Oh, excuse me, I'll get another chair," Howard says and hurries out.
Kvasir steps to my side and my gaze shifts in the mirror to the being who was never human at all. He stands almost a full head taller than me, but his frame is narrower, less the muscular bulk that I carry though his strength is almost equal. His pale skin is living porcelain, though time, war and grief have given it a sallow cast, and the hollows of his cheeks and eyes are almost gray while faint veins show through the skin at his temples. His long, heart-shaped face with its pointed chin was once soft and beautiful as the classic depiction of an angel, but his features have become severe despite the lighthearted disposition he still manages to present. His hair is bound in a messy braid and his ears taper upward to slight points in the cartilage while the lobes are somewhat longer than normal ears. Eyes that appeared hazel and very human moments ago are now a creamy jade green, larger and centered with long, narrow pupils like a cat's consumed by a feral quality, primordial and uncanny. Subtly marring these features are three long narrow scars, roughly two inches apart from each other, that run diagonally across his face. The top one begins on his forehead, fades off at the inner corner of an eyebrow, and picks up again on the opposite, lower cheek. The middle one bisects a brow and disappears to leave a line across his nose, and the third is lower, running from cheek to chin. These claw marks pain me every time I look at them, no matter how thin they are compared to when he first acquired them.
It has been a while since the illusion was lifted for mortal eyes, since over twenty years ago when Winfield Scott Lovecraft, before he married and had a child, became entangled in business best left to the creatures of antiquity that stare at us from the mirror.
Howard returns with a parlor chair from the set in the front room where his mother dozes peacefully. He stops short when he sees us again, that look of wonder reducing him from eighteen to twelve, and his shaky hands drop the chair, causing a loud thump. "Um... uh... I apologize for staring. May I offer a cup of tea, g-g-gentlemen?" He doesn't know whether to address us as men or something else now.
I move away from the mirror to examine the telescope. "That will not be necessary right now, Mr. Lovecraft." It is the first time he has heard me fully and directly speak to him, and I sense already that he is uncomfortable with my accent and its Eastern European inflections. Kvasir, on the other hand, has fine-tuned his northern American English—and all other languages that he speaks—to the point of having no foreign accent at all.
"Howard. Please, call me Howard." He continues to stare, the angle of his gaze currently on my left temple and the marks there, as he absently navigates around the chair and plunks down in it, grabbing the edges to hold himself up. "What exactly is this? How did you disguise yourselves? Is it magic?" He says the word with a certain distain. "And my mother?" A nod down the hallway behind him. "How did you sedate her so easily?" He now stops on Kvasir's face and his gaze affixes on those green feline eyes staring back with an almost predatory humor. "Dear God."
I know from my perusal inside his mind that he is an atheist who doesn't believe in magic or God—though as a child he toyed with an extremely infantile idea of paganism—and this is the exclamation of a young man who simply does not know what else to say.
"No, no God here," Kvasir says. "I am an earthly being just like you," he clarifies. "It is something of a mind trick. As to how I anesthetized your mother, that was a manipulation of unseen energies through the use of geometric patterns and mental volition. It is really more of an ancient technology than anything, but mankind has always had trouble distinguishing that from the idea of magic. May I?" He removes the coat from his arm and gestures at the bed post.
"Oh! Of course, I can take those for you!" He starts to rise again.
"Not necessary." Kvasir hangs his coat on the post and gives me a gesture to remove mine.
I shrug my shoulders, and he takes my coat for me, adds it over top of his own on the bed post while I take a seat on the edge of the bed. I lean forward and prop elbows on knees, fingers steepled as I study our host a little longer. He looks very little like his father and much more like Mrs. Lovecraft with that pointed face and inquisitive nose. A brief and awkward silence falls, and Howard fingers his chin as he digests the provender we have already fed him so far. I watch his gaze dart to me now and trace the patterns of my scars again. In his mind there is a stirring of both revulsion that they are scars and wonder at their strange artistry.
"I do not know where to begin," he says, "and I have to confess that I did not really believe, after my discussions with Mr. Freysson, that any of this was true. I was just playing along, welcoming a new story, an adventure." He shrugs meekly. "I have so rarely left Providence."
I look over the titles on the desk and a stack of larger volumes that has been used as a makeshift table by the bed. A tea cup with a stain in the bottom sits there. "You like to read."
"I do. And write." He gestures at the Remington. "I bought that typewriter used two years ago to write my astronomy essays for publication. But I'm afraid I am a terrible typist. Actually, I don't like the sound of it… the clacking keys.“ He shudders at the mere suggestion of the noise.
"I enjoyed the two stories you shared with me," Kvasir says. "The Picture was especially entertaining."
Howard looks relieved. "Oh, deepest gratitude! I wrote that last year, and it has been at least three years since The Beast in the Cave. I haven't attempted to publish them yet. What do you think?”
"You
should."
"Have you, uh, have you read my stories, Mr. Corvinus?" He looks hopefully at me.
"No."
Kvasir, knowing there is no cure for my forthright manners, continues. "As I told you, Howard, we need writers, individuals capable of taking some of the concepts of which you will hear and using them in your own work. You may channel them however you wish—"
"Oh, I would be happy to chronicle them for you." He wiggles on the chair like a kid at an ice cream parlor.
"Eh, well, chronicling is not so much what we need as simply for you to act as a sort of spokesperson."
"We need a story teller," I interject. "Someone who can represent certain elements of our experiences. Tell them as stories, get them out to the public.”
Kvasir nods along with that. "There has, for some time, been a growing market for sensational tales, which is an excellent way to reach the unwary.”
“I see.”
“But there is far more to it, Howard.” I look him in the eyes and take a breath. I see again, therein, that craving for knowledge, and behind that the gaping dark beyond the edge of his mind. There lies the portal that concerns us, and it is true that anything could pour out of there. He needs only to reach within himself and give it a psychic rope to catch onto. On a breath I mutter to myself, “Well, if we are going to do this." Then I clear my throat and speak up. "Within every mind is a doorway.”
“Yes?” Howard flushes with eagerness.
"Every human mind is a doorway, but a rare few open into a primordial well that reaches into the past so far and deep that it is virtually impossible to imagine. Some, unfortunately, fall down that hole into that chasm and never return. Not in sound mind, anyway. They see what is out there in the cosmos, buried under our feet, or wedged between worlds, and they cannot comprehend it."
"You mean as Nietzsche stated." He grows more serious, casting aside all prior surprise at us. Kvasir has, indeed, prepared him well. "When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you."
"Indeed."
"And men who fight monsters should be cautious that they do not themselves become monsters."
It's a statement all too familiar where I am concerned, and I can only give him a grim nod to that. "Others do manage to survive and return intact," I continue. "They are the Dreamers, able to explore the countless lands at the end of this tunnel: the Dreamlands."
"The Dreamlands?" Already Howard's eyes are glazing, the name alone conjuring possibilities in his mind.
“They are that place beyond this realm you know as earth. There are two ways in, through dreams, and through a handful of hazardous physical portals that connect this world to that. Dreamers are often especially adept going there as children, an ability that often fades as adulthood and its distractions take hold, though there are plenty who do make it into adulthood and retain the ability. For example, there have been a number of authors who were Dreamers. Baum, for example, and Charles Dodgson, whom you would know better as Lewis Carroll.”
Howard’s reaction is one long chain or fast-spilling words. “You-mean-to-say-that-The-Wizard-of-Oz-and-the-Alice-adventures-were-written-by-Dreamers?” His legs tense as he resists rising from his seat at this surprise, but he gulps in a breath instead.
“Yes,” I say.
"So, the cyclone, or the rabbit hole, those represented even stranger portals." An incredulous chuckle shakes him and then a breath that sounds like relief, because some part of him has sensed this all along.
I nod along. "Representations, yes, but as you will have already surmised, the Dreamlands are not all that they sound. For all of their wonders, there are tremendous horrors as well. Baum and Carroll both took much literary license and chose to cope by focusing primarily on the wonders, only slipping in the most bizarre and horrific aspects when it served plot device and even those are watered down.”
“Oh, do not get started on that,” Kvasir gripes at me. “They are still best sellers.”
I wave him off. “What we need are authors who will not shy away from the terrible elements, who will not water them down. Perhaps even discover more Dreamers or inform and inspire other new authors in the right direction. We had begun this with a young man named Robert Chambers, but he no longer wishes to have much to do with us.”
“Chambers?” This one he does not know yet.
“He wrote a novella titled The King in Yellow,” Kvasir interjects. “It was, at least, somewhat going in the right direction.”
“I shall have to read it then.” Howard enthusiastically starts to scratch out the title in his notebook.
“No,” I say dully. “No, you really do not.”
“Why not?”
“One day, Howard,” Kvasir says calmly. “Just wait for now. I think you will find plenty of inspiration on your own with what we are about to share.”
“Indeed,” I say. “In fact, I believe you have already stumbled upon such inspiration. You have sampled the Dreamlands unwittingly, especially the horrors. I understand you have already relayed as much to Mr. Freysson.”
Howard nods and shivers. “Night-gaunts,” he whispers.
Kvasir shrugs. “Among others, yes. Night-gaunts have various motives for what they do, and some serve different beings of higher status. Those that terrorized you when you were a child were not of any allegiance.”
"I thought they…" Howard swallows a hard lump and draws a breath to finish. "I thought they were inspired by the Gustav Doré illustrations in the large deluxe copy of Paradise Lost that used to sit in the parlor of my grandfather's house. That was only three blocks from here."
We give him a moment to move past the painful memory of being forced to move from said house.
“We shall get to night-gaunts soon enough,” I tell him quietly. “The important thing is that you understand that you are a Dreamer, Howard, and as grown though you are now, it is possible you may visit the Dreamlands still." I watch his body stiffen, and his thoughts spin to organize new questions which I hope to answer for him before he need bother speak. "Your mind looks right down that tunnel. You see it as a vast stairway descending into a world that only a few humans have the privilege of seeing, and that can be a curse as well."
He cringes, and I see the image of a night-gaunt flashing forward in his mind with its faceless, horned head, stick thin, sinewed body, leathern wings spread wide. It swoops down from a soggy, patched sky. A little boy screams distantly. It is him at age five, scared witless as the thing grabs him by the stomach and sweeps him high into the air, and this did not even take place within the Dreamlands but upon the threshold into them.
"Learn to navigate the path and you will survive, but it may be a burden on you in the waking world."
New excitement diffuses from him, thick and odorous as piss though a little less acrid. I want to tamp down that excitement by telling him that he inherited this curse from his father, the poor bastard who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and discovered the more terrifying side of that pre-primordial and abysmal realm which unraveled his sanity bit by bit until he could take no more. On another of Kvasir's silent warnings, I hold back, realizing that I could undo the arrangement completely if I say too much too soon. Reluctant though I felt out on the doorstep, I find something stirring in me, and I hate to admit it, but I like this man child whose head is full of philosophy and myths, hateful and sad things. As I search for the words to go on with this meeting, it is Howard who now stuns me.
"I don't believe in curses." The flame from one of the oil lamps reflects in the glass of his spectacles, little glowing gold dots floating directly over his pupils, presenting the illusion of an inner light.
"You may yet, after you hear my tale, Howard," I finally say.
"Well then tell it," he says rather impatiently, "for you will not meet a more eager audience, Mr. Corvinus."
✽✽✽
"It began in the last days of the kingdom known then as Dacia," I tell Howard as I sit up and rearrange myself on
the edge of his bed, and Kvasir finally takes a seat beside the desk. "It was in the summer of 106, A.D. when I became what I am now."
"And what are you, exactly?" he asks, a distinctly investigative authority creeping into his voice.
Here I must find the correct and gentle tone for him to understand that regardless of how I am about to define myself, he is in no danger from me. "Understand that I was a human man, but certain events transformed me into this. There are ancient names for entities similar to my kind from cultures everywhere: Incubus, Akhkharu, Rakshasa. But none are quite accurate and none at all are of the origin that caused my conversion. There is far more to me than human legends alone can define. I can eat the food of most men, but the diet which sustains me is human blood and, just as often, the flesh itself."
I watch Howard mouth words silently before he boosts out of his chair and scrambles for the desk where he retrieves a notebook and a pencil. He resettles, crosses his legs to use one knee as a support as he scrawls letters on the pad. On the surface, he barely reacts and maintains a calm facade, though I sense a chill rise and fall in his core. "Like a vampire?" He gestures at the stack of books beside the bed, and a title along one of the cracked, leather spines: Dracula by Bram Stoker.
"In some ways." I nod and smile at the simplicity of that comparison and the irony of the story's roots in my homeland. "But I am far more than your fictional count. I cannot die by any known means, and whether you call me vampire, demon, blood drinker, flesh eater, I am utmost a monster, and I wish I could say that I am the worst you will ever meet, but there are far greater abominations out there." I know I will have to name the thing that I could be, the thing that I refuse to become, at some point, but to do so now feels too soon and will likely illicit a whole other conversation far too out of context. “Call me simply Other for that is a more comprehensive designation for an unnatural creature such as myself, or even Mr. Freysson here.”
