Gothic Lovecraft

by Lynne Jamneck

  Nor did sympathy warm her haggard features when she ushered hobbling guest into the bedchamber and shook her husband’s shoulder to awaken him. Scant sparks escaped hollow sockets to show his eyes were open, and dry wheezing grew louder without filling hollow cheeks. Goodman Brown was sunk deep in feather mattress as if lowered partway into earth already.

  “Is it my own grandfather,” Goodman Brown murmured, “who rejoins the living younger than myself?” Faith withdrew and quietly shut the bedroom door, no sign of curiosity on downcast face.

  “I’m here to render whatever comfort and assistance I may,” deferential visitor declared. In the glow of guttering oil lamp, his staff’s snake-head seemed to blink under his folded hands.

  “You’ve come to help.” Brown vented a rasping laugh. “I’d a lifetime’s worth of your help when you lured me, in callow youth, through the woods to that Sabbat of your worshippers. And there you helped me see the truth that we of Salem, and everywhere, drink greedily from sin’s chalice, pastors, thieves, matrons, harlots, and my own wife. I am grateful for that truth whether or not you fashioned profane spectacle from fog and moonbeams, for truth is truth by whatever road it travels, is it not? And is not truth to be esteemed above all else?”

  “I fear you taunt me,” confessed inveterate beguiler.

  “No more than do you, in the guise of revered kinsman.”

  “You wrong me!” Knobbly fingers went defensively to broad linen collar. “This august vessel I deemed most proper to bear the milk of charity, glad tidings of mercy. The sands are soon run from your unhappy hourglass, but say the word and those years are replenished, and your happiness. This I offer in recompense for the misery you suffered at my remiss hands.”

  “In return for which you ask nothing?” A smile, or more aptly a rictus, spread like a crack in the waxen mask of pending death.

  “Have a care not to provoke me! My clemency is finite as the corruptible world.” Intimations of an unbecoming leer spoiled the mask of serenity.

  “You cannot cow me.”

  “Do you assume redemption through the crucible of self-torment? Do you fancy your soul purified and invincible against hell’s violence? Elevated among the elect, are you?”

  “Oh, no, quite the opposite,” Brown quavered with studied innocence. “I owe the devil his due and mean no flippancy when I give thanks for purging me of trust in Christian virtues, and of doubt in nature’s godlessness. Else the scales would have remained on my eyes, and I’d never have forsaken received wisdom to loft toward enlightenment, in keeping with others of this age, but surpassing them as the eagle does the wren. I’m indeed in your debt.”

  Some semblance of pity carved deeper furrows around the guest’s grim-set mouth. “Yet here you are. Much good has this enlightenment brought you, and much pleasure.” A sadder frown lent patriarch the pout of a gargoyle. “Am I one with whom you should hope to dissemble?”

  “I shouldn’t wager who or what you are.” Color suffused waxen complexion, and passion galvanized frail husk. “You’ve become of meager import to me, for what are heaven and hell save figments of hoodwinked souls?” The bed quaked at a spasm of coughing. “And what are these purported souls in your ledger,” he croaked, “beyond a currency that exists by mutual consent between you and the gullible?” At odds with impiety was the fiery eye of a zealot. “Why bestir yourself at all for me, who may not exist except in fever vision?”

  “You’ve beheld God’s countenance, if anybody has.” Goodman Brown became acerbic, like a schoolmaster hectoring a dullard. “Tell me, when was your last confabulation with Him?”

  Deceiver wrinkled patrician nose, as if the Goodman’s hauteur offended it. “You impugned me as Father of Lies an instant ago, and now you goad me for an answer we both know you’d not believe.”

  “Again you would mislead me into self-doubt, but I’ll not backslide. You’ve done too well at weaning me off the creed so needful to you and your victims alike.” Goodman Brown’s look latched onto his guest as if with designs to convert the very devil. Guest narrowed uncongenial eyes at prospects of dotty sermonizing, at reservoir of vitality below the still waters of dotage. “The truth shall edify you, though to be edified is nowise to be happier, as if happiness or aught dear to us were dear among the stars.”

  “You’ve been among the stars?” Was that a gibe or a question? Goodman Brown’s grin was not unlike that of head on serpentine staff. The staff’s owner glared at mortal impudence, but before his temper found words the Goodman was underway.

  “As my kindred spirit Descartes might have put it, once the x and y axes of sin and saintliness no longer bound me, neither did compunctions toward a spotless repute. I presumed the Ushers, the oldest booksellers in Boston, to have had works by Newton, Hooke, and Halley, names outside your circle I daresay.” Goodman Brown gulped a ratchety breath; his guest archly mouthed “I daresay” but held his peace.

  “Because of God’s absence from these doctors’ formulas for fathoming creation, churchmen militant reckoned them ungodly, whereas I hungered after them for just that reason. The clerk, an impish fellow who sniffled and hemmed as though surfeited with snuff, had nothing I sought. But with an air of broaching no new subject, he asked did I know a son of the shop’s founder had been jailed for witchcraft? I could only shake my head, and he elaborated how the shackled Hezekiah had escaped through another prisoner’s devices, a Goody Mason, who somehow used equations like those of Newton as sorcery.

  “The clerk could not specify the manner of this usage, but asserted Goody Mason’s grasp of metaphysics would have confounded Kepler himself. What’s more, rumor had it she still subsisted in squalid garret out in remote suburbs. If only she were handy, her I should approach for lessons that reduced Newton’s calculus to child’s play. I thanked him and withdrew hastily lest his sniffles, and his probable derangement, prove infectious, and repaired homeward on purchasing my books elsewhere.

  “Some hours past dark I stabled my horse and trudged with weighty satchel to my door. I’d crossed from moonlit path into the shadows below the eaves when a rat scampered where my foot was about to land, near to tripping me, startling me the more because it was the size of a young woodchuck. My hand was fraught with instinct to grab for a pitchfork.

  “Cackling burst from the blackness that had harbored giant vermin. ‘You’ll want worse than a pitchfork to dispatch me and mine!’ I was flustered by shrill outcry, and further that I’d unawares been pantomiming my intent, which I surely hadn’t voiced. This prowler’s cadences of lunacy and menace were moreover alarmingly strange, yet I was convinced she was no absolute stranger.

  “Had she, I inquired, been some years ago among Salem’s mingled gentry and rabble in the wilderness, where now my acreage was situated, when Great Deceiver contrived joining me and my Faith in a Hallows-Eve travesty of marriage? I’d meanwhile had no luck espying trespasser in pitch-dark shadow, and her pet was gone afield, committing untold mischief.

  “She tittered and jeered, ‘To indulge such mummery is beneath me. And is it not beneath you too, a would-be disciple of Halley and Copernicus? I’ll show entire what they only glimpsed, and much they never dreamed of. Say the word, and all is yours.’

  “I had to grant then the verity of my absurd suspicions about this intruder’s name, and how curious that both you and Goody Mason besought me with ‘Say the word.’ But she would never sign your ledger, would she?” The Goodman’s diction verged on nettlesome. His audience swatted at an unseen gnat.

  “That ledger goes back millennia. Can you recollect every soul with whom you’ve dealt?” chided the Archfiend.

  “Mere millennia,” sighed Goodman Brown. “Goody Mason promised I would learn the age and watch the birth pangs of the cosmos—though after consorting with you, how could I not beware of fine enticements? As I strained my sight in vain for the least glimmer of her, I queried, ‘At what cost do you propose to school me?’

  “‘What cost would be too high?’ she crowed. �
��What of this earth would not pale in value beside my teachings?’

  “I prayed she speak more softly, lest she bestir my wife and swaddling boy. ‘How tragic that would be!’ she mocked in husky whisper. ‘Very well, simply nod and we’ll adjourn for the nonce.’

  “I’d scarce begun to wag my chin when monstrous, insolent rat leapt over my toes and into the blackness, jaws clamped on a mangled rooster’s neck. On the heels of my wanton oath was a silence more doleful than in a midnight churchyard. That silence resumed as soon as I’d entreated, ‘Goody Mason?’ I ventured into black shadow under the eaves and let my eyes habituate. No one squinted back at me, not harridan nor thieving rat, as if I’d been alone all along.

  “The next visitation, and each subsequent, disquieted me no less than the first. I was milking cows in the barn at daybreak, as later I’d be shelving turnips in the root cellar or adding fieldstones to a boundary wall, when the scuttle of great rat past my toes and a violet flash, swifter than a blink, heralded my instructress. Stooped and spindly crone curbed my protest at her pet’s new depredations that dawn by hissing, ‘Whist! You said your wife and baby mustn’t hear!’

  “While I regathered my wits, she plucked up my lamp and muttered and goggled around till some junction of angles and curves wrought by carpentry and shadows pleased her. She positioned the lamp to preserve this arrangement, whistled like a thrush for her accomplice, and beckoned me to ‘tour heavens framed in no Bible story.’ With a tittering as human as Goody Mason’s, rodent hurtled by me, and then with deceptively snakish speed, crone latched scaly fist about my arm and tugged. I stumbled in tow through that geometry of curves and angles, whose outlines flared up violet.

  “Intersections of cow stall and beam and windowsill remained solid as ever, but radiant empurpled edges stood out like a ship’s prow, and we penetrated them as though they were cobwebs. We emerged into lustrous firmament, suspended there as if we’d vaulted from ship’s prow to lodge in its rigging. I was dumbfounded at this, and at our encasement, or transformation rather, into diversely sized globes and serried rectangles, but likewise was my mind transformed into deeming these alterations meet and natural.

  “Some proficiency of Goody Mason’s will detached us from the invisible rigging and propelled us into that firmament and toward further gleaming geometries fashioned of nameless constellations and celestial bodies, and she planted in my thoughts some comprehension of the marvels beyond those geometries.

  “I therewith became her protégé as she revealed a fabric of reality set forth by no astrolabe or scripture. We contracted through the needle’s eye to realms infinitesimal beyond reach of microscopes, where the most elementary particles within all matter madly spun round or bounced off or cleaved to one another, like eternal riot in measureless Bedlam. Else we ascended to divine vantage where our sun was less than a speck of dust in an immense pinwheel of stars, and then we withdrew to such remoteness that our pinwheel was one speck in a countless host dispersing headlong toward ultimate dissipation.

  “But within a starless planet’s frozen ocean, a lucent portal, contrived from cracks in ice and temple ruins blasphemous to Euclid, led to the most astonishment. For on traversing it, I was apparently home again, except my vision now detected twice what it ever had, a teeming density of grains, formerly clandestine, whose black network and trillion filaments connected and perforated trees, hills, farmhouse, me, and everything material, and made of the air a fluid mosaic, and crowded night sky with whorls like magnified fingertips. It was a world of foreign substance pervading ours, omnipresent, but occluded from earthly faculties.”

  Goodman Brown broke into raw chuckles that lapsed into feeble coughing. “I’d always pondered how you and Cotton Mather got on,” the Goodman informed his guest. “What was he save his day’s paradox incarnate? An avid partisan of science, a champion of inoculation against the smallpox, yet he endorsed spectral evidence to root out witchcraft, to condemn the innocent by asserting they trafficked in the Invisible World. And here I was, trafficking with one he’d brand a witch, through whom I was privy to an Invisible World his followers in science may not approach for centuries.”

  The semblance of Goodman Brown’s grandsire pensively kneaded his chin. “Hearsay has it Cotton Mather was among the keenest intellects in the colonies, a claim you’d never arrogate to yourself. Perhaps deferring to his cosmogony would better suit your modesty. Can you prove this Goody Mason was not bedazzling you with phantasms?”

  “If Mather’s obsolete ‘cosmogony,’ as you dignify it, were so unerring, then why, among those nineteen whose executions he applauded, were only Goodies Carrier and Corey present at that Hallows’ Eve Sabbat of yours? Or were you bedazzling me with phantasms that night?”

  Venerable mouth indecorously smirked. “To err is human. A rash decision or two hardly required my whispers in Mather’s ear. Your Goody Mason, on the other hand, must have been infallibly rational.” Pert as a goat, Grandsire rubbed upraised right boot against left ankle.

  “You’ve had the pleasure of her company, then, to make sport with me thus?” The Goodman’s flinty eyes rebuked the Deceiver. “Or need I restate that she and Mather shared their generation’s handicap, one foot mired in benighted past, while the other strove toward wisdom? Even as Mather credulously peopled the air with ghosts and witches, she couched ingenious mathematics in the ignorant trappings of magic, mathematics so complex its applications were tantamount to conjury.

  “But that was poor excuse for her to affect hocus-pocus posturings, distress at beholding the cross, the fellowship of a beastly familiar, and talk of a ‘master’ whose book I’d have to sign, especially after she’d professed such scorn for ‘mummery.’ In fine, I grew skeptical of any genius in her, who taught her transportive geometries solely as rote, with no grounding in their principles. Her ‘master,’ I surmised, was conversant with those principles, and I was both eager and loath to pay him court. His powers of learning were enough to make him imposing, if not fearsome, unlike Goody Mason, fatuous despite her attainments.

  “Between her mentions of his ‘book’ and calling him ‘the Black Man,’ I mused he might be another sly embodiment of you, which would have let me dismiss celestial voyages as illusory. I could then have acquitted myself more conscionably as householder, for though my wife and son were none the wiser to my weeks and months of rovings, a premonition of leaving them insecure had come to haunt me. Goody Mason’s ‘master,’ I meanwhile supposed, must have cultivated your likeness to render her more biddable to his hidden purposes.”

  Archfiend shrugged. “I take many guises. Others may disguise themselves as me. Do not, mind you, underrate me as one who moves in mysterious ways.”

  “Peculiar how Goody Mason’s ‘Black Man’ said much the same himself.” An adversarial smile began to form till some internal anguish quelled it and shortened his breath. “He,” the Goodman persisted, “might not outdo you as an opportunist, though his domain was loftier than yours. And whereas you boast of serving no one, the Goody’s ‘master’ answered to a lord whose realm was inordinately grander than your Jehovah’s.”

  “Would you wheedle me into staging a defense of that odious Jehovah? I rejoice in your exertions to take Him down a peg. Why would I not?” Immortal trickster may have tried forging ingratiation on venerable features, but seemed unctuous at best. “And pardon my remarking this concern for family after you ostensibly severed such mawkish ties, at first because sin tainted them, and then with astronomic delvings to preoccupy you. How could the grubbing lot of a farmer compete?”

  “Every time the Goody and her pet came to fetch me, I departed feeling as I had that night of hiking to the woods for my rendezvous with you, when Faith and I were blissfully in love. I did not like that feeling.” Indignation furrowed ashen forehead.

  “Goodman Brown, do not fault me for following a course I never urged on you!” False grandsire’s wrinkled brow parodied the Goodman’s.

  “Nor did I like the feeling,
more and more distinct, of others watching over our journeys, whose very act of watching perturbed my equilibrium, and put me in sympathy with the fawn that fears a lurking catamount.” To diabolic visitor, bitter grimace was akin to those on myriad clients surrendering to damnation. “In brief, I was near to admitting regret at ever giving Goody Mason the nod.”

  Unctuous smile once more marred grandfatherly visage. “Regret? Of what use is that? To you fell privileges beyond the ken of angels, the knowledge of worlds barred to them, of mechanisms governing the atoms of Democritus and the tedious doom of this clockwork universe.”

  “Knowledge, yes, you’ve always been a great one for promoting knowledge since your antics in Eden,” the Goodman interjected.

  Deceiver went on as if deaf to irony. “I might envy you the sublime panoramas of suns colliding, of opalescent clouds smothering constellations, of cities and jungles and armadas inaccessible to earthly senses. Are you not enriched by these splendors? Haven’t wonderment and rapture persuaded you of some magisterial design? Is it absolutely certain you’ve been versed in purely secular mysteries?”

  “You overplay your hand.” Contempt hardened the Goodman’s frown. “You cannot restore me to your clutches by reviving my credence in heaven and hell. For what are beauty, reverence, or love but human valuations, pretty gloss to smooth over chaos and futility, pathetic before omnipotent indifference?”

  “You’re sadder than I foresaw.” Dour assessment smacked uncharitably of reproach.

  Goodman Brown shook his head as if disheartened that his pronouncements on the worth of happiness had gone to waste. “No easier for you than me discerning sorrow from wisdom, eh? But we come to the crux.” He cleared ratchety throat. “I knew no customary ride impended that night my fellow voyagers emerged from hearthside shadows. Both were exultant as topers, cackling brazenly as if wakening wife and child above us were of no consequence.