Gothic Lovecraft

by Lynne Jamneck

  Oubliez le Chien.

  Fifteen minutes later, I’m locking the front door of my apartment behind me. I make a hot cup of chamomile tea, which I drink standing at the kitchen counter. I’m in bed shortly after ten o’clock. By then, I’ve managed to completely dismiss whatever I only thought I saw crossing Jenckes Street.

  5

  “Open your eyes, Ms. Howard,” Abby Gladding says, and I do. Her voice does not in any way command me to open my eyes, and it is perfectly clear that I have a choice in the matter. But there’s a certain je-ne-sais-quoi in the delivery, the inflection and intonation, in the measured conveyance of these seven syllables, that makes it impossible for me to keep my eyes closed. It’s not yet dawn, but sunrise cannot be very far away, and I am lying in my bed. I cannot say whether I am awake or dreaming or if possibly I am stranded in some liminal state that is neither one nor the other. I am immediately conscious of an unseen weight bearing down painfully upon my chest, and I am having difficulty breathing.

  “I promised that I’d call on you,” she says, and, with great effort, I turn my head towards the sound of her voice, my cheek pressing deeply into my pillow. I am aware now that I am all but paralyzed, perhaps by the same force pushing down on my chest, and I strain for any glimpse of her. But there’s only the bedside table, the clock radio and reading lamp and ashtray, an overcrowded bookcase with sagging shelves, and the floral calico wallpaper that came with the apartment. If I could move my arms, I would switch on the lamp. If I could move, I’d sit up, and maybe I would be able to breathe again.

  And then I think that she must surely be singing, though her song has no words. There is no need for mere lyrics, not when texture and timbre, harmony and melody, are sufficient to unmake the mundane artifacts that comprise my bedroom, wiping aside the here and now that belie what I am meant to see in this fleeting moment. And even as the wall and the bookshelf and the table beside my bed dissolve and fall away, I understand that her music is drawing me deeper into sleep again, though I must have been very nearly awake when she told me to open my eyes. I have no time to worry over apparent contradictions, and I can’t move my head to look away from what she means for me to see.

  There’s nothing to be afraid of, I think. No more here than in any bad dream. But I find the thought carries no conviction whatsoever. It’s even less substantial than the dissolving wallpaper and bookcase.

  Now I’m looking at the weed-choked shore of a misty pond or swamp, a bog or tidal marsh. The light is so dim it might be dusk, or it might be dawn, or merely an overcast day. There are huge trees bending low near the water, water which seems almost perfectly smooth and the green of polished malachite. I hear frogs, hidden among the moss and reeds, the ferns and skunk cabbages, and now the calls of birds form a counterpoint to Abby’s voice. Except, seeing her standing ankle deep in that stagnant green pool, I also see that she isn’t singing. The music is coming from the violin braced against her shoulder, from the bow and strings and the movement of her left hand along the fingerboard of the instrument. She has her back to me, but I don’t need to see her face to know it’s her. Her black hair hangs down almost to her hips. And only now do I realize that she’s naked.

  Abruptly, she stops playing, and her arms fall to her sides, the violin in her left hand, the bow in her right. The tip of the bow breaks the surface of the pool, and ripples in concentric rings race away from it.

  “I wear this rough garment to deceive,” she says, and, at that, all the birds and frogs fall silent. “Aren’t you the clever girl? Aren’t you canny? I would not think appearances would so easily lead you astray. Not for long as this.”

  No words escape my rigid, sleeping jaws, but she hears me all the same, my answer that needs no voice, and she turns to face me. Her eyes are golden, not blue. And in the low light, they briefly flash a bright, iridescent yellow. She smiles, showing me teeth as sharp as razors, and then she quotes from the Gospel of Matthew.

  “Inwardly, they were ravening wolves,” she says to me. “You’ve seen all that you need to see, and probably more, I’d wager.” With this, she turns away again, turning to face the fog shrouding the wide green pool. As I watch, helpless to divert my gaze or even shut my eyes, she lets the violin and bow slip from her hands; they fall into the water with quiet splashes. The bow sinks, though the violin floats. And then she goes down on all fours. She laps at the pool, and her hair has begun to writhe like a nest of serpents.

  And now I’m awake, disoriented and my chest aching, gasping for air as if a moment before I was drowning and have only just been pulled to the safety of dry land. The wallpaper is only dingy calico again, and the bookcase is only a bookcase. The clock radio and the lamp and the ashtray sit in their appointed places upon the bedside table.

  The sheets are soaked through with sweat, and I’m shivering. I sit up, my back braced against the headboard, and my eyes go to the second-story window on the other side of the small room. The sun is still down, but it’s a little lighter out there than it is in the bedroom. And for a fraction of a moment, clearly silhouetted against that false dawn, I see the head and shoulders of a young woman. I also see the muzzle and alert ears of a wolf, and that golden eyeshine watching me. Then it’s gone, she or it, whichever pronoun might best apply. It doesn’t seem to matter. Because now I do know exactly what I’m looking for, and I know that I’ve seen it before, years before I first caught sight of Abby Gladding standing in the rain without an umbrella.

  6

  Friday morning I drive back to Newport, and it doesn’t take me long at all to find the grave. It’s just a little ways south of the chain-link fence dividing the North Burial Ground from the older Common Burying Ground and Island Cemetery. I turn off Warner Street onto the rutted, unpaved road winding between the indistinct rows of monuments. I find a place that’s wide enough to pull over and park. The trees have only just begun to bud, and their bare limbs are stark against a sky so blue-white it hurts my eyes to look directly into it. The grass is mostly still brown from long months of snow and frost, though there are small clumps of new green showing here and there.

  The cemetery has been in use since 1640 or so. There are three Colonial-era governors buried here (one a delegate to the Continental Congress), along with the founder of Freemasonry in Rhode Island, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, various Civil War generals, lighthouse keepers, and hundreds of African slaves stolen from Gambia and Sierra Leone, the Gold and Ivory coasts, and brought to Newport in the heyday of whaling and the Rhode Island rum trade. The grave of Abby Gladding is marked by a weathered slate headstone, badly scabbed over with lichen. But, despite the centuries, the shallow inscription is still easy enough to read:

  HERE LYETH INTERED Ye BODY

  OF ABBY MARY GLADDING

  DAUGHTER OF SOLOMON GLADDING esq

  & MARY HIS WYFE WHO

  DEPARTED THIS LIFE Ye 2d DAY OF

  SEPT 1785 AGED 22 YEARS

  SHE WAS DROWN’D & DEPARTED & SLEEPS

  ZECH 4:1 NEITHER SHALL THEY WEAR

  A HAIRY GARMENT TO DECEIVE

  Above the inscription, in place of the usual death’s head, is a crude carving of a violin. I sit down in the dry, dead grass in front of the marker, and I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting there when I hear crows cawing. I look over my shoulder, and there’s a tree back towards Farewell Street filled with the big black birds. They watch me, and I take that as my cue to leave. I know now that I have to go back to the library, that whatever remains of this mystery is waiting for me there. I might find it tucked away in an old journal, a newspaper clipping, or in crumbling church records. I only know I’ll find it, because now I have the missing pieces. But there is an odd reluctance to leave the grave of Abby Gladding. There’s no fear in me, no shock or stubborn disbelief at what I’ve discovered or at its impossible ramifications. And some part of me notes the oddness of this, that I am not afraid. I leave her alone in that narrow house, watched over by the wary crows, and go back
to my car. Less than fifteen minutes later I’m in the Redwood Library, asking for anything they can find on a Solomon Gladding and his daughter, Abby.

  “Are you okay?” the librarian asks, and I wonder what she sees in my face, in my eyes, to elicit such a question. “Are you feeling well?”

  “I’m fine,” I assure her. “I was up a little too late last night, that’s all. A little too much to drink, most likely.”

  She nods, and I smile.

  “Well, then. I’ll see what we might have,” she says, and, cutting to the chase, it ends with a short article that appeared in the Newport Mercury early in November 1785, hardly more than two months after Abby Gladding’s death. It begins, “We hear a ∫trange account from la∫t Thursday evening, the Night of the 3rd of November, of a body di∫interred from its Grave and coffin This most peculiar occurrence was undertaken at the behe∫t of the father of the decea∫ed young woman therein buried, a circum∫tance making the affair even ∫tranger ∫till.” What follows is a description of a ritual which will be familiar to anyone who has read of the 1892 Mercy Brown case from Exeter, or the much earlier exhumation of Nancy Young (summer of 1827), or other purported New England “vampires.”

  In September, Abby Gladding’s body was discovered in Newport Harbor by a local fisherman, and it was determined that she had drowned. The body was in an advanced state of decay, leading me to wonder if the date on the headstone is meant to be the date the body was found, not the date of her death. There were persistent rumors that the daughter of Solomon Gladding, a local merchant, had taken her own life. She is said to have been a “child of ∫ingular and morbid temperament,” who had recently refused a marriage proposal by the eldest son of another Newport merchant, Ebenezer Burrill. There was also back-fence talk that Abby had practiced witchcraft in the woods bordering the town, and that she would play her violin (a gift from her mother) to summon “voraciou∫ wolve∫ and other ∫uch dæmon∫ to do her bidding.”

  Very shortly after her death, her youngest sister, Susan, suddenly fell ill. This was in October, and the girl was dead before the end of the month. Her symptoms, like those of Mercy Brown’s stricken family members, can readily be identified as late-stage tuberculosis. What is peculiar here is that Abby doesn’t appear to have suffered any such wasting disease herself, and the speed with which Susan became ill and died is also atypical of consumption. Even as Susan fought for her life, Abby’s mother, Mary, fell ill, and it was in hope of saving his wife that Solomon Gladding agreed to the exhumation of his daughter’s body. The article in the Newport Mercury speculates that he’d learned of this ritual and folk remedy from a Jamaican slave woman.

  At sunrise, with the aid of several other men, some apparently family members, the grave was opened, and all present were horrified to see “the body fre∫h as the day it wa∫ con∫igned to God,” her cheeks “flu∫hed with colour and lufterous.” The liver and heart were duly cut out, and both were discovered to contain clotted blood, which Solomon had been told would prove that Abby was rising from her grave each night to steal the blood of her mother and sister. The heart was burned in a fire kindled in the cemetery, the ashes mixed with water, and the mother drank the mixture. The body of Abby was turned facedown in her casket, and an iron stake was driven through her chest, to insure that the restless spirit would be unable to find its way out of the grave. Nonetheless, according to parish records from Trinity Church, Mary Gladding died before Christmas. Her father fell ill a few months later and died in August of 1786.

  And I find one more thing that I will put down here. Scribbled in sepia ink in the left-hand margin of the newspaper page containing the account of the exhumation of Abby Gladding is the phrase Jé-rouge, or “red eyes,” which I’ve learned is a Haitian term denoting werewolfery and cannibalism. Below that word, in the same spidery hand, is written “As white as snow, as red as red, as green as briers, as black as coal.” There is no date or signature accompanying these notations.

  Now it is almost Friday night, and I sit alone on a wooden bench at Bowen’s Wharf, not too far from the kiosk advertising daily boat tours to view fat, doe-eyed seals sunning themselves on the rocky beaches ringing Narragansett Bay. I sit here and watch the sun going down, shivering because I left home this morning without my coat. I do not expect to see Abby Gladding, tonight or ever again. But I’ve come here, anyway, and I may come again tomorrow evening.

  I will not include the 1785 disinterment in my thesis, no matter how many feathers it might earn for my cap. I mean never to speak of it again. What I have written here, I suspect I’ll destroy it later on. It has only been written for me, and for me alone. If Abby was trying to speak through me, to find a larger audience, she’ll have to find another mouthpiece. I watch a lobster boat heading out for the night. I light a cigarette and eye the herring gulls wheeling above the marina.

  Four Arches

  Robert S. Wilson

  “Okay, class. Does anybody know how Michelangelo recreated the human body with so much anatomical detail?”

  The room of seventh graders stared dumbly at Mrs. Kemp.

  “Anybody? … Billy?”

  Billy Johnson shrugged, nearly dunking his gangly head into his collarbone.

  “Josh?”

  Josh Baker was whispering in a silly, high-pitched voice to Jeff Dower from behind sandy blond bangs. He sat up straight and in the normal voice he barely used, a tone of forced seriousness, he said, “No, Mrs. Kemp,” then turned back to Jeff and giggled.

  “Well, since none of you bothered to read the chapter I assigned last week, I suppose I’ll have to tell you the entire story.”

  The class moaned in protest.

  “Michelangelo was so obsessed with painting the human body accurately that he went out and … dug up bodies … to study the way the muscles and bones and flesh worked together.” The class stared back in awe as she explained, in vivid detail, the Renaissance painter's preferred techniques of dissection until, glory of all glories, the bell rang out its monotonous tone.

  “Now, kids, please don’t go around telling everyone ‘Michelangelo was a grave robber,’ okay?” Some of the students laughed as they picked up their books and made their way out of the art room.

  In the hallway, Josh Baker yelled above the buzzing roar of crowding students, “MICHELANGELO WAS A GRAVE ROBBER, MICHELANGELO WAS A GRAVE ROBBER.” Billy and Jeff walked beside him, laughing along the way.

  When Josh was finally done chanting about Michelangelo, Jeff turned to them. “Hey, you guys, we should go out to Four Arches tonight.”

  Billy pushed up his thick gray plastic glasses, his face covered in pimples and framed in long straight brown hair, and asked, “What’s the deal with that place, anyway?”

  Josh perked up. “Nanny? You’ve never been to Four Arches?” Nanny was Josh and Jeff’s pet name for Billy. It made entirely no sense and only Josh and Jeff seemed to think it was funny, but the way they laughed when they said it, Billy was sure there was some big joke he wasn’t getting.

  “Well … no—I mean, I’ve heard about it. But not enough to really—”

  A deranged smile grew across Jeff’s face, and his voice took on that same high-pitched derisive tone that he and Josh always used. “What’s-a-matter, Nanny, you hear about the Goat Man?”

  “What the hell is a Goat Man?” Billy asked.

  Jeff’s face straightened and, in his normal voice, he explained. “Four Arches is a bridge, man. It’s these big concrete arches outside town that train tracks cross over. They’re covered in graffiti, and everyone says people go out there and worship the devil and shit. And just under the top of the main arch, there’s these tunnels in the concrete that— if you’re in them when the train is on the bridge—vibrate and shake the inside like crazy. It’s awesome!”

  “And they say if you’re in there at night when the train comes, the Goat Man—a man with a human body and the head of a goat—will come out and kill you, Nanny!” Josh raised his hands and reached out f
or him.

  Billy pushed the boy's arms aside, and they slid away. “All right, let’s go. I wanna see this place. It sounds cool.” Josh and Jeff looked at each other, brows furrowed in mocking contemplation.

  “All right, let’s go tonight then.” Josh peered with one eye open back and forth at Billy and Jeff until they both nodded in agreement.

  That night they met at Josh’s house, since it was closest to the Arches. They rode their bikes into the dusk, tires tossing up gravelly dirt from the blacktop of County Road 500 West. The sun dove deeper in the sky the further from town they pedaled. By the time they sped around the curve and the giant aged structure of the bridge came into full view, it was lit only by the blue glow of the moon. Staring intently, Billy nearly rode his bike off the road.

  The dull gray-green concrete seemed to grow out of the side of the hill and then arch over the road and down into the grass where the next several arches hovered over the creek beyond the trees. Near the top of each arch, wrapped around the curve of them, tubular cavern-like open spandrels stretched all the way across, growing from the middle outward with the thickness of the bridge. Billy counted eight of them in all, staring back at him like black wide open eyes shining in the moonlight.

  Jeff set his bike down and held his arms out in a display of showmanship. “This is Four Arches, Nanny.” Billy was too mesmerized by the sheer coolness of the thing even to care what Jeff called him at the moment. He dropped his bike and started walking toward the bridge like some flesh-hungry zombie. He could barely make out brightly colored graffiti on the side facing them:

  Jason and April forever.

  Satan loves you.

  The Goat Man is coming.

  For the best blowjob you ever had call Cindy—653-1129.

  Billy had just begun to realize how quiet it was when he felt cold stiff hands grip his shoulders and turn him around. Standing just below his line of sight, Billy stared into two huge, black, glassy eyes. The hoarse beginnings of a scream crept from his lungs as he staggered backward to get away.