Gothic Lovecraft

by Lynne Jamneck

  In the center of the basement was a statue that I had seen before, its bulk almost human but hunched like a toad up on its haunches, its face a mass of angular tentacles. It was limned in the same sickly green illumination that engulfed me, a light that seemed to sweat from the statue’s surface. Next to it stood a figure draped in a black robe, a figure that I recognized as Lady Jenny, though her features were askew, like a mask poorly fitted over some shifting form beneath. Beside her crouched a darker shape that she held on the end of a chain, and when she spoke it wasn’t with the voice of Judy Becker; it was the voice of an old drunk, dying from tuberculosis. The voice of a thousand worms, suddenly given the power of speech.

  I woke with her words on my tongue, though I couldn’t fit them to human vocalization, couldn’t make any sense of them, even to write them down. I’ll spare you any Lovecraftian attempt at approximating the sounds, which began to die in my memory even as I scrambled for pen and paper.

  Irene confirmed my suspicions that many of the rooms in Dream House—my own included—had once had servants’ entrances that let onto back stairways winding down to the kitchens and, of course, even the larder in the basement. The doors themselves had been lost to one of the building’s renovations, but some of the stairs remained buried behind the walls, and she confirmed, when I pointed to the spot where my dream door had been, that it was about where the servants’ entrance appeared in old photographs of the room.

  I asked her about the basement, but she said that most of it had been filled up and bricked over since before her time there. “If there’s any way into it,” she said, smiling, “I’ve never seen it.”

  So here’s the lightning-round bonus question: When you’re dealing with things that exist outside of our normal conception of either space or time, is a dream sequence really any less real than anything else? I think we both know the answer to that one.

  That morning, I went out to walk the grounds. I picked my way along a trampled-down path that led around the side of the house, past the trees with their almost staged moss and across a footbridge that spanned a small stream. The sun was shining, but there was no birdsong, and the farther I walked the more I began to notice kudzu creeping up the trunks of the trees, crowding in on the sides of the path.

  I was almost unsurprised when I rounded the corner and saw the rusted shell of the first car. It wasn’t a field, as it had been in my dream. Trees grew up among them, hiding them from view from the air or the windows of the house, but here they were, car after car, when you could find them among the foliage run riot. What’s more, I’d paid attention on the walk, and I knew that I’d taken more or less the same path that Wayland had in the lost episode, when he’d stumbled upon the secret cemetery.

  I didn’t get immediately back into my car and drive away, leaving all my stuff up in the room, as I would have encouraged a character to do had I been watching a movie. It wasn’t stupidity that drove me back inside—remember that, the next time you’re watching a scary movie and someone goes down into the basement—it was curiosity, maybe the only emotion in our repertoire that is capable of overpowering our fear.

  Inside the house, I scrutinized the painting on the wall behind the front desk, looking for subtle changes. I asked Irene casually about her husband, and she said that he was around there someplace, that he usually tended the grounds while she kept up the house itself. She looked straight at me as she spoke, her eyes brown and deep as wells, and I thought of the scene in In the Mouth of Madness, the kindly old lady behind the counter with her husband shackled to her leg, the bloody ax waiting out in the greenhouse.

  I went upstairs, packed my bags, and checked out of my room a day early. I drove home without stopping except to fuel up and buy sodas, deleted the lost Dream House episodes from my computer, kissed my wife, and lived happily ever after. But of course you and I both know, dear reader, that’s not how these stories end. I called yesterday to make my second reservation at Dream House. Irene didn’t sound at all surprised to hear from me.

  I’ll kiss Grace goodbye one last time. I wonder if she’ll know, if she’ll try to stop me, but I’m beyond stopping now. I’ll return to the Dream House, and when I get there I’ll drive around the side, along the road I’ve never taken, to the parking lot that I shouldn’t know about, and pull my rental car up alongside the other rusting hulks that lie beneath the kudzu. I’ll collect my key from the front desk, and I’ll go up to my room—the same room as before—and I’ll lie down on the bed and go to sleep, perchance to dream.

  The Unknown Chambers

  Lynda E. Rucker

  In the lightless places he waits, in the dark that is darker than the dark of the day and the dark of the night and the dark of the soul, he waits he waits for his father he says “father I am waiting for you” and the sun is falling in a blistered sky and the night is roaring in and still he waits.

  —From Asmodeus,

  by Garland William Stevens, 1936

  “Is Asmodeus seeking this?”

  Catherine jumped. “What?”

  “I asked if anyone was reading this.”

  Reality righted itself. A stoop-shouldered man of indeterminate age with a craggy face and a wad of tobacco in his cheek was pointing at the newspaper on the edge of the plastic orange table where she sat. “No,” she said, “no, go ahead and take it.” The spell was broken. Outside the window was not the weird world of Garland William Stevens’s ruined plantations and degenerate Southern families but a drab four-lane highway and a gas station across the street. Around her, the Bojangles fast food restaurant was rapidly filling up with the post-church crowd: hefty middle-aged ladies and their balding husbands, small children in Sunday finery, grandmas and great-grandmas with walkers, and shiny-faced teenagers. What Garland William Stevens would have called the filthy mess of humanity. Small wonder really that the town of Eudora did nothing to honor the man, given the contempt with which he chronicled its perceived shortcomings. In fact, most likely no one around her had ever even heard of him.

  Catherine gobbled down the rest of her ham and cheese biscuit, shoved her tablet into her bag, and headed back out to her car. Back on the road, she soon turned off the four-lane onto a poorly maintained two-lane, bumping over railway tracks. She passed two abandoned granite sheds, long metal buildings, the stonecutting shops where local families had made their fortune carving monuments—tombstones, that is—out of the granite unearthed from quarries throughout the county until China proved able to do it more cheaply and the industry died, leaving the town with nothing. She supposed that at one time the four-lane must have brought visitors to Eudora as well, back in the day when people used to travel by state highways instead of the Interstate. Now it was just another tiny Southern town closing in on itself and clinging to its outmoded ways as a confusing and frightening twenty-first century unfolded before it

  But commerce was not her concern, and she drove on as the road grew rough with potholes and narrowed even more, and then pavement gave way to Georgia red clay. She slowed, as the recent heavy summer rains had turned the clay to mud, and more than once her car skidded gently toward the wide ditches on either side. She wondered what she would do if she met another vehicle on the narrow lane, but then she rounded a corner and there it was. The old Stevens homeplace.

  Catherine left her car on what must have once been a grand circular drive outside and approached the place. It was in less disrepair than she expected, given that the man had no heirs and the place seemed to be owned by an out-of-state company from whom she had been unable to get a response. The house was more modest than she had imagined as well. Stevens had loathed the place, of course, as he loathed everything. Despising his slave-owning forefathers as evidence of the essential evil that poisoned humanity, he was equally contemptuous toward abolitionists and their civil-rights activist descendants—“do-gooders,” he called them— finding their efforts exercises in futility against a backdrop of cruelty and indifference. In Stevens’s worldview, savagery tow
ard one another was the natural state of humanity; any efforts on the part of the species to rehabilitate itself were at best pointless and at worst roads to hell paved with good intentions.

  Or was this his belief system? That the man had been virtually hypergraphic was both a blessing and a curse for an ambitious young graduate student. During his short life he had not only produced a not insubstantial volume of published fiction and nonfiction but reams of letters, notes, and diaries. So difficult and contentious a figure was Stevens that he was little studied and thus largely unknown, and much of his archive remained unsorted decades after his death. As repulsed as the man was by people, he carried on a prodigious correspondence with dozens of them, and from the one side of the exchange she was able to read, those correspondents praised his unfailing generosity and sensible advice. It was as though having established for himself that humanity as a whole was a disgusting, bestial, evolutionary dead-end, he set out to contradict that assessment with his own behavior at every turn. These paradoxes, and the fact that she didn’t yet really know what shape her dissertation would take, were part of what made the research so intriguing.

  “They’re waiting at the edge.”

  She jumped and whirled round. The speaker looked to be in his twenties, lanky and blond, wearing a black T-shirt, jeans, and a trucker hat. He was also startlingly homely, with features overlarge in an otherwise too-small face. She snapped, “What did you say?”

  “I said, are you the lady from the college? They sent me your letter. The owners. They said you would be coming by.”

  She frowned. “Nobody ever replied to me.”

  The man shrugged. “They wouldn’t. They don’t never answer nobody about nothing.” She couldn’t place his accent; it was thick, Southern but not local.

  She said, “Who are you?”

  “I’m the caretaker.” The man extended his hand and pulled back his lips in what she assumed must be a smile; she wished he hadn’t. There seemed to be too many teeth in his mouth. She felt off-kilter; she had not expected anyone to be here, and here he was, and he knew who she was and why she was here and so far she still didn’t know anything about him.

  She was being silly. This was a terrific opportunity, particularly since she’d never imagined she might be able to go inside.

  “But I’m afraid I can’t help you with your research,” he said. “I don’t know nothing about this guy. My family’s not from around here. I just look after the place.”

  “I promise, just being shown around the place is a huge help,” she said. “Where are you from?”

  “Down South Georgia. My people come from the swamp,” he said, in a way that let her know no further questioning would be welcome. Well, she didn’t care who he was or where he came from anyway. If he didn’t want to engage in small talk, all the better; she could get on with the business of exploring the house.

  “We can go inside, can’t we?” she said, but he already had keys in his hands and she followed him up onto the wide front porch.

  When the door swung open, she took a step back in surprise. Whatever she had expected, it was not this. Based on the interior of the house, anyone would be forgiven for thinking that Stevens had not only not been dead for decades but had only stepped out to run an errand that morning and would be back if she just waited around long enough. The place was minimally furnished, but beyond that it felt lived in.

  But of course. “You live here,” she said to the caretaker, and he shrugged. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone was out here. I couldn’t get any information from anyone about it and I just assumed it was abandoned. I didn’t mean to disturb you.” She almost added I can come back at a better time if you want, but bit back the words before they were out. There would never be a better time: she might never have another chance like this one.

  “It’s left the same as when he lived here,” the caretaker said.

  “Oh. So you live here, or… ?” She left the question dangling so he could pick it up and answer it, but he remained silent. “Oh, God,” she said. “Sorry for my rudeness.” She held out her hand. “I’m Catherine, and what was your name… ?”

  “Don’t matter none. You can just call me the caretaker.”

  “That’s fine, but it would really help if I could get your name. For my research.”

  “Let me show you the downstairs first,” he said, heading off any further questions. She followed him round the spartan rooms. What seemed to be the living room contained only a single wooden chair and a small rickety table that appeared to function as a desk, stacked high as it was with papers and open books. The caretaker hustled her through too quickly to get a closer look at them. The remainder of the tour was equally rushed: a kitchen with old but modern appliances, an upstairs bedroom that was as bare as the living room save for a single bed and another wooden chair, and a whole host of rooms behind closed doors that she was not invited to look behind.

  She tried one last question. “Just to be clear… those books and papers in the living room are yours, right? They aren’t unarchived papers from Mr. Stevens, are they?”

  “That’s all I can show you of the place,” the man said. “I hope it helped you out. You ought not to come back here.”

  “I’m sorry for being so nosy,” she said. “It’s just, you know, there’s been almost no work done on Mr. Stevens, and so primary sources are mostly all I have to go on. Which is kind of simultaneously a scholar’s dream and nightmare. Would it be possible for me to contact you again at some point?”

  “I got to get to work now. We ain’t set up for tourists here, you know.”

  The protest that she was not a tourist—and what tourist could possibly be interested in this anyway?—died on her lips. “I’m sorry I disturbed you,” she said. Driving back into town and heading toward home, something niggled at the back of her mind, something she felt she had missed, but she could not put her finger on what it was.

  Degeneracy is the disease of the human race. For every lie told by biblical sources there are truths as well, and none so true as that tale of the Fall of Man. From the time man drew his first breath, this disease seized him, and whatever gifts might have been innate were quickly subsumed by his lust: for power, for violence, for sex. The Garden of Eden withered and died with the exhale of that first breath. Human beings tell tales about monsters to hide their own monstrosity.

  —From the unpublished papers

  of Garland William Stevens, c. 1925

  “The natural explanation is that Garland William Stevens himself is still alive, having achieved some sort of unnatural longevity just like a character in one of his stories.” The bar around her and her best friend Marisol was starting to fill up with students, even though it was a Sunday night, and she had to shout it in order to be heard. Three beers in, her theory did not seem so unlikely.

  “Or,” Marisol said, “the so-called caretaker is his inhuman progeny, the result of some kind of weird mixing with an ancient inhuman race of beings.” Marisol had sensibly dropped out of their PhD program, abandoning her own dissertation on women in cannibal films two years earlier to start a catering business, a shift in focus that spawned its share of jokes both in and out of the department about just what the menu would consist of. She still worked the same insane hours she had as a graduate student, but she actually got paid well for doing so and still had time to read for pleasure, unlike Catherine. And she’d devoted some of that spare time to remaining Catherine’s first reader, even before her adviser, helping her start to shape years’ worth of writing and notes into something resembling a critical analysis and a book-length dissertation.

  “Both, probably,” Catherine said. “Why couldn’t I have picked someone normal and easy to study like… well, pretty much anyone else?”

  “Because your parents never told you, but you were actually adopted, and are also the unnatural progeny of Garland William Stevens, drawn back to your birthplace and destiny by some inexorable force …”


  “Oh god. All these scenarios just write themselves, don’t they? I’ve been mired in reading this stuff for so long I’ve pretty much lost touch with reality, but what’s your excuse?”

  “Listening to you for the last few years.”

  “I’m not that single-minded, am I?” She saw her friend’s face. “I am, aren’t I? Jesus. Sorry. But seriously, everything about it was weird, and there was more weird stuff about it I can’t put my finger on.

  Marisol was looking at her more seriously now. “Like he was a creep or something? You probably shouldn’t have gone out there on your own.”

  “No, not weird like that. Anyway, who would’ve ever imagined someone would be out there in the first place? No, it was like something I saw that didn’t register consciously. Or something I heard, or smelled, or even just a feeling.”

  Marisol grinned. “I have the feeling you need more beer.”

  “I have the feeling I have to be on campus before eight tomorrow morning to proctor an exam so, no, I’m gonna take a raincheck on that one. But seriously, can you do me a favor?”

  “Depends on what it is.” They had been friends for more than a decade; it was how they always answered the question, and neither had ever refused the other.

  “If you’re not working tomorrow afternoon, I want to drive back out there. It’s going to piss off Mr. Caretaker, but if he’s that mad about it, he can just accuse me of trespassing and tell me to leave and I will.”

  Marisol frowned. “Are you sure? What if he’s one of those shoot-first-ask-questions-later assholes?

  Catherine shook her head. “No, if there’s one thing we don’t have to worry about, it’s that. He’s not the type.”

  “How can you know?”

  “Look, I’m not asking you to go back out there with me because I’m scared to go by myself. I’m asking you because I need a second set of eyes and ears and another brain to give me impressions. There’s something weird and very much not dangerous going on out there, and you know how I’ve been spinning my wheels on this dissertation lately. Please, Marisol. You know what an impossible dream it is to get a tenure-track job in the humanities these days. If I could come up with something truly ground-breaking and something that had both academic and popular appeal I’d be—well, I wouldn’t be set, but it would help me out a lot, and it could be life-changing for me. And if there’s more stuff out there, or if this caretaker guy could give me information…”