by John Pelan
Even in the midst of my dour funk over Sonja's getting away by herself (at least I hoped it was by herself), I still maintained routine contact with Graham and the director of Subterrain and a few others involved in the soundtrack. Movies are made by nothing if not committees, often in conflict. Post-production, from my perspective and since it's all I've ever been involved with, is the worst—okay, we've got a bunch of raw footage.… Now what do we do with it? Needs can change on the momentary whims of any of a dozen or more people. Oh, so you're using the underwater sequence after all? Sure, I can come up with something for that by next Tuesday.
And then there was Uncle Terrance, who, after a few days in Alaska, had had to cut short their trip because the rigors of travel were getting to be too much for him. He and Liz had returned to Chicago so he could rest and, I suppose, try not to lie there imagining he could feel the growth advancing inside him like vines. We were on the phone with each other at least every other day, and at first it was as though he'd never left off that crate and its contents. He didn't even mention it the first time or two we spoke, but then, almost tentatively:
“Have you heard him yet?” my uncle asked. “Has he sung for you?”
I told him yes, along with my theory that it was actually a chant.
“I never thought of that. I'll have to pass that along.”
“Terrance,” I said. “Since there are other skulls, do they do the same thing?”
A pause; then, cautiously, “So I've heard.”
“Do they have any explanations for it?”
I could hear him laughing softly, almost derisively. All the answer he'd give.
“Well over a century's worth of skulls,” I tried next. “Have they done this all along? Or is this something new?”
“I really can't speak on behalf of them all, and because Mis-katonic's finds aren't as centrally stored as they once were…”
“Just yours, then,” I said. “Ours. When did it start?”
“Two years ago, perhaps a little less.”
“Why? What happened then? Why would it suddenly start up then?”
“You must understand, Miskatonic often shares information on a need-to-know basis —they've learned the wisdom of that the hard way—and, well, thus far…”
“Do you know that its rhythms perfectly sync with emissions from Sirius when they're converted into audio range?”
“Good God,” said Terrance. “However did you discover a thing like that?”
And I stood there holding the phone, shaking my head. Having to tell him that I didn't know, because I couldn't really say where those ideas had come from and what had guided my hands toward the Sirius data.
“The Dogon tribe,” I said. “They have to know about that, don't they?”
“Quite extensively.”
“'Terrance, whose…” And I faltered, because I found that it was requiring a surprising amount of courage to ask what I wanted to know. “Giving me that skull. Me, someone completely unconnected with Miskatonic. You made it seem like this soulful gesture. But whose idea was it for you to do that? Was it yours?”
Silence. Then, “No. Theirs.”
“Toward what end?”
“I really don't follow…”
“You must've thought it was strange. You had to. Because you don't just take an artifact like that and treat it like a family heirloom. So what was giving it to me supposed to accomplish?”
“It was discussed among the committee that oversees the business to do with Homo sapiens primoris, and what I understood is that there was interest in seeing what someone of your background in sonics would make of the phenomenon. Your work isn't unknown to them. Surely you're av/are that your own work has been used for group rituals, for trance inducement and other consciousness alterations.”
Judging by some of the fan mail I've received from such people, I wasn't sure how much importance could be placed on their conduct.
“Why not just be up front about it?” I said. “Why the charade?”
“I suppose,” he mused, “for the same reason that wildlife filmmakers tend not to interfere in what they're documenting: to let nature take its own intended course.”
So maybe it was cruel, but I had to ask: “Terrance, are you even dying?”
“I deserve that,” he said. “Much to my chagrin, let me put it this way: If there's a black suit hanging in your closet, don't get rid of it anytime soon.”
It was something I'd been taking for grantee: that when I first heard from Sonja after she left, it would be with a phone call. Which was why I'd been taking the cordless into the studio, something I ordinarily never did. Or she would just reappear, having gotten over the worst of her frustration with my monomaniacal work habits, and I would hear her car, or the door, or the sound of her voice calling to anr ounce her return. I was ready for any of these, hoping for one, so we could at least start to negotiate some sort of compromise between what I was and how I worked, and whatever needs of hers had evidently begun to conflict with that.
What I didn't expect was a postcard. Or where she'd mailed it from. Or what she'd written on it.
The front of the card showed a simple, boring shot of the capital building of Vermont, in Montpelier. The postmark had been stamped in a small village to the southeast, in the farm country where…
Well, you know.
I suspect there are things about your father's death that you've never come to terms with, Sonja had written. Maybe the time has come for you to do that.
Except for signing her first name, this was all she'd written. Evasive, concise, cryptic… and indescribably cruel. I'd never known her to play games before. It was one of the reasons I'd been so drawn to her. After some of the psychobitch mind-fucks endured during my more tumultuous years, Sonja had seemed refreshingly free of pretense and artifice. So what was I supposed to blame for this shift: the cultural kinks of the country she lived in now … or just a life spent with me?
Because you really couldn't expect me to wonder if it hadn't been there in her all along, and I'd been too blind to notice, would you?
One phone call later and I had a ticket for a cross-country flight the next day, with a rented car waiting at the other end. After all this had been taken care of, it was only a matter of how to spend the oppressive hours between. For the first time ever, the idea of going into the studio repelled me, because I imagined the skull waiting for me down there, and the sound of it sliding into my soul the way slivered bamboo slides beneath fingernails.
When you look upon a skull, any skull, especially a monstrosity like this one, it's so easy to lose sight of the fact that this was once an individual. Who was born, who grew, who died. Whose eyes had seen creatures no longer alive today, known only by their bones, if they're known at all; whose ears had listened for them; whose tongue had tasted their flesh. And I wondered if, when he raised his eyes to the night sky, he stared in awe at its vastness, or with instinctive collusion at the glimmer of far stars, or if he roared in defiance of it all. I wondered what he had built and left behind, how he lad adorned it to mark it as his own, if he knew pride. And most of all, I guess, I wondered what had become of the offspring; he'd almost certainly sired, and theirs as well, and all the others down through the ages, with their savage teeth and their long long stride.
To these ancient fathers, I fear we would today seem like such a puny race.
Thinking along these lines had put me in the mood to call Terrance, and I'd already thought I should tell him that I would be away for a day or two, or however long it would be. He assumed I was flying south, something pertaining to the film, and I let him go on assuming it.
He sounded worse, his voice noticeably weaker. The cancer? Yes. And no.
It was everything.
“I feel as if a while back I started reading the most absorbing mystery in the world,” said my uncle, “but now I'll never have time to finish the book.”
Only everything.
“You wondered what happened tw
o years ago?” he said. “I pressed my old colleague from here in Chicago, Sam Charl-ton… and think I may have learned of scmething that's at least linked to the phenomenon of the skulls. The report was initially submitted to a professor of genetics at Miskatonic by an ally in Reykjavik. Can you guess why Iceland has become a living genetics laboratory in recent years?”
“I give up,” I said, weary of the way Terrance always seemed to think he was in a classroom.
“Two main reasons. First, it's been settled for roughly a thousand years, and the influx came almost exclusively from one place: Norway. Where, you remember, we found the skull. Even today, because of its remoteness, Iceland's population remains remarkably pure. They're pretty well all descended from those original settlers. And second, from the very beginning they were obsessed with genealogies. They have unbroken records going all the way back to the Viking age. The history of its population has literally been mapped out in its entirety.
“So these factors combine to make the place a haven for genetics research, unlike anyplace else on Earth. If you have, say, the same disease or congenital defect afflicting widely dispersed members of the present-day population, it's possible to comb the genealogies and see if there's a common ancestral link between them all, even if it goes back dozens of generations. It's invaluable for helping to identify and isolate the specific genes and mutations that cause various conditions.”
“And now that I know that, why should I care?” Playing hard to reach; but then, losing your wife will do that to you.
“Because, quite unexpectedly, it isolated something else. Another of those anomalies that get the official silent treatment because there's little or no basis for understanding them. Apparently there's one lineage on the island that exhibits something in the genetic structure that isn't strictly, as we recognize it… human. But almost without fail, the people it was found in are characterized, either anecdotally or by photographs, as being of quite large stature. Dental peculiarities, too, sometimes. As if a diluted but still viable strain of DNA had survived from that race of primoris we know was in Norway.”
The sons and daughters of giants, I thought, and flashed on the old European legends of such unsavory folk as ogres.
“And soon after this was noticed, and the tests were run and rerun to confirm that the results weren't contaminated, the test subjects themselves disappeared. All of them.”
“What do you mean, 'disappeared? You mean, poof, you blink once and they're gone?”
“I mean homes abandoned, jobs vacated, money left in bank accounts and untouched ever since. I mean a mass exodus of hundreds of men, women, and children occurring within a week's time, with no trace of them since.”
“Your choice of words,” I said. “Exodus implies a destination. So where to?”
“Since there were no indications of flights booked or any other kind of travel arrangements… ? Presumably the Icelandic interior. The country's populated only around the coast— a lot like Australia, just different extremes of temperature. The place is a cold waste that was deforested by the original settlers. Most of Iceland's uninhabited. UninhabitaMe, by almost anyone's standards. Geologically the place is quite young, spit up by volcanoes when the rest of the Earth was already old. Not much in the interior but calderas, crags and flows of black lava, barren land, and glaciers.”
“Sounds like a time capsule,” I said. “The prehistoric world condensed down to… how big is it?”
“Forty thousand square miles,” he said. “And you're not the first to make that observation.”
“So these latter-day giants disappeared, and then…”
“And then the skulls began to sing.”
“So what happened there?” I asked. “Your Miskateers must have all sorts of ideas about that, don't they?”
“Well, what occurred implies a kind of group consciousness. Whether or not its members were aware of it before, in their everyday lives, they must've possessed it. So if they encountered one another on the streets, maybe there was an innate recognition in passing, even if it left them puzzled. At night, perhaps they dreamed of one another. So, just speculating, it's possible the threat of discover}', of further examination, awoke… something. A flight response. A homesickness predicated more on time than geography.”
“So they retreated to…”
“The replication of their ancestors' world. They went home.”
5
If I've given the impression that I'm completely callous about my original family, that's not the case. There isn't much I have pertaining to the first five years of my life, but what there is I've kept in a lidded wooden box, except for my father's record albums, which won't fit. Most of my family photos aren't originals, but are on the glossy inner sleeve of his final album. You know how bands used to do with their packaging— take a scrapbook's worth of candid photos and reprint them scattered on top of one another to show the world how much fun they had every day. Here's the lifestyle you fans are paying for.
So I've always known what it looked like, the place where my father died. The band had rented the same Vermont farmhouse before as a songwriting retreat, and there was a shot of it in that final album. In my early teens, I'd done enough digging to know how to find the place, always intending to go there, but by the time I had a car of my own, my interest in making such a pointless trip had already begun to wane.
Besides, it was probable that I'd been there before, maybe even was there that mid-October night he'd died. If I had, though, I'd blocked it from memory. Terrance and Genevieve had always been vague on the subject, claiming that by the time I was old enough to seek answers about it, they were no longer sure what these were.
So if I was expecting a flood of memories to be unleashed as soon as I stepped from the car and onto the grounds, it didn't happen. A hazy familiarity, nothing more, which may have been as attributable to the old picture as genaine memory. Or suggestibility, because here it was October Egain, October in Vermont, and the leaves of the maples were searingly red, and the oaks a merry orange and yellow.
Since the place was deserted, and had been for a long time, it was easy to imagine that everything had been left just as it'd been back then, the austere charms of this white two-story farmhouse allowed to rot day by day. The windows, knocked out perhaps by stones flung by boys from neighbciring farms, never replaced. The boards of the porch, sagging underfoot, never repaired. Nearly thirty years of dust, never swept aside. Graffiti, never scoured away.
It was strange to see them, these sentiments of strangers wrought in paint that had been sprayed and slopped by long-ago fans of my father. In the years following his overdose, this place had drawn them… the fanatics who couldn't let go of the dead, the delusional who'd dissected his dippy lyrics and concluded he was speaking just to them, the losers who'd decided to make their own lives a eulogy for the life he had squandered. I assumed this was why the place had gone to seed—his death had doomed it to become a morbid roadside attraction for just the kinds of tourists you wouldn't want: the kind who traded in a currency of broken dreams instead of cash.
Most of what they'd left behind was still legible, although waterstains down the walls had rippled away parts of it. Some of the mourners pledged eternal devotion, which I wondered if they remembered now. Others promised to see him again one day in Narnia or Middle-Earth, fantasy lands that he'd lyrically appropriated from richer imaginations fian his own. Still others, more ambitious, had reproduced album artwork on a wall-size scale.
Pathetic, just pathetic. All of it. Whatever Sonja could have possibly thought I needed to come to terms with, I couldn't see how she'd gotten the notion it would happen here.
As I walked through the derelict house, its musty damp chill heavy in my nose and the gritty crunch of my footsteps unnaturally loud, I realized that I didn't know specifically where he'd died. Down here on the first floor, or upstairs, or… ? I'd always imagined it happening in whichever bedroom he and my mother had been staying in, but for all I kne
w, it could've happened on the flagstone path out back, or the hayloft of the barn, or the bank of the brook that was supposed to flow past the treeline.
Would I know it when I stood on the spot? Would they have known, these sorry pilgrims from another age who'd been left unmoored by his unceremonious junkie's death?
It appeared that they had, once I'd climbed the stairway to the moldering second floor. All graffiti led here, to a room at the end of a hallway whose floor was a hazard zone of warped boards. A corner room, with windows on two sides, where nothing remained in the way of furnishings, only what the grieving and the curious had brought with them and left behind— bottles and candle stubs, empty packages of rolling papers and used condoms as dry and brittle as cicada shells. More faded paint, expressing more of the same… except for one inexplicable sentiment that brought on a momentary frown:
NO ACCIDENT, it read, in block letters that were strangely ornate. HE KNEW WHAT SHE WAS.
A few inches below that, a much sloppier, hurried attempt to establish some sort of dialogue:
OH YEAH & WHAT WAS SHE???
It had, after all these years, gone unanswered.
You can waste a lot of time after seeing something like this, hunting in vain for anything else that can illuminate it—it has to be there, you've just missed it. Every squs re inch becomes important. But eventually I surrendered. There was no more, just the watercolor residue of old dried tears.
She … my mother? I couldn't think of anvone else it might be referring to. He wasn't faithful, and they weren't even married, but still I sensed that this had to mean my mother, if only because she'd been by all accounts the main woman in his life. Mother of his child. They can draw a lot of flak, the mates of coveted men, so maybe this was no more than the aching bitterness of some lovelorn schoolgirl who by now had short, practical hair and teenagers of her own.
He knew what she was.
But I didn't want to know, because wanting to know would mean I cared. And all I cared about now was this strange and lonely turn my life had taken, the void in our bed left by the woman I had married.
