by Gafford, Sam
“Don’t forget,” Lovecraft said, “Two-Gun Bob killed himself.”
“Yeah, well, there’s plenty of ways to do that. Sometimes doing nothing works just as well.” I replied.
There had been an article in the paper not too long ago about a doctor doing work on cancer treatment. It wasn’t one of those peach-pit things, but it was an herbal remedy—supposedly some type of combination of herbs and diets. I’d read a lot of those books, including the one by Norman Cousins. Sometimes they seemed to work, most times they didn’t. I’d never had the discipline to see them all through but, considering the alternatives, I didn’t have a lot of choices.
At work, I looked up the doctor’s book. To my surprise, we actually had a copy. As I glanced through it, it looked more like a cookbook than anything else. The medicine was a blend of herbs and vitamins (supposedly available at any health food store), and there was a special diet that focused on macrobiotics and avoided things like meat and oils. It seemed to be typical stuff, but the doctor’s photo had a kind and gentle face, so I bought it. I enjoyed making my manager nervous when she rang it up. It was obvious why I was buying it, but no one dared to mention it.
“You know,” Lovecraft said to me in a horrified whisper, “someone once said that my Shub-Niggurath was a representation of sexual disease. Can you believe that?”
I heard this at least once a day. It was one of the things that really bothered him given his upbringing and personality.
“Yeah, I can believe it,” I replied. My manager didn’t even look at me. She had gotten used to me talking like this.
On the way home, I bought the herbs listed in the book at the local health food store. I didn’t recognize most of the names, and the clerk wasn’t much help either. Several of the ingredients weren’t there, so I had to substitute. The clerk thought that the other herbs and vitamins were just as good; even though I didn’t believe him, I didn’t have anything else to go on.
I stopped at a local restaurant and had a big steak meal with a plateful of french fries. My farewell to meat. I avoided the seafood platter out of deference to Lovecraft, who, as always, kept looking around and exclaiming, “Gad, how these birds do eat!”
At home later, I read through the book some more. The doctor believed that the steady use of his herb/vitamin combination, along with the diet, was able to curb the growth of cancer. In a few instances he described, the cancer had disappeared completely. I laid the pill bottles on the counter. I mixed the herbs together. There were clear specifications on what to take, how much, and when. I took the first dose and followed it with Dr. Lyons’s medication. It had a long clinical name that I couldn’t pronounce, but it was “the latest in cancer treatment.” Couldn’t hurt to keep taking it: I’d paid for it, after all, and it hadn’t been cheap. The cost of being poor and sick in America.
There wasn’t much on TV that night. The cable channels were all boring, so I put on an old Night Stalker tape and read for a while. Out of habit, I picked up The Dunwich Horror and started reading “The Shadow over Innsmouth” again. It had always been one of my favorites, but Lovecraft wouldn’t give me any peace.
“Disease, disease, disease. That’s all they keep talking about. According to some critics, everything I wrote came from a fear of disease, either sexual or mental. Why couldn’t it just be a story? Why did it have to be about something?”
“You think that’s bad,” I replied, “you should read Hodgson. Now there’s a man who had a real problem with disease.”
That piqued his interest, and he settled down with a volume of Hodgson’s short stories. One of the small-press books, of course; I would never have been able to afford a first edition, and he wasn’t reprinted often.
Lovecraft read quickly and quietly. Reading was one of the few things that kept him calm. Every so often he would chuckle to himself or make a satisfied sound after reading a particularly good section.
In this way, I eventually fell asleep.
I was walking through the streets of Innsmouth. Past the Esoteric Order of Dagon church (with its sinister shadow in the basement), along the streets of houses that, though habitable, showed no signs of life. I walked by the supermarket and waved to the stock clerk who, as usual, bore a striking resemblance to Frank Belknap Long. (I hoped he’d had an easier life than the real Long.) Zadok Allen was wandering about, of course, and we exchanged laughs and old stories.
“Well, ya know, death’s funny. It comes when ya don’t call and never answers when ya do!” Zadok laughed without the trademark Yankee accent.
Lovecraft the narrator came lumbering down the street from the supermarket, and Zadok staggered off to meet him, practicing his Yankee-speak as he walked. They had an appointment to keep.
I sat on the beach and looked out at Devil’s Reef. It was an ugly thing—a piece of rock jutting out of the water. Beyond it, I knew, the ocean floor fell away and the Deep Ones swam not far beyond.
Several fishermen with the ‘Innsmouth look’ stopped by and encouraged me to swim out. “G’wan,” they said, “why not?”
Why not, indeed? I took off my clothes (never self-conscious in dreams . . . I had never had the ‘waking up in school naked’ dream) and entered the water. Though I had done it a few times before, I’d never swum out very far. This time felt different. The water was warmer, heavier than before and it enveloped me like nothing I had ever felt. I swam out to the rock and climbed on top of it.
From there, I could see Zadok and Lovecraft talking on the beach as Zadok gave his little speech. And then it struck me. Every other time I’d been here, I had only seen and experienced what Lovecraft had written in the story. I’d never been out to Devil’s Reef before and, remembering the story, neither had the narrator. Oh sure, he described planning on going to Devil’s Reef with his cousin and diving off the deep end, but it wasn’t an actual place visited in the story. Yet I was there. I could feel the rough stone beneath my fingers and, looking over the other end, could swear that I could see other things beneath the surface, beckoning to me.
Slowly, I dipped into the water and followed.
When I woke up this time, there was blood on the pillow. That wasn’t good. I touched my nose and my fingers came away bloody. Suddenly, my head was shoved into an invisible vise and I collapsed back into my pillow, barely able to keep from screaming.
In his chair, stroking an invisible cat that wasn’t there but was anyway, Lovecraft sat silently.
After a few minutes, the pain subsided and I was able to sit up. The front of my undershirt was covered in blood. This hadn’t been the first attack, but it was definitely the worst.
“Dr. Lyons said it would only get worse,” Lovecraft added unnecessarily.
I ignored him and went to clean myself up.
Sometime later, I made myself some breakfast. I didn’t have any of the macrobiotic stuff the book doctor recommended, so I made do with eggs and bacon. I’d give up the bad stuff later, although I had begun to think that there wasn’t any point in giving anything up and that I should just surrender to excesses. Spend the last months of my life carousing from one bar to another, drinking too much, eating bad food, sleeping with anonymous women (assuming I could find any who were willing), and giving myself up to the extremes.
Lovecraft looked disapprovingly at me.
“I know,” I said, “you’d probably prefer if I just sat there quietly and suffered the way you did while I eat a can of cold beans and some crackers.”
“You could do worse,” he said, but I didn’t see how.
“I could do a lot better,” I said and started mentally counting up the money in my bank account. Just enough for a real large splurge or six months of diminishing capacity. Yeah. Life’s great.
“What about the dream?” Lovecraft asked.
I looked at him. I’d grown used to him asking questions at the most inappropriate time for a spirit who shouldn’t even be here (“Why are you haunting me anyway? What did I do to you?”), but this was une
xpected.
“What dream?”
He looked at me. I knew perfectly well what he meant, and he had this habit of looking at me a certain way when I was avoiding a subject. I expected him to hand me a business card someday with “H. P. Lovecraft, Conscience” printed on it. Jiminy Cricket had nothing on him.
“It was a dream, that’s all.”
He just glared at me. “Here,” he finally said, “read this. It might help you understand.” He threw a copy of Hodgson’s The Ghost Pirates at me. I still hadn’t figured out how he was able to manipulate objects, but my head was hurting too much to wonder about it.
I looked at the book. “I read it already.”
“Read it again. You obviously didn’t get the connection.” He went back and starting petting the cat again. It was an all-black kitten whose name, if you dared to mention it in today’s PC climate, could get you into a lot of trouble. “All the pigeons come home to roost,” I thought.
I took the herb/vitamin potion and chased it with one of Dr. Lyons’s Miracle Cure. “Good for what ails ya!” I got dressed and left for work. On the way, I found the Hodgson buried deep into my coat pocket. He put it there. I put it there. Didn’t matter. It was there anyway.
When I got to work, I saw Keziah Mason in the occult section, chuckling to herself as she read one of the New Age witchcraft books. She certainly didn’t look like the young, trendy/sexy girls that are witches in today’s movies and TV shows. Brown Jenkin was curling around her feet, looking up at her from time to time with a very hungry shine in his eyes. This was something new. Usually it’s just Lovecraft, now other characters were coming to visit.
Poe lived virtually his entire life in poverty. He died in a gutter in Baltimore. That tells you something right there. He never lived to see his work gain the fame it deserved. Neither did Lovecraft. Neither did Howard. Is there a pattern here?
The last clear thing I remember from that afternoon at work was waiting on Nyarlathotep. I suppose it was only inevitable. With Keziah and Jenkin about, the Dark Man couldn’t be far away. I was running the register when he came up. He put a couple of self-help books on the counter (two of those I’m Okay, You’re Okay self-affirmation kind of things) and started fumbling for his wallet. This struck me as kind of funny, as I couldn’t imagine Nyarlathotep having a wallet. I wondered what would be inside it. Would he have a driver’s license? From where? Kadath maybe? Snapshots of Keziah and Azathoth? Who did he want contacted in case of an emergency? And what was the wallet made out of? I started laughing, which made him look up at me. The man was dark. I don’t mean just your normal black man. Nyarlathotep was the antithesis of light. Then he smiled and I could smell his breath. It wasn’t the stagnating breath of decay as I’d been expecting. It was sweet and cloying. It made you think of hot summer nights when the heat sticks to your skin and you can peel your sweat away in layers. My eyes closed and I went away.
I was in the Miskatonic Library with Lovecraft and Henry Armitage. We were looking at the dead thing that lay on the floor where the guard dog had killed it. The upper body was strange enough, but it was below the torso that “sheer phantasy began.” Wilbur Whateley had died in his attempt to steal the Necronomicon. “Why didn’t he just buy a copy from a book dealer off eBay or something?” I said. Armitage glared at me.
The game was afoot and I was standing in the open fields of Dunwich. Before me was the farmhouse of the Fryes, the poor, doomed Fryes. It was 3 a.m., but I could see everything as if it were high noon. Even from a distance I could hear their terrified conversation on the phone party line. I saw the trees near the house bend apart as the invisible thing came closer. I had expected it to be something like Godzilla rampaging through downtown Tokyo. That’s what happens when you’re a child of the media and you grow up watching a genre that consumes itself with such gusto.
I heard the splintering of wood and looked up to see the top of the farmhouse cave in at the middle. The screams were horrible. Within seconds, the house was gone and the thing continued walking through the forest. “The Elmer Fryes had been erased from Dunwich.”
I made my way up to Sentinel Hill where the final confrontation would take place. I had walked this route before with Lovecraft/Armitage, but this time felt different. I could feel the wind on my face. My body had form and substance where before it was only dust and mist. Sometimes I was Rice. Sometimes I was Morgan. And once, just once, there was a brief time when I could have sworn I was Armitage and I was spraying the spawn of Azathoth with the powder.
Above me there was the usual half-face squirming in torment, except this time it stopped. It looked straight at me, ignoring the other two. “And what do you think you’re looking at?” it said before it went back to its part and obligingly disappeared. I almost expected it to say “I’m gonna keep my eye on you” before it left, but it didn’t. Afterwards we went back to the circle of terrified townsfolk and Armitage went into his speech. “Watch the skies!” I mouthed behind him. “Watch the skies!” The townspeople looked at me as if perhaps the wrong thing had been sprayed with the powder on the hill.
I regretted not seeing Old Wizard Whateley this trip. He was always a lot of fun to talk to, particularly if you got a few drinks into him.
When I awoke, I was in a hospital bed.
I’d been in them before, of course, so this was no really strange thing to me, but it still wasn’t a good sign. There was a strong coppery taste in my mouth. I knew that wasn’t a good sign either. My finger was hooked up to one of those machines, and I could hear the heart-beat monitor behind me, happily beeping away. (I’ve always wondered why they put those things just out of your sight. As if watching your heartbeat might make it stop.) I felt weak and worn out. My clothes were gone and I was in the hospital gown. Lovecraft was sitting in the chair near by.
“Can you believe what they’ve done to my city?” he asked when he saw I was finally awake. “They tore up the bridge. Tore up that historic bridge to make room for more traffic and make the downtown more scenic.” He pronounced scenic with an extra flourish of sarcasm.
“Where am I?” My bed was encircled by one of those curtains but, due to the lack of noise, I could tell I wasn’t in an emergency ward. It was still somewhat light out, so I knew it was daytime, but I didn’t know what day.
“You’re in Rhode Island Hospital. It’s attached to Jane Brown, you know. I went and looked in at the room where I died. There’s a nurses’ station there now. Everything changes.”
I pulled the cord and buzzed for the nurse.
A large woman in a white uniform came a few minutes later. She explained that I had been unconscious for the last few days after I’d come into the emergency room by ambulance. “You’ve had an attack,” she said, and Dr. Lyons had me admitted. She’d alert him that I was awake and left the room after giving me some more medication. “Painkillers,” she said, but she didn’t bother to tell me what kind.
Inspector Legrasse walked by my door and waved at Lovecraft. He was dragging along some half-crazed swamp dweller behind him.
A little while later, Dr. Lyons came in, but he looked an awful lot like Jeffrey Coombs from Re-Animator.
“Mike,” he said.
“Dr. Lyons,” I replied in my best Jack Webb voice. “Where’s Bill Gannon? I heard he got arrested for wife beating.”
He looked at me as if I were some sort of test bug. “What?”
“Nothing. A lame attempt at pop culture humor. What am I doing here?”
Dr. Lyons pulled up a chair. “You had an attack.”
“What kind of an attack?”
He sat there for a moment, searching for the right words. “You were at work. Do you remember that?”
I nodded yes.
“You were waiting on a customer. He was a black gentleman. In the middle of the transaction you began screaming and yelling for him to leave you alone. In fact, I’m told that you actually said that the man should ‘take his old witch away and stop haunting you.’ Sound fami
liar?”
“No. Not at all. I really did that?”
“I’m afraid so. A few of your co-workers tried to get you to calm down, but you went into a spasm and blacked out. You’ve been here for two days.”
I tried to concentrate on what he was saying, but all I could see were those weird dimensional things from From Beyond circling his head.
“What happened?”
“The tumor is growing. It’s pressing on the part of your brain that covers motor functions and memory. I don’t know what’s happening to it. It almost seems as if something is making it grow faster.” He paused for a moment. “Michael, you’re experiencing hallucinations.”
“Oh?”
“It’s not unusual, given the tumor’s location. But I admit that I didn’t think this would happen so quickly.”
Dr. Lyons/Herbert West stood up so he would appear more impressive.
“Michael, you need to have the operation.”
“We’ve gone over that before.”
“I know. You don’t have the money or insurance. But we’ll find a way, Michael. You’ve got to do this.”
I looked at him. It was easier to just go along.
“Okay. Sure.”
“Good. I’ve got you set up for the operation in two days. We’ll keep you here and keep an eye on you until then. Okay?”
I nodded.
“All right. Just rest easy. I’ll be back later.”
After he left, I lay there for about ten minutes. Then I got up, got dressed, and left. Lovecraft followed me out. No one stopped me. It seemed that no one took any notice of me, and I wondered if they saw me at all or if it was just the way things are in Rhode Island.
I took the bus home.
There was only one message on my machine. It was from my boss.
“Michael . . . um, I’m sorry to have to say this but we’re going to have to let you go. I hope you understand. We just can’t have any more scenes like today. I know you have problems but, legally, we can’t afford the risk. Sorry. We’ll mail you your last paycheck. Um . . . so you don’t really need to come back. Okay? Hope everything works out for you. Bye.”
