The Dreamer in Fire and Other Stories

by Gafford, Sam

  I took an extra dose of the herb/vitamin potion and lay down in bed.

  “So now what are you going to do?” asked Lovecraft.

  I didn’t say anything.

  Lovecraft was standing near the window. There wasn’t much of a view to see. He had on one of his father’s old suits. It fit him pretty well but was still a little loose in the shoulders. I wasn’t sure if it was one of the suits that got stolen while he was in New York.

  “You know,” I finally said, “I’ve read both of the biographies. Joshi and de Camp’s.”

  He grimaced.

  “At least Joshi took the time to try and understand the era,” he responded. “De Camp lived through some of it and he still couldn’t understand how it affected me.”

  “They never said much about your death. About how you felt as you lay there in that bed at Jane Brown.”

  He turned to look at me. For some reason, his lantern jaw looked more solid. I could almost swear that his chin was reflecting the light.

  “Go to sleep, Michael.” It was the first time I had heard him refer to me by name.

  I went to sleep.

  Professor Wilmarth/Lovecraft was talking about the black stone. Akeley had sent it through the mail and it had disappeared. I took out the stone from Machen’s “Novel of the Black Seal” and showed it to him. He was interested but disappointed. “Yes, but it’s not quite what we’re looking for.” He played the record for me, and I listened to that strange otherworldly voice.

  “To Nyarlathotep, Mighty Messenger, must all things be told. And He shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides, and come down from the world of Seven Suns to mock. . . .”

  It was not surprising that it was my voice speaking on the record.

  Wilmarth/Lovecraft took no notice.

  Suddenly, we jumped forward and I was in Akeley’s cabin. Wilmarth/Lovecraft was talking to Akeley, who was sitting in the opposite chair and covered in his huge robe. Akeley was describing Yuggoth with its great cities of black stone. After a while, Wilmarth/Lovecraft went to bed and I took his place.

  “So,” Akeley said in that queer, disjointed voice, “what are you looking for?”

  “Not much,” I answered. “It’s just that I’ve always wondered—a lot of us have wondered—who are you really? Under that mask. Who are you? Are you one of the Fungi? Are you Nyarlathotep?”

  “Why don’t you see for yourself?”

  I reached over and took off the mask. It was Lovecraft. “Of course,” he said, “who else would it be?”

  I never developed a taste for Clark Ashton Smith. I knew he was a good writer, but something about his work never clicked with me. Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith were touted as Weird Tales’s “Three Musketeers.” And yet it was often said that Seabury Quinn was more popular with the readers than any of them. Lovecraft never got a cover. Guess Margaret Brundage just couldn’t bring herself to paint Cthulhu and, after all, there were no half-naked damsels in distress in Lovecraft. Maybe he would have been more successful if there had been.

  The next few days passed strangely.

  I don’t need to say that I didn’t show up for the operation. Dr. Lyons called once, demanding to know where I was and why I didn’t come in. He didn’t call again. In fact, nobody called after a while. I got to the point where I had to pick up the phone and check it regularly to make sure it was still working.

  I stopped doing that when a thick, guttural voice came on the empty line and said, “YOU FOOL, WARREN IS DEAD!”

  The dreams went back and forth then. Sometimes I’d have them when I was sleeping. Sometimes I’d have them when I was awake. I’d be walking down Thayer Street and suddenly I’d be walking down a street in Arkham, heading for the Witch House.

  Were they real? Was anything real at this point? I remember all those stories where everyone knows that the dreams are real except for the dreamer. In Pet Semetary, the main character (whose name escapes me but he was played by Dale Midkiff in the movie which wasn’t a bad adaptation—King had suffered far worse) goes for a midnight walk with the spirit of the dead student. The student leads him down the path to the Pet Semetary and then tells him not to go beyond the wall. He might as well have put a big neon sign saying, “This way to the Wendigo’s Zombie grounds.” When he wakes up, he’s stunned to find his feet covered with mud and sticks. When I read that, I wasn’t overcome with fear. Of course the dream was real. Aren’t they always? My first thought was, “Damn, that’s gonna be hard to clean up.”

  The dreams. Eventually the dreams are the only things that are real. In the dreams there’s no cancer, only monsters, gods, demons, ghouls, and things you can grab and hold with your hands. Something you can fight and batter into submission. Ever try to grab a cancer?

  I stopped eating after a while. Didn’t know why I was bothering anyway. Everything tasted the same and had that metallic, coppery taste to it. Lovecraft approved of that. We talked a long time about things, and only occasionally would something creep through the woods or the walls. I kept taking the herb/vitamin potion along with Dr. Lyons’s medication until it ran out. The Hounds of Tindalos ran through every once in a while but stopped coming when I ran out of food to give them. The cats of Ulthar never bothered to come at all, preferring to stay on the moon until everything was over.

  “Am I dying?” I asked Lovecraft.

  “Maybe. Who knows? What is death? Don’t ask me.”

  “But you’re dead.”

  “I am?”

  I finally found the section in The Ghost Pirates that Lovecraft was talking about.

  The good ship had been plagued by the appearance of ghost pirates who are making away with the sailors. There were ghost ships following them through the mist. The narrator tries to explain what’s happening:

  “Well, if we were in what I might call a healthy atmosphere, they would be quite beyond our power to see or feel, or anything. And the same with them; but the more we’re like this, the more real and actual they could grow to us. See? That is, the more we should become able to appreciate their form of materialness. That’s all. I can’t make it any clearer.”

  I was spending more time away. I couldn’t remember what day it was or what month. The cable was shut off eventually, which was okay because the electricity followed shortly after. I lay in bed, fumbling through my mind. Things and places wandered through me until, eventually, I found myself spending less and less time in that small room in Rhode Island. When I was there, my head was one large hurt. I had begun to think of my brain as a big black stain. If I could lift my head and look in the mirror, I felt sure that my eyes would be completely black.

  Lovecraft accompanied me most of the time, but sometimes I was alone walking through the worlds. I was solid, with form and substance. Here I was thin and ghostly. The people there welcomed me. They grabbed my hand, slapped me on the back, and brought me along. Here, only Lovecraft stayed at my side and, eventually, I woke up and even he wasn’t there anymore. He had moved beyond, and to see him I’d have to let myself drift away.

  I didn’t float off the way you hear in those near-death shows. I fell away from myself, sinking through the earth. I was going beyond and following old Joe Slater to that strange place that was a star far away which shone upon Olathoë aeons ago.

  The ground below me became a solid deck of a ship. I felt it move through the water as we raced forward into the strange and forbidding sea where an island had suddenly appeared.

  Asenath looked at me through Edward Derby’s eyes. I sent three bullets into her brain.

  I reached for the smooth surface of polished glass.

  I thrilled to the sound of Erich Zann’s music as the deaf-mute man called to something outside the window.

  I tore through Capt. Norrys’s body while the sounds of the rats ran off in the distance.

  I unfurled the photo at the corner of Pickman’s painting.

  I cringed in Nahum Gardner’s farmhouse as the colour sprang free
.

  I . . . I . . . I . . . had become . . . fiction.

  Acknowledgments

  “The Adventure of the Prometheus Calculation” is previously unpublished.

  “Casting Fractals,” first published in Black Wings V, edited by S. T. Joshi (PS Publishing, 2016).

  “‘The Dreamer in Fire’: Notes on Robert Winslow’s ‘Sutter’s Corners,’” first published in Grimoire No. 1 (1993).

  “The Gathering Daemonica,” first published in Dark Corridor #3 (2009).

  “‘Good Morning, Innsmouth!’” is previously unpublished.

  “He Whose Feet Trod the Lost Aeons” is previously unpublished.

  “Hellhounds on the Trail,” first published in Shadows of the Past: Arkham Horror Book Club Anthology, Volume I, edited by Frederic Norton (NEHW Press, 2014).

  “Homecoming,” first published in New Tales of the Old Ones, edited by Michael C. Dick (KnightWatch Press, 2013).

  “‘How Does That Make You Feel?’” is previously unpublished.

  “The Land of Lonesomeness,” first published in the Weird Fiction Review No. 5 (November 2014).

  “My Brother’s Keeper,” first published in Wicked Tales: The Journal of the New England Horror Writers, Volume 3 (2015).

  “Passing Spirits,” first published in Black Wings, edited by S. T. Joshi (PS Publishing, 2010).

  “Showtime,” first published in Dark Corridor No. 1 (2007).

  “Static,” first published in Machina Mortis: Steampunk’d Tales of Terror, Volume 1, edited by Sam Gafford (KnightWatch Press, 2013).

  “Sunspots” is previously unpublished.

  “Weltschmerz,” first published in Black Wings III, edited by S. T. Joshi (PS Publishing, 2014).

  “‘What Was That?’” is previously unpublished.