by S. T. Joshi
Resources tapped, I resigned to broadening my reach for anything that could pass for an answer. I had only one option in mind. Off I went to the local witch-doctor.
IT WAS FORTUNATE FOR ME THAT NEW AEON BOOKS kept hours that were as unconventional as its inventory. Unlike the night of my and Pamela’s fateful first visit, that morning the store was virtually vacated. The few browsers had their features hazed by the bright sun pouring through the shop’s dirty windows. A rodent-featured man stood by the cash register, his cigarette hovering before an ashtray that was in dire need of emptying.
He looked surprised when I approached.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“I hope so. A few months ago my fiancée and I attended an event here. It was a talk on H. P. Lovecraft.”
“Which one?” The chortle that followed his question irked me.
“What?”
“I said which one. Stanley’s probably given seven or eight talks on that guy.”
“Stanley? That’s the man who was lecturing that night? Bigger fellow, receding hair?”
“I wouldn’t give that flattering description too loudly,” the man replied. “He’ll hear you.”
“Stanley’s here?”
The man jutted his thumb toward a far corner of the shop. “Stanley’s always here.”
I moved toward the man in the stacks. His sizeable frame was made shapeless by the rumpled London Fog coat that draped it. The hairless dome of his cranium was once again a fountain of perspiration.
“Excuse me? Stanley?”
“Who wants to know?” he returned. I didn’t catch the title of the book he was clumsily shoving back onto the shelf, but can only assume it was something he was embarrassed by. “I was doing research,” he added defensively.
“My name is Mason Day. I saw one of your Lovecraft lectures here.”
“Yes?”
“I… need your help.”
My plea seemed to soften Stanley’s demeanor. A look of authentic concern claimed his face. I told him about how Pamela had followed Lovecraft’s suggestion of sleeping with a stone under her head, and although I omitted the details about just how severely Pamela had been impacted, I made sure that Stanley knew the situation was dire.
“I feel for you, Mason. I really do. But unfortunately I don’t really see how I can help.”
“Well, have you ever heard of anything like this happening before? I mean, did Lovecraft ever suffer after sleeping with that bit of gravestone under his pillow?”
“HPL never mentioned anything to that effect. For what it’s worth, I’m of the opinion that whatever forces he contacted through that practice significantly augmented his imagination.”
“So you believe that this kind of little ritual, or whatever you want to call it, can do as much good as harm?”
He moved his thick hands in a noncommittal gesture. “It’s difficult to say. I’m afraid you’re riding the razor’s edge here. On one hand, your fiancée is clearly in a bad state. But on the other hand, her magic is working. Now, I’m not trivializing your fiancée’s predicament, believe me. But what she’s experiencing—the feeling that everything around her is aware and is watching—is not necessarily an indication that she’s mentally ill. There’s a long, long line of individuals throughout history who spoke of this deeper reality.
“The poet William Blake had an experience very similar to your fiancée’s. He was sitting in his garden one idyllic afternoon when, without warning, he was suddenly overcome by the realization that every flower, every blade of grass, every weed, was sentient. He described it as all Nature becoming plumes of a peacock—a vibrant collection of eyes watching him. The spirits made themselves known to Blake. Perhaps they’re doing the same with your fiancée.”
“No,” I said with more than a little stubbornness. “This is all in her head.”
“Or the spirits are,” Stanley returned.
In my exhausted state, I was unable to scrounge up a retort, so I exited New Aeon without comment.
THE TRIO OF DAYS THAT STOOD BETWEEN PAMELA’S admittance and subsequent release were excruciating for me. For Pamela, I would imagine they were unspeakable. I visited her twice, but both times she didn’t exhibit the faintest awareness of my shadow at her bedside, of my hand closing over hers, of my voice whispering hollow consolations.
The blindness had not lifted, though the specialist I spoke to assured me that such a sudden recovery was incredibly rare. Her optic nerves were in perfect condition, and the doctor assured me that she would see again, in time. Her referral was not to an optometrist, but a psychotherapist.
“Your fiancée’s problem is rooted somewhere in mind, Mr. Day,” the doctor had assured me. “Ascertaining the root issue is the first step toward her recovery. Her affliction is real, even if its cause is not immediately physically apparent. After all, just because we cannot see a problem’s source doesn’t make the problem any less real.”
I wish she hadn’t ended on that tone.
Pamela didn’t say a word during the ride home, nor during the slow ascent to our apartment, guided as she was by my hand.
When we entered the living room, Pamela exhibited her wish to lie down by stumbling her way toward the bedroom. I swept to her side and made the rest of her journey a less bumpy one. She lowered herself onto the mattress, her legs stiff, her arms at her side. I looked into her open eyes. Their sightless gaze was affixed on the ceiling. The blindness had taken none of their rich citrine-brown coloring.
I wondered what time-bomb could have been ticking away inside her. This question led to others, even uglier. I wondered how well I had really known this woman, my fiancée, this stranger on the bed.
Or maybe there was no deep Freudian tumor. Maybe it was all just the spirits that bled in through the hag stone…
With care, I removed Pamela’s shoes before exiting the room.
I prepared a makeshift bed for myself on the sofa. Every few minutes I got up to check on Pamela.
The late show was airing Suddenly, Last Summer, a film I’d never seen. I hoped it would be dull enough to bore me into slumber. Instead it infected me, wreaked havoc with the delicate state between wakefulness and sleep where I spent most of the night. In the dream, if dream it can be called, Pamela had assumed the Elizabeth Taylor role. She was the bedlam-confined victim. The girl with the abominable secret, the one everyone wanted confined or cured by the lobotomizing scalpel. I envisioned myself as Montgomery Clift’s character: the sympathetic doctor whose staunch ethics might have saved the girl.
But my subconscious mangled Williams’s play into pure Grand Guignol. Though I hadn’t wanted to do it, in the dream I stood idly by while gruff nurses tightened straps across Pamela’s forehead and jaw, tethering her to a vivisectionist’s table. I moved upon her, bearing something that resembled a corkscrew.
Pamela did not utter a sound while I blinded her with tools of crooked steel.
I awoke with a strangled cry. I hoped I hadn’t woken Pamela. Light the blue of livid flesh poured from the snowy pattern on the TV. I rose to switch it off, and that’s when I caught sight of the figure in the hallway.
My cry wasn’t strangled this time. “Jesus Christ, Pam!” I was almost laughing with relief over her familiar silhouette in the doorway. “You scared the hell out of me!”
I heard her… heard the four words that trailed through the room like stale cigarette smoke. I knew what Pamela had said, but still, I said, “What?”
“I can see now,” she repeated.
She stepped forward, into the ghost light from the dead channel.
I could see then too; see the pair of dull gray stones that stared out from Pamela’s mask-slack face. They resembled a pair of greyed eggs being birthed from the bloodied sockets. I could see them pulsing and squirming. I could see them seeing me.
“I can see… everything,” Pamela hissed. “I’m scared, Mason. Nothing’s solid anymore… everything’s… opening up… like flowers.
&nbs
p; “We’re not alone here, Mason… please…”
Her hands were groping for me, or perhaps swatting away whatever phantoms the stones in her eye sockets were now witnessing.
“… please… help me…”
She tumbled over the coffee table. I stepped back from her crumpled frame. Pamela was whimpering like an animal.
I ran.
Why elaborate on the horror of seeing Pamela with the eyes of a Catholic statue? Why puff up a smokescreen to make my actions seem excusable? They were not. In the face of true adversity, pure crisis, I fled.
The apartment stairs, the lobby, the streets—they all passed by in a stone-gray smudge. I found my way to Wicker Park and slumped down on a vacant bench.
The sodium lamp above made me feel as though I was in an interrogation room. I sat shivering, watching drunks and lovers milling about the footpaths and the manicured hills.
I’m not sure what finally led me to go back. Perhaps it was the cold tide of foreboding that was rising within me; the hopeless realization that my life had been irrevocably altered.
She was piled in one corner of the bedroom, beside the battered wingback chair where she liked to knit on winter Sundays. The carpet bag where she kept her yarn was lying in the blackish pool by her fist. She’d used one of her needles. It was still jutting from the crudely hollowed socket.
THE DOCUMENTATION FROM PAMELA’S STINT IN THE hospital went a long way to support the coroner’s conclusion of suicide. Her funeral was sparsely attended. I sublet my way out of our lease and moved to another city.
I try not to think about Pamela anymore. It’s one of the many things I like keeping to the past. Yet I have compulsions that keep me going back to her.
For example, no matter the season, I pay regular evening visits to the beach. I go there to dig for stones. To date I have found three that Pamela would have classified as hag stones, their holes as vacant as bored-out eye sockets.
Each time I’ve found one, the routine is always the same. I always thrill to the discovery, always fancy that Pamela is somehow straining to see me from the far side of the hag stone. I’m invariably tempted to peer through it and finally see what my dead fiancée saw.
I always stop when the stone is only halfway to my eye. Then I toss it into the sea.
My apartment is small but cosy. For months I kept waiting for my guilt and grief to rear up in the form of nightmares, but they never came. My sleep is always dreamless, no vision at all.
But sometimes there is sound: a low, beckoning whistle, like wind through an old tunnel. I wonder if I’m living in that great void that lurked at the threshold of Pamela’s dream. Maybe the blackness I see when I slumber is a vision after all: the image of the desert of nothingness that keeps me on one end and my beloved on some far unreachable shore.
Underneath an Arkham Moon
JESSICA AMANDA SALMONSON AND W. H. PUGMIRE
(To the memory of Robert Bloch)
Jessica Amanda Salmonson is the author of The Deep Museum: Ghost Stories of a Melancholiac, Ou Lu Khen and the Beautiful Madwoman, Anthony Shriek, A Silver Thread of Madness, The Swordswoman, Mr. Monkey and Other Sumerian Fables, The Garments of Shekhinah, The Eleventh Jaguarundi and Other Mysterious Persons, and the Tomoe Gozen saga. She is a vegetarian, gardener, mystic, and curmudgeon.
W. H. Pugmire has been writing Lovecraftian weird fiction since the mid-1970s. His recent books include Uncommon Places (Hippocampus Press, 2012) and The Strange Dark One: Tales of Nyarlathotep (Miskatonic River Press, 2012). His newest books are Encounters with Enoch Coffin (Dark Regions Press, 2013; written in collaboration with Jeffrey Thomas) and Bohemians of Sesqua Valley (Arcane Wisdom), which debuted at the NecronomiCon in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2013.
Our lives are not measured in years. They’re not measured in achievement. Our lives are measured in nightmares and sorrows.
THE COMMONPLACE BOOK OF HENRY ANTHONY WILCOX
“I BEG THEE,” SAID AMBROSE TEASINGLY. “LET ME touch Mehmeh.”
“No. She’s sleeping.”
“I’ve a right!” he said petulantly. “I’m her cousin!”
“Leave her be,” said I, and tied the collar of my cape more tightly about my throat. Ambrose was a pretty thing, considering; in profile he might have been a Pre-Raphaelite maiden, though the long dark silken hair was wispy and thin.
We sat in September’s fading twilight. Seventeenth-century tombs slumbered beneath patrician trees. The low ossuary on which we rested provided sufficient comfort. There was no wind, yet slender branches of a giant willow moved subtly, sinuously, in the gathering dusk, elongated leaves whispering secrets of many who have passed beneath the sod.
This tree stood in the center of the cemetery. Its ancient trunk engulfed a weathered, illegible slab. Long ago the stone had borne a cultic symbol, round as the moon, with one crater gazing. I leaned and nudged Ambrose while concocting a fantastic remark about the spectral nourishment such rugged roots must suck from the charnel earth, and my barefooted companion laughed.
“That’s exactly why I come here,” Ambrose sighed, as he etched the earth with the middle toe of his right foot, the while balancing a foreboding tome on his left knee. He had the aspect of an aristocratic dandy and might have disguised himself to succeed in any corner of the world but for shoulders even more narrow than could be explained by his lack of arms. He required no sleeves, and an opening only for the left shoulder from which protruded but two fingers, fingers that were like the antennae of an outsized insect.
He continued as if reading a poem from his book: “I suck the debris of dream that leaked beneath this ground from out the chilling brains of the dead. Those brains have rotted into dust, but dreams can never dim. They call to our witch-blood. They seep upward from out the sod, into our chalk flesh, burrowing within our skulls. They need only the occult persuasion of those of us who can intuit their presence and existence.”
He had finished the etching in the earth, and pointing with a finger-like toe told me, “You see here, this emblem that I am copying from your gift of this priceless book, De Vermis Mysteriis? Should you decide to sink onto your knees and nuzzle that sigil you will taste such secrets of the worm as you have never known.”
I sensed him turn to look at me. I thought him in fine spirit, but his moods were never stable. He looked angry as he spat.
“But why do I bother with loquacity, when you so completely ignore my ruminations? You’ve been away from Arkham for so long a time. I would have thought you’d enjoy drinking in her corrupted ambience, her elixir of things past, such as I, her oracle, possess. Do you still find my mental processes more ridiculous than profound? I dislike being treated with indifference; better just to say you find me foolish than to look away in silence. Ah, I could kill you if you weren’t the first one that I loved; even a man such as I has an ego. What on earth are you staring at?”
In truth I did find him absurd, and what’s worse, predictable; but at the same time he represented safety, as beneath his “posturing in purple” was a nurturing spirit. I had returned to Arkham from the “real” world with fewer victories than I expected. I had been defeated, I of noble blood, noble of its kind. I needed Ambrose’s familiarity, even that part of him that could slip from poetry to venom in a single heartbeat.
So I smiled at his momentary anger. I sighed before giving him reply. “What indeed,” said I, and pointed. “At that unearthly thing. Do you see it, up there, on the attic window of that tottering old house across the road?”
Ambrose’s pupils opened full wide until none of the paleness of his irises remained. That was a beautiful thing to me; and it made me say, “Isn’t it sweet, our kindred’s ability to penetrate gloom of night? A lightless curtain falls upon us; and yet we see—beautifully we see. Ah, but I should take all that more for granted had I not been so long absent. It’s only Arkham dusk, and we are Arkham devils. I’ve forgotten, since I’ve been away, how the lucent moon over our witch-town fills us with rare lunacy
, enhances arcane senses.”
I turned my gaze from Ambrose and back to the ruined house. “Look at the reflected moon on that attic window,” said I, “and tell me it isn’t a rare sight. The moon has never worn its shape so oddly, has never radiated with such a sickly hue. Whenever has the Mare Insularum looked so like a weepy eye?”
I wrapped my arms together as the hump on my back shuddered slightly. Mehmeh could never speak, and most of my kin assumed her simple, like a child. She was not simple. But even the rare senses of our kind could never pierce the intensity of her lonely cognizance.
“Your twin grows restless,” Ambrose whispered, and I knew that he ached to touch the deformation beneath my cape, however sternly I forbade him to do so. She was no longer sleeping and I had no more excuse to give. He scooted backward along the tomb’s slab as I unhooked the clasp at my throat. The cape fell back, and Ambrose leaned forward, close, and said, “Sweet Mehmeh. Lovely Mehmeh,” as though speaking to a child. He turned his two-fingered shoulder toward Mehmeh and delicately petted her cheek. She spoke to him in the only way she could: “Meh. Meh. Meh. Ah meh meh.” It was an endearing noise, like that of a pet, and I well knew Ambrose loved her as he might love a sister or a niece, if not only a housecat or jewel-scaled serpent.
She and I were fused along our spines. In places her spine and mine were one. She had barely any legs, and the tiny feet of an infant, but her arms were long and spindly and curiously hinged so that if she wanted to, she could embrace me at her back. However, spasticity made a calm embrace unlikely, and Ambrose ducked expertly when she thrashed at him with her claws. “Dear Mehmeh,” he said. “Dear, dear Mehmeh.”
He cocked his head and wore a sly grin. He turned his eyes from me and Mehmeh to gaze again at the antiquated house that rotted beneath miasmic moonglow. He said, “I could tell you curious legends of that haunted house, if you cared to know it—though I would hate to bore you further.”
Ah, so he was still a little angry with me, but mostly ameliorated by the calming influence Mehmeh had upon him, now as during our mutual childhoods. I watched his raised, nearly simian foot hover near me, hesitating, and then move in curious fashion to make some outré sign unto the moon. Softly, I laughed at my cousin and then pushed off the ossuary so as to fall onto my knees near to his other foot, which I took into my hands and, bending lower, kissed.
