Fyodor shook his head decisively. No monitoring mothers. Roman was of age.
“I do feel a pleasant . . . oddness,” Roman murmured, his eyes fluttering as Leah left the room.
“Good,” Fyodor said. “Just relax into that. Let it wash over you.” He switched on the tape recorder, aimed the microphone.
“I feel . . . sort of thirsty.” His eyes closed; his hands dropped loose, occasionally twitching, at his sides.
“That will pass. . . . Roman, let’s go back to that experience by the ocean, a little over a year ago. You said after that, you were remembering a white room, with a nurse. Could we talk about that again?”
“I . . . ”
“Take your time.”
“ . . . She holds my hand. That’s what I remember about her. The soft pressure of her hand. Trouble breathing—a pressure, a pushing inside me, crowding my lungs. And then—my very last breath! I remember thinking, Is this indeed my last breath? Gods, the pain in my belly is returning, the morphine is wearing off. . . . They say it’s intestinal cancer, but I wonder. Perhaps I should try to tell the nurse about the heightened pain. She’s sweet, she won’t think me a whiner. The others here are more formal, but she calls me Howard. I feel closer to her than I ever did to Sonia . . . my own little Jewish wife, ha ha, to think I married a Jewess, and my closest friend, for a time, before he got the religion bug, was Dear Old Dunn, a Mick. . . . I want to raise the nurse’s hand to my lips, to thank her for staying with me. But I can’t feel her hand anymore. I’m floating over her. . . . There’s a voice, an inhuman guttural voice, calling me from above the ceiling— above the roof. Above the sky. I must ignore it. I must go away from there, to find something, something to anchor me safely in this world. . . . I want to tell my friends I am all right. . . . I drifted,
drifted, found myself in front of Dunn’s house. . . . There is a cat, heavy with pregnancy, curled up under the big elm tree. I love cats. Feel drawn to her. That calling comes again, from the deep end of the sky. I need to anchor. The cat. I fall . . . fall into her. The warm darkness . . . then sounds, the scent of her milk and her soft belly . . . light! . . . and I remember exploring. I was exploring the yard . . . the big tree, overshadowing me, days pass, and I grow . . . the sweet mice scurrying to escape me . . . ”
Fyodor had to lean close to hear him.
“Oh! The mice taste sweeter when they almost escape! And the birds—they seem happy to die under my claws. Their eyes, like gems . . . the light goes out . . . the gems fall into eternity . . .mingle with stars. . . . I can scarcely think—but my body is my thought as I patrol the night. I pour myself through the shadows. The other cats—I avoid them, most of the time. If I feel the urge to mate, I go into the house . . . this house! . . . through the back door . . . the girl lets me in . . . I know what a girl is, what people are, I remember that much. I know there is food and comfort there. I rub against the girl’s legs, climb onto her lap. I will let my embers smolder here. She admires my golden eyes. The girl tells her mother, and Father Dunn, who has come to visit, that the cat understands everything she says. When she says follow, the cat follows. She tells them, ‘I think it understands me right now! It is not like other cats . . . ’ ”
Fyodor shook his head. This was not going as planned. Roman should be incapable of fantasizing under the influence of this drug; the formula was related to sodium pentothal, but more definitive; it had a tendency to expose onion-layers of memories, real memories . . . but a memory of being a cat? Was Roman remembering a childhood incident in which he’d imagined being a cat?
“How . . . ” Fascinated, Fyodor cleared his throat, aware his heart was thudding. “How far back do you remember . . . before the white room—and before the cat?”
Roman moaned softly. “How far . . . how deep . . . the nightgaunts. I have come to this house to see Dunn. Of all my friends in the Providence Amateur Press Club, he was the one I trusted the most. Curious, my trusting a Mick—I sometimes sneer at the Irish in the North End, but even so, I love to work with dear old Dunn on his little printing press, in the basement of that magnificently musty old house. I am even tempted to take him up on the wine his father kept in that hidey-hole down there. But I never do. Dunn loves to cadge a little wine from his father’s bottles. Makes up the difference in grape juice. The old Irish rogue conceals the bottles from his wife, she doesn’t like him drinking . . . wine from Italy, a local Italian priest got for him . . . dear old Dunn! I even ghostwrote a little speech he made . . . ghostwriter, wondrous and most whimsical to think of that term, considering how long I wandered, here, from house to house in Providence, afraid of the
Great Deep that yawned above me when I breathed my last. Gone. Did anyone notice?” He made a soft rasping moan. “What will people remember of me? If anything they’ll remember the intellectual sins of my youth. But why should people remember me? I’m sure they won’t. . . . If I could tell them what I saw that day, on my trip to Florida! Getting out of the bus, on the South Carolina coast, an interval in the bus trip . . .my last real trip, in 1935 it was . . . driver told us the bus would be delayed more than an hour . . . there’s time to visit the lighthouse on the point near the station. Determined to get to know the ocean. Wanting to go against my own grain. But you can’t grow the same tree twice. Yet I writhe about, trying to change the pattern. I will go to sea, until I make peace with its restless depths. Despite what I told Wandrei—or because of it. I’ll show them I’m more than the polysyllabic phobic they think me. Found the lighthouse—tumbledown old structure, seems to have been fenced off . . . a broken spire . . . what a shame . . . there’s been a storm, I can see the wrack from the sea mingled with its ruins . . . the breakers have shattered the lower, seaward wall of the lighthouse . . . there, is that a hollow beneath it? I clamber over fence, over slimed stones, drawn by the mystery, the possibility of revealed antiquity. Perhaps the lighthouse was built on some old colonial structure . . . Look here, a hollow, a cobwebbed chamber, and within it a sullen pool of black water—its opacity broken by a coruscation of yellow. What could be glowing, sulfurous yellow, within the water of a pool hidden beneath a lighthouse? It’s as if the lighthouse had one light atop and a diabolic inverse sequestered beneath. There, I stare into it and I see . . . something I’ve glimpsed only in dreams! The tortured spires, the cracked domes, the flyers without faces. . . . I’m teetering into it . . . I’m falling—swallowing saltwater. Something writhes in the water as I swallow it. An eel? An eel without a physical body. Yet it nestles within me, biding, whispering . . .
“Darkness. Walking . . .
“Back on the bus, looking fuzzily about me. How did I make my way back to the bus? Cannot remember. The driver solicitous, asking, ‘You sure you’re all right, sir? You’re wet clear through.’ I insist I’m well enough. I take a few minutes to change my clothes in the station restroom. The other passengers are exasperated with me, I’m delaying them even further. I feel quite odd as I return to the bus. Must have struck my head, exploring that old lighthouse. Had a dream, a nightmare—can’t quite remember what it was . . . dream of something crawling into my mouth, worming through my stomach, down to my intestines . . . something without a body as we know them. . . . Quite exhausted. I fall asleep in my seat on the bus and when I wake, we’re in northern Florida.”
Fyodor glanced at the tape recorder to make sure it was going. Had he administered the drug wrongly? This could not be a memory—Roman could not possibly remember 1935. Still, it was surely a doorway into Roman’s unconscious mind. A powerful mind—a writer’s mind, perhaps. A narrative within a narrative, not always linear; a nautilus shell recession of narrative . . .
Eyes shut, lids jittering, Roman licked his lips and went hoarsely on. “ . . . trip to Cuba canceled but still—Florida! Saw alligators in the sluggish green river—seemed to glimpse a slitted green eye and within that eye a sulfurous light shining from some black sky. . . .A great many letters to write on the bus back, handwriting can scarcely be legibl
e . . . oh, the pain. In the midst of my midst, how it chews away. Cursed as always with ill health. Getting my strength in recent years, discovering the healing power of the sun, and then this—the old flaw chews at me from within now. I fear seeing the doctor. Nor can I afford him. Little but tea and crackers to eat today . . . can’t bear much more anyway, the pain in my gut . . . I seem to be losing weight . . . R. E. H. is dead! Strange to think of ‘Two-Gun Bob’ taking his own life that way. He should have been a swordsman, striking the life from the faceless flyers when they struck at him in some dire temple—not muttering about his Texas neighbors, not stabbed through the soul by his mother’s passing. We should not be what we are—we were all intended to be something better. But we were planted in tainted soil, R. E. H. and I, tainted souls blemished by the color out of space. I wrote from my heart but my heart was sheathed in dark yellow glass, and its light was sulfurous. So much more I wanted to write! A great novel of generations of Providence families, their struggles and glories, their dark secrets and heroics! I can be with them, perhaps, when I die—I will become one with the old houses of Providence, wandering, searching for its secrets. . . . And I refuse to leave Providence, when I gasp my last. . . .
“The sweet little nurse takes my hand, more tenderly than ever Sonia did. But God bless Sonia, and her infinite patience. If only . . . but it’s too late to think of that now. The nurse is speaking to me, Howard, can you hear me? . . . I believe we’ve lost him, doctor. Pity—such a gentlemanly fellow, and scarcely older than . . . I can’t hear the rest: I’m floating above them, amazed at how emaciated my lifeless body is; my lips skinned back, my great jutting jaw, my pallid fingers. I’m glad to be free of that body. There’s no pain here! But something calls me from the darkness above. Is the light of Heaven up above? I know better. I know about the opaque gulfs; the deep end of the sky. The Hungry Deep. I will not go! I will go see Dunn! Yes, dear old Dunn. Something so comforting about the company of my fellow Amateur Pressmen. I’ll find my way to Dunn’s house . . . Here, and here . . . I flit from house to house . . . is it years that pass? It is—and it doesn’t matter. I drift like a fallen leaf along the stream of time, waft through the streets of Providence. How the seasons wheel by! The yellowing leaves, the drifting snow, the thaw, the tulips . . . I see other ghosts. Some try to speak, but I hear them not . . . There—Dunn’s house! I’ll see if he’s still within. But no. Father Dunn has moved on. There is the little Irish girl, adopted by the Dunns. And the cat, her cat, fairly bursting with kittens. Oh, to be a cat. And why not? The mice . . . sweeter when they run . . . I speak to the girl . . . she shouts in fear and throws something at me. She chases me from the house!
“What’s that? One of the great metal hurtlers in the street! Truck’s wheel strikes me, wrings me out like a wet rag . . . Agony sears . . . I float above the truck, seeing my body quivering in death, below me: the body of the cat. But I am at peace, once more, drifting through Providence. Let me wander, as I did once before . . . let me wander and wait. Perhaps next time I’ll find something more suitable. Someone. A pair of hands that can fashion dreams . . .
“The Great Deep calls to me, over and over. I won’t go! My ancient soul has strength, more strength than my body ever had. It resists. I remember, now, what I saw in the ruins of that old lighthouse—under its foundations: the secret pool, the shamanic pool of the Narragansett Indians. A fragment of a great translucent yellow stone was hidden there—a piece of a larger stone lost now beneath the waves, once the centerpiece of a temple in the land some called Atlantis.
“The cat-eye stone struck from Yuggoth by the crash of a comet—whirling to our world, where it spoke to the minds of the first true men; gave the ancients a sickening knowledge of their minuteness, the vast darkness of the universe.
“It has been whispering to me since I was a child—my mother heard it, she glimpsed its evocations: the faceless things that crawled from it just around the corner of the house. She’d tell me all about them, my dear half-mad mother Sarah. She had visited that place, and heard its whispering. And that seemed to plant the seed in me—which grew into the twisted tree of my tales . . .
“I drift above the elm-hugged street, refusing to depart my beloved Providence. But the call of the Great Deep is so strong. Insistent. I hear it especially loudly when I visit Swan Point Cemetery. No longer summoning—now it is demanding.
“There is only one way free, this time—I must hide within someone . . . I must find a place to nestle, as I did with the cat. . . .Here’s a woman. Mrs. Boxer is with child. I feel the heartbeat, pattering rapidly within her—calling to me . . . I go to sleep within her, united with him, the tabula rasa . . .
“I wake on the beach, full-grown. I cannot quite speak. I cannot control my body. It moves frantically about, speaking into a little invention, from which issues a voice. ‘Why, what do you mean?’ says the voice. ‘This is your mother, for heaven’s sake! Whatever are you about, Roman?’ If only I could speak and tell her my name. A voice comes from my mouth—but it is not my voice, not truly. I want to tell her my name. I cannot . . . My name . . . ”
Fyodor leaned closer yet. The next words were whispered, hardly audible. “ . . . is Howard. Howard Philips. Howard Philips Lovecraft . . . ”
Then Roman was asleep. That was the natural course of the drug’s effects. There was no waking him, now, not safely, to ask questions.
Stunned, Fyodor sat beside Roman, staring at the peacefully sleeping young man. Seeing his eyelids flickering with REM sleep. What was he dreaming of?
Fyodor had grown up in Providence. Everyone here had heard Lovecraft’s name. Young Fyodor Cheski had his own Lovecraft period. But his mother had found the books—he was only thirteen—and she’d taken them away, very sternly, and threatened that he would lose every privilege he could even imagine if he read them again. She knew about this Lovecraft, she said. Things whispered to him—things people shouldn’t listen to.
It was one of his mother’s fits of paranoia, of course, but after that Fyodor was taken with a more modern set of writers, Bradbury and then Salinger—and a veer into Robertson Davies. Never gave Lovecraft another thought. Not a conscious thought, anyway.
His mother, in her manic periods, would babble about a cat she’d had as a small girl, a cat that used to talk to her; she’d look into its eyes, and she’d hear it speaking in her mind, hissing of other worlds—dark worlds. And one day she could bear it no more, and she’d driven the cat into the street, where it was hit by a passing truck. She feared its soul had haunted her, ever since; and she feared it would haunt Fyodor.
A chill went through Fyodor as he realized he had fallen entirely under the spell of Roman’s convoluted narrative. He had almost believed that this man was the reincarnation of the writer who’d died in 1937. Perhaps he did have a little of his mother’s . . . susceptibility.
He shuddered. God, he needed a drink.
He thought of the wine in the basement. It was still there. Hal said it was vinegar, but he hadn’t tested the other bottles. Fyodor had a powerful impulse to try one out. Perhaps he’d see something down there that would spark some insight into Roman.
His patient was sleeping peacefully. Why not?
He went downstairs, to find that Roman’s mother, anxious, had gone to see her sister. Leah was yawning at her desk.
He looked at her, thinking he really should take her out, once, see what happened. She’s not dating anyone, as far as he knew.
He almost asked her then and there. But he simply nodded and said, “I’ll take care of things here. He’s sleeping . . . he’ll stay the night. You can go home.”
He watched her leave, and then turned to the basement door, remembering the agent had mentioned the house had belonged to the Dunn family for generations. Doubtless Roman had found out about the house’s background, somehow, woven it into his fantasies. Probably he was a Lovecraft fan.
Fyodor found the switch at the top of the steps, switched on the light and descended t
o the basement. Really, that bulb was too bright for the basement space. It hurt his eyes. Ugly yellow light bulb.
He crossed to the corner where he’d replaced the cap over the hole in the floor. The crowbar was still there. He pried up the cover of cement and wood—took more effort than he’d supposed.
But there were the bottles. How was he to open them?
Why not be a little daring, opening the bottle as they did in stories? He pulled a bottle out and struck the neck on the wall; it broke neatly off. Wine splashed red as blood against the gray concrete.
He sniffed at the bottle. The smell wasn’t vinegary, anyway. The aroma—the wine’s bouquet—was almost a perfume.
The bottle neck had broken evenly. No risk in having a quick swig. He sat on one of the crates, put the bottle to his lips, and tasted, expecting to gag and spit out the small sip . . .
But it was delicious. Apparently this one had been sealed better than the one his friend Hal had looked at. Strange to think it had been here undisturbed all those years—even when his mother had lived here. Only once had she mentioned the name of the people who’d adopted her. The Dunn family.
He wanted badly to sit here awhile and drink the wine. Quite out of character—he was more the kind to have a little carefully selected Pinot in an upscale wine bar. But here he was . . .
Strange to be down here, drinking from a broken wine bottle, in the concrete and dust.
It’s not like me. It’s as if I’m still under the spell, the influence, of Roman’s ramblings. It’s as if something brought me here. Something is urging me to lift the bottle to my lips . . . to drink deeply . . .
Why not? One drink more. If he was going to ask Leah out he’d need to be more spontaneous. He could call her up, tell her the wine was better than they’d supposed. Might be worth something. Ask her to come and try some . . .
He licked his lips—and drank. The wine was delicious; a deep taste, and unusual. Like a tragic song. He laughed to himself. He drank again. What was it Roman had said?
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition Page 60
