Christopher Kovacs first read Nine Princes in Amber in 1979 and he’s been a fan and collector of Roger Zelazny’s works ever since. For the six-volume The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny from NESFA Press that he co-edited with Dave Grubbs and Ann Crimmins, Kovacs assembled all of Zelazny’s known published and unpublished stories, annotated the works to explain allusions and cryptic references, and gathered Zelazny’s own comments about individual stories from correspondence and interviews. He also wrote a biography titled “…And Call Me Roger”: The Literary Life of Roger Zelazny that was published in six parts, one per volume of The Collected Stories.
In the daytime Kovacs is an Endocrinologist (specialist in diseases involving glands and hormones) and an academic clinician scientist who studies bone metabolism. When he has time during evenings and weekends, he’s also a professional artist; one of his works has appeared on millions of stamps for Canada Post and Japan Post. He lives in Paradise, Newfoundland, Canada.
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A Thousand Smokes
by W.H. Pugmire
A Thousand Smokes (sonnet IV)
It towered, the twisted entity, above the ground-mist that enveloped me as I swept into that hollow of old oaks. I confess that it felt strange, knowing once again the uncanny sensations that I had experienced as a youngster; for I had put childish things behind me, had become absorbed in my studies at Harvard and Miskatonic, had done my best to abolish the farm boy from Dunwich. Yet here I was, an adult, standing before the grotesque oak that had bewitched me with fear and wonder as a child. It enchanted me still, with its incredible height and extensions of menacing branches that spread out as though they were hunting for some nourishing prey to pluck from the ground. My sister had mocked my sense of peril whenever we approached that tree on our way to our altar in the hollow; yet now I was returned to Dunwich, because Elana’s corpse had been found tangled among the tallest branches of that old oak.
The grey mist was the same that I had known when I was young, and its smell was an odor that had found me in dream no matter how far I had travelled from this land. There are aromas that can be found in Dunwich only – or perhaps we who are bred here have developed uncommon senses with which to detect the region’s aberrant nature. Those perceptions awakened now, as I walked into the hollow’s depth and found the megalithic site that had been a boyhood haunt. It had enchanted me then – and bewitched me still, the circle of tall stone pillars that bespoke of incredible age and mystery. There was something unearthly in the way the stones had been assembled, and the sight of them now touched my eyes with a chilly wonder that seeped to my brain and touched it with frigid reminiscence. I saw again the rough-hewn altar stone within that monolithic circle, and could smell the herbage, rank and wild, that clung to that sinister slab. My liquid eyes peeped through mists of time and saw the body that reclined on that dank stone, and I knew that it was I. I felt, again, that other chaff, those weeds of delirium that I thought I had expunged by leaving Dunwich and dwelling among ordinary folk. It clung to my skull still and infected my brain, the immortal madness that is a Dunwich heritage.
I suddenly recalled the one infiltration of that familial folly when I was at Miskatonic. Elana had come to visit me, on a whim, her first venture out of Dunwich Village. I had ushered her into an abandoned science room, so as to hide her deformity from the other students; for my sister wore the fleshy remnants with which some of our kindred were cursed, a kind of swarthy texture to the skin that did not look natural to human kind and that led to talk of witch-blood and traffic with strange forest presences. I noticed a kind of cruelty in her slanted ochre eyes as she laughed at my rush to sequester her from notice.
“Ye’ve done well, my brother, hiding your ancestry from kindred students. Do any of them know that ye were squeezed out of a Dunwich womb? Peculiar, I call it, how so many young village lads are lured to Miskatonic University. Heh? Now I heard they has a lot of books here, just like the one grand dad borrowed from the Whateley farmhouse right afore the Horror. Remember that book, how we used to study it until mater found us with it and hurled it into ye hearth? Ma didn’t know about my notes, did she? Nar! And she never saw me dig remembered sigils in yon farmyard dirt. What’s the matter, my brother, you’ve got one of your headaches? Here, rest on this metal table here, it’s long enough to hold all of you. Oh look, a little knife. What, it’s a scalpel? A science tool? Hell, we could have used it in the hollow, when I rested ye on that altar and etched diagrams into your hide. There, rest your head, Elias.”
Her words were ever soothing. One could resist her nothing. I climbed onto the operating table and shut my eyes as my ears drank the sweetness of her voice. I was almost unaware of the sharp scalpel blade that began to etch schema into my skin.
Memory faded and I regained my sense of place. Unaware, I had walked to that altar stone in the hollow and reclined upon it. I fancied that I could smell again the alchemical fragrance of incense and occult candles that Elana and I had burned as part of unholy rite. As if in dream, I could remember her chanted phrases, copied from that ancient tome and memorized by my sibling. I recalled the smoke of candle and incense that mingled with the grey ground-mist; and then I saw the banks of other emission, the thousand smokes that herald the coming of that Nameless One whom we adored with sacrament. It oozed toward us, the One who wore a mask of fire, ushered by the smoky hooded phantoms that surrounded the altar and pressed their ashy kisses to my exposed flesh. Then I saw the additional phantom, a spectre that stood a little ways from the others. Although clothed in cloud and shadow, its contours were familiar. I watched its movement as it filtered to me and saw that it held a ritual dagger. I kissed that dagger as the apparition touched it to my mouth, and my eyes brimmed with tears as familiar sigils were etched into my flesh. A cosmic wind arose, and the phantom’s hood was loosened so that I could behold her odd beloved face. Behind her, the Nameless One reached past the starry voids and clutched a strange grey world, of which Elana and I had read in an ancient tome. I could feel the streams of my liquid mortality seep from new-born cuts and mingle with the ashy remnants of phantom kisses. Reaching out, I clutched my sister’s hand and floated off the altar, joining with her into the embrace of that Nameless One who guided us to past space and time, to hoary Yuggoth, where we would dance in ecstasy among immortal fungi. –finis–
Wilum Pugmire spent this past summer writing his brains out and finished a new book, BOHEMIANS OF SESQUA VALLEY, to be published in March by Arcane Wisdom Press. For a forthcoming issue of FUNGI he has written a new novelette, his Sesqua Valley version of Lovecraft’s The Lurking Fear. His newest book, THE STRANGE DARK ONE–TALES OF NYARLATHOTEP, has just been published by Miskatonic River Press, and his book written in collaboration with Jeffrey Thomas, ENCOUNTERS WITH ENOCH COFFIN, will be published next year. He is presently working on his first novel, a Sesqua Valley version of THE LURKER AT THE THRESHOLD.
You can browse and buy W.H. Pugmire books on his Amazon page.
Story illustration by Sascha Renninger.
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The Strange Case of Crazy Joe Gallo
by Jeffrey Thomas
Prologue: The Man, the Myth, the Mythos
On his successful 1976 album Desire, Bob Dylan asked what made them want to blow Joey Gallo away – but only a handful of people ever knew that it had to do with the fabled grimoire the Necronomicon, written by the “Mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred.
Long before the young, audacious mobster had earned his nickname Crazy Joe, he was born and grew up as Joseph Gallo in that section of Brooklyn known as Red Hook – a neighborhood where some very odd events, documented by a writer named Howard Lovecraft, had occurred a few years before Gallo’s birth on April 7th, 1929.
He was to die on that same date, while celebrating his birthday with family, forty-three years later.
1: Crazy Joe and the Mad Arab
Gallo first learned of the infamous, ancient book while s
erving a ten year sentence for extortion. Gallo was widely read – in prison he devoured the writings of Sartre, Machiavelli, Kafka, Nietzsche, and Camus – and so it was not unnatural for him to become intrigued by talk of this legendary tome.
In prison, Gallo had befriended numerous African-Americans, as it was his revolutionary and controversial idea to work together with African-Americans on the streets instead of opposing them as the mob had traditionally done. One of his most recent allies was a new inmate named Jerome Johnson, and on an overcast day out on the exercise yard an avid Gallo pressed Johnson to relate how he had himself acquired a copy of this unthinkably rare volume. Listening in was another prisoner, of Southeast Asian descent, named Joshi (a fervent atheist, doing time for violently assaulting two Jehovah’s Witnesses on his doorstep) – who was also familiar with the Necronomicon through his own reading, though he had never seen a copy himself.
“You mean to tell me you got this book stashed on the outside right now?” said Gallo, who bore a strong resemblance to the actor Robert Duvall (who would appear in the movie The Godfather in a number of years), though it would be actor Peter Boyle who portrayed Gallo after his death. “Thing must be worth a lot of money to the right people.”
“Yeah, man,” said Johnson. “But it’s not just what it’s worth, it’s what it can do…that’s what I want to tell you.”
“I can see you’re smooth, Jerome, but how’d a street hustler like you get a hold of a thing like that?”
“There was this guy named Gavin, collected all kinds of crazy damn books besides this one. I been inside his apartment, man, and you shoulda seen the spooky shit he collected. Shrunken heads, bones, animal parts; like a fuckin’ museum. But the man was into junk, and that’s how he came to be introduced to me. Every time I came to see him he’d had to sell off more of that creepy collection of his, ‘til at the end the place was almost emptied out. Last time I seen him, all’s he had left was a couple of books, and he tried to trade me that there Necronomicon for his fix.”
“Obscene,” Joshi muttered. “Trading such a book for narcotics.”
“I told him I didn’t need no wormy old book for a doorstop, so then he told me how rare the thing was and all. I asked him what it was about, and he said it talked about these gods or monsters or something called the Old Ones, that came to our world gazillions of years ago, but they got defeated and locked up by these other cats called the Elder Gods. Gavin said maybe all this shit was what originally inspired people to believe in devils and angels, and –”
“No, no, no!” Joshi protested loudly. “That line of thinking is so horrendously wrongheaded! No wonder this fool became a drug addict! Angels? The Elder Gods are not good, they don’t care about humanity! We’re nothing more to them than we are to the Old Ones, and – ow!”
Gallo had clapped Joshi across the back of the head. “Quiet down! Man’s trying to tell us his story, okay?”
“Anyways,” Johnson continued, “I didn’t wanna hear about all that loony shit, so I was just about to leave when he got all desperate and told me he’d give me an example of what this book could do.”
“Yeah? So what was it he showed you?”
“Shit, Joey, you won’t believe me. You’ll say I was on the dope myself, but I wasn’t. At least, not just then.”
“So tell me, already.”
“He read something outta that book…a spell or…incantation or whatever. He was facing the corner of the livingroom – he said it had to be a corner. And he said he had to read the…the ascent chant?”
“Ascending?” prompted Joshi.
“Right, right. The ascending chant to open, the descending chant to close.”
“Madonne,” Gallo said impatiently. “To open or close what?”
“Joey, I swear it – I saw a door open up in the corner of the room.”
“A hidden door?”
“No, a doorway to another world! It just sort of slowly appeared, man, like it started out dim and then got brighter, until I could see through it. Door had a pointy top, like a window in a church. And man, on the other side was water! At least it looked like water, like I was looking through a glass window into the bottom of the ocean. But the bottom of an ocean on another planet, or some damn thing.”
“Jerome,” Gallo snorted, smirking as he wagged his head. “Man…”
“Look, man, you want to hear this or not? If you don’t wanna believe me, Joey, we can end this right now.”
“No, go on,” Joshi all but pleaded, his eyes practically bulging from his head, “go on!”
Gallo got Joshi in a headlock and said through gritted teeth, “I told you to shut your trap, didn’t I?”
“Hey!” a guard patrolling the yard called over to the men. “Gallo, you got a problem over there?”
Gallo let the red-faced Joshi straighten up, his arm around his shoulders, and grinned back at the guard. “Just palling around, Hank!”
“Well treat your girlfriend a little better, will ya?”
The guard strutted off, and Gallo mumbled, “How ‘bout I’ll treat your wife a little better?” Slipping his arm from Joshi, he turned back to Johnson with a more serious expression than he had worn before, and said, “Tell me.”
“Well,” Johnson began again slowly, reluctantly, “after a few seconds I started to see things back there in the water, moving through it. Like shadows at first, but big.”
“Deep Ones?” Joshi blurted heedlessly.
“Huh?”
“Fish-like humanoids?”
“They looked kinda like bugs, or crabs. Huge crabs. But their heads…they were just like brains, with no face, but with like feelers or tentacles growing out of them!” Johnson wiggled the fingers of both hands above his own head. “And they had these huge wings, that you could sort of see through, that helped them move through the water.”
“Mi-go,” Joshi hissed to himself in awe. “The fungi from Yuggoth!”
Johnson ignored him. “Anyway, I almost fell over a table backing away from that doorway, Joey, believe me. I almost crapped myself. I started yelling at Gavin to close the damn door, close it now!”
“Sure it wasn’t just a movie, from a hidden projector or something?”
“No, man, listen to me!” Johnson was clearly agitated now, his face shiny with sweat and his own eyes beginning to protrude. “There was this buzzing sound coming from the doorway, coming through the water. It was getting louder and louder, and it hurt my ears. It hurt my fucking brain! It sounded like a giant bee or something – like a whole swarm of giant bees. And it was getting louder because one of those things was coming toward the doorway! Like it seen us, Joey, and wanted to come get us! Wanted to come through the doorway into that guy’s livingroom and get us! I was ready to panic by now, I ain’t ashamed to say it, and I even took out my gun and pointed it at Gavin and told him to read that fuckin’ descending chant right now or I’d kill him! But he knew I couldn’t do that. If I killed him, I didn’t think I could read that chant myself. So he just smiled at me, and walked over to the doorway, right up close to it so the light from the water like rippled across his face. By now that crab thing was walking across the bottom of the ocean or whatever, walking straight up like a man and waving those big wings and reaching out its claws to us. It was only a few yards away, it looked like. And what does that sick bastard Gavin do? He reaches out one hand and sticks it through the doorway! Sticks it into the water! I seen him flinch a little, like the water was freezing cold – and I realized I could even feel the cold from where I was standing. Then he pulled his arm out again, and his sleeve was soaked and dripping on the floor! There wasn’t no glass over the doorway, after all, so I don’t know how the water was held back like that. Held back even though he could reach right into it!”
“My God,” Joshi muttered, no doubt forgetting his atheism for the moment.
“But before that thing could reach the doorway – reach it and stick its arms through, too – Gavin looked down at the book and read
the descending chant, and the doorway went dark again. Disappeared, like it was never there. All that was left was a little water dribbled on the floor.”
“And then what?” Gallo asked, in a thoughtful tone of voice.
“Then what? Well, I traded him my drugs for the fuckin’ book, of course!”
2: Released to the World
When Crazy Joe Gallo left prison in 1971 he looked physically diminished, though his ambitions were anything but. Gallo had already attempted to overthrow crime lord Joe Profaci before his ten year prison stint, but cancer had since done Gallo’s job for him and taken Profaci out. Another Joe, Magliocco, had stepped up to fill Profaci’s shoes, but after a heart attack did him in it was yet another Joe, Colombo, who took the helm of what was now called the Colombo crime family. Whatever its name and whoever ran it, Gallo wanted to conquer it, and he enlisted the aid of his brothers Larry and Albert “Kid Blast” Gallo to do so. But not only them…
Gallo’s fellow inmate from prison, the scholarly Joshi, had been released several years earlier. No doubt the last people he had expected to show up at his apartment door one night in 1971 were Joe Gallo and Jerome Johnson. “Well,” Gallo told the stricken-looking Joshi, “it’s better than opening the door to a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses, ain’t it?”
Inside Joshi’s kitchen, Gallo told Joshi he had nothing to fear from them. In fact, Gallo had a proposition. “How’d you like to become the unlikeliest hitman in the whole of New York, my friend?”
“What are you talking about?” the man stammered.
“This,” said Johnson, thumping a valise down on the kitchen table and unlatching it. Joshi leaned over it timidly to peek inside, wincing as if he expected to see a bomb within, though no doubt hoping it was a mound of cash.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2012 - Issues 10 through 20 Page 65
