by S. T. Joshi
On the last flight of stairs before the foyer, the distinctive rumble of an oil truck reached his ears. A mature woman with bobbed reddish hair and bulky green sweater turned to him from the partly open front door. Justin guessed her to be one of the owners, because she apologized for the furnace running out of fuel in the night. “Not a problem. Please don’t give it a thought,” he replied without slowing down.
He staked out the table nearest the breakfast bar and pounced at the eggs and sausage and bacon that rewarded early risers. He may have cut off rival guests when going for extra platefuls; he could only vouch for moving faster than whoever else was en route at the same time. To discourage any challenges over his right to multiple helpings, he scowled needlessly at the goateed kid on inattentive duty.
Between every course, he re-examined his new series of shots, as if enough squinting would flush out what he wanted to see. According to his feckless camera, Lovecraft was purely a hallucination, invisible in blurry and sharp exposures alike. The security light upon the blue wall, however, exerted an inordinate presence. It consisted of three bulbs in an upside-down triangle, and though he’d gazed into its glow last night with impunity, in pinpoint reproductions it was burning bright, painfully so within seconds. More inexplicably, it remained in tripartite clarity even when the rest of the frame was smudgy. And toward the end of the sequence, the bulbs were plainly larger, or perhaps in the process of sneaking closer. They weren’t playing by the rules of optics in any case, but there his patience for analysis ended. His eyes roved dully over the dwindling contents of chafing dishes. He could always consign more servings to the bottomless pit, but had felt no more satisfied after the last couple. He was becoming too fidgety to stay any longer.
Today’s morning walk differed markedly from yesterday’s. It proceeded north along Benefit Street and wasn’t recreational. Justin wasn’t sure yet what it was, but he was averse to letting nostalgia or disappointment enter into it again. Four cups of coffee did not in themselves account for the high-strung nerves that required he range across the landscape, and half a mile of Georgian and Federal elegance was behind him before he understood he was in pursuit of something. Where Benefit merged with North Main, and only dreary new shopping centers and prefab apartments and “professional buildings” lay ahead, he swerved right, up Olney Street. He wasn’t out to take stock of his surroundings, but the wrong ones, he sensed, would ill suit his purposes, whatever they were. At the hectic intersection with Hope Street, he marveled that Tortilla Flats, the one Mexican bistro in town way back when, had survived a third of a century. For other than old time’s sake, he tried the door. He was now willing to have another go at breakfast, but they weren’t open yet.
He forged on, into neighborhoods of Colonial Revival mansions and wedding-cake Victoriana and prim bungalows and rundown triple-deckers that still had more character than anything constructed in Justin’s lifetime. Not till he was deep in a terra incognita of broad avenues and manorial pretenses did he grasp that Lovecraft, or his unbodily likeness, had some bearing on this obscure mission. Much keener was his awareness that it must have been lunchtime, and he in a gilded wasteland as far as restaurants were concerned.
Subjective, hungry ages elapsed before he chanced upon a busy artery, with the brackish Seekonk River to the east, and westward, a cluster of businesses. It was dimly familiar, and on its outskirts the words Wayland Square popped into his head after thirty-five years of disuse. Historically it had been an “exclusive” retail hub for the old money, but Justin at present had eyes only for the black and yellow sign that read Minerva’s Pizza.
At the cash register, a gray, spindly gent with a gravelly voice told Justin to sit where he liked. A table up front afforded him a view of the sunny street through an expanse of plate glass. Apparently churchgoers didn’t come here for Sunday dinner, and none of the homecoming set were in evidence either. Some kids from a prep-school track meet, to judge by the uniforms, were lunching with their families, and that was about it.
He scanned the menu for whatever promised to contain the most meat, and under Subs he gravitated to Steak and Cheese. His cravings and his restlessness were no more subject to free will than were his eyes, drawn irresistibly to the movement on the screen above the mirrored bar. The sound was muted, and the kitchen crew had forgotten the TV was on. How else to explain why nobody changed the channel? Outdoorsmen were fishing in some Deep South cypress swamp, and Justin couldn’t imagine a more tedious contest of man against nature. Nonetheless, he had to watch until there was a sandwich to devour. He didn’t notice who brought it. But while he bit off and chewed mouthfuls, his mind’s eye kept harking back to close-ups of the bait in taunting play, back and forth, back and forth, just below the leaf-strewn surface. He knew he’d seen the like somewhere lately, and it nagged at him and eluded him and made him put down his sandwich and think.
Then the revelation pitched him into momentary vertigo. His putative Lovecraft had shared in the abridged range of motion, the repetition, the agitated beckoning. If ghost he really was, he was under some duress, but of what nature and to what end? Lovecraft, or his puppeteer, had coaxed Justin to follow. That same hidden agency was implicated, coincidentally or not, in firing up Justin’s feral appetite and joyless wanderlust. He dared not conjecture further without more to go on. He was in too vulnerable a mood.
His hands had raised the Steak and Cheese halfway to his mouth. He forced himself to put it down again and stared out the window to take his mind off food while he tried to concentrate. Justin’s one conceivable source of information to tie together Lovecraft, the two places where he’d seen Lovecraft, and some background on those places was the novelette by Lovecraft himself. But how to get hold of it on short notice, and what was it called, anyway? His eyes were scrutinizing storefronts across the street, as if that would help. Then he laughed out loud and wolfed the rest of his sandwich and a handful of chips with a rush of new determination. In what was once a branch post office, a fanlight-spanned masonry façade. Fanciful lower-case letters in each of its trapezoidal panes spelled out “Myopic Books.” He strode to the cash register without waiting for anyone to bring the check, and was almost out the door before he reversed course and stuck $20 in singles under his water glass. If this manic energy refused to let him alone, maybe he could at least channel it for his own good.
He reined himself in after sprinting up Myopic’s front steps. No point in alarming people with a dramatic entrance! The layout was uncommonly airy for a used bookshop. A fetching girl with long black hair and disarming eyes was online at the desk, presumably filling mail orders. She escorted him to the horror section, a free-standing bookcase in a far corner. What jaw-dropping luck! A Lovecraft omnibus stood on top of the case, beside a slipcovered set of Tolkien. “Looks like you found what you wanted,” she said.
He had her ring it up and asked if she’d mind him reading it on the premises. She shook her head. “We’re open till six.” At second glance, she was simply rendering realpolitik its due. A couple of bearded duffers were ensconced in comfy chairs by a coffee table, noses deep between covers. They gave off a vibe of barnacles. Toward the rear wall, he settled into a barber’s chair, upholstered in chiffon green. He strove for a semblance of composure, though inwardly he was on a breathless hunt.
His hunch to skim through last stories first proved correct. An allusion to Federal Hill guided him to the title “The Haunter of the Dark,” and he resolved to peruse carefully, to stay on track from word to word, despite his jumpiness. In barest outline, a Midwestern visitor to the East Side blunders into mental linkage with a hostile alien while inspecting vestiges of a grisly cult in a deserted Atwells Avenue church. Justin had read the tale before, but so long ago that this amounted to the first time all over again. His reactions, too, were bound to be different now from when his interests were merely academic.
He had to stop sometimes and bathe his eyes in the calming brightness around him, to divert his racing thoughts fro
m premature conclusions. The protagonist’s dread of “something which would ceaselessly follow him with a cognition that was not physical sight” reminded Justin of those hypothetical unseen trespassers during yesterday’s nap. And concerning the “unholy rapport he felt to exist between his mind and that lurking horror,” why wouldn’t that express itself as the insatiable hunger and compulsive restlessness which even now tried to unseat him, and in which he was no willing participant?
He pushed on through the text. More stubborn efforts led only to graver intimations. The victim’s despair at “a strengthening of the unholy rapport in his sleep” reminded Justin of how displaced and, yes, alienated he’d felt first thing that morning, and when the hero later stirs from a mesmeric daze in the church and inhales a “stench where a hot, searing blast beat down against him,” Justin recalled the heat in his room, and the stink of burnt mold, after a night without oil in the furnace. He felt hemmed in by the pages and looked out the narrow window in front of him, but it was half blocked off by foreign-language dictionaries, and beyond the glass was an antitheft steel latticework, with a claustrophobically nearby brick wall filling the view. Justin dove back into the book on his lap.
The narration laid increasing emphasis on the malign entity’s intolerance of light, and Justin had to nod in tentative agreement, since both his Lovecraftian experiences had occurred after dark. Finally he reached the diary excerpts recording the hero’s semi-coherent desperation as his nemesis closed in. The climactic image of “the three-lobed burning eye” turned Justin’s stricken musings to the camera hanging from his neck, and its documentation of the church site’s security light with its three glaring bulbs and disregard for the way objects should take shape in photographs. And in retrospect, how disquieting that the lights had gone out after Justin activated his flash! He twisted his head away from the book, toward a wider window to his left. The shop had a flagstone patio out back, where the blooms on a hydrangea and the leaves of a virginicus were already brown. Must have been nice here in summer! He wondered if he’d live to see it, then grimaced at himself for turning morbid on such a flimsy basis.
The sunshine happened to fade before his eyes. How long had he been in that chair? Had the overhead fluorescent been humming like that all along? He stood too fast and everything spun for several heartbeats. Stiff and creaky legs carried him to the desk, and he started framing an apology for loitering till the last minute. The barnacles had vacated their comfy furniture! A bad sign, but the wall clock above the desk was a tad shy of 5:15. He relaxed a bit and thanked the fetching girl for being very helpful, and hoped his long-term occupancy hadn’t been a problem. “As long as nobody heard you snoring,” she assured him.
Out on the sidewalk, he slid his purchase into a big inside pocket of his denim jacket. Desires to eat and roam plagued him again. Minerva’s was right there, and a large meatball calzone stood out as the shortest wait for the most protein, with the added virtue of portability.
He headed down Angell Street and wondered how far he’d get before tearing the wrapper off dinner. Past the first bend in the road, the green and white sign for a Newport Creamery loomed over him. One more youthful hangout he’d forgotten for decades! Too bad he hadn’t scouted ahead; a burger plate and sundae sounded good. Then he saw that nothing was left but the sign. Streetlight penetrated sheet glass sufficiently to indicate an interior gutted of booths, counter, stools, freezer cases and all.
But in the distant recesses, people were moving around, unhindered by gloom, animated, at arm’s length from each other. The more he studied them, the less shadowy they became, as if Justin must have been wrong about the dearth of illumination back there, and they seemed closer than at first. Momentarily in lambent glow he beheld a frail, gaunt oldster presiding over a table of deferential young men. He wore a dark suit of thirties vintage that seemed on the verge of falling apart at the seams, and he retained enough thin white hair to part on the left. His chin projected well ahead of his delicate mouth, into which he was spooning a banana split with laudable gusto when he wasn’t offering an opinion. His audience had shoulder-length hair and turtleneck shirts and flared jeans, and were patently not the youth of today.
Back when researching his thesis, he’d woven trivia about Lovecraft and this stretch of Angell into wistful daydreams centering on this restaurant. At seeing them converted into three dimensions, he fought a lump in his throat. Opposite the Creamery hulked a typically boring apartment complex of the fifties, and adding injury to insult, for its sake the beautiful birthplace of H. P. Lovecraft had been destroyed. In the young Justin’s reveries of a better Providence, Lovecraft had not been struck down in middle age, overdue royalties had let him regain his ancestral home in the nick of time, and his legendary taste for ice cream frequently enticed him, in his fragile but genial eighties, to cross the street and hold court in the Creamery with Justin’s horror-fan contemporaries. Justin still cherished that daydream, and to gaze into its world, not only parallel but long defunct, made him weak with yearning, and his lower lip trembled.
He blinked away tears. The kids at the table were regarding him with anticipation, as if he had agreed to come palaver with them, and the ancient Lovecraft was graciously waving him in. Justin gulped. Who, me? But the door ought to be locked. He stepped over and tugged at the handle. He saw and felt it start to heave open, yet could see through it, at the same time, to a door that wasn’t budging, as expected.
Justin let go and shuddered, and his melancholy reddened into anger. What would have happened if he’d set foot across that phantom portal? Lovecraft and the boys were still hopeful of his company. Justin grabbed his camera, stowed the lens cap, and turned on the flash. Not now, not ever had he seen Lovecraft’s ghost, but only this soulless effigy. Absurd to suppose a spirit would age posthumously! And what about this coterie of ghost hippies? Whatever was pulling the strings here either thought little of Justin’s intellect or had major limitations in its own.
Justin raised the camera. The tableau most likely wouldn’t leave a record, but why not see what would? And if something sinister, and photophobic, were trailing him, this was the least he could do. He aimed and shot a sequence. When he lowered the camera, the interior was dim and empty again.
His appetite, however, was unabated. The calzone was reduced to grease on his fingertips, for all the restraint he could summon, blocks away from Benefit Street. Furthermore, knowing that his surplus energy derived from some ominous, furtive source was of no help in suppressing it. He could, at best, shut himself in his room and ride the frazzling current toward a better understanding of whatever was hounding him.
He washed his beefy-smelling hands, flopped into bed, plucked the remote off the nightstand, and turned on the TV. He used whatever began yacking at him as a subliminal anchor to normality, while he examined his series from the Creamery.
Naturally, his was the only human form throughout, camera masking his face, as reflected in the brilliance of the flash upon plate glass. Inside, trackless dust between bare walls showed faintly. All the way back, a rear door opened onto the Deco brick row of Medway Street. That he had to take on faith, because a substantial area within the vague doorway contained three scorching orange discs in triangular arrangement. The security light had followed him to Wayland Square!
After a bout of hot sweat and nausea, Justin noted with perverse satisfaction that a meager five minutes in bed were yielding valuable insights. Lovecraft and anyone with him were figments planted in his mind. The “three-lobed burning eye” was not. And the sentience behind that eye and those figments had even more invasive access to the mind of man, or to Justin’s at least, than it had in the story.
As he spooled through the sequence, the “lobes” hovered unwavering, as if in wait. On finer inspection, though, they weren’t exactly framed by the door but overlapped it, so that they seemed to shine from vastly farther away than the door, yet were inside the building at the same time.
In the last image, a
ll that changed. The eye, in predictable reaction to the flash, had departed, but in its place was not the formerly hidden portion of doorway. A circular hole was floating there, and not a vacant one. A pattern informed the murky grayness, as of braided strands of dirty smoke or striations in muscle tissue. The printed page had implied a winged and cloudlike entity skulking in the church. Here was a glimpse of detail, intriguing, disturbing, but equally uninformative in practical terms. It was, in fact, petrifying to linger over that fingerprint-sized window onto inexpressibly remote and strange conditions. Justin started feeling dizzy, as if on the brink of physically tumbling into that tiny gateway.
Look away! On television, a silver-whiskered park ranger was calf-deep in reedy wetland, lecturing on the ecology of the Blackstone Valley. A local cable production, Justin surmised. The visuals switched to fishermen flycasting from a grassy riverbank. They jogged his thoughts back to the TV in the pizzeria, and to the bait wiggling on the hook.
Different bait for different fish, he thought, then thought further, depending on the neural circuitry and genetics and much else of which the fish had no clue. And yes, depending also on the mood of the fish. Was his predicament the upshot of being the right person in the right mood, in his case of withdrawal and loneliness, broadcasting a signal from the right place at the right time, perhaps when the stars were right,” as Lovecraft put it? Was there a species of angler, a predator whose range was of dimensions rather than miles, receptive to that signal? In that angler’s continuum, had that first incident in List happened scant moments ago? If only he could recapture what his mood had been before he’d first sighted Lovecraft. Had he been troubled, depressed, tense? He drew a total blank. In respect to emotions, it may as well have been a stranger in that baggy uniform.
