by Anthology
And there you were.
Then you literally grabbed me by the scruff of the neck as if I were a kitten and dragged me up the stairs into your oh-so-exclusive private dorm room on the third floor, which you shared with, I think, nobody. It fit. I mean, you were special, with connections, or something. You dragged me up and all sorts of crazy thoughts went through my head, up to and including thoughts of the loss of my precious virginity, not that I could necessarily even formulate the phrase “homosexual encounter” and of course later I understood how fantastic (and stupid) it was to imagine that you would ever descend to the earthly plane of carnality at all. But, yeah, the dread was there and also a kind of expectation, as if yes, you finally were singling me out for something special.
So up we went, and I fluttered and babbled nonsense and struggled to avoid tripping or dropping my textbooks.
You let go of me, and with a melodramatic flourish got out a key.
“Opie, I want to show you something.”
“But my name’s Brian.”
“I think of you as Opie, from Mayberry, The Andy Griffith Show, the nice, simple Southern country kid—”
“But I’m from Vermont.”
“Aw jeepers—” You laughed and turned the key, then looked down at me. It helped, for dramatic effect, that you were more than a head taller than me and maybe seventy pounds heavier. “Opie, I want you to take a look at this—”
You swung the door open, and I let out a gasp and unconsciously or masochistically or whatever, I really did exclaim, “Jeepers!” (because I knew you wanted me to) when you flicked on the light and I saw that the room was filled with some of the most amazing artwork I had ever seen or ever hoped to see. Did you know, even then—yes, I suppose you did, because you seemed to know everything about me, about everyone—did you know that I was trying to be a painter myself, and taking all sorts of art classes and getting nowhere? The kindest thing one of my teachers said, after looking at my attempts at landscapes, was, “Mr. Simmons, you might become a decent cartoonist. Think of Charles Schulz or whoever draws Miss Peach.”
But here—
“Jeepers…”
Here in brilliantly subtle, bold colors were landscapes or cityscapes, but depicting no scenes anyone had ever beheld on this Earth, strange jungles of pale, glowing tree-like growths and vines like living ice that hung from the sides of black towers that reached up into an equally black sky, where no sun shone, and the stars did not seem quite right, somehow. Words cannot begin to capture the power of the image. I felt the cold, the distance, the strangeness, and I somehow had the sense that all of this was alive—the jungle growths, the vines, even the towers. As I looked more closely I saw that there seemed to be things, animals of some sort, creatures, and human beings caught in those frigid vines, dangling there like the prey a spider wraps in silk and leaves dangling in the web for later. I was afraid even looking at what must have been a fantasy image, because it was so real, as real and alive as the black, winged monstrosities that seemed to flicker through some of the scenes and shift slightly whenever my eye turned away from them.
It was both beautiful and terrible beyond belief.
“Behold the Gardens of Ynath,” you whispered.
“Huh? What?”
I noticed a half-finished painting on an easel, and brushes and paints on a stand beside it.
“Your work?”
“Yes, when the spirit is upon me. But I am not entirely sure it is my work.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know you don’t.”
* * * *
And the dreamer wakes, from out of his dream, into his dream. In the dream of the man who was dreaming, the dreamt man awoke. Pace Borges. Like that. All is real, and nothing is real. Lao Tzu dreaming he is the butterfly and the butterfly dreaming he is Lao Tzu.
The dreamer awakes, and for an instant the cold is pain. He looks down at his useless legs dangling amid the starfields. He looks down again, and hours, days, years have passed, and the great planet Jupiter stretches out below, farther than the eye can see or the mind comprehend. He has the sensation of falling, of accelerating, and he knows, somehow, that his winged bearers are swooping into the planet’s gravity well, for a slingshot boost, the kind space-probes use to gain momentum when coming out the other side, from the forward motion of the planet.
Dreaming still, I look down and notice that my shoes, loafers, which are no more appropriate for interplanetary travel than for climbing a hillside in Vermont, have fallen off, and are tumbling, down, down into the multi-colored cloud bands, and my stocking feet drag slowly across the turning planet. One sock slides off, and I see that the skin of my foot has turned a dark blue.
But there is no more pain.
Only darkness, as Jupiter fades away and I am carried deep, deep into the endless, nighted abyss.
* * * *
Justin, we were more than friends. I was your slave for years, Renfield to your Dracula. I would have done anything for you. You knew that.
You knew too that I wouldn’t cry out, even when you took hold of me again, and maybe I was still afraid of what you might have intended for my nubile self.
But it wasn’t that. It was never that.
You sat on the couch. I sat at your feet, back to you, so that your legs held my shoulders in place, and you placed your terrible, speaking hands on either side of my head, and somehow you were inside my mind then. I think, I thought then at least and for a long time after, that it was some kind of hypnosis, because I didn’t believe in magic, or telepathy, and I had an absurd flash of an image of Mr. Spock with his Vulcan Mind Meld. Then I stopped thinking at all, because I was soaring, with you, into the vision you deigned to share with me, and it was a kind of rape, a head-rape, or mind-fuck, to use the commoner parlance, as I, too, shared the vision and we soared through the black spaces, beyond the Earth, to places with impossible names, to Yuggoth and Shaggai and the darkness beyond; to the Gardens of Ynath, where, somehow I knew, ancient intelligences waited, minds frozen in ice for all eternity but alive for all eternity; waited, to talk to us.
It was all so real. I seemed to come right to the threshold. I could just begin to hear the ancient voices speaking, like a buzzing inside my head, just begin to feel their soothing, timeless wisdom. I wanted it so badly to continue, to become clearer—
And then I fell away, and I was in the room with you again, and I think I did cry out, and maybe I even wept.
After a very long time, you sighed and said, “Opie, now you know about the old family curse. My father had these visions, and my grandfather before him. They dreamed thus every night, as I do. They knew many things which I myself am only beginning to discover, but they, too, reached for the Gardens of Ynath and could never reach them. They leapt. They fell short. Now you know what it feels like.”
At long last, I asked a very sensible question.
“Why are you sharing this with me?”
You smiled, but only, I think, from a sense of irony. You did not laugh at me. I will thank you for that. I think you answered me honestly when you said, “A combination of ego and loneliness. I want a disciple.”
Now maybe one or both of us were out of our minds. That would have been the logical explanation. But I didn’t think so, not then.
Justin, if you had been Christ calling out to me, “Come, follow me,” I would have come and followed, and hoped I would be promoted to apostle one day.
* * * *
It was only much later that I understood that you were taking me up to the mountaintop to show me the treasures of the world (not to mention the universe), which would be mine if I would but fall down and worship you. And I did fall down and worship you, but if you were devoting this much attention to plain old Opie, a.k.a. Brian Simmons, it must have been some kind of dry run, to prepare you for the Big Job which was to come later.
Get thee behind me, Justin.
I never said that. Not until now.
* * * *
I on the other hand was pretty much the same as ever. True, in middle age I became bald as an egg, but if I kept my hat on I was the same old Opie.
The place stank. It was a wreck. We had to walk gingerly where the floorboards had been torn up.
“Answers,” you muttered. “Looking for answers.”
Gaining courage, I asked, “Did you find any?”
You glanced down at the torn up floor and said nothing.
* * * *
Awakening once more, I gaze into the greater darkness, the great hole in space, the black mouth that swallows stars.
Accelerating, close to the speed of light, the winged ones bear me into that darkness. Colors shift, stars streaming like some brilliantly luminous fluid, rippling from red to golden to unbearably brilliant violet.
* * * *
It’s not enough to say that you changed my life, Justin. You were my life. I would have told everyone on campus of your genius, whether they wanted to listen or not, but you commanded me to keep everything a secret, because the world wasn’t ready yet, you said, because misunderstandings could happen, because it could be the end of the human race if somebody screwed up.
Yes, you told me that. I took it as par for the course.
Call me Opie. Call me Renfield. Call me whatever you like.
So I learned to deceive, to hold things close, to walk through life as if the mundane things around me mattered, when I knew how trivial they were. I got straight A’s. I gave up trying to become an artist. I studied science, then accounting. It didn’t matter. My parents though I was “coming down to Earth at last.”
Ha ha. I don’t remember if we ever found time to laugh at that one.
Justin, I think the most amazing revelation of all to me was not that you and your family had shared visions of alien worlds, or had even spoken, treated with, or served intelligences from Beyond, but that you were from Vermont too, silly as that sounds. We were almost neighbors, but I’d grown up in Brattleboro, which is a little nothing town, where, yeah, kids rode skateboards and played pinball (before there were videogames) and watched the same reruns of The Andy Griffith Show on television that everybody else did.
You, on the other hand, were raised way up in the hills, but were by no means a rustic, being privately tutored by your rich, eccentric daddy, who was a man of great culture and education, like his father before him and his before him, all of them devoted to, yes, “research” which had something to do with gardens of ice and winged creatures from outer space. That your father had perished, when the family mansion burned down, or exploded, or just plain vanished didn’t seem to have discomfited you too much. You had his bank accounts. And his talents.
You told me a lot more that summer, when I brought you home with me. On the train on the way up, you told me the whole story, like a story, and so I tell it like a story, because it seems, as we do, entirely fictional: that the Outer Ones or Old Ones or whatever you want to call them had descended from the sky into the Vermont hills sometime in the remote past. They were described in various Indian myth cycles, and in folklore whispered from generation to generation. It was rumored, too, that sometimes they recruited human agents, or even spokesmen, and that one day, when it pleased them, they would make themselves known to mankind, and history as we know it would come to an end.
Their purpose, no one had ever figured out. Some guessed it was mining, but what kind of rock would be worth journeys over quadrillions of miles and millions of years?
You didn’t think it was that at all. Your theory was that other entities lay sleeping in the Earth, vast powers that orthodox science had never suspected, nor could ever conceive; that the Outer Ones came to speak with them, to exchange dreams, and humanity was no more a part of the process than if the greatest scholars and philosophers and poets had come together for some vast, sublime conversation and all these sages just happened to be infested with fleas, and we were the fleas.
“Maybe we can join the flea circus,” I said.
“Maybe we already have,” you replied.
Now the really funny thing about that trip and that visit was how my parents treated you.
Father gave you his bluff, hearty handshake and a slap on the back.
You turned to me and smiled gently.
At dinner, that first night, Mother said, “Brian, I am so glad you are starting to make friends. I was worried about you for a while there.”
Father put down his fork, but still spoke with his mouth full. “That’s it, son. We want you to be normal.”
How very funny.
Then you and I announced we were going “camping.” Mother took us aside and said, “Justin, I trust you because you’re Brian’s friend, so I just want to ask you to look after him.” That was funny too.
The unfunny part came later. Off we went, with backpacks and tent. We spent several days in the woods. The air was so wonderfully clear. The sky at night was intensely beautiful, as it is in Vermont, so far from the cities. But you and I looked at the stars in a different way, knowing that among them, or beyond them lay the Gardens of Ynath, where the Outer Ones might carry us in transcendence and glory, where we might live forever and know all the mysteries of the cosmos.
That was your promise to me.
That was what I hoped for, longed for.
And my mother thought we were off being “normal.”
We came to places where ancient stones stood in strange circles, where, you told me, the Indians, and some wild, degenerate white men once danced naked on moonless nights, hoping to draw down the Outer Ones to accept barbarous sacrifices. We came to a hill filled with noises, where rocks somehow pressed together beneath our feet, making a trembling, muted thunder.
And by the edge of a broad stream, in the white sand, we found the tracks, where something had walked, leaving prints like pairs of crab claws pressed into the ground.
I knew that certain people who ventured too far into such places often did not return, or if they did, they were so changed in subtle, terrible ways, that it would have been better if they had not.
But we were not afraid. We had our visions. In our dreams, we reached to the very edge of the Gardens of Ynath, and we heard its whispers.
Then it happened. We camped before the mouth of a cave on one of those moonless nights which the local people had once learned to dread, and out of that cave rose what first seemed an enormous cloud, but which resolved itself against the stars into thousands of winged, flapping shapes, huge things, trailing long limbs and tails, like winged jellyfish I thought, no, like flying crabs, but really like nothing anyone has ever described or put into words or ever could.
We had sought them out. We found them. You stood up. You waved a flashlight and shouted, “Here I am! Come and take me! I want to go!”
I. Me. Me. Me. Meaning you, Justin Noyes. Just one. Singular.
I think that was how the spell broke. If you’d said “Take us,” oh, how the whole history of the world might have been different—
“Take me!”
I wasn’t your friend. I wasn’t even your instrument anymore. Was I ever more than an excuse to get back to Vermont?
“Take me!” you cried out, and they swarmed over you like a tide. They reached down. They took you.
But about dumb little Opie? Did you notice? Did you wonder?
No, I don’t think you noticed or cared that I huddled there in the tent, shit-scared, motionless, that somehow, when the time was upon us I wasn’t ready to go, that I thought back over all sorts of incoherent things: games I’d played as a child, my electric train set, collecting butterflies, what I was learning in school, the names of all the presidents,
anything, everything that bound me to humanity, to the Earth.
I wasn’t ready. At the crucial moment I turned away. I buried myself under a sleeping bag.
And I dreamed terrible dreams all that night, and it seemed to me that great swarms of the Outer Ones poured down from stars, bearing metal tubes of some kind, perhaps weapons, which released a gas, a darkness, which covered over the Earth’s cities. The lights went out one by one, until all the world was still, and then the stars began to fade; and I saw the Outer Ones descending upon me at last, reaching out with those sharp, double-claws of theirs; and they spoke among themselves, making a humming, buzzing noise, and I was no more a part of the conversation than a flea would be.
When I awoke screaming in the morning, you were gone.
I left the tent where it was. I wandered for what must have been several days in a delirium. When I finally made it back home, bruised, cut, starving, my clothing torn, one of my shoes missing, I fell into my mother’s arms and couldn’t say anything for quite some time. At last I was able to say that there had been a misunderstanding, and that you, Justin, weren’t coming back.
And my father just shook his head and said, “What did he turn out to be? Some kind of faggot?”
* * * *
But you did come back, didn’t you?
I am getting ahead of myself.
Justin, this is the part of the story where the hero grows up.
Childhood ends. Things change.
And then I became normal.
I became more normal than you could have ever imagined. I banished my dreams, my visions. By sheer force of will, a force you probably never suspected I had, I turned from the Gardens of Ynath, and looked upon them no more.
And when I became a man, I put aside childish things.
You might even say that I developed a backbone, a sense of self-worth, a separate identity.
Suffice it to say that when I went back to college the following semester, I became aggressively normal. I worked hard, dressed plainly, earned good grades, got drunk at the occasional fraternity party, and voted straight Republican when Ronald Reagan was running. I moved to New York after graduation, where I could hide from the brilliant stars beneath the city’s glare, and never gaze up at the Gardens of Ynath. My last concession to my allegedly artistic nature was an attempt to become a set-designer for an Off-Off-Very-Off-Broadway theater company, but before long I ended up keeping the accounts for them, because I really did have a talent for numbers, and when the accounts were all straight goose-eggs, I moved on.
