The Book of Cthulhu 2

by Lockhart, Ross

  And they appeared to be right in this (although I know now that they were wrong), for my malady turned out (apparently) to be simple homesickness and nothing more. It was with a feeling of immense relief that I returned to my mother and our brick home in the hills, and with each room I reentered I gained more assurance—even, or perhaps especially, the cellar with its well-swept floor of solid rock, my father’s tools and chemicals (acids, etc.), and the marinely decorated, floor-set rock inscription “The Gate of Dreams.” It was as though all the time I had been at Miskatonic there had been an invisible leash dragging me back, and only now had its pressure slackened completely.

  (Those voices are continent-wide, of course: “The essential salts, the fane of Dagon, the gray twisted brittle monstrosity, the flute-tormented pandemonium, the coral-encrusted towers of Rulay…”)

  And the hills helped me as much as my home. For a month I roamed them daily and walked the old familiar paths between the parched and browning undergrowth, my mind full of old tales and scraps of childhood brooding. I think it was only then, only with my returning, that I first came fully to realize how much (and a little of what) those hills meant to me. From Mount Waterman and steep Mount Wilson with its great observatory and hundred-inch reflector down through cavernous Tujunga Canyon with its many sinuous offshoots to the flat lands and then across the squat Verdugo Hills and the closer ones with Griffith Observatory and its lesser ’scopes, to sinister, almost inaccessible Potrero and great twisting Topanga Canyons that open with the abruptness of catastrophe upon the monstrous, primeval Pacific—all of them (the hills) with few exceptions sandy, cracked, and treacherous, the earth like rock and the rock like dried earth, rotten, crumbling, and porous: all this had such a hold on me (the limper, the fearful listener) as to be obsessive. And indeed there were more and more symptoms of obsession now: I favored certain paths over others for ill-defined reasons and there were places I could not pass without stopping for a little. My fantasy or notion became stronger than ever that there were tunnels under the paths, traveled by beings which attracted the venomous snakes of the outer world because they were akin to them. Could some eerie reality have underlaid my childhood nightmare?—I shied away from that thought.

  All this, as I say, I realized during the month after my defeated return from the East. And at the end of that month I resolved to conquer my obsession and my revolting homesickness and all the subtle weaknesses and inner hindrances that kept me from being the man my father had dreamed of. I had found that a complete break such as my father had planned for me (Miskatonic) would not work; so I determined to work out my troubles without running away: I would take courses at nearby UCLA (the University of California at Los Angeles). I would study and exercise, build up both body and mind. I remember that my determination was intense. There is something very ironic about that, for my plan, logical as it seemed, was the one sure course to further psychological entrapment.

  For quite some time, however, I seemed to be getting on successfully. With systematic exercise and better-controlled diet and rest (still my twelve hours a night), I became healthier than I ever had been before. All the troubles that had beset me in the East vanished completely away. No longer did I wake shuddering from my dreamless sleepwalking; in fact, as far as I could determine at the time, that habit had gone for good. And at college, from which I returned home nightly, I made steady progress. It was then that I first began to write those imaginative and pessimistic poems tinged with metaphysical speculation that have won me some little attention from a small circle of readers. Oddly, they were sparked by the one significant item I had brought back with me from shadow-beset Arkham, a little book of verse I’d bought at a dusty secondhand store there, Azathoth and Other Horrors by Edward Pickman Derby, a local poet.

  Now I know that my spurt of new effort during my college years was largely deceptive. Because I had decided upon a new course of life that brought me into a few new situations (though keeping me at home), I thought I was progressing vastly. I managed to keep on believing that for all my college years. That I could never study any subject profoundly, that I could never create anything that took a protracted effort, I explained by telling myself that what I was doing was “preparation” and “intellectual orientation” for some great future effort. For several years I managed to conceal from myself the fact that I could only call a tithe of my energy my own, while the residuum was being shunted down only the powers that be know what inner channels.

  (I thought I knew what books I was studying, but the voices now are telling me, “The runes of Nug-Soth, the clavicle of Nyarlathotep, the litanies of Lomar, the secular meditations of Pierre-Louis Montagny, the Necronomicon, the chants of Crom Ya, the overviews of Yiang-Li…”

  (It is midday or later outside, but the house is cool. I have managed to eat a little and made more coffee. I have been down to the basement, checking my father’s tools and things, his sledge, carboys of acid, et cetera, and looking at “The Gate of Dreams” and treading softly. The voices are strongest there.)

  Suffice it that during my six college and “poetic” years (I couldn’t carry a full load of courses) I lived not as a man, but as a fraction of a man. I had gradually given up all grand ambitions and become content to lead a life in miniature. I spent my time going to easy classes, writing fragments of prose and an occasional poem, caring for my mother (who except for her worries about me was undemanding) and for my father’s house (so well built it needed hardly any care), rambling almost absentmindedly in the hills, and sleeping prodigiously. I had no friends. In fact, we had no friends. Abbott Kinney had died and Los Angeles had stolen his Venice. Simon Rodia gave up his visits, for he was now totally preoccupied with his great single-handed building project. Once on my mother’s urging I went to Watts, a settlement of flower-decked humble bungalows dwarfed by his fabulous backyard towers that were rising like a blue-green Persian dream. He had trouble recalling who I was and then he watched me strangely as he worked. The money my father had left (in silver dollars) was ample for my mother and myself. In short, I had become, not unpleasantly, resigned.

  This was all the easier for me because of my growing absorption in the doctrines of such men as Oswald Spengler who believe that culture and civilization go by cycles and that our own Faustian Western world, with all its grandiose dream of scientific progress, is headed toward a barbarism that will engulf it as surely as the Goths, Vandals, Scythians, and Huns engulfed mighty Rome and her longer-lived sister, dwindling Byzantium. As I looked from my hilltops down on bustling Los Angeles always a-building, I placidly thought of the future days when little bands of blustering, ill-kempt barbarians will walk the streets of humped and pitted asphalt and look on each of its ruined, many-purposed buildings as just another “hut”; when high-set Griffith Park Planetarium, romantically rockbuilt, high-walled, and firmly bastioned, will be the stronghold of some petty dictator; when industry and science will be gone and all their machines and instruments rusted and broken and their use forgotten…and all our works forgotten as completely as those of the sunken civilization of Mu in the Pacific, of the fragments of whose cities only remain Nan Matol and Rapa Nui, or Easter Island.

  But whence did these thoughts really come? Not entirely or even principally from Spengler, I’ll be bound. No, they had a deeper source, I greatly fear.

  Yet thus I thought, thus I believed, and thus I was wooed away from the pursuits and tempting goals of our commercial world. I saw everything in terms of transciency, decadence, and decline—as if the times were as rotten and crumbling as the hills which obsessed me.

  It was that I was convinced, not that I was morbid. No, my health was better than ever and I was neither bored nor dissatisfied. Oh, I occasionally berated myself for failure to manifest the promise my father had seen in me, but on the whole I was strangely content. I had a weird sense of power and self-satisfaction, as if I were a man in the midst of some engrossing pursuit. You know the pleasant relief and bone-deep satisfaction that co
mes after a day of successful hard work? Well, that was the way I felt almost all the time, day in and day out. And I took my happiness as a gift of the gods. It did not occur to me to ask, “Which gods? Are they from heaven…or from the underworld?”

  Even my mother was happier, her disease arrested, her son devoted to her and leading a busy life (on a very small scale) and doing nothing to worry her beyond his occasional rambles in the snake-infested hills.

  Fortune smiled on us. Our brick dwelling rode out the severe Long Beach earthquake of March 10, 1933, without sustaining the least damage. Those who still called it Fischer’s Folly were nonplussed.

  Last year (1936) I duly received from UCLA my bachelor’s diploma in English literature, with a minor in history, my mother proudly attending the ceremony. And a month or so later she seemed as childishly delighted as I at the arrival of the first bound copies of my little book of verse, The Tunneler Below, printed at my own expense, and in my hubristic mood of auctorial conceit I not only sent out several copies for review but also donated two to the UCLA library and two more to that at Miskatonic. In my covering letter to the erudite Dr. Henry Armitage, librarian at the latter institution, I mentioned not only my brief attendance there, but also my inspiration by an Arkham poet. I also told him a little about the circumstances of my composition of the poems.

  I joked deprecatingly to my mother about this last expansive gesture of mine, but she knew how deeply I had been hurt by my failure at Miskatonic and how strongly I desired to repair my reputation there, so when only a few weeks later a letter came addressed to me and bearing the Arkham postmark, she hurried out into the hills quite against her usual wont, to bring it to me, I having just gone out on one of my rambles.

  From where I was, I barely heard, yet also recognized her mortal screams. I rushed back at my most desperate limping speed. At the very spot where my father had perished, I found her writhing on the hard, dry ground and screaming still—and near to her and whipping about, the large young rattlesnake that had bitten her on the calf, which was already swelling.

  I killed the horrid thing with the stick I carry, then slashed the bite with my sharp pocketknife and sucked it out and injected antivenin from the kit I have always with me on my walks.

  All to no avail. She died two days later in the hospital. Once more there was not only shock and depression, but also the dismal business of a funeral to get through (at least we already owned a grave lot), this time a more conventional ceremony, but this time I was wholly alone.

  It was a week before I could bring myself to look at the letter she’d been bringing me. After all, it had been the cause of her death. I almost tore it up unread. But after I had got into it, I became more and more interested and then incredulously amazed …and frightened. Here it is, in its entirety:

  118 Saltonstall St.,

  Arkham, Mass.,

  Aug. 12, 1936.

  Georg Reuter Fischer, Esq.,

  Vultures Roost,

  Hollywood, Calif.

  My dear Sir:—

  Dr. Henry Armitage took the liberty of letting me peruse your The Tunneler Below before it was placed on general circulation in the university library. May one who serves only in the outer court of the muses’ temple, and particularly outside Polyhymnia’s and Erato’s shrines, be permitted to express his deep appreciation of your creative achievement? And to tender respectfully the like admirations of Professor Wingate Peaslee of our psychology department and of Dr. Francis Morgan of medicine and comparative anatomy, who share my special interests, and of Dr. Armitage himself? “The Green Deeps” is in particular a remarkably well-sustained and deeply moving lyric poem.

  I am an assistant professor of literature at Miskatonic and an enthusiastic amateur student of New England and other folklore. If memory serves, you were in my freshman English section six years ago. I was sorry then that the state of your health forced you to curtail your studies, and I am happy now to have before me conclusive evidence that you have completely surmounted all such difficulties. Congratulations!

  And now will you allow me to pass on to another and very different matter, which is nonetheless peripherally related to your poetic work? Miskatonic is currently engaged in a broad interdepartmental research in the general area of folklore, language, and dreams, an investigation of the vocabulary of the collective unconscious, particularly as it expresses itself in poetry. The three scholars I have alluded to are among those active in this work, along with persons in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, who are carrying on the pioneering work of the late Professor George Gammell Angell, and from time to time I am honored to render them assistance. They have empowered me to ask you for your own help in this matter, which could be of signal importance. It is a matter of answering a few questions only, relating to the accidents of your writing and in no way impinging on its essence, and should not cut seriously into your time. Naturally any information you choose to supply will be treated as strictly confidential.

  I call your attention to the following two lines in “The Green Deeps”:

  Intelligence doth grow itself within

  The coral-palled, squat towers of Rulay.

  Did you in composing this poem ever consider a more eccentric spelling of the last (and presumably invented?) word? “R’lyeh,” say. And going back three lines, did you consider spelling “Nath” (invented?) with an initial “p”—i.e., “Pnath”?

  Also in the same poem:

  The rampant dragon dreams in far Cathay

  While snake-limbed Cutlu sleeps in deep Rulay.

  The name “Cutlu” (once more, invented?) is of considerable interest to us. Did you have phonetic difficulty in choosing the letters to represent the sound you had in mind? Did you perhaps simplify in the interests of poetic clarity? At any time did “Cthulhu” ever occur to you?

  (As you can see, we are discovering that the language of the collective unconscious is almost unpleasantly guttural and sibilant! All hawking and spitting, like German.)

  Also, there is this quatrain in your impressive lyric, “Sea Tombs”:

  Their spires underlie our deepest graves;

  Lit are they by a light that man has seen.

  Only the wingless worm can go between

  Our daylight and their vault beneath the waves.

  Were there some proofreading errors here?—or the equivalent. Specifically, in the second line should “that” be “no”? (And was the light you had in mind what you might call orange-blue or purple-green, or both?) And, in the next line, how does “winged” rather than “wingless” strike you?

  Finally, in regard to “Sea Tombs” and also the title poem of your book, Professor Peaslee has a question which he calls a “long shot” about the subterranean and submarine tunnels which you evoke. Did you ever have fantasies of such tunnels really existing in the area where you composed the poem?—the Hollywood Hills and Santa Monica Mountains, presumably, the Pacific Ocean being nearby. Did you perhaps try actually to trace the paths overlying these fancied tunnels? And did you happen to notice (excuse the strangeness of this question) an unusual number of venomous serpents along such routes?—rattlers, I would presume (in our area it would be copperheads, and in the South water moccasins and coral snakes). If so, do take care!

  If such tunnels should by some strange coincidence actually exist, it would be scientifically possible to confirm the fact without any digging or drilling (or by discovering an existent opening), it may interest you to know. Even vacuity—i.e., nothing—leaves its traces, it appears! Two Miskatonic science professors, who are part of the interdepartmental program I mentioned, have devised a highly portable apparatus for the purpose, which they call a magneto-optic geoscanner. (That last hybrid word must sound a most clumsy and barbarous coinage to a poet, I’m sure, but you know scientists!) It is strange, is it not, to think of an investigation of dreams having geological repercussions? The clever though infelicitously named instrument is a simplified adaptation of one which has alrea
dy discovered two new elements.

  I shall be making a trip west early next year, to confer with a man in San Diego who happens to be the son of the scholarly recluse whose researches led to our interdepartmental program—Henry Wentworth Akeley. (The local poet—alas, deceased—to whom you pay such generous tribute, was another such pioneer, it happens oddly.) I shall be driving my own British sports car, a diminutive Austin. I am some thing of an automobile maniac, I must confess, even a speed demon!—however inappropriate that may be for an assistant English professor. I would be very pleased to make your further acquaintance at that time, if entirely agreeable to you. I might even bring along a geo-scanner and we could check out those hypothetical tunnels!

  But I perhaps anticipate and presume too far. Pardon me. I will be very grateful for any attention you are able to give this letter and its necessarily impertinent questions.

  Once more, congratulations on The Tunneler!

  Yrs. very truly,

  Albert N. Wilmarth.

  It is quite impossible to describe all at once my state of mind when I finished reading this letter. I can only do so by stages. To begin with, I was flattered and gratified, even acutely embarrassed, by his apparently sincere praise of my verses—as what young poet wouldn’t be? And that a psychologist and an old librarian (even an anatomist!) should admire them too—it was almost too much.

  As soon as the man mentioned freshman English I realized that I had a vivid memory of him. Although I’d forgotten his name in the course of years, it came back to me like a shot when I glanced ahead at the end of the letter and saw it. He had been only an instructor then, a tall young man, cadaverously thin, always moving about with nervous rapidity, his shoulders hunched. He’d had a long jaw and a pale complexion, with dark-circled eyes which gave him a haunted look, as if he were constantly under some great strain to which he never alluded. He had the habit of jerking out a little notebook and making jottings without ceasing for a moment to discourse fluently, even brilliantly. He’d seemed incredibly well read and had had a lot to do with stimulating and deepening my interest in poetry. I even remembered his car—the other students used to joke about it with an undercurrent of envy. It had been a Model T Ford then, which he’d always driven at a brisk clip around the fringes of the Miskatonic campus, taking turns very sharply.