I am Providence

by Nick Mamatas

  “This is my room,” Norman said, “whether I’m banned from the convention or not. You get out.”

  Armbruster shot a look at the cops. The one not monitoring the sullen line of people pouring their drinks away just shrugged.

  “Fine,” Armbruster said. “Enjoy your ‘party room,’ son.” He walked out of the room, followed by Bhanushali, with the cops and Colleen immediately behind.

  In the hallway, everyone was silent, but thanks perhaps to some pre-planning Bhanushali and Armbruster walked over to the elevator bank and the cops hustled Colleen down the side steps and out to the rear parking lot.

  “Miranda rights? Charges?” she asked.

  “Trespassing?” the cop said, like it was a question.

  The other cop opened the door to the cruiser and gestured extravagantly. “You have the right to remain silent. Honestly, it’s a good idea. We want to find a killer, not break up room parties. Don’t say anything, keep your head down, and we’ll process you quickly.”

  Colleen almost smiled at that. After the formal arrest, the body cavity search, the seemingly endless wait, and the offer of “a baloney sandwich, or fucking nothing if you don’t like meat, Little Miss Vegan” in response to her inquiries about food, she found herself handcuffed to a bench in a hallway. Opposite her, handcuffed to another bench, was Ms. Phantasia. His heavy eye make-up was smeared, and lipstick was a gash across the bottom half of his face, but somehow he still managed to look more like the late drag queen Divine than he did The Joker. It might have been all the purple and green velveteen, and the Iggy Pop t-shirt under the vest with buttons near-bursting over his belly, or it might have been despite all that, but there was something about Phantasia that was compelling, even as he just sat there, slouched over, half-defeated. He was like a pile of top hats and silks and scimitars after the magician had left the stage, or the circus big top three hours before show time. Something magical had happened. Something astounding was promised. For a moment, Colleen could see why a lost soul like Chloe would hitch her wagon to this star.

  “They didn’t know which cell best suited me—boys or girls—so they left me out here. I was too rough for the girls, and they thought the boys might grow too excited once they gazed upon my countenance, so here I am,” he said. His voice was melodious and deep, like a singer’s or a late-night TV horror movie host from back when TV stations had such things. “Perhaps they had the same difficulty with you?”

  Colleen smirked. “Don’t be a fool, Phantasia. They put us together in the hope that we’d talk and one of us would say something. They don’t know whether you killed Panossian or I just said I saw you to throw suspicion off me and on to you.”

  “Fantastic! How did you come to such a conclusion?” Phantasia asked.

  “I am a writer, you know. I do more than just Lovecraft pastiches. When something strange happens, I think about motivation. Why would someone do such a thing? Why would the police put me, the person who gave them your name, and you together?”

  “Perhaps they’re waiting for you to say something incriminating,” Phantasia says. “To gloat? Apparently, in this town walking down a flight of steps can be incriminating. That’s what they have me in for. And you?”

  Colleen frowned. “I attended Norman’s dumb ritual slash party slash drunken mental breakdown without my Summer Tentacular badge.”

  “They should put you to…death!” Phantasia declared. He planted himself on the bench and shook rapidly, making a buzzing noise with his tongue and teeth. “Haha, don’t worry, darling. The fathers of our great state have never executed anyone.”

  “Life in prison then. You’re the one facing a murder charge, aren’t you? Pretty jolly for all that,” Colleen said.

  “Oh no, that’s all been resolved. Charles Cudmore killed Panossian,” Phantasia said. “I’m afraid one of the police officers decided to get a little fresh with me when taking me in, and so there was a misunderstanding and somehow the police officer decided that I was resisting arrest and had somehow slapped him, though I did no such thing. My dear old pater cannot afford the bail money right now, but Bhanushali is hard at work raising funds.”

  “She was hard at work getting me back down here when I saw her last,” Colleen said. “She is the one who had me arrested.”

  “Don’t think too harshly of Bhanushali, young miss. She was briefly under arrest as well. Imagine it—that old priss being strip searched? When Cudmore was wheeled in, they let her go and decided that Cudmore had killed Panossian.”

  “Why the hell would they do that?”

  Phantasia’s gaze drifted overhead, as though he were gathering his thoughts, or fabricating some. “Do you know why I enjoy Lovecraftian fiction?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “It is because Lovecraftian fiction posits a world that is indescribable, incomprehensible, and delicious. There’s something out there in the dark, and it may be divine, or grotesque, or both. Pain and wonder, an unparalleled combination.

  “Life as we live it is mostly just pain, interspersed with enough wonder to keep us from going mad. Except for those of us who go mad. Panossian was a mad one, I think. He didn’t know how to live in this world. Honestly, neither do I. Fuck, girlfriend, take a look at me. I often sit on a bench down by the river and people-watch, or ride the buses all day. I’ve learned something from my observations. I have learned, Ms. Danzig, how people live in the world. How they adapt to a universe so black and infinite that their minds cannot correlate the contents of it. Do you know what they do?”

  Colleen said, “Why don’t you just tell me.”

  “They lie,” Phantasia said. “To themselves. Or maybe ‘lie’ isn’t quite the right word. They simplify. Lie quite right simplify! Oh my, I am rhyming. Oh, for a Boswell of my own to capture every utterance. Anyway, where was I?”

  “Lie,” Colleen said. “Simplify.”

  “Yes, of course. They see a world too immense to understand, and shrink it so that they can understand it. Police do this all the time. Why did Charles Cudmore kill Panos Panos Panossian? Ms. Danzig, he did it because someone suggested that he might have, and then he was wheeled into the morgue himself. Think of how easy this makes the case—no need to continue the investigation, no need for a trial. There is a connection between the two: Panossian had a copy of Arkham, which was bound in human skin, sent to him by Cudmore…as it was his skin that bound the book. He was expert at removing skin from a body, and he removed Panossian’s face expertly from the poor bugger’s cranium.”

  “What was Cudmore’s motive?” Colleen asked. “Why would Panossian try to sell Arkham back to Cudmore if Cudmore sent it to him in the first place?”

  “They had an argument,” Phantasia said. “The police interviewed nearly every member of the Summer Tentacular about Panossian. How do you think he came off once those interviews were compiled? He constantly argued with and needled his Lovecraftian colleagues, his brothers and sisters of the tentacle. He was widely hated, and desperate for money.

  “For his own part, Cudmore foolishly gave away something he could have sold for a great deal of money. He was a little man—it’s not as though he had so much excess flesh that he could manufacture so many extra copies.” Phantasia rubbed his belly with his uncuffed hand. “Unlike some of us. He sent Arkham to Panossian, for free, when he could have sold it for tens of thousands of dollars to virtually any of the upper-tier collectors. How much did Panossian want for his book? Probably not more than a few hundred dollars, maybe one thousand. It’s hard to sell a flesh-bound book on the open market, unless you are the one with the flesh.”

  “And why murder Panossian so violently, why take his face?”

  Phantasia shrugged. “I wouldn’t say Cudmore was stable. He had that odd misshapen head. And he could have perhaps decided to make another special limited edition of the flesh of a murder victim’s rictus, trapped forever in a frozen howl. He had the contacts to sell such a book privately, and if you know anything about book collectors, you know they don’t let p
etty issues like a corpse and a murder stand in the way of gaining a truly unique item.

  “That was Cudmore’s goal in joining the corps sent to seek out the grave of poor dead N-Word Man. Ah, cats! ‘Objects to adore, idealise, and celebrate in the most rhapsodic of dactyls and anapaests, iambics and trochaics,’ as Lovecraft said. But Cudmore hoped to make a book of the cat if there was any flesh not ‘et by worms, and if there was, he’d use the bones as decorative details. Bhanushali probably wanted the dead cat for herself, and they argued over the issue and he left and then he fell to his death in the dark and cursed wood of Providence. The murderer struck down by fate. They search his hotel room and find the face and the copy of Arkham. Case closed, convention over, and now we can all go home.”

  Colleen took a moment to process all of that, and said, “I see. That is a simple story. Makes sense. Plays upon the stereotypes of Lovecraftians the cops probably spent all weekend confirming while performing surveillance at the con. And I bet there’s Panossian’s DNA on Cudmore and vice-versa.

  “But you do know, don’t you, that Cudmore didn’t just fall and die. He was struck on the head, then fell on another rock, right? He was killed too. So, in your simple story, who killed him?”

  And with that, Ms. Phantasia burst into great screaming tears.

  13. From Beyond

  Charles Cudmore lay dead four feet away from me, in the adjacent cold chamber. Were I alive I’d climb out of my cell, walk over to his, open the door, yank him out, open his mouth, and piss down his dead throat.

  He actually seemed to like me, back when he was alive.

  Folks like Cudmore come along every so often. You think you know the lay of the land, you think you have a good mental map of the social pecking order, and then, a new player emerges and he is already everyone’s best friend. You wouldn’t peg him for the type—he had a slow, southern drawl and blundered into every political and pop culture discussion one could possibly have. War in Iraq? Hulk Hogan sex tape? He’d always weigh in on Facebook or some forum, to denounce everyone as missing the real truth, which he, conveniently, had access to. Have I mentioned that his head was shaped like the top of an asparagus, and he wore shaggy bangs to complete the picture? But it was no use mocking his appearance; we’re all ugly here in Lovecraftiana. Cudmore was a good enough sport to embrace the look, and the nickname.

  Three years ago, I’d never heard of him. Cudmore first appeared on my radar when he debuted his column in Dreamlands, which was shocking for two reasons: Ronald Ranger was notorious for not publishing the work of other people in his ’zine, and the column was dreadful. I mean, it was routinely without thesis or point, like asking a smart eighth-grader who hadn’t done the reading to get up in front of the class and discuss the major themes of Hamlet.

  His first column was about my book. The first sentence of his first column was about how he was so busy setting up his column that he hadn’t had time to read my book, so he’d be just reviewing the first twenty pages or so. Literally—Panossian’s The Catcher in R’lyeh is one of those especially challenging Mythos novels new writers often think is a good idea, but I’ve been so busy setting up my office and brainstorming ideas for this new Dreamlands column, “Get to the Point,” that I’ve only had time to read two dozen pages.

  He went on to explain that within those two dozen pages was everything wrong, and right, with Lovecraftian fiction. I was a hipster who didn’t understand the classics, but it was good that I was confronting the Old Guard with new ways of thinking and writing, but Salinger was boring, but adding Lovecraft to anything made it less boring. Panossian was obviously a pretentious git, but if you had to pretend to be something you’re not, at least Panossian made the choice to pretend to be a good writer.

  It wasn’t the review that bothered me—really, it wasn’t—it was the follow-up email chastising me for not sending him a thank you note for reviewing my book. Thank you notes were key to Cudmore’s own bottle rocket ascension. Six months later, he was starring in YouTube videos with Bhanushali, and launching a crowdfunding campaign for a new feature-length documentary about C. M. Eddy, which everyone was extremely enthusiastic about. Twenty thousand bucks later, Cudmore had produced a four-minute trailer that sounded like the audio had been mixed in a bus depot men’s room. Last Summer Tentacular, he got a table in the dealers’ room and had one product for sale: H. R. Giger’s Necronomicon and Necronomicon II, with tipped-in lithographs and leather binding and black cloth slipcases. It was a set of course, both signed and both numbered—and yes, they were numbered 666, that infamous Biblical number that has nothing to do with Lovecraft or the Necronomicon or anything, but which immediately doubled the price. And Cudmore wanted $2500 for the books, no negotiations, no chatting.

  He just raised his eyebrows, asked, “Do you have twenty-five hundred dollars in cash?” and then glanced down at the book. “No? Move along then. You’re blocking traffic.” That weekend, in every panel he was on, or attended as a member of the audience, he managed to mention that the books were for sale, and that they had been a personal gift from Giger.

  His other big anecdote was this: when he was down in Hollywood “doing some work,” Richard Matheson had taken him aside and given him two pieces of advice—always be true to yourself, and don’t be a name-dropper.

  “Like Richard Matheson told me, ‘Nobody likes a name-dropper,’” Cudmore told me during our panel about Fred Chappell, the poet and Lovecraftian from North Carolina. The name I had dropped was “Fred Chappell,” whom I had interviewed the year before for a small science fiction magazine.

  Cob and Phantasia pooled their money to buy the books, and then flipped a coin to see who would get Necronomicon and who would get Necronomicon II. They live on opposite ends of Providence, so even in the event of a major hurricane coming ashore, it was likely that at least one of the volumes would survive. That’s all it took for Cudmore to become a quasi-legendary figure. He had the goods, he had connections to writers that people have actually heard of, and he knew the secrets of kissing up and kicking down. He had one other skill too, a crucial one.

  Charles Cudmore could make a deadline.

  Now, the stuff he produced wasn’t very good, but if you’re a fan and just want to consume nothing but Cthulhu all day while waiting for Cthulhu to come consume you, then it was fine. Do you remember when getting weddings videotaped was a big deal, and if you come from an “ethnic” family like mine, the cheesier the editing the better? Heart wipes, slide shows of the bride and groom as babies on their potties, split screens, Mission: Impossible music played on a Casio keyboard, a green screen sunset. That was Cudmore—tons of green everywhere, line drawings of nude women on their backs, their bellies sliced open and intestines rising from their stomachs to form a cloud of tentacles under a pair of glowing eyes. His Giger tribute. And he pointed out that in his depiction, the big tits of all the dead girls slide into their armpits. “That’s what big tits do, Panossian, when they’re real,” he told me once. He designed his own ridiculous-looking tattoos as well. He had one of a pair of tits with toothy mouths for nipples and tentacles on the underside, like a pair of jellyfish. But he always wore a blazer over his T-shirts to keep his tattoos hidden. Asparagus Head was that kind of guy.

  He never met a font he didn’t like; the more the merrier. His layouts looked like the menu at a Mediterranean restaurant. He used Photoshop the way a kid uses a knife to spread peanut butter. I thought he was just incompetent, until I realized how malevolent he was.

  There was an online dust-up a couple of years ago about a bust of Lovecraft being crowdfunded. A science fiction writer in Israel saw a link and wrote a long blog post about Lovecraft’s anti-Semitism. Let’s be clear—Lovecraft was an anti-Semite. He wasn’t an anti-Semite for his time, he wasn’t an anti-Semite only before his marriage to Sonia Greene, he wasn’t an anti-Semite until he learned about the horrors of Nazism, he was an anti-Semite from beginning to end. The man hated the fucking Jews. When he lived in Brooklyn,
he described the population as “a mongrel herd with repulsive Mongoloid Jews in the visible majority, and the coarse faces and bad manners eventually come to wear on one so unbearably that one feels like punching every god damn bastard in sight.”

  Anyway, he didn’t punch anyone, but a number of people in the broader genre of the fantastic, of which Lovecraftiana is the rundown district with the amusement park full of rusty rides and meth-addled carnies, objected to the fund-raising and suggested instead that the money be used for something else: scholarships for writers of color, a bust of Octavia Butler, a statue of a dragon…there were all sorts of ideas, really, for what to do with other people’s money.

  Bhanushali, a woman of color herself, took exception to the “anti-Lovecraftian interlopers” and launched a month’s worth of daily tirades against all the counter-ideas, which is fine, and then also attempted to contextualize and redefine Lovecraft’s racism and anti-Semitism out of existence. This was especially disappointing, as Bhanushali herself wrote quite eloquently about Lovecraft’s personal shortcomings in the past. She suggested that the bust be made in her own image, called the Israeli science fiction writer “a parasite” (big rhetorical blunder, that one), and signed one petition on behalf of the entire Summer Tentacular, which annoyed me and a few other people.

  Armbruster and Cudmore were Bhanushali’s chief lieutenants, with Cudmore the head of the Facebook division. Nobody could talk about the issue without Cudmore materializing and declaring everyone “Knee-Jerk Liberals,” to which he would then add, “And I am speaking as a Liberal myself.” (Yes, he capitalized “liberal,” like most people who aren’t actually liberals do.) He’d go on about his own Jewish heritage (one grandfather) and explain how inferior everyone complaining was to Lovecraft, writing-wise. He further poured a few letters into some grade-level reading comprehension test website, along with the Facebook comments of his rhetorical enemies, to prove that Lovecraft was twice as intelligent as anyone who didn’t want the bust made. He declared that I, personally, was “just a maggot who hopes to eat enough shit to one day pupate and then finally emerge as a board-certified gadfly.”