400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

  His pace becomes more leisurely in the throng. The streets are full of citizens seeking an evening’s entertainment, a meal, a stroll. Mr. Lovecraft savors his ice cream, and vicariously Douglas takes enjoyment from the older man’s pleasure. All these sights and flavors, yes, they are part of Mr. Lovecraft’s world—somehow they feed his fantasies, they stoke the visions that he then crafts into stories and passes on to Douglas. Douglas feels an almost unbearable pang of affection—for the shabby gentleman, clearly impoverished, spending his spare dimes on sweets, petting cats, strolling in the colonial byways like one in a dream. This—yes, this! Douglas feels the beginnings of a deep kinship, but really it is not the beginning—it is the culmination. It had begun with the stories…it had begun in Kadath and Sarnath, in Dunwich and in Celephais. Douglas understands him perfectly, the lonely man walking alone, so apart from and indifferent to the crowds that swarm around him. In this they are the same. In so many ways the same. Past banks and churches, the clanging of streetcars, the lights coming on around them, neon signs garish and alluring. At Mathewson Street, an immense church (another of the Aunts’ landmarks, Episcopalian, said with faint dismissal), Douglas sees like a glowing shrine the marquee of the Loew’s State Theatre. For a moment Mr. Lovecraft stares at it almost wistfully, he thinks; but then he turns and walks down another avenue, down streets less grand, darker. It’s easy to remain unseen here. Mr. Lovecraft finishes the last of his cone, stops before a small alcove, brushes his hands together fastidiously, then steps in off the street, out of sight.

  Douglas slowly approaches the alcove himself, and sees a small glass booth before double doors—a theatre, far less majestic than the Loew’s, and almost unattended. In fact there is no one in the booth to sell tickets—until a figure swims up inside the glass, and Douglas stumbles away before he can be spotted.

  Mr. Lovecraft!

  He removes his suit jacket and hangs it from a hook at the back of the booth, then settles himself in a chair at the ticket window. There he waits, staring out at the night, while Douglas sinks back into shadow to watch.

  To see a movie is a rare event for Douglas; he saves his quarters for his magazines and the Aunts have no use for films, much less now that they have begun to talk. Thus there is little meaning for Douglas in the titles that appear on the booth’s placard: Hallelujah! sounds like something his Aunts might approve, but The Mysterious Island very much does not. The thought of such an island, wrapped in mystery, with Mr. Lovecraft presiding as keeper of the gateway, fills him with excitement and anticipation. He digs into his pockets in case some coins might have miraculously appeared.

  Of Mr. Lovecraft he can see nothing now but his head and shoulders, with a harsh light thrown down onto him from above. A few patrons close around the booth, and Mr. Lovecraft dispenses tickets in a perfunctory manner, as if anxious for the customers to be gone. As the flurry of purchases subsides, Mr. Lovecraft turns to the coat on its hook and from an inner pocket removes a cylinder of paper. He uncurls it, flattens it on the counter, and produces from some hidden place a bottle of ink and a pen.

  Is he…writing? In the lull between customers, composing? Is it possible that H.P. Lovecraft’s miraculous tales are penned here, under such circumstances?

  Douglas cannot contain himself. He wants to see the words trailing from the tip of the pen. He carefully creeps from the shadows, drawing closer to the glass, trying to see if he recognizes any especially magical syllables. He stays close to the doors, where the darkness is dense and he can stay hidden—but suddenly the doors fly open, and out comes a small group of women, laughing and chattering. Their appearance jostles Douglas close to the booth, and Mr. Lovecraft looks up. Their eyes lock. Douglas feels his eyes go wide, a shock almost physical in its intensity. Mr. Lovecraft’s jaw is set. As he straightens in the chair, he drops his pen and the papers curl up instantly. He is about to say something but Douglas cannot bear it. It’s too much all at once. In a panic, he bolts past the booth and into the street, and throws himself around a corner.

  Breathless, he runs along the side of the building until another door nearly opens in his face, another explosion of laughter and voices, and he finds himself caught in a stream of filmgoers leaving the theatre. He holds the door for several ladies, out of habit, as the Aunts have taught him; and as they pour past, he finds himself gazing into the dark interior of the theatre. Thinking of the Mysterious Island, which might easily be an image out of Lovecraft’s stories, he seizes an edge of the curtains that drape the exit; he rushes through the velvety portico and finds himself inside.

  Most of the seats are empty, though a tide of newcomers continues to trickle in from the top of the aisles. Trying to calm himself, hoping not to attract notice, he sinks into the front row seat and tips his face toward the vast curtained screen, and closes his eyes to take stock of his thoughts.

  He wonders how to make his way back to Mr. Lovecraft. He has accepted the challenge he felt the man offered, but he must prove himself worthy. Once the movie has started, if he can return to the booth, he might find both the courage and the words to explain that he too has dreamt of R’lyeh, that he has heard the hound that chases the bearer of the talisman, that he has felt the evil wind that blows through the hidden chambers of the Nameless City. But as the lights of the theatre dim, as the curtains draw back from the screen and the first newsreel begins to play, he wonders if perhaps there is something else he is meant to see. Surely there is a deeper reason H.P. Lovecraft himself sits and sells tickets to this particular house. Perhaps what awaits are not ordinary serials and newsreels, staid dramas and inane musicals. The projectionist could be an emissary of Lovecraft; the projector a beam straight from that burning imagination, the magic lantern of his feverish mind.

  As the screen begins to quiver with light, Douglas chants the names beneath his breath: Nyarlathotep! Azathoth! The names ring him in the darkness.

  And then the darkness is no more. An explosion of light in his eyes.

  Blinded, he gapes and hears a high nasal voice. He gapes and sees Mr. Lovecraft glaring at him, holding him fast in the beam of an electric torch, trained on Douglas like a searchlight. The man’s sharp pale features, caught in the beam for a moment, loom out of the theatrical dark, dwarfing the screen, and he says, “You!”

  The word an uncontainable portent.

  And then he leans closer, thrusting the torch like the barrel of a gun into Douglas’s face, and says the words that send the boy reeling out into the night, as bereft as the blind worlds that spin in the void to the tune of a mindless idiot god.

  Douglas flees, pitching down the dark Providence streets, his mind in shards, his dreams tattered, shedding magic and mystery as if they are coins in a pocket full of holes. Innsmouth, R’lyeh, Ulthar, all crumbling into ruins. Fast he plunges from the halls of dream, never to know Y’ha-nthlei, never to be carried on black wings. The streets of Providence hateful again, no solace in their antiquity, the churchyards simply full of bones, the hounds nothing more or less than the hounds that always hunted men. And as he flees toward the rest of his life, the words still ring and circle as they always will when he casts his mind back to this night, this theatre of despair. They will echo every day and far into the night, far into the years; they will echo even after Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s death, an occasion of obscure satisfaction only capped by the unmarked grave that Douglas never bothers to seek out.

  Echoing, yes, but never more terribly than that first night of horror, when he realized he could never escape into a weird dream of eldritch magic and mystery, from a truth too plain and too insistent.

  Lovecraft’s final words, ringing sharp and cutting, the words that send him flying, feeling faceless as a night gaunt, into the dark:

  “Get out before I call the police, you dirty little nigger!”

  * * *

  “The Boy Who Followed Lovecraft” copyright 2011 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared online in Subterranean Press Magazine, Winter 2011.

&nbs
p; FORGET YOU

  She came into his life the way his cats crept into his lap. One day he was alone, had been alone for years, his life and his home empty of anyone but himself and a few friends who didn’t visit all that often anyway. And then at some point he realized she had been there for a while, in his house, in his bed, in every part of his life, having accomplished the transition so subtly that he could never say exactly when or how it had occurred.

  He ran his hand along her cheek in a swift caress, brushing the line of her jaw as he tucked the one stray lock behind her left ear as he often did, and said, “How did we find each other?”

  “Oh, you,” she said, with that look, as if the question were another of their habitual endearments. “You’re sweet.”

  He traced her other cheek, looked deep into her right eye, then her left, having memorized the stained glass kaleidoscope pattern of her irises so clearly from this practice that he could see them easily when he closed his own eyes.

  “No,” he said, “I’m serious. How?”

  She laughed without a sound, just an exhalation, and mirrored the movement his hands were making, cupping his face in her own palms.

  “Just lucky, I guess,” she said. “Me, I mean.”

  “Of course, me too, I just . . .”

  She kissed him, and he thought, Well, that’s one difference between her and the cats.

  He asked his friends, when he thought of it, in the very infrequent moments when she was not with him. “How did we meet?” he asked. And they laughed because it was such an odd question that they knew he was setting them up for some kind of joke. And when he said, “No, I’m serious,” they grew serious too, and took on a puzzled, questioning tone. “Uh . . . you’re asking us? You guys have been together longer than we’ve been friends.”

  He went through his photographs, the digital images first, looking farther and farther back through the files, and she was in them all, and he could remember now how she had been there at the time. Beyond a certain point there were no more photos, but that was because of a huge lightning storm, when they’d gone a week without power and his computer had been fried, with everything on it lost. So of course there were no digital photographs from the years before that. He found a box in the closet full of older prints and negatives, in envelopes date-stamped by the pharmacies and photobooths where he had dropped them off to be developed. And it was something of a relief to see that she was not in any of these. He could clearly recall how alone he had been then, but he still could not remember how she’d come into his life. One thing was becoming clear though: It was getting harder to remember life without her. Soon he feared that he would not be able to remember a time when she had not been with him.

  He dug out a photograph of himself alone and put it in his pocket to keep with him as a reminder. It was a self-portrait he had taken, just a solitary photo of himself alone in the kitchen looking out the window as if at the emptiness of his life, which had been very empty then. This image had always seemed to him to capture the essence of his loneliness, and looking at it now made him wistful and sad, even nostalgic. He kept taking it out and looking at it, trying to remember how it had ended. Her arrival must have come about sometime in the age of deleted images when everything was uncertain. But when he asked his friends about it, to try and zero in on a date, he couldn’t convince them that he wasn’t teasing them somehow. And when he started asking her, she began to take offense.

  “Why are you always asking me this?” she asked. “What’s your problem? It’s like you’re obsessed. Do you want me out of your life or something? Do you want things back the way they were before we met? Is that it?”

  “No, I . . . I just want to remember,” he said.

  These conversations changed things between them. Or things were changing anyway, and the conversations were a symptom. There was no telling. But he felt he had started something and there was no going back. Just by noticing it, he had started it unraveling. It was as if, once she knew he had noticed the oddness, she started covering up the truth—as if she was afraid he might discover her secret. As long as he accepted the situation and went about his life without questioning it, everything was just fine. But he could no longer pretend to remember. It was driving him crazy. He was convinced she had done something, manipulated reality somehow, folded it around and inserted herself there in his life. Who was she, anyway? What was she? What sort of being had this ability to unravel and reweave the material of existence, working her way into it as if she had always been there?

  “Stop looking at me like that,” she said. “I don’t appreciate it.”

  “I just want to know how you did it,” he said. “I just want to know what you are.”

  “God!” she said.

  It occurred to him that what they were heading toward was the unmaking of what she had made in the first place. Past a certain point, it was inevitable. She would remove herself from his life. She would vanish as if she had never existed. First from the daily routine—she’d be gone from their home, gone from their bed, gone from the parties they had with their friends. Then she would absent herself from the photographs—first from whatever new ones he took, obviously, but then from the older ones as well. If he ever thought to go back through his files, he’d see nothing but photos of himself. When he asked his friends about her, they would look glum to see him filling the emptiness of his life with imaginary partners, and they’d say, “Who?”

  Eventually he would have forgotten her completely, and all the evidence in the universe would indicate that she had never existed, and there would be no one to question it because he himself would have forgotten.

  This was the way things were heading, and all because he had noticed. He wasn’t supposed to, he decided. He was supposed to have been oblivious, and just accept it. She must have done this before, but he was the first to have seen through it. Otherwise she would have done something different to make sure he remained unaware. She would have learned from prior mistakes, which meant he must be the first mistake. He was probably the only one who would see through her, because after this she would know what to do to remain undiscovered. In this way he felt privileged, special. He should feel fortunate that she had come to him, because it had allowed him to learn a very important truth about himself. From now on, even in his solitude, even when the memory of her had removed itself, he would own this bit of self-knowledge. He wouldn’t know how he had come by it, but he would cleave to it nonetheless. She had made him more whole, more truly himself. So there was a purpose to her being here after all.

  Such were his thoughts on the last morning, as dawn crept into their bedroom, as the air grew bright and she grew dim, as the place where she was lying grew unlaid-in and the cats stretched out to fill it. But the thoughts were fleeting for he was already forgetting her, and he almost didn’t notice when, in the final moment, she woke and opened her eyes and turned and looked, but not at him, and said to no one but herself, “Why is this always happening to me?”

  * * *

  “Forget You” copyright 2012 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared online at Lightspeed Magazine, April 2012.

  BONFIRES

  The shore was dark when we showed up, but it would soon be blazing, and that thought was all I needed to warm me while we built the bonfires. The waves slopped in and sucked out again like black tar, and I went along the waterline with the others, pulling broken boards and snags of swollen wood out of the bubbling froth and foam, hauling it across the sand and up to the gravel where the road edge ran.

  Piles from previous scavenging were heaped up high and drying there. It didn’t take us long to figure out which ones were dry enough to burn. Some of the piles already had little combs of bluish light flickering along the splintered edges, as if they couldn’t wait to burst into flame. These were the ones we pulled from first, dragging pieces down toward the sound of waves and standing them on end, so they stood there tilted and crazy, like drunken skeletons leaning on each other so they wouldn’t fal
l down.

  I had matches and lighters, pockets full of strikers and flints and everything we’d need to start a fire. While I was standing there looking at the pile of drift, seeking the best place to set a flame, she came up next to me with a can of fuel, uncapped already, so volatile that she seemed to swim and melt in the fumes like a vision on a hot road.

  “You want it here?” she asked.

  “Let’s get it burning,” I said. And she tipped the can, dousing the pile so it would make a proper pyre. The stuff was tinder dry already; the touch of gas was nearly friction enough to set it off. But it waited almost respectfully, the pyre wanting me to give it life. I’ve always been obliging.

  As the flames exploded, she threw the can into the fire, and you could hear it crumple like a metal lung collapsing. I turned to her and she was laughing, and then I was on her, mouth on mouth, sucking on the metal in her tongue, pierced by it. She tasted like gasoline.

  We weren’t the only ones around the bonfire, far from it. Many hands had been pitching on wood and paper and broken furniture, ripped-up books and matted newspapers, dolls stuffed with sawdust, figures made of straw. We were shadows with bright glinting eyes, orange and vibrant in the light from the flames, all of us ageless and infinitely experienced in our innocence. We danced around our pyre as if it was the center of the universe; we were part of the ring of light that held off the encircling dark. I squeezed her hand and couldn’t tell, when our knuckles ground together, whether it was her bones or mine I felt. I sucked on her tongue and she chewed on my lips; we could devour each other and never run out of other to devour. We were sweating from the fire, even though the wind from the black sea had turned cold as the flames got hotter, and now you could hear the screaming it carried.