All the while, she waited patiently, in the rain. If he had been lesser than a dog, he might have looked back in time and Regretted that his master hadn’t years earlier summoned his murderer.
They walked home in the drizzling rain in states of different but equal bliss. Both thoughtfully, of course.
This thoughtfulness was the reason both were unobservant, or they would have heard following them, something that sounded like the inexorable slink of a rotary carpet sweeper fitted with galoshes.
It was the giant tentacled Thing, the murderer Itself–its eyes big as watermelons, fixed upon them.
The giant tentacled thing was suffering mightily, having followed the Call all the way from the deeps of Chesapeake where the horseshoe crabs are feastly, up through beach towns rife with crab thieves and souvenir shops, out into the terrible wasteland of New England towns crawling with small but proud colleges, insane asylums hiding behind hedges, and poets.
Onwards the thing soldiered, till it reached the Caller. And though it dispatched Hylam Pituitary Hector as fast as it could gulp, the Thing remembered too late, that merely excising the spleen doesn’t go far enough. One must never swallow a fevered brain.
It had suffered all day with dyspepsia. And to kill time till it could decamp, had peeping-tom’d thru the window and espied these now-boon companions, the dog and his mistress. It had watched them all day, traversing the outside of the house silently, its polka-dot sucker-prints washed off by the incorrigibly unsalty rain.
And it shadowed them now.
They reached her house and went in the door, totally wrapped in their world.
Ibsen shook himself in the front room (so violently did he shake off that hot steamy wetness, that the next day every volume of the Readers Digest Condensed books was nowhere to be found. They’d shrunk so tight that all that was left was a scattering of articles that had popped out onto the braided rug–a‘s, the‘s, and an‘s. Useless as plots, Dr. Patchoulevsky swept them up and boxed them for some purpose that would make itself known some day. About six months later, she wrapped a bow around the box and presented it as a welcome present to her new neighbor, the celebrated fly-tier Buff McInerny. He took them graciously and was touched that she had tried to give him a thoughtful gift, so he didn’t look down on her ignorance. Trouts aren’t smart, granted, but they’re not dull. Clearly the woman didn’t know fishing, or she’d not have thought anything less than a box of peripatetically‘s would do.)
But the Thing with the tentacles was still outside and the woman and dog had now progressed to the room that had enchanted Ibsen. If they had been observant, they would have noticed a low regular squeak like that of windscreen wipers, and if they’d looked over at the window, they’d have seen, staring in upon them, an eye flattened across the expanse.
“I’m at least as intelligent as a dog,” said the observer to itself. “And I’ve been to Ceylon.”
And though it looked to some, as if it were of morbid personality, it was actually an optimist. So the Thing reached up to the second floor, where it found a crack in the bathroom window. It only needed an inch.
And to its delight, the dog and woman were as intelligent as it had hoped. The dog recognised the Thing’s sucker-prints from the Deceased’s bedroom, and welcomed the Tentacled One most heartily into the fold.
And the dog’s mistress rustled up a bucket of clams.
LAST SCENE IN THE MOVIE
(although Ibsen insists he doesn’t wish to play himself)
Full moon over the Grand Canyon silhouettes on its rim: one Winnebago; and the three companions–a paw, hand, and tentacle poised over each respective brow–the Dog, the Woman, and the Thing each gazing infinitely thoughtfully into the abyss.
CLOSING CREDITS
Music:
Craft My Lovethrob by the Arrhythmics
Galoshic Riff by Thing
It was a story in Lovecraft Unbound edited by Ellen Datlow that led to the invitation to write this report, though Anna Tambour was recently told by a reader and bookstore owner whose stock includes shrunken novels, “Why do you bother with fiction? Why don’t you write a book about you and R_____ [the dog who taught her syntax].” R_____ shies away from publicity, so this report above was about someone else.
Two upcomings of particular note for those with spectacularly peculiar taste (and what reader here doesn’t fall into that genre?): “King Wolf” in A SEASON IN CARCOSA edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., himself. And CRANDOLIN, a novel, will be released by the singular Chômu Press later this year, for the feasting season. See annatambour.net for other stories and books, as well as Medlar Comfits, Anna’s other website.
Story illustration by Galen Dara.
Return to Table of Contents
The Ouroboros Apocrypha
by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
ONE.
IF YOUR VOICE emerges from a playback device – mechanical or digital – do you recognize it at once? The time may come when you have spent so many hours obsessively recording your voice and playing it back to try and fathom the precise timbre of your tone, the drift of your vowels, the crash of your consonants, the provenance of your accent and the frequency of your slurs and stutters and maggots, when you are so inured to the sound of your own recorded voice that you can listen to it neutrally, neither cringing not preening. At that point questions might arise. Whose voice is that? Who am I, sitting here, listening to it? And when you begin to speak in that voice, you may never be entirely certain that it really was your own voice all along, even before you spent all that time listening to all those recordings.
My own sense of self, once as firmly-rooted as any, had suffered a series of shocks in the summer of __82. As a consequence, I had decided to procure a range of technological equipment to aid me in an attempt to piece together my own selfhood. My ego hunting kit. Picture an ordinary backpack, medium-sized, of some synthetic material dyed a deep blue and festooned with the logos of some well-known sporting organization. Open it, and find within: an inexpensive digital camera. A handheld recorder. A video camera with tripod. A plaster-cast making kit. A notebook and several ballpoint pens. A syringe for extracting blood samples, and vials for storing them. And various other devices and tools.
With these, I spent many industrious hours making records of various aspects of my being, internal and external, and many more hours engrossed in the perusal of these records. Much of what I absorbed was predictable, mundane. I was not searching for fascination; I had no interest in replacing my self-alienation with narcissism. I wanted to feel a spark of recognition. That was all.
TWO.
You must not imagine that I am some privileged sybarite, languorously chronicling my cosseted self in an Esseintian retreat. Here is what I find when I probe my remaining memory-banks: my family is prosperous, but I am the product of a branch that has failed to prosper. My father, dissolute old man, has run through his share of the estate floating a dozen ill-starred business ventures. Worse, after my mother’s premature death, he married hastily and poorly, during one of his flush phases. His second wife has so estranged my father’s affections from me that I am forced to live in humble lodgings in a grim, commercial city, very far removed from the pleasant plantation where I began my life. I have some minor verbal ability but no real talent or drive, so I work as a proofreader for an academic publisher. It is steady, stupefying and meagerly-paid work, but I am incapable of searching for any other after a decade and a half spent squinting at rows of text, thinking of nothing beyond the moment.
For months after my cataclysm I pursued my quest to re-integrate my selfhood in my free time, in the evenings, on weekdays and on holidays. I did not have an extensive social life, and what little there was of it had been torn asunder during the course of the incidents that had brought me to this pass. Sometimes I decided it was no longer worth my time trying to recapture a lost soul, for surely that was what I was trying to do. No matter what had been lost, it was senseless to waste the rest of my li
fe on a futile quest to recover it. The days stretched before me, identical and empty and I threw myself into them, working overtime, spending hours aimlessly strolling through the city I lived in, gazing thoughtlessly at the grey skies and pondering the sound of crickets.
At such times, I would sometimes wander into neighborhoods that seemed completely deserted although surely that is an impossibility in a densely populated city like this, trapped between mountains and sea, forced to grow upwards and inwards, to stratify upon itself like a scab. When I entered these spaces, the emptiness within was not dulled so much as overridden for the moment by a cold, thrilling sense of total unease. I cannot explain why this was pleasurable except to suggest that this unease, unlike anything else in my dull, changeless days, hinted that there was still potential for the unexpected, however dark and senseless.
More often though, I would move amongst the dazed, lurching crowds of people on their way to and from work, home, escape, refuge, shelter, peril, perfidy, oblivion. Most people had troubled eyes and shadows lurking in their stare, but they seemed to be themselves, even the ones that seemed most uncomfortable in their skins. Even in the junkies, the drunks, the mentally ill or the physically destroyed, there was this sense of immanence, this sense that an identity of some kind, however scattered or tainted inhered within this shell. I could tell the difference by gazing into my reflection in any passing shop-front or car window, glancing sidelong into my emptied eyes and knowing that even the lowest of these had within them something that I had lost, or had never found and taken.
Back home I would proceed with my repetitive, desperate self-searching, sampling, tweezing, pricking, picking, scraping, tracing, photographing and recording. I would construct assemblages that seemed, momentarily, to have a sense of integrity, wholeness. But then I would step back and try absorbing that precious spark to see it splutter out, leaving the same acrid whiff of alienation that tainted every breath I took.
a)
‘You bite into an apple and find a worm in it. You throw the apple away.
But what if the worm could make itself look like part of the apple?
What if the worm could make itself look like the apple?
What if the worm could make itself look like many apples, like an apple orchard, like a man walking through the orchard, plucking an apple, biting into it, finding a worm, discarding the apple?
What if it’s worms all the way down?’
THREE.
One day, after another failure, I flung everything away from me in rage, then gathered it all up in a duffel bag, as much of it as I could. My latest ego assemblage, my latest attempt at capturing the spirit that had fled from within. I stuffed it all into that canvas bag, strapped the bag across my back and headed out. I walked heedless of the heat and crowds around me until finally I reached a place where it was cold and empty, where the familiar sense of dread potential somewhat obscured the seething within. Here I sat down on a defunct railway embankment, overgrown with weeds and strewn with wind-tossed litter and opened my bag. I gazed at the contents for a moment in rueful scorn and then began throwing them onto the piles of refuse that burgeoned in this place.
‘Relics, are they? Some sort of shrine?’
The voice was a little over-loud, a little startled at itself, as if not used to being heard out loud. I looked around me, startled. Then I saw him. Or her. I’m still not sure; suffice it to say the person speaking to me was a small, slight figure of indeterminate age and gender, wrapped in a motley assemblage of filthy rags, bits of plastic bags and soiled upholstery from long-abandoned furniture. This person had wrapped a remarkable turban composed of police tape, coils of obsolete cabling and more filthy rags around his or her head and inhaled foul-smelling smoke from a makeshift pipe created from plastic tubing.
‘A shrine?’ I asked.
‘Yes, a shrine,’ the strange person replied, hunching over to pick up a sheaf of photographs and quickly compare them with me before squirreling them away somewhere inside its garments. ‘A shrine to yourself? To the self? To the idea of a self?’ With each question, it came nearer to me, fairly enveloping me in waves of rank, salty odour. There was another odour here, too; a sickly-sweet smell of rotting flesh.
‘Yes, to the idea of a self…’ I replied, gasping at the stench, at both the stenches and stepping back a pace or two. ‘A failed idea,’ I added, as I proceeded to complete emptying my bag. The creature nodded and looked intently at my discards, stooping to retrieve the occasional item of interest. I glanced around me, looking for the source of that smell of decay. Surely it was some sort of offal, some refuse from a butcher’s shop?
‘Hmm, yes, yes…I see. Quite,’ said the creature. After a moment, it backed away from me to a relatively clear patch where it squatted down on its haunches to examine its new acquisitions. It started humming intently to itself, a one-up, one-down constant sing-song of pleased concentration. Lines of saliva began to track down from its mouth across its chin. I looked down again, still curious about the origin of the other smell. Then I saw them. Those forms, lying amidst the debris. What I’d thought were rags covering them was actually a thick layer of worms, crawling. I moved closer, and then was repulsed by the smell and also by the shape and size of those forms. It was impossible…
I turned around walking away from the embankment. Just as I was about to round a corner, the creature called out to me. ‘Your idea is good. But you can’t just build a new self from your own self, whatever that may be.’ I turned back and tried to get the creature to tell me what it meant, but by now it had wrapped its voluminous rags around it like a sort of cocoon and refused to respond. As I finally left that place, I thought I heard a voice whisper, ‘You need more raw materials.’ But I might have been wrong; in any case, I no longer had any wish to linger there.
FOUR.
The very next day at work, standing around in the canteen during a coffee break, on the edge of a social grouping and gazing at a co-worker whose lively smile and glossy hair I had long admired, even envied, I realized what the creature had meant. We are products of many selves, of many particles of many selves. Father’s eyes, mother’s smile, granduncle J.’s sense of humour, favourite cinematic stars’ stances, walks, camera angles (even though no camera other than the cyclopean stares of ever-present surveillance chronicle the bulk of most of our lives), preferred popular songsters’ dress sense, but also more subtle, the polite smile learned from a classmate we were never actually friends with, the specific tone of voice to convey tenderness learned from a young lover observed only once charming his chosen damsel while seated in a bus stand, the precise sigh of satisfaction after a really good omelet imagined from the look of contentment on a balding background figure in a detailed cafe scene in a Belgian comic read in translation.
We are all hybrid self-assemblages, built up through love, genetics, habituation, envy, hatred, curiosity, admiration and fear. I had been trying to piece together something in hermetic isolation, something unnatural and freakish. No wonder I had failed. Now, I studied my charming co-worker with new intentness, more intention. That smile, the way it crinkled the cheeks into dimples. An engaging smile. The hair helped too; an impression of health, of attractiveness, of good grooming and a sense of style. Desirable characteristics: no one wants to waste coffee break with some hangdog loser, dandruff on the shoulders of his bedraggled sweater, glum scowl on his pasty face.
I spent the next few days taking furtive photographs and making secret recordings of office chat. I started to cast my net further afield, taking snapshots of interesting passers-by on the streets, buying illustrated magazines and clipping out pictures that caught my attention. Soon, I combined these with my self-documentation into a new mixed assemblage. I spent a weekend studying this assemblage, genuflecting before it, praying to some unspecified source of dispensation that I might begin the new week imbued with qualities that would make me feel whole again. Again and again I studied my little video clips, pausing, replaying, pausing
; time after time I pored over my collages of telling details culled from dozens of snapshots, letting the details tell me who I was to be; over and over I listened to my library of choice soundclips, allowing tone and timbre to sink into the tissues of my throat.
FIVE.
The next day, I walked straight to work without any of those detours into empty zones of menace which I had begun to make a habit of. Solitary unease would be replaced by a more heady, wholesome thrill today; there was still a part of me that felt a certain dissociated unrest, but I was determined that the spark of identity that I had coaxed over the weekend would be put to the test today.
At the gates to the office tower in which my own workplace was situated, I paused in my new, dynamic stride to flash a casual, dazzling time-of-day smile at the security guard. ‘Good morning,’ I called out to him as I strode past. ‘Good morning, sir,’ rang out the reply as I approached the lifts. I was early for work; the only other people riding the lift with me were a middle-aged woman and the lift attendant. I called out my floor to the attendant and then nodded to the woman. ‘Good morning,’ I said to her. She glanced at me, startled, and then smiled and returned the greeting. She got off two floors before me.
At my own office, I surprised the receptionist, a surly single mother frequently took breaks to visit the daycare centre in the same building where she deposited her offspring during work hours, with a cheerful, brisk greeting. My coworkers and manager were greeted similarly as they filed in over the course of the next forty minutes. The days that followed were a success – people seemed to respond well to my new persona, and I was increasingly convinced that I too had responded well to it. The climax of my new selfhood was to be an office party, to be held on Friday of that week. In the past, I had always avoided such gatherings, both before and after my crises. But I had decided that that my new path would be a different one, away from the colder, more ethereal climes I had previously favoured and into the day-lit warmth of normality.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2012 Page 22
