The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction

by Paula Guran

  The following Friday, Lorrie invited me to join her and her friends. If she hadn’t, I would have asked to. Of course I wanted to meet her outside of school, where our respective schedules permitted us to see one another in only a few classes, but I was eager to talk to Jude, as well, about the tape whose songs were playing in my head whether I was listening to them or not, which had become the soundtrack of my life – or, I’m not sure if this will make any sense, but it was as if my day’s activities had become an extended illustration of the music, a featurelength video for it.

  The principle difference between this night and the previous Friday was I spent it sitting beside Lorrie on the hood of her car, my feet resting on the front bumper, hers crossed under her legs, so she had to lean against me to keep from sliding off. I wasn’t daring enough to put my arm around her, but I placed my hand on the hood behind her and pretended to support myself with it, when its actual purpose was to allow a maximum portion of me to come into contact with a maximum portion of her as unobtrusively as possible. An hour and half with a pretty girl pressed into me was more than sufficient compensation for the remainder of the night being a virtual repeat of the week before, from another carton of vegetables in a strange-tasting and spicy sauce to further conversation to which my contribution was minimal. In addition, Jude was not in attendance. I asked Lorrie about his absence while she walked me to my car. She shrugged and said, “He’s got a lot going on.” I wasn’t exactly disappointed, especially since the kiss I received at this departure was significantly longer and – more involved, I guess you might say. But when Lorrie suggested I might like to meet with her and her friends the next night, some small measure of what prompted me to say, “Sure, yeah,” was the prospect Jude would be present.

  He wasn’t, and since the weekend after was the prom, I didn’t see any of Lorrie’s friends. I saw her, and the large house where she and her parents lived, and D’Artagnan, her standard poodle, and her parents, who were younger than mine and glowed with money, and the elaborate royal blue dress she wore. Your grandfather had rented an Oldsmobile to ferry us to the prom, held in the catering hall of the Villa Alighieri, an Italian restaurant. Later, he chauffeured us to an after-prom party being held at someone’s house out in Millbrook, and still later to retrieve us from the smoldering embers of the party and return us home. Lorrie and he hit it off, and the night went as well as these things do. The meal and music were adequate, the company at our table pleasant.

  What I remember most about the prom is that The Subterraneans’ music colored it, too. In fact, were it not for my subsequent experiences at The Last Chance, I likely would have identified a moment at the dance as the weirdest thing that ever happened to me. It occurred while the DJ was playing the prom theme (for the record, Madonna’s “Crazy for You”). Lorrie and I were slow dancing, her head resting on my chest. Underneath the homogenized sentimentality of Madonna’s lyrics, The Subterraneans’ singer was declaring it was always Halloween, here. The space around the dance floor dimmed, as if the lighting there had been lowered almost completely. Where the tables and chairs had been, tall forms moved from left to right in a slow procession. I had the impression of heads like those of enormous birds, with sharp, curving beaks, and dark robes draped all the way to the floor. Then the light returned, and the figures were gone. What I had seen was weird with a capital W, but it also vanished so quickly I was able to blink a couple of times and put it out of my mind. The girl leaning against me, in her stockinged feet because she’d removed her uncomfortable shoes, swaying in time to the theme, facilitated this. For the remainder of the prom, the vision did not return, nor did it during the after-party events, when I was engaged in more pleasant pursuits. The night concluded with a goodbye kiss on the front step of Lorrie’s parents’ house, after which, your grandfather took me for breakfast at McDonald’s.

  One month after the prom, Lorrie broke up with me. It was less traumatic than you might suppose. Although I had continued to join her and her friends at the DCCC parking lot for takeout Chinese on Fridays and Saturdays, school, sport, and work commitments kept me from seeing any more of her. Not to mention, one of the girls on the track team, a cute sophomore, had told me she thought I resembled the lead singer of the band, ABC, and he was cute. While I had never been quickest on the uptake when it came to such things (a fact to which your stepmother will attest), even my limited powers of perception could detect this new girl’s interest in me. So when Lorrie called to say, “It isn’t working,” I found it easier to sigh and agree than I might have otherwise. I was still welcome to hang out with her and her friends, Lorrie said, which I took as a formality but appreciated nonetheless. I said I might. After I hung up the phone, I was sad, and briefly angry, at things not working out between Lorrie and me, but I was also more philosophical, more mature about it than I believe I have been about the end of any subsequent relationship, which is a strange thing to realize.

  Lorrie and I remained friendly, although I returned to the college parking lot only once to eat with her and her friends. As luck would have it, Jude was there as well, for the first time since the night he had handed me the tape of The Subterraneans. I wondered if he remembered passing me the cassette, but of course he did. Since I was no longer seated next to Lorrie, it was easier for him and me to lean our heads toward one another and talk. He didn’t ask me if I’d listened to the tape. He knew. He said, “Well? What do you think?”

  “I think I can’t stop listening to that tape,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if it isn’t playing: I’m still hearing it, you know?”

  Jude nodded. “Anything . . . else?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you seen anything?”

  “Have I . . . ?” But I had, the robed forms moving past the dance floor at the prom.

  Jude caught it in my face. “You did,” he said. “What? What did you see? The Black Ocean? The City?”

  “People,” I said. “I think they were people. They were tall – I mean, seven feet plus – and wearing these costumes, bird masks and long robes. At the prom,” I added.

  “The Watch,” he said. “You saw members of the Goddamned Watch.”

  “Is that good?”

  “As long as they didn’t see you – they didn’t, did they?”

  Did they? “No,” I said.

  “Then you’re fine,” he said. “Holy shit. You know you’re the first person I’ve met who actually saw something? Amazing.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “I’m sorry. I mean, I get that something important has happened – to me – but I don’t know what it is.”

  “It’s the music. It thins what’s around you, lets you see beyond it.”

  I had read and watched enough science fiction to think I understood what Jude was talking about. “You mean to another dimension?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Dimension, plane, iteration, it’s all just a way of saying someplace else. Someplace more essential than all of this.” He waved his hand to take in the cars, the parking lot, the college, us.

  “How— who are these guys? The Subterraneans? How did they do this?”

  “I don’t know. There are rumors, but they’re pretty ridiculous. A lot of bands have messed around with occult material, usually as an occasion for some depraved sex. Fucking Jimmy Page and his sex magic. This is different. These guys are into some crazy mathematics, stuff that goes all the way back to Pythagoras and his followers. What they tried wasn’t a complete success. Most of the people I’ve handed the tape to played it once and ignored it. A few became obsessed with it. Like I said, though, you’re the first to see anything.”

  “Have you?” I said. “You have, haven’t you?”

  “Twice. Both times, I saw a city. It was huge, spread out along the shore of an ocean for as far as I could see. The buildings looked Greek, or Roman. A lot of them were in ruins, which made the place seem old, ancient. But there were people walking its streets, so I knew it wasn’t abandoned. The ocean w
as immense. Its water was black. Its waves were half as tall as some of the buildings.”

  “Where is it?” I said. “Do you know what it’s called?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I spoke to a folklorist over at SUNY Huguenot. He’d heard of the city. He said it was called the Black City – also the Spindle. He thought it was another version of Hell. He was the one who told me about the Watch, the guys in the bird masks. Said you did not want to attract their attention.”

  “Why not?”

  “He didn’t spell it out. I’m guessing a fate worse than death.”

  “Oh.”

  “They’re coming here, you know.”

  For a second, I thought Jude was referring to the Watch, then I understood he meant the band. “Here? Where?”

  “They’re playing a show at The Last Chance. Late June, I forget the exact date.”

  “Are you going to go?”

  “Are you kidding? You have to come, too.”

  “Me?”

  “Look at the effect a recording of their material had on you. Imagine what hearing it live could do.”

  “I don’t know.” To be honest, I was as worried by the prospect of what your grandparents would say as I was any further visions. Depending on their moods, they had a way of making a request to do something new sound as if it were a personal injury to them.

  “You cannot be serious,” Jude said. “You’re standing on the verge of . . .” He threw up his hands.

  “Of what?”

  “Does it matter?” he said. “Really? Does it? Even if this place is a district in Hell, isn’t that more than you’re ever going to find, here?”

  I was religious enough for his example to give me pause, but I understood and sympathized with the underlying sentiment. It was what I responded to in The Subterraneans’ music in the first place, in so much of the music I liked to listen to, the sense that there was more, to what was outside and to what was inside me. “Let me see,” I said.

  As it turned out, your grandparents raised no objection to my attending the concert. They ran through the standard questions: Where was it? When was it? Who was I going with? Who was this band? All of which I answered to their satisfaction. Their biggest concern was that I understood I would still have to wake up for church the next morning. I said I did. Having cleared this hurdle, my principle dilemma was whether to invite Adrienne – the girl from the track team, with whom I’d been going out for a couple of weeks. On the one hand, I wasn’t sure what I might be exposing her to. On the other hand, she might be angry at not being invited to a concert with me. Yes, my priorities were not what they should have been. I decided to play the tape for her and let her decide for herself. The expression she made when the first note of the first song burst from my car’s speakers told me her decision before the song was done: this was not her kind of music. I could have insisted she listen to the remainder of the cassette, but I was relieved she hadn’t liked the band and didn’t press the issue. It meant I could attend the show with her consent, and without having to worry about her.

  This left Jude and myself to be concerned about. Not only did The Subterraneans’ music continue to form the soundtrack to my life, to the extent that whatever was taking place around me seemed to occur less for its own sake and more as an illustration, however obscure, of the lyrics of the moment, but I experienced a second vision. It occurred while I was lying on my bed, reading for school (Waiting for Godot). The earplug was in my right ear, the cassette nearing its mid-point. Beyond the foot of the bed, where my desk was jammed against the wall, the air darkened, wavered, as if a sheet of black water was descending from the ceiling to the floor. I put down my book and sat up. A figure stepped forward, almost through the water. It was one of the Watch. This close, it was enormous, nearer eight feet than seven, wider than my narrow bed. The beak on the bird mask shone sharp as a scimitar; the glass eyes were black and empty. The mask left uncovered the figure’s mouth and jaw, white as fungus. Its body was hidden by a heavy cape covered with overlapping metal feathers, or maybe they were scales. A long moment passed, during which my heart did not beat, before the figure and its watery aperture faded from view. Once I could see my desk again, my heart began hammering so hard I was afraid I was going to vomit. Jude’s words, “As long as they didn’t see you,” sounded in my ears, temporarily drowning out The Subterraneans. What if the Watch saw you? What if one of its members stood at the foot of your bed and leveled the glass eyes of its mask at you? What did that mean?

  Nothing good, obviously, something Jude confirmed when I called him. I asked him what the SUNY professor had said about the Watch. Not much, it seemed. According to him, the Watch dealt with invaders to the City. Don’t worry, Jude said, I was probably fine. I said I didn’t feel fine. “They’re trying to scare you,” he said.

  “Well, they succeeded,” I said. “I’m thinking maybe we should give the show a miss.”

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “We have to go.”

  “Did you not just hear the story I told you?”

  “What do you think is going to happen if you stay home?” Jude said. “Do you think everything’s going to go back to normal? You are inside the music now. We both are.”

  “And what do you think is going to happen if we go?” I said. “If the music has us, then how will going to its source help us?”

  “Listening to the tape started something,” Jude said. “It isn’t complete. That’s why we’re catching glimpses of the other place, instead of seeing it whole. If we’re in the presence of the actual music, it might finish the process.”

  As far as logic went, Jude’s argument left a lot to be desired. But so did the entire situation. In the end, I decided to attend the concert, after all.

  It may have occurred to you to wonder why I didn’t share any of this with my parents. As your mom and Steve, Liz and I have done with you, throughout my childhood and adolescence, your grandparents routinely assured me that I could always come to them, there was nothing I couldn’t tell them, no matter how bad. I think they meant it, too. The times I had taken them up on their advice, though, had gone less than swimmingly. When I struggled with math or science, your grandfather, who was something of a math prodigy, couldn’t understand how what was in front of me wasn’t perfectly clear, and had trouble finding the words to explain it to me. When I brought home a failing grade, my protests that I had tried my best were dismissed, because if I had tried my best, then I wouldn’t have failed. When I complained of being teased by other kids in school, my parents asked me why I was letting it bother me. From the distance of years – not to mention, the perspective I gained raising you and your little brother – I understand and appreciate that they were doing the best they could, as do most parents. At the time, however, it meant there was no serious chance of me approaching them about what was happening to me. What would I have said? I couldn’t stop listening to this tape? I was seeing tall men dressed as birds?

  So after I signed out at work on Saturday, 21 June, I drove up Route 9 to Poughkeepsie and The Last Chance. The moon hung full and yellow in a violet sky. I knew the club from the concert calendar the DJs at the local rock station read off twice a day. It had achieved notoriety as the place The Police had played on one of their early US tours – it may have been the first – to an audience of half a dozen people. (There was a snowstorm that night, or so the story goes.) I hadn’t been to it, but this was because the bands and singers I wanted to see were playing the Knickerbocker Arena in Albany, or Madison Square Garden to the south. The club reminded me of my high school auditorium, a long, rectangular space overhung by a balcony for about half its length, with a curtained stage at the far end. There was a bar along the back wall, but the fluorescent green band around my wrist restricted me to overpriced Cokes. Underneath where the balcony ended, the floor dropped six inches. A few tables and chairs were positioned around this abbreviated ledge. By the time I arrived, they were occupied by couples in various states of fascinatio
n with one another. Maybe fifteen feet in front of the bar, the sound board was illuminated by its own set of lights. A skinny guy who didn’t look much older than I was stood holding a pair of headphones to his right ear while he slid a lever steadily up a slot in the board. Cigarette smoke clouded the air at the bar, where I stopped for a Coke and to survey the club. I was wearing my work clothes; though I had removed my tie; but I didn’t stick out as much as I had feared. What audience there was appeared slightly older, college age, and were dressed in jeans and casual shirts. It was easier than I’d anticipated to find Jude, who sighted me at the bar and came over to join me. He was wearing a torn Anarchy in the UK T-shirt, camouflage pants, and Doc Martens. His hair stood up like the crest of some tropical bird. I had missed the opening act, he said, but that was no loss. Some guy with long hair whose guitar strings kept breaking; already, Jude had forgotten his name. He guessed the band would be on in another forty-five minutes, maybe an hour.

  We passed what was in fact an hour and a half making small talk. Much of it concerned Lorrie and the other people I’d hung out with in the college parking lot. It was gossip, really. Apparently, Lorrie was seeing a guy who’d been a senior at our school. I recognized his name. He’d been in the drama club. I didn’t know him, but Jude considered him an asshole. “She should’ve stuck with you,” he said. I thanked him, but told him the decision to break up had been mutual. This was a surprise to him. Yes, I said, I was seeing someone new, too, so really, everything had worked out all right. Despite the music playing in my head, everything seemed normal, mundane. We were a couple of friends out to listen to some live music, discussing our mutual friends. The weirdness that had enveloped me for so many weeks seemed far away, dream-like.

  The appearance of The Subterraneans, themselves, bolstered my sense of the ordinary. There were four of them, drummer, keyboardist, guitarist, and lead singer, who strapped on an acoustic guitar which spent the part of the show I saw hanging at his side like a prop. The four of them wore black jeans and plain black T-shirts. Their hair was long, but not so much they couldn’t have worked most day jobs. The curtain parted, and they emerged from backstage nonchalantly, picking their way through the cables on the stage to their respective instruments. Without introduction, they started into their first song.