by Rick Dakan
“Lucky you’re married to a rich and successful lawyer then,” I said, repeating a minor jibe I’d given Conrad a thousand times.
“Better than being married to a keyboard,” Conrad replied, using one of his standard ripostes that I’d also heard a thousand times. “So, are you gonna go see him in the park?”
“Of course. I’m dying to know what the hell he’s been up to.”
“Call me as soon as you’re finished. I want to know every detail.”
“Naturally,” I said. “Same to you.”
“What about that Lovecraft thing he asked you about?” Conrad asked. “Do you remember anything besides what you learned from playing the Call of Cthulhu game in high school?” Conrad had been part of our gaming group with Greg and Paul way back when, along with Shelby.
“I don’t remember much, but I’m going to brush up on it before I see him on Friday.”
“Well then, I’ll know where to find you for the next forty-eight hours. In front of your computer looking up every Lovecraft reference you can find online.”
“That sounds about right,” I admitted.
“Won’t your anarchist subjects be jealous?” Conrad teased, no doubt suspecting I was behind on my book.
“Probably, but I’ll just have Cthulhu eat them if they get too tiresome.”
I hadn’t read any H.P. Lovecraft in years and years. A horror writer from the 1920s, Lovecraft hadn’t had much success in his day, but in the decades since, he’d developed quite a cult following among horror and sci-fi fans. I’d first been exposed to his stuff when I was in middle school and bought some lead miniatures from Grenadier Games based on monsters from Lovecraft’s stories. They were so unlike the standard Dungeons & Dragons monsters I was used to, I purchased them not even knowing what game they went with. Inside was a flier for something called The Call of Cthulhu, which I convinced my parents to let me order a copy of by mail. When the box finally came six to eight weeks later I showed it to my folks, and my dad surprised me by recognizing the name Lovecraft.
As it turned out, my father had a friend who had turned him on to Lovecraft when they were in law school together. He took me to the downstairs closet where my parents kept all their old paperback books (our house had bookshelves everywhere when I was a kid — a whole family of big readers) and pulled out four slim, yellowed paperbacks, stuffed in there between old John Le Carre and my mom’s massive collection of Nero Wolfe mysteries. The one on top was one of the more startling images I’d ever seen on the cover of a book — a close-up photograph of a human skull showing just the area around one eye socket. Next to the empty nasal cavity and surrounded by bleached white bone was what looked to be a real, living blue eye. In retrospect I know it must’ve been a glass eye, but at the time I remember being startled and even somewhat horrified at the picture, the eye looked so realistic. Underneath the ocular horror, in lurid green and yellow letters, was the book’s title: The Tomb by H.P. Lovecraft. I took that book and the others to my room and put them aside for a time, more interested in the brand-new game that had just arrived.
The game The Call of Cthulhu tried to capture the essence of Lovecraft’s horror stories, particularly those that revolved around a pantheon of aliens, demons, and ancient gods known as the Cthulhu Mythos. With their tentacled, alien, sometimes shapeless forms and utterly inhuman psychology and motives, the monsters of the Cthulhu Mythos were to be feared more than fought, fled from rather than confronted. The game’s scenarios revolved around solving mysteries, unraveling secrets, and slowly (or sometimes quickly) going insane rather than searching dungeons and acquiring treasure. It offered a much more intense and compelling setting for role-playing and, again, the monsters were just so damn cool. Call of Cthulhu (or CoC as we came to call it) soon became the dominant RPG my friends and I played for several years of our gaming time before we moved on to other games like TORG and Rolemaster and eventually went our separate ways to college. I hadn’t given Lovecraft much thought since then, although I’d run across fans and films and books inspired by his work more and more in recent years. The old pulp horror writer seemed to be making a comeback.
As for the yellowed, brittle paperbacks my father had given me, I never read very many of Lovecraft’s actual stories. They were too dense, too wordy, too strange for my teenage sensibilities. I read a few of the more famous tales, and enjoyed them most when the wild, tentacled monsters I knew from the game appeared in them. Lovecraft’s language piled on the atmosphere and detail in a way that I have only later come to appreciate for its brilliance and evocativeness, but at the time I was more moved by the defining statistics and detailed illustrations in the game books than I was by the actual source material. Perhaps it was just too difficult for a happy, middle-class kid from a Florida beach town to really envision the decrepit New England communities that Lovecraft presented as the scenes for much of his horror. Or maybe it was just that I’d not yet experienced anything frightening and beyond my comprehension and lacked the imagination to really let my mind boggle at the terrible perspective on existence that Lovecraft’s horror presented. I became an expert in the Cthulhu Mythos without having actually read very much of the creator’s own work.
Returning to Lovecraft now, two decades later, I turned to Google for starters. “HP Lovecraft” produced one and a half million hits. So yes, there were some people out there paying attention to him. I started right at the top, with hplovecraft.com, which proved to be a thoughtful, well-put-together but simple site maintained by a combination of fans and actual Lovecraft scholars. Links from that site sent me out to others, including one for the old Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, which was not only still in print but seemed to be going strong and publishing new material. There were links to other fan sites like Yog-Sothoth.com and The Esoteric Order of Dagon Web site and even to a rock band that performed music inspired by Lovecraft. I flew through the links, bookmarking site after site so I could go back and look at them later if I wanted. The fan and even scholarly attention that people paid to Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos in general struck me as surprising. Was Lovecraft really that good? I’d have to go back and check again.
What surprised me more was the amount of kitsch and humorous material that had grown up around one of Lovecraft’s most famous creations: Cthulhu himself. The great god Cthulhu is a building-sized monster with a squid-like head, dragon wings, and a blubbery, bipedal form. He’s the tentacled face of the Cthulhu Mythos and as such has gotten a lot of attention. In addition to Cthulhu toys and miniatures, there were also stuffed animals for the kids, fuzzy slippers, Christmas tree ornaments, and even a NASCAR-inspired Cthulhu 500 racing game. Whatever mystery and horror the monster Lovecraft envisioned might once have possessed seemed more than a little diminished by this transition from dread elder god to nerd pop-culture icon. I had a few laughs at some of the jokes, but my interest soon began to wane and I wondered what made Shelby so interested in Lovecraft and Cthulhu after all these years.
Arlington Park is a sprawling, neighborhood recreational area in the middle of town, not too far from the old site of Pine View School for the Gifted where Shelby, Conrad, and I had all met. The duck pond, once the site of an epic capture-the-flag game in my youth, was much as I remembered it — a grass-framed, ovoid body of water about twenty yards long with a wooden bridge dividing it across the middle. I took a seat on one of the benches nearby and waited for Shelby, the hot Florida sun beating down on my clean-shaven head. I seldom spend much time hanging about in parks at midday and was thinking that I really should have brought a hat or some sunscreen. I was going to get a sunburn if he didn’t show up soon.
I had a view of both paths coming into the open area around the duck pond, so I was surprised when two firm hands gripped my shoulders from behind. Startled, I instinctively shrugged away from the grasp and turned to see Shelby standing behind me. He’d cut his long hair and dyed it black, so it took me an extra half-second to recognize him. I stood up with a smile on my face
and hugged him, saying, “Hey, man! Great to see you.” We embraced and I could tell that in addition to the haircut he had bulked up some, putting on a little weight and a lot of muscle. He wore a black T-shirt and jeans with paint-splattered work boots.
“It’s good to see you too, Rick,” Shelby said. “It’s been a while.”
I motioned towards the bench. “Do you wanna have a seat?”
“Let’s try the nature path through the woods. Get out of the harsh light of the sun and away from prying eyes,” Shelby suggested, and we started walking down the asphalt path toward the woods.
“So,” I said, walking a little faster than my normal pace in order to keep up with Shelby’s long, relaxed strides. “Tell me what’s going on. Conrad said you’re living with someone.”
He smiled, a genuine, Shelby’s-happy-about-something smile that spread across his whole face. “More than one someone. But you mean Kym. Yes, she’s very special. Our bond is strong and we’ve tied our fates to one another.”
“Is that some hippie way of saying you’re married?” I asked, excited.
“No. It’s just the truth. Our fates are now tied to one another. It’s a good thing that we like spending time together because we don’t have much choice in the matter anymore.”
“She’s pregnant?” I asked, not surprised that Shelby’s amorous ways had caught up with him.
“I hope not. No, nothing like that. It’s… ” He rocked his head side to side, as if weighing word choices. “It’s complicated. Let’s leave it at that for the moment.”
“OK.” This evasiveness didn’t faze me. It was Shelby being Shelby and I’d grown used to it, especially when it came to matters of his love life. In high school he’d been the first of us to start dating but he’d never spoken much about the details of his many and varied girlfriends. He mostly dated outside of our small school set, and no one girl ever seemed to be around for more than a few weeks. It was a trend that continued into adulthood. Shelby always seemed to have a woman at his side when he wanted one (or two, or three), but he never stayed with anyone for very long. It was about time he finally found someone to settle down with, I thought.
As we walked into the cool shade beneath the trees I brought him up to date on my latest writing projects. He seemed particularly interested in the anarchist intentional community in rural Virginia where I’d spent a week during my researches, and asked a number of questions about how they were organized and what legal arrangements they’d made when forming the commune.
“Sounds like it’ll be an interesting book,” Shelby said after I’d answered all his questions.
“I think so, and hopefully the handful of people who’ll actually read it will think so as well. I just want to finish writing the damned thing at this point. But enough of my wacky anarchist stuff, what’re you doing for a living these days?”
“I’ve been doing a lot of research on my own as a matter of fact,” he said.
“Going to write a book?”
“Perhaps at some point, but that’s not my main goal. No. I’ve been searching for meaning in life.”
I laughed. “Aren’t we all. How’s your search going?”
“Good.”
“Did you find any?”
“Nope.”
“But the search is going well?”
Shelby smiled. “The search is done. I found no meaning.”
“That’s rather nihilistic isn’t it? Have you been reading Sartre again?”
“Lovecraft,” he answered his voice deep and serious.
I stared at him a moment and then laughed. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Your quest for meaning ended with a pulp horror writer from the 1920s?”
Shelby stopped walking and turned to face me. “He was a brilliant man,” he said, his tone now serious, like a lecturer addressing his classroom. “A prophet in many ways, although he would never have thought of himself in such terms. But a prophet I think he was. He saw the world… the universe… for what it is. He understood our place in it. His writings reveal more horrible truths about existence than he would ever have admitted, even to himself.”
“You found all that in the Cthulhu stories?”
“Not just the fiction. The letters as well. Lovecraft was a ferocious correspondent — he wrote hundreds of thousands of letters, many of which contain some of his most powerful insights.”
“Huh. That’s a lot of letters,” I said, a little snark in my tone.
“He had a lot to say.”
“I guess so. What turned you on to Lovecraft again after all these years?”
“After all these years?” he asked.
“You know, since we used to play the Call of Cthulhu RPG back in the day.”
“You may not remember, but I didn’t actually get to play role-playing games with you at the time you guys were into CoC. I think you’d given up on it by the time I got my car.” He smiled now, but back in our early teens, I remembered how frustrated he was by the restrictions his family placed on him.
Shelby’s mom was young when she had him, and she was cool. If it had been up to her, Shelby probably could’ve done whatever he wanted to as a kid. But it really wasn’t up to her. His dad was only a fixture in his life during summer vacations in Connecticut; Shelby and his mom lived under the aegis and domination of his maternal grandparents. They had rather strict views about what was and what wasn’t appropriate for a young man to do. In retrospect I can see now that, for the most part, their decisions were for the best. Shelby needed some sort of discipline in his life. For whatever reason, Shelby’s grandmother had gotten the idea into her head that Dungeons & Dragons would turn him into a devil worshiper and strictly forbade it. Shelby blamed it on a story Sixty Minutes did. Once she learned that we were playing it during sleepovers on weekends, she didn’t allow Shelby to come over to any of our houses anymore. He could date, he could go to the beach, he could go to school dances, we could all go to the mall, but no sleepovers with D&D (and, of course, no drinking, drugs, sex, or any of the other things forbidden to teens everywhere).
Shelby managed to find ways around most of the restrictions they laid on him, but since most of our gaming took place over a Saturday night in Greg’s rec room, he had to live with us retelling our role-played tales over lunch during the school week. And I can say in all honesty he found that just about as interesting as it sounds. When he finally did have some freedom with his own car, he started playing with us on occasion, but it was always sporadic, something to do when he didn’t want to go on a date some Saturday evening.
“I came across Lovecraft’s writings in the dark times after I left town,” said Shelby. “And I’m telling you, it was a dark time. He was just what I was in the mood for — thick, weird, ropey writing that wraps around your brain and seeps into your pores. I’m not ashamed to admit that I was pretty depressed after that mess. And you know me. Faced with a challenge I dive into it headfirst and try and fight my way through it. So I decided to read the most depressing shit I could find, thinking it would put my life in perspective.” Although the description of himself as someone who faces troubles head-on didn’t match the Shelby I knew, his decision to treat depression with more depression sounded exactly like him. Sort of like drinking his way out of a hangover or fucking his way out of girl troubles.
“And Lovecraft’s writings reward greater and greater attention. I was pissed at this town and what had happened to me. I’d been given the shaft, you know? But I came to realize that it’s just humanity’s nature to react that way to things that make them uncomfortable. To bury their heads in the sand when faced with the enormity of the universe and our fleeting place in it. This town couldn’t help reacting to me the way it did. It’s in its DNA, and I should have expected it.”
“So why did you come back?” I asked.
Almost as if he’d been waiting for the question, the answer rolled off his tongue with rehearsed ease. “A person strongly reflects his sur
roundings and does best in founding his elements of incident and color on a life background to which he has a real and deep seated relation.” Shelby smiled. “Lovecraft said that about Providence, and for me it’s true about Sarasota: the soil and the air are in my blood and cell structure. If I’m going to make my mark on the universe anywhere it will be here, in sleepy, conservative Sarasota. I’ll shock the town into consciousness and the cry this city makes upon finally awakening from its stupor will be heard around the world.”
I just stared at him for a moment. I had the conversational equivalent of whiplash. It was like someone else had taken over Shelby’s body for that speech. “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.
“What we want we may make about us; and what we don’t want we may sweep away,” came his reply, as if that somehow answered my question.
“Another Lovecraft quote?” I asked, trying to catch up with whatever he was talking about. “Is this the kind of stuff that you’ve found meaning in?”
“That last bit was from the short story ‘He.’ One I like a lot actually, although it’s not so popular as the Mythos stories.” Shelby smiled. “And the bit before about a person reflecting his surroundings is from a letter Lovecraft wrote to a young admirer of his, Donald Wandrei. But there’s another quote from ‘He’ that’s been my particular inspiration lately: ‘I thought of the emptiness and horror of reality, and boldly prepared to follow withersoever I might be led.’ That pretty much sums up my philosophy on life’s journey these days.”
“Dark stuff,” I said, and it was. Shelby didn’t seem depressed at all, but I was now suspicious of his unique technique for treating depression with more depression. “Is everything OK?”
“Never been better. Although there are more than a few challenges ahead. Speaking of which, I need your help with something. You have an eBay account, right?”
“Sure,” I said. “I don’t use it much, but I have one. Why?”
