by T E. D Klein
***
I couldn’t live a week without a private library.
—Lovecraft, 2/25/1929
That’s what I thought, too, until recently. After a lifetime of collecting I’d acquired thousands upon thousands of volumes, never parting with a one; it was this cumbersome private library, in fact, that helped keep me anchored to the same West Side apartment for nearly half a century.
Yet here I sit, with no company save a few gardening manuals and a shelf of antiquated best-sellers—nothing to dream on, nothing I’d want to hold in my hand. Still, I’ve survived here a week, a month, almost a season. The truth is, Howard, you’d be surprised what you can live without. As for the books I’ve left in Manhattan, I just hope someone takes care of them when I’m gone.
But I was by no means so resigned that November when, having successfully reserved seats on an earlier flight, I found myself with less than a week in New York. I spent all my remaining time in the library—the public one on Forty-second Street, with the lions in front and with no book of mine on its shelves. Its two reading rooms were the haunt of men my age and older, retired men with days to fill, poor men just warming their bones; some leafed through newspapers, others dozed in their seats. None of them, I’m sure, shared my sense of urgency: there were things I hoped to find out before I left, things for which Miami would be useless.
I was no stranger to this building. Long ago, during one of Howard’s visits, I had undertaken some genealogical researches here in the hope of finding ancestors more impressive than his, and as a young man I had occasionally attempted to support myself, like the denizens of Gissing’s New Grub Street, by writing articles compiled from the work of others. But by now I was out of practice: how, after all, does one find references to an obscure Southeast Asian tribal myth without reading everything published on that part of the world?
Initially that’s exactly what I tried; I looked through every book I could find with “Malaya” in its title. I read about rainbow gods and phallic altars and something called “the tatai," a sort of unwanted companion; I came across wedding rites and The Death of Thorns and a certain cave inhabited by millions of snails. But I' found no mention of the Tcho-Tcho, and nothing on their gods.
This in itself was surprising. We are living in a day when there are no more secrets, when my twelve-year-old nephew can buy his own grimoire and books with titles like The Encyclopaedia of Ancient and Forbidden Knowledge are remaindered at every discount store. Though my friends from the twenties would have hated to admit it, the notion of stumbling across some moldering old “black book” in the attic of a deserted house—some lexicon of spells and chants and hidden lore—is merely a quaint fantasy. If theNecronomicon actually existed, it would be out in Bantam paperback with a preface by Lin Carter.
It’s appropriate, then, that when I finally came upon a reference to what I sought, it was in that most unromantic of forms, a mimeographed film-script.
“Transcript” would perhaps be closer to the truth, for it was based upon a film shot in 1937 and that was now presumably crumbling in some forgotten vault. I discovered the item inside one of those brown cardboard packets, held together with ribbons, which libraries use to protect books whose bindings have worn away. The book itself, Malay Memories, by a Reverend Morton, had proved a disappointment despite the author’s rather suggestive name. The transcript lay beneath it, apparently slipped there by mistake, but though it appeared unpromising—only ninety-six pages long, badly typed, and held together by a single rusty staple—it more than repaid the reading. There was no title page, nor do I think there’d ever been one; the first page simply identified the film as “Documentary—Malaya Today,” and noted that it had been financed, in part, by a U.S. government grant. The filmmaker or makers were not listed.
I soon saw why the government may have been willing to lend the venture some support, for there were a great many scenes in which the proprietors of rubber plantations expressed the sort of opinions Americans might want to hear. To an unidentified interviewer’s query, “What other signs of prosperity do you see around you?” a planter named Mr. Pierce had obligingly replied, “Why, look at the living standard—better schools for the natives and a new lorry for me. It’s from Detroit, you know. May even have my own rubber in it.”
INT: And how about the Japanese? Are they one of today’s better markets?
PIERCE: Oh, see, they buy our crop al! right, but we don’t really trust ’em, understand? (Smiles) We don’t like ’em half so much as the Yanks.
The final section of the transcript was considerably more interesting, however; it recorded a number of brief scenes that must never have appeared in the finished film. I quote one of them in its entirety:
PLAYROOM, CHURCH SCHOOL—LATE AFTERNOON.
(DELETED)
INT: This Malay youth has sketched a picture of a demon he calls Shoo Goron. (To Boy) I wonder if you can tell me something about the instrument he’s blowing out of. It looks like the Jewish shofar, or ram’s horn. (Again to Boy) That’s all right. No need to be frightened.
BOY: He no blow out. Blow in.
INT: I see—he draws air in through the horn, is that right?
BOY: No horn. Is no horn. (Weeps) Is him.
***
Miami did not produce much of an impression...
—Lovecraft, 7/19/1931
Waiting in the airport lounge with Ellen and her boy, my bags already checked and my seat number assigned, I fell prey to the sort of anxiety that had made me miserable in youth: it was a sense that time was running out; and what caused it now, I think, was the hour that remained before my flight was due to leave. It was too long a time to sit making small talk with Terry, whose mind was patently on other things; yet it was too short to accomplish the task which I’d suddenly realized had been left undone.
But perhaps my nephew would serve. “Terry,” I said, “how’d you like to do me a favor?” He looked up eagerly; I suppose children his age love to be of use. “Remember the building we passed on the way here? The International Arrivals building?”
“Sure,” he said. “Right next door.”
“Yes, but it’s a lot farther away than it looks. Do you think you’d be able to get there and back in the next hour and find something out for me?”
“Sure.” He was already out of his seat.
“It just occurs to me that there’s an Air Malay reservations desk in that building, and I wonder if you could ask someone there—”
My niece interrupted me. “Oh, no he won’t,” she said firmly. “First of all, I won’t have him running across that highway on some silly errand—” she ignored her son’s protests, “—and secondly, I don’t want him involved in this game you’ve got going with Mother.”
The upshot of it was that Ellen went herself, leaving Terry and me to our small talk. She took with her a slip of paper upon which I’d written “Shoo Goron,” a name she regarded with sour skepticism. I wasn’t sure she would return before my departure (Terry, I could see, was growing increasingly uneasy), but she was back before the second boarding call.
“She says you spelled it wrong,” Ellen announced.
“Who’s she?”
“Just one of the flight attendants,” said Ellen. “A young girl, in her early twenties. None of the others were Malayan. At first she didn’t recognize the name, until she read it out loud a few times. Apparently it’s some kind of fish, am I right? Like a suckerfish, only bigger. Anyway, that’s what she said. Her mother used to scare her with it when she was bad.”
Obviously Ellen—or, more likely, the other woman—had misunderstood. “Sort of a bogeyman figure?” I asked. “Well, I suppose that’s possible. But a fish, you say?”
Ellen nodded. “I don’t think she knew that much about it, though. She acted a little embarrassed, in fact. Like I’d asked her something dirty.” From across the room a loudspeaker issued the final call for passengers. Ellen helped me to my feet, still talking. “She said she was just
a Malay, from somewhere on the coast— Malacca? I forget—and that it’s a shame I didn!t drop by three or four months ago, because her summer replacement was part Chocha—Chocho?—something like that.”
The line was growing shorter now. I wished the two of them a safe Thanksgiving and shuffled toward the plane.
Below me the clouds had formed a landscape of rolling hills. I could see every ridge, every washed-out shrub, and in the darker places, the eyes of animals.
Some of the valleys were split by jagged black lines that looked like rivers seen on a map. The water, at least, was real enough: here the cloudbank had cracked and parted, revealing the dark sea beneath.
Throughout the ride I’d been conscious of lost opportunity, a sense that my destination offered a kind of final chance. With Howard gone these forty years I still lived out my life in his shadow; certainly his tales had overshadowed my own. Now I found myself trapped within one of them. Here, miles above the earth, I felt great gods warring; below, the war was already lost.
The very passengers around me seemed participants in a masque: the oily little steward who smelled of something odd; the child who stared and wouldn’t look away; the man asleep beside me, mouth slack, who’d chuckled and handed me a page ripped from his “inflight” magazine: November puzzle page, with an eye staring in astonishment from a swarm of dots. “Connect the dots and see what you’ll be least thankful for this Thanksgiving!” Below it, half buried amid “B’nai B’rith to Host Song Fest” and advertisements for beach clubs, a bit of local color found me in a susceptible mood:
Have Fins, Will Travel
(Courtesy Miami Herald) If your hubby comes home and swears he’s just seen a school of fish walk across the yard, don’t sniff his breath for booze. He may be telling the truth! According to U. of Miami zoologists, catfish will be migrating in record numbers this fall and South Florida residents can expect to see hundreds of the whiskered critters crawling overland, miles from water. Though usually no bigger than your pussycat, most breeds can survive without...
Here the piece came to a ragged end where my companion had torn it from the magazine. He stirred in his sleep, lips moving; I turned and put my head against the window, where the limb of Florida was swinging into view, veined with dozens of canals. The plane shuddered and slid toward it.
Maude was already at the gate, a black porter beside her with an empty cart. While we waited by a hatchway in the basement for my luggage to be disgorged, she told me the sequel to the San Marino incident: the boy’s body found washed up on a distant beach, lungs in mouth and throat. “Inside out,” she said. “Can you imagine? It’s been on the radio all morning. With tapes of some ghastly doctor talking about smoker’s cough and the way people drown. I couldn’t even listen after a while.” The porter heaved my bags onto the cart and we followed him to the taxi stand, Maude using her cane to gesticulate. If I hadn’t seen how aged she’d become I’d have thought the excitement was agreeing with her.
We had the driver make a detour westward along Pompano Canal Road, where we paused at number 311, one of nine shabby green cabins that formed a court round a small and very dirty wading pool; in a cement pot beside the pool drooped a solitary half-dead palm, as if in some travesty of an oasis. This, then, had been Ambrose Mortimer’s final home. My sister was very silent, and I believed her when she said she’d never been here before. Across the street glistened the oily waters of the canal.
The taxi turned east. We passed interminable rows of hotels, motels, condominiums, shopping centers as big as Central Park, souvenir shops with billboards bigger than themselves, baskets of seashells and wriggly plastic auto toys out front. Men and women our age and younger sat on canvas beach chairs in their yards, blinking at the traffic. The sexes had merged; some of the older women were nearly as bald as I was, and men wore clothes the color of coral, lime, and peach. They walked very slowly as they crossed the street or moved along the sidewalk; cars moved almost as slowly, and it was forty minutes before we reached Maude’s house, with its pastel orange shutters and the retired druggist and his wife living upstairs. Here, too, a kind of languor was upon the block, one into which I knew, with just a memory of regret, I would soon be settling. Life was slowing to a halt, and once the taxi had roared away the only things that stirred were the geraniums in Maude’s window box, trembling slightly in a breeze I couldn’t even feel.
A dry spell. Mornings in my sister’s air-conditioned parlor, luncheons with her friends in air-conditioned coffee shops. Inadvertent afternoon naps, from which I’d waken with headaches. Evening walks, to watch the sunsets, the fireflies, the TV screens flashing behind neighbors’ blinds. By night, a few faint cloudy stars; by day, tiny lizards skittering over the hot pavement, or boldly sunning themselves on the flagstones. The smell of oil paints in my sister’s closet, and the insistent buzz of mosquitoes in her garden. Her sundial, a gift from Ellen, with Terry’s message painted on the rim. Lunch at the San Marino and a brief, halfhearted look at the dock in back, now something of a tourist attraction. An afternoon at a branch library in Hialeah, searching through its shelves of travel books, an old man dozing at the table across from me, a child laboriously copying her school report from the encyclopedia. Thanksgiving dinner, with its half-hour’s phone call to Ellen and the boy and the prospect of turkey for the rest of the week. More friends to visit, and another day at the library.
Later, driven by boredom and the ghost of an impulse, I phoned the Barkleigh Hotella in North Miami and booked a room there for two nights. I don’t remember the days I settled for, because that sort of thing no longer had much meaning, but I know it was for midweek; “we’re deep in the season,” the proprietress informed me, and the hotel would be filled each weekend till long past New Year’s.
My sister refused to accompany me out to Culebra Avenue; she saw no attraction in visiting the place once occupied by a fugitive Malaysian, nor did she share my pulp-novel fantasy that, by actually living there myself, I might uncover some clue unknown to police. (“Thanks to the celebrated author of Beyond the Garve ...”) I went alone, by cab, taking with me half a dozen volumes from the branch library. Beyond the reading, I had no other plans.
The Barkleigh was a pink adobe building two stories tall, surmounted by an ancient neon sign on which the dust lay thick in the early afternoon sunlight. Similar establishments lined the block on both sides, each more depressing than the last. There was no elevator here and, as I learned to my disappointment, no rooms available on the first floor; the staircase looked like it was going to be an effort.
In the office downstairs I inquired, as casually as I could, which room the notorious Mr. Djaktu had occupied; I’d hoped, in fact, to be assigned it, or one nearby. But I was doomed to disappointment. The preoccupied little Cuban behind the counter had been hired only six weeks before and claimed to know nothing of the matter; in halting English he explained that the proprietress, a Mrs. Zimmerman, had just left for New Jersey to visit relatives and would not be back till Christmas. Obviously I could forget about gossip.
By this point I was half tempted to cancel my visit, and I confess that what kept me there was not so much a sense of honor as the desire for two days’ separation from Maude, who, having been on her own for nearly a decade, was rather difficult to live with.
I followed the Cuban upstairs, watching my suitcase bump rhythmically against his legs, and was led down the hall to a room facing the rear. The place smelled vaguely of salt air and hair oil; the sagging bed had served many a desperate holiday. A small cement terrace overlooked the yard and a vacant lot behind it, the latter so overgrown with weeds and the grass in the yard so long unmown that it was difficult to tell where one began and the other ended. A clump of palms rose somewhere in the middle of this no-man’s-land, impossibly tall and thin, with only a few stiffened leaves to grace the tops. On the ground below them lay several rotting coconuts.
This was my view the first night when I returned after dining at a nearby restaurant.
I felt unusually tired and soon went inside to sleep. The night being cool, there was no need for the air conditioner; as I lay in the huge bed I could hear people stirring in the adjoining room, the hiss of a bus moving down the avenue, and the rustle of palm leaves in the wind.
I spent part of the next morning composing a letter to Mrs. Zimmerman, to be held for her return. After the long walk to a coffee shop for lunch, I napped. After dinner I did the same. With the TV turned on for company, a garrulous blur at the other side of the room, I went through the pile of books on my night-table, final cullings from the bottom of the travel shelf; most of them hadn’t been taken out since the thirties. I found nothing of interest in any of them, at least upon first inspection, but before turning out the light I noticed that one, the reminiscences of a Colonel E. G. Paterson, was provided with an index. Though I looked in vain for the demon Shoo Goron, I found reference to it under a variant spelling.
The author, no doubt long deceased, had spent most of his life in the Orient. His interest in Southeast Asia was slight, and the passage in question consequently brief:
...Despite the richness and variety of their folklore, however, they have nothing akin to the Malay shugoran, a kind of bogey-man used to frighten naughty children. The traveller hears many conflicting descriptions of it, some bordering on the obscene. [Oran, of course, is Malay for ‘man,’ while shug, which here connotes ‘sniffing’ or ‘questing,’ means literally, ‘elephant’s trunk.’) I well recall the hide which hung over the bar at the Traders’ Club in Singapore, and which, according to tradition, represented the infant of this fabulous creature; its wings were black, like the skin of a Hottentot. Shortly after the War a regimental surgeon was passing through on his way back to Gibraltar and, after due examination, pronounced it the dried-out skin of a rather large catfish. He was never asked back.
