Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time (26 page)

She was evasive about how she had first met her husband, but she readily discussed her other journeys with him.

I learned that, in her travels, she had conversed with the communal cenobites in India, who followed the model of Mar Awgin, and she had also consulted the aging mystic Helena Blavatsky on theosophy. She’d had meetings with many remarkable men and women abroad, emerging with a sense of the cosmos not so far removed from the rigid, austere faith she’d grown up with. She admired the discipline of our ascetic hermits, but I confessed I found them repellent in their relentless mortification of the body, their denial of their humanity to transcend our petty failings.

Some would say it was an inappropriate gathering, but if you learn from it, how can it be wrong? Our worlds are not some fragile bits of glass that shatter at the encounter with the Other. Our ability to inquire surely defines our humanity; it sets us above hounds and mere rutting beasts of the field, all jaw and genital.

To my delight, she found my curiosity charming and invited me to come back if I had occasion.

One morning, I brought her a selection of fresh fruit from my family’s farm and some uncommon examples from the deeper jungle that I had retrieved with no small effort. Their succulence is an indescribable temptation. I am sure
falang
have never seen such delicacies in their own homelands. It would have been unfitting and inhospitable for me not to introduce her to them during her time among us.

She received them graciously and, as we sat at the table, we conversed of many things, the merits of good and evil, the need for order to triumph over chaos, the journeys of empire and the wisdom of civilization.

“Centuries ago, Ashoka the Great conquered the realm of Kalinga, but he was overcome with sorrow at the lives he destroyed and the karmic weight he had taken upon himself,” I told her, to explain the beliefs of our homeland. “He sought to atone by dispatching holy wise men around the world to teach the
dharma
and the truths of the Buddha.”

As I reflected on the carnage of the
falang
of the last decade, I wondered whom they will send someday. She seemed lost in thought, distracted by something as if I were an insignificant fly. She poured a cup of tea. I could hear clocks ticking around the room. Occasionally, they would chime.

She inquired about my cousin Khampha. “Is he steadfast?”

I smiled. “As long as I have known him, he knows whom to protect and he will do so unfailingly. He has great strength and instincts.”

She seemed pleased to learn she was a perceptive judge of character.

Idly, she revealed her belief in a lost continent of Lemuria, drunk by a pitiless ocean eons ago. They were peopled by mindless-yet-spiritual giants, prone to degeneracy and horrid acts. Madame Guillaume suggested that not all of the Lemurians sank with their homeland in the cataclysm.

In turn, I shared the story of the loathsome Old Ones of Laos, ancient elder things who once terrorized humanity, such as treacherous Raphanasuan, a nefarious giant fiend who devoured mortals, affronting the heavens with his lust and malice. It was clear she found my account as quaint as children’s tales.

There was a commotion one day near Wat Xieng Thong, with many men rushing back and forth, gathering supplies and making frantic preparations, seeking blessings from the monks for their task.

“What is it?” Madame Guillaume inquired. “What has them so excited?” She watched their efforts with intense curiosity. I asked the men and returned to her.

“They are getting ready to hunt a tiger,” I told her. “It has been seen running wild for many months now and it is clear nothing can appease it. It has killed many in the hills and deep forest.”

“A tiger has them so distressed?” she asked, with clear disbelief on her face.

“They do not believe it is an ordinary tiger, but one of the spirits who take the shape of tigers. Sometimes, they appear as a beautiful, bathing woman with long, dark hair, sometimes as a meditating monk by a tree,” I told her. “But they are all dangerous.”

I knew of a time when such a spirit appeared as a baby. They then tore you to pieces when your guard was down. “They use the souls of their victims to give them power. It is dangerous for men to hunt them, because they will eventually be killed and turned into tigers, themselves, by vengeful spirits.”

She laughed dismissively at my account. A
falang
will only believe so much in our nation. They forget their own words about ‘when in Rome’. Perhaps it is better that way.

“How dangerous is it, truly?” she asked. “In the wilderness of your people?”

I knew she wanted a ‘rational’ answer. I did not wish to worry her and, instead, regaled her with tales of gentle creatures and inspired sights that rewarded the patient traveler. “But haste in Laos can be lethal and you cannot take what is on the surface for granted. What is tranquil to the eye can have a storm in the heart,” I conceded. “The most dangerous of all are other humans. A human is hardest of all to be certain of. If Khampha has any weakness, it is that he does not know the ways of others as well as I,” I explained. “Even when he can speak to the villagers in the mountains, he does not understand their beliefs, their customs. He thinks they should just do things as the Lao do and make it easier for themselves.”

“He seems very good with the French,” Madame Guillaume reminded me. “He is very obedient and quick to please us.”

“I suppose that is enough,” I replied.

On another morning, we strolled leisurely through the streets of the city in the early hours, while it was still cool. I deigned to show her the gilded spires and temples we’d erected over the centuries. She thought the elaborate giant serpents on the balustrades of our temples horrific and heathen, but I explained their comforting significance as our guardians in such a world as ours. But to her, the serpent was forever some symbol of paradise lost, a fallen humanity estranged from the divine truth and good words.

The
falang
are curious creatures to me, insistent on the written, as if one’s spoken word is insufficient. They found a thousand ways to complicate time, enchanting our neighbours with trinkets and clockworks in exchange for poppies and silk, a bit of spice and teas. A strange bargain.

What a bleak world they come from.

One afternoon, in the villa, she presented me with a book of poetry by Lautreamont,
Chansons de Maldoror
. I cannot claim to fully appreciate its cryptic fantasies and the misanthropic verse she read to me. But she was enamoured with his language and the florid poems of Baudelaire. I gave her an antique Buddha I had kept from one of my many travels. She told me it would fetch an excellent price in Paris.

It has not always been easy for me to make my way among people. When I was young, and so quickly apprehended the words of strangers, some soon accused me of dark magic and I dared not stay long among the highlanders, whose elders were a grim, suspicious and superstitious lot. When the
falang
arrived and I began to practice their language with ease, many dismissed me as some mere parrot, a mimic incapable of original thought or a sense of history. But I was useful and amusing as a guide. Word spread, little by little.

Madame Guillaume entertained me with the theories of Pasteur and his vaccines, but many who arrived from foreign shores were still unprepared for the pitiless crucible of our tropics. They fell to malaria, dengue fever and other horrific diseases that left them dying, miserable and delirious in our sun.

I came to appreciate Madame Guillaume’s extensive knowledge of
les petites morts
, the little deaths of the world. I shudder to recall them and the way a human screams in their throes. Humanity is filled with many forbidden moments, memories they lock away, lest they be undone by truths, or the writhing chaos that may destroy them and bring total oblivion.

“Your jungles remind us of lost worlds, their raw beauty a reminder of a pure humanity before we tamed nature, shackling her intensity to our mortal, time-bound whims,” she said wistfully, as we stood atop holy Mount Phu Si, watching for some sign of Monsieur Guillaume’s return. For nearly a month, we returned there each sunset. I began to think of the Annamite legend of Nui Vong Phu, a tragic beauty who turned to stone, awaiting her husband’s return from the sea near Lang Son.

There is a Russian writer who said we must not lie to ourselves, because we may come to believe our own lies and be unable to distinguish between the truths in ourselves and the world around us.

I think he is not very far from being a Buddhist.

Time passes strangely in Laos, where the
falang
call us ‘lotus-eaters’, as each day seems little different than the last to them. News travels of melancholy Legionnaires, suicides who’ve fallen to
la cafard
, a peculiar malaise exacerbated by the heat and depression from viewing the vast stretches of jade leaves and peaks of our realm. Monsieur Masie, a French consul in the city, had been among the more prominent men to meet such an end. The
falang
priests called for more faith.

There was a day when I intended to come to the Guillaumes’ villa to discuss the ancient legends that Monsieur Guillaume was so driven to unearth, but Madame Guillaume’s gardener informed me that she had disappeared without a word in the night. There wasn’t a trace, a hint, a single clue that might explain her departure. I asked among the boatmen, the merchants of the morning market. No one had seen her. She had not taken a thing with her, but, as if she were a phantasm, it was as if she had never been here at all. I was questioned, but no one openly accused me of anything. After a few weeks, an official declared she had wandered into the forest and doubtless been devoured by some savage beast, or run afoul of Black Flag bandits. There is no evidence to support any of these explanations.

The servants kept the villa in order for several weeks before they grew bored. With no sense of their masters’ returns, they scavenged what they could and sold the valuables discretely among their compatriots, discarding the rest, particularly the library of the Guillaumes, left in a sad disarray of tattered pages upon the floor. I, too, salvaged what I could.

My recent dreams occasionally figured a strange, howling woman, and images of blood and flight across space like some bird or fiend. But I do not believe there was any message from beyond, any cryptic signal to bring to the fortunetellers of the city.

Months passed and the villa was still abandoned. It was in a state of disrepair from unscrupulous vandals and a rumour of inauspicious spirits pervading the space. Accounts of a ‘presence’ spooked the neighbors, who did their best to ignore the house and move on with their affairs. But there was a night I felt compelled to go. I found the door ajar and heard something rustling within. I entered.

I saw a shadow fumbling, squatting, shifting about, but not wholly panicked. It sensed me and called out, “Who are you?”

“It is only I, Saeng,” I replied. The shadow moved partially into the moonlight. It was a
falang
, with a long, disheveled beard, and I soon realized it was a very changed Monsieur Guillaume. He had a glint in his eyes like some savage creature. But he smiled.

“You know of our journey?”

I answered in the affirmative.

“No one else has returned?”

“No. No one.” It was the truth, turning into a legend here.

“Not even Khampha?”

“Not even my cousin,” I said. “What happened, monsieur?”

“He fled when we needed him most,” the man answered. I asked him to give me a full account.

He shuffled towards a far wall and slumped down before he began. I could still feel his eyes on me. The room was fragrant, like the deep jungle.

“All of my life, they have mistaken me for something I am not,” he began. “They think me a fool; they think me a rogue or some dilettante. Don’t think I don’t hear the whispers in the darkness, the snickering, the chortles and sneers, young man. But I have always sought true wisdom. It is true I traffic in objects for eclectic tastes, for those who could not bear the travails of retrieving their shiny, little baubles themselves. But I always recover the true valuables. Here, around the world. It sustains me.”We are animals. We are meant to sweat and, for millennia, every day was a challenge of life and death for humans. To explore and civilize, in this, we must send those who can still deal with uncertainty and risk, and emerge undaunted. You live in your world of demons and fear, but there is such light to apprehend. You fall so short of what you can be. Of what you can change.”

“Did you find the temple?” I asked, fearing for his sanity.

“The mystery is fundamental, you know. Most people are nothing but zombies – somnambulists stumbling through life in some sad, dreaming haze – but if we can wake up a soul, we have accomplished something. I don’t know if we found the temple we sought. We found a temple – far, far from where Khampha believed we would. Our bearings were lost and the journey was arduous.

“We came, prepared as civilized men. Thirteen of us in all. For the last several kilometers, we’d finally had a breakthrough from clambering over all of that brush and stone. We were following an ancient trail of unknown origin, barely anything at all. The centuries had done a profound job of reclaiming it. What we found had the logic of a human trail, moving with obvious purpose; it was not some meandering animal track. We were heading for a steep ravine.”

It is difficult to describe his breathing. It was as if it no longer came naturally to him. He cocked his head curiously at me, as if to see if I was still listening to him. His voice lowered.

“Khampha told us that the people ascribed death and savagery to forest spirits among these hills. The narrow trail walled us in by brush. All of us noticed that the jungle, always overflowing with the sounds of life, was distressingly silent. There was a presence in the brush that we could not hear or see. It was merely felt. If only you could have seen it. It was all so primordial. This was surely untouched Laos. The leaves were thick on every side, the trees grown close together over centuries. An occasional breeze pushed past us down the remnants of the ancient trail, making the leaves whisper. It was haunting. The stones were slick and we had to be careful with our footing. But at last, there it was before us. It was beautiful. How could the living have left it behind? There, something beyond words.