Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft (16 page)

Chandra said, “I am doing my art. You can take it or leave it.” She had stopped her weird music and was clearly about to leave. Larry thought about stopping her physically and then stopped himself, surprised at how far he had changed in less than a week.

She looked at him and responded as though she had read his mind. Probably easy enough to read his face. “You haven’t changed. You’re just noticing how you really are because you heard my music. You are seeing some of the monstrous you that you have learned not to see. But the real world is split further away from your views than you know. If you want the Real, go with what you are beginning to see.”

“What’s your real name?”

“Same as your mom’s, dummy. Hannah. I was born Hannah Maria Nibiru.”

She walked out, and suddenly the real shock of his momma’s death hit him. He crumpled into a chair and cried and forgot his excuse of strange drug trips with mystic musicians.

Somehow in the next hour, he called his sister and the funeral home and booked a flight for tomorrow. He didn’t give a damn about gossip and drove home to his Doublesign apartment.

That night he had the last nightmare.

He was sleeping in his little bed at home. It was cold, he could hear the gas heater turn on and the Santa Fe train in the distance, and so it must have been about ten o’clock when the train rattled through town. Beyond the curtains he could see the Christmas lights at the Casey house, and his room smelled of gingerbread. He could hear Momma crying and he could hear his sister in her tiny bedroom snoring lightly. Sissy had had breathing problems in the old house, and it was always so cold. Momma called out to him, “Where is my little man? Where is Larry? Come help me, Larry. Come help me!”

He sat up and (with the ease that such changes happen in dreams) he was his adult self. “Momma, you don’t need me! You need Sissy!”

“Sissy can’t help me no more. She can’t see me!”

“Momma, she can’t she you because you’re dead! This is a nightmare and I am sorry that I said you’re dead.”

“Baby, baby. That’s one of those fake splits you make. There is no line between Dead Momma and Live Momma and Good Momma and Bad Momma. Now come to me, baby. Don’t you love me anymore? After all I have done?”

So Larry got out of his bed and walked down the hall. In her room, Sissy was sleeping in her childbed, but it was the adult sister and somehow he knew that they slept in this house every night. And Momma would always be in
this
house, where she had been sick and the family had been poor. Not the nice house, not the nursing home.

Momma was saying, “There is no line between Dead Momma and Live Momma and Good Momma and Bad Momma,” and he heard Sissy mutter in her sleep, “Iä! Shub-Niggurath!” Which also made sense. Fear and Love. Guilt and Innocence. Curves and Angles.

At the end of the hall, Larry opened the door to his mother’s bedroom. It stood there in the darkness with a voice coming from the middle of column and the stench of vomit and decay and this time it was holding something squirming, not a Cthulhu plush toy, and Larry knew it was him as a baby. Little Lawrence Derby Ellison, and he could tell by some reflected points of crazy Christmas lights from next door that Momma had too many eyes in the wrong places. “Please look at me, baby, please know.” He could hear Chandra’s melody off in the distance.

Despite his best intentions he reached back and flipped on the light. They say you can’t turn a light on in dreams, but they are wrong. And Lawrence Derby Ellison saw what his mother really looked like and what he looked like and what the world really was. Before he merged with his mother and was born again, he heard the last notes of Chandra’s music, which he realized sounded flute-like.

The next morning, his landlady, who had heard of his mother’s death from her cousin, who was the janitor at James Bowie Junior High, knocked on the door of his apartment. When there was no answer, she opened the door and went in. The coroner later said heart failure, but Irma said she will think of the poor boy’s expression the rest of her days. Some things aren’t meant to be seen.

(
For James Wade
)

We were all sad when Emily inherited her uncle’s place. He was a bad man who expressed his badness in things given. Once he gave the mayor a little ivory whistle. Said it was a duck call. The mayor hunted, we all hunt, but the mayor had the balls to hunt on Ephraim Bishop’s land. So Ephraim tells him, he’ll draw more ducks with the call. It works. The mayor was beside himself. Shooting and eating ducks all the time. His mainly bald head grew shiny with duck fat. It was illegal to hunt that much, of course, but the mayor of Kingsport was above the law. He came to the Lodge many nights, Masonic Lodge 118—one of the oldest in the great state of Massachusetts. Always wanting us to go hunting. We have day jobs, Mr. Mayor. He went out more and more and we’d hear that whistle—didn’t sound a damn thing like a duck—and then blam! Then he started hunting so much, he was never in his office, so he lost the election. But he didn’t care, got grossly fat on ducks—or whatever he was shooting. We wouldn’t see him for days, just hear the whistle. Finally at the Grandmaster’s suggestion we paid a call and his house was smelly with feathers and blood and no Mr. Mayor. We still hear the whistle sometimes at night when there is no moon, we hear the shots sometimes too, and that’s been thirty-five years.

So like I says, we was disappointed that Ephraim had left her the house. It stood on Central Hill and was old enough to have a plaque, but we didn’t give it one. Built by one Edward Crane, who spent most of his days in Europe. After he died in 1723, the house stood vacant until the Bishops bought it in 1758. It had a bad reputation, witchcraft and such. But it didn’t really bother anyone until Ephraim fixed the place up, but I’m getting ahead of myself or beside myself, I wanted to talk about Emily Bishop.

Her father, Ephraim’s brother, was a good banker, regular Mason, and as honorable a fellow as you would want to know. William Bishop was a solid, uninteresting guy; he was unlike his brother Ephraim, who always had a different beautiful woman on his arm and too much cash in his hands. William didn’t drive too flashy a car. He gave to charities and good works and he let his wife drag him to church every Sunday. She was a Southern woman and made him some sort of Baptist. She and Ephraim took a hate to each other at first sight. He sent her a tall blue vase with thirteen white roses in it. We told her not to take any gifts from him, so she had her driver take it back and gifted Ephraim with some book by Billy Graham. We took a liking to her at once. She had met William at Miskatonic University. He had majored in economics and she had taken an MRS degree, if you catch my drift. Her family was dirt-poor. Came from Savannah, Georgia, which is almost as old as Kingsport.

Ephraim’s next volley was to invite brother and missus to the family house. It was one of the oldest structures in Kingsport; some of its thick walls were laid down in 1700. I went to the house as a boy when Ephraim and William were growing up, and after Ephraim’s death and after what happened to poor Emily.

How would I describe it?

Even though the house was not huge, we kept getting lost in it, that day we broke in to see after Emily. The sheriff said it had a labyrinthine structure. His English minor at Miskatonic seems to have stood him in good stead.

Ephraim had begun remodeling the house in the late 1970s. His ancestors had built over a large window that marred the house’s classic lines. For some reason Crane had shaped the top of his home to resemble an octopus head. His claim was that he wished to “frighten the superstitious” and “amuse the fearless.” This had led to rumors of the house being a sort of American version of Francis Dashwood’s Hell Fire Club—with the drinking and the sexing and devil worship, but no dressing up like monks and nuns. Crane was after all an American, although he could apparently stand to be in his house only twice a year, at the ends of October and April. But he did always bring beautiful women on those occasions. For the most part lovely foreigners who were never seen again.

In the center of the octopus’s head was a strange convex lens about seven feet in diameter. It was the color of milk tinged with blood. It should have been a healthy pink, illuminating the naughtiness of Crane’s Black Masses perhaps, but something about the shape suggested a diseased or even blind eye. The first Bishops had certainly done the city a favor by covering the monstrosity. When Ephraim had dislodged the false wall that had covered it, there was talk in the city of having it covered, but Ephraim’s lawyers found an obscure easement that Edward Crane had obtained. It seemed that, because of some rather large fee he had paid, the city would simply mind its own business about his architecture. Ephraim must have put a light in his upper room, which was an oak-paneled library, since the window seemed to glow slightly at night.

Anyway, as I was saying, Ephraim made a big deal of inviting William and what was her name?—Marie—to his home. She was a looker. Ephraim’s cook and his butler put on a great spread; Ephraim talked peace and invited William and Marie to spend the night. Some neighbor found Marie that night wandering among the back alleys at the base of the hill. Poor thing was wearing only a thin nightgown, and the New England winter had harmed her flesh. She had no idea how she got there, and William had somehow slept through the night unaware of his missing wife. We all thought that Ephraim had won that round and that she would be packing her bags for Georgia. However, she proved to be of sterner stuff and not only stayed that terribly harsh winter but also gave William his daughter in July.

Emily—well, Emily was a disappointment from the start. She had been born with extreme curvature of the spine and (it was said) a tail. Her flesh was a waxy white that flushed pink when the baby cried. And she cried almost all the time. William had money, so the nannies and nurses were hired and the series of surgeries began. William was a good man but not a strong man, and a crying and ugly daughter seemed to be a bit much for his nerves. He spent as much time as he could at the Lodge, and many thoughtful hours at the bank and too many hours at a tavern called the White Ship.

One foggy night about two years into Emily’s ill-fated life, something remarkable was seen. The two brothers Ephraim and William began to enjoy each other’s company at the White Ship. They would be heard singing rather disreputable and archaic ballads, consuming heroic quantities of rum, and loudly expressing their borderline fascist politics at the TV. We were curious that Ephraim, who had turned his back on us in high school, had any normal habits like cussing and drinking. Ephraim had intended to be a literary man and had sought out Princeton to learn creative writing. He had always thought we were too common, and Kingsport too provincial.

Rumor had it that Ephraim and his brother had taken up whoring as well. One night, and I heard this from the bartender himself, Ephraim and William had taken a back booth and were irritating other customers with loudly spoken dirty jokes. The bartender had been about to throw them out when they grew hushed. Ephraim had opened a small, long box, the sort that holds necklaces, and was indeed showing his brother a strange rose quartz medallion. As the bartender walked up, Ephraim snapped the case shut and winked at his brother.

The strange medallion was seen soon after—around the throat of nineteen-year-old Suzie Reiman, the achingly beautiful daughter of the bank president. After her mother’s death when she was twelve, Suzie had been the apple of Albert’s eye. William lacked the discretion even to try and keep the affair secret. Even the gossip column of the
Kingsport Chronicle
made remarks much more transparent than Ephraim’s freaky window. Albert Reiman tried shipping his daughter off to Milan “to study art.” Suzie responded in great Gothic fashion and attempted to cut off her head with an electric carving knife, which heretofore had only been useful in mangling Thanksgiving turkeys.

William had lost his position at the bank and fell to drink. His brother seemed to have deserted him. William stopped his patronage of the White Ship, a rather well-known Kingsport landmark, and instead began drinking boilermakers at Pete’s. Marie struggled to keep her head up. But as money played out and her employment solution as an aide at Kinder Kare failed to pay for Emily’s needs, she divorced William and headed toward warmer climes.

William’s demise was without drama although not without pathos. One drunken night he declared to the patrons of Pete’s that he knew something. He stumbled out into the dark snow at closing time. The next morning when his car was found on Pete’s lot the police were called. They found him frozen in the same alley Marie had turned up in seven years before.

Ephraim paid for a fabulous funeral. He sat alone stroking the rose quartz amulet that had last been Suzie’s. Rumor had it that she had been buried with it, but I think that was an exaggeration. People loved to do that with Ephraim.

After that day we never saw Ephraim. He paid his cook and his butler well. They weren’t the sort to talk about anything; they weren’t even New Englanders. He had female visitors from time to time, usually at the end of October and April; you can imagine the sort of rumors that started. We all watched the rose window those nights. Sometimes there appeared to be flashes of light within as though some sort of signaling were taking place, but most of the time there was simply that murky opalescence that made you think if you just kept watching something would be seen. I confess to have bought a pair of binoculars to gaze upon its eldritch surface.

Then Emily was sighted. She was in college in Arkham. She had been reshaped by who knows how many surgeries. Her head was as upright as her mother’s, no longer permanently cocked as though listening to a secret. Her skin had a much healthier hue. She was not what you would call a pretty woman, but she was not the ugly crying child that had driven her weak father away. We hoped that she would come to town, but if she did what could we say to her? “You sure don’t look as ugly as you used to. How does your poor mama send you to a fancy school? Why this one?” So although it would have eased our curiosities, it may be better that she didn’t run into us.