Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft (23 page)

A posterboard Christmas tree from Barlow’s far-off youth in Florida hung in the room marking the season. Its green had faded; its lights and ornaments had grown dim.

“I make them for books of the dead,” said Burroughs.

“But they deal with the extreme past, not some future state,” objected Miss Jimenez.

“Exactly,” said Burroughs. “If reincarnation is a fact, you want to orient yourself toward the future. You do that by looking backward to before death. Not just your last death, but a time before death. Before the ball games and the biological courts. That’s why the codices stretch back four hundred million years.”

“But that amount of time can’t have any meaning,” said Bill Peabody.

“Why does time have to be ‘meaningful’?” asked Guy Smith. “Does ‘In the beginning’ have any meaning?”

Professor Barlow smiled. “Now you’re beginning to think mythically. You have to drop your Western thinking if you want the Mayan world to open to you.”

Smith, Burroughs, and Carsons smiled. The rest of the class looked angry. Maybe angry at having Western rationality spurned, but some were angry that the professor favored the queers. Well, there was a rumor at least.

A bell rang and students ran from class.

“Feliz Navidad!” yelled Barlow. “Remember to get your reading done over the holidays!”

Carsons, Smith, and Burroughs remained. Barlow looked at them quizzically. He avoided the gay ex-pat community. It would be professional death. But he liked Burroughs. Burroughs was a writer, unpublished of course, but he had the kind of mind that focuses on anything without flinching. When details about Mayan or Aztec religion came up that made the other students shudder, Burroughs merely looked thoughtful. Barlow couldn’t help but think about Burroughs’s ideas of pre-death as reflecting the sort of thing that Lovecraft had written about. Of course, real anthropology wasn’t based on subjectivity. He had thought of sharing his prize, Lovecraft’s handwritten ms. of “The Shadow out of Time,” with Burroughs, but the sexuality question bothered him. It had been so painful when he had confessed to Lovecraft during the last visit. And there had been—well—mistakes with students.

Audrey Carsons asked him, “Dr. Barlow, you seem to hint at things sometimes. We’re interested in the real secrets.”

“There are no secrets, Mr. Carsons, only speculations.”

Burroughs said, “My uncle Ivy made millions on speculations. Speculations just mean you got there first. Poison Ivy they called him.”

“Speculations are a more guarded for a scholar than a Wall Street type, I’m afraid. What speculations are interested in?”

“We want to know about Death. Ah Pook and Zushakon. We want to know about Ix Tab or Yig Tab, the serpent goddess in charge of snares—catching a soul in her coils for its next reincarnation.”

“Those names don’t appear in the official codices,” began Barlow.

“We’re not interested in the well-thought-of translations,” said Guy Smith. “We’re interested in the ones that Work.”

“You’re talking about magic,” said Barlow. His other vice, one that Lovecraft thought terrible. A vice that had to be hidden from the scholarly world.

“Yes, that could be a word for the technology we’re looking for,” said Burroughs.

“I won’t discuss anything like that on campus. Maybe you could drop by my apartment over break. There is another codex, one that has a problematic history that talks about the ideas you are interested in. Of course, I’d have to swear you to secrecy.”

“Of course,” said Burroughs. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

He regretted inviting them. Barlow felt it was a set-up. But who’s conning whom? Two years ago he happened across a small bookshop in Tlatilolco, a weird neighborhood for a bookshop. It was stuck between a barber’s shop and a taquería—it had books overflowing its ancient shelves. Mainly modern novels in English, French, and Spanish—random volumes from encyclopedias, books brought into the city by tourists, cheap occult books on palmistry and the lore of the tarot—in short, junk. Barlow had been about to leave when the shopkeeper, a well-dressed woman in her thirties, asked if he needed help finding anything. Her English had almost no accent, her skin tone was very light.

“No, I don’think you would have what I am interested in.”

“Señor, we do have what you are interested in, that I know. My uncle’s shop is a trifle unorganized.”

At that moment he spotted a fading copy of the June 1936 copy of
Astounding Stories
with Lovecraft’s “The Shadow out of Time” providing the (inaccurate) cover illustration. The Great Race of Yith (as faded as his Christmas tree) menaced a well-dressed white man. Barlow broke into a big smile and picked up the magazine, which lay atop a stack of books. Beneath it was the
Codex Catamaco.
The word “Codex” was a magnet to his iron. He snatched up the thin, light-brown, leather-covered book. The frontmatter had been torn away. It looked as if the book had originally about a hundred pages. The paper quality was poor, rough, and brown. It had probably been printed during the war. The last seventy pages were a Mayan codex with
interlinear English translation.
Like most scholars, Barlow assumed that the language would someday be deciphered, but certainly nothing like this level of translation existed. The book’s backmatter was mainly in place—including an index that included topics that were well known to any Mayaologist—and others of a more tantalizing nature such Charles Hinton, the mathematician who had done significant work on the fourth dimension. Of course, all such rogue references were conveniently pointing to the missing pages in the front. But if the volume were a hoax or a joke, it had been an expensive one—buying the type for the Mayan ideographs had cost a pretty penny. Trying not to look overly excited, he asked the book’s price. The young woman looked over its condition and told him simply to take it—her store didn’t sell damaged goods. He picked up a copy of Norman Mailer’s 1948 bestseller
The Naked and the Dead,
no doubt brought in as summer reading by a tourist, and paid a few pesos for it. It seemed wrong not to leave something.

Barlow had almost run home with the book. He came back the next day. He had expected the shop to vanish, or the “uncle” to be some seedy character from a Lovecraft story. He was a middle-aged businessman fond of Mark Twain with no idea from whom he had bought the codex. He tried to get Barlow to buy some books on palmistry. The shop lasted another year and either closed or moved.

The remaining book was in four parts. The first was the tale of the arrival of the death-god Ah Pook on Earth via comet 400,000,000 years ago. He fell in the northern polar regions where he fought two other death-gods, Kisin and Zushakon. The three divided deaths on this world. Ah Pook taught humans how to die in order to be reborn with their memories more or less intact. They had to be careful not to remember their deaths, or they would die again. Zushakon, a centipede god that lived in a lightless world, collected criminals—evil beings that were sacrificed to him in a grisly manner—whose souls he would use as a sort of garment. The text gave a dubious translation of Zushakon as the “Ugly Spirit.” Kisin was less picky. He/It simply fed on death and rot of all sorts. The three gods fought for over a million years, calling on the aid of other beings from exploded stars.

The second part dealt with the creation of humans and other races—the Insect People, the Vegetable People, the Fungus People, the Hairy People, and finally humans—by the death-gods as sources of food or “vessels” for their servants/allies. Each of these groups were given various worlds or planes of existence, but they could trade certain gems, drugs, and metals with one another—if they paid a high tax to the death-gods. Barlow had never read any mythological speculation of this sort; frankly, the “gods” were being treated as a sort of space alien. It certainly reminded him more of Lovecraft’s fiction than true mythology. Humans should love or fear their gods, but not be nihilistic toward them. He read with a start that the Fungi People had been given an extra-cold planet to live on. This was too close to Lovecraft. Why had that copy of
Astounding
been lying conveniently atop the pile of books? But that wouldn’t have meaning for anyone other than him in Mexico City. The effort to place it in a bookstore in a neighborhood that he had visited perhaps twice, and hope that he would spot the magazine
and
pick up the doctored book beneath, required millions-to-one odds.

The third part of the book was similar to the
Tibetan Book of the Dead.
It explained death as a long journey begun at the invitation of one of the death-gods. It was a hazardous journey, where every mistake you had made in your life counted against you. The three gods were going to try and trick you, but if you slipped past them you were out of “time” and in eternity. Ix Tab, goddess of snares and hanging, tried to trick you by inverting future and past. You might be cagey enough to avoid two fornicating peasants thinking that as the road to be born as a peasant, but you could touch a rotting dog’s body and be sucked into the corpse to live the dog’s life in reverse. On one of the glyphs “Ix” was translated “Yig.” Now that had to be either a hoax or the biggest coincidence ever, because Lovecraft had made up that name as a god for one of his revision clients.

The fourth part of the book was about control, both magical and political. The Mayans used (and still use) a slash-and-burn system of agriculture. If you wait too long to burn the shoots, rains will make them too damp to burn. If you plant too early, drought can ruin your crops; if you plant too late, the big downfall could wash away your seeds. A few days either way and a year’s crop is lost. So the priests are given great control calendars—this way they will seem to be gods. The priests are instructed to have a continuous circle of festivals so that the population never learns how to read the signs of the year; thus they need the priests—that is probably why there is no number higher than twenty in spoken Maya today. After this
realpolitik
came a time-travel spell that enabled the priests to go back in time and make contact with the death-gods.

Barlow was ashamed of it, but he wanted to
try.
He had two questions for Lovecraft. One was about the real source of the
Necronomicon.
The other had been about boys—about sex with boys. Both answers had been disappointing.

Now Burroughs and his friends had mentioned Zushakon, a name not attested in the three “official” codices
.
Likewise (and more suspiciously) “Yig.” He knew Burroughs was an heir to the Burroughs adding machine company. He might have resources that could produce the book—but how could he have got it to Mexico in 1948?

Burroughs was a weird cat. He claimed to know another writer, Jack Kerouac, whose
The Town and the City
came out last year. Burroughs even said one of the characters in the book was based on him (Will Dennison). He had a wife, Joan—another book character for Kerouac, Mary Dennison—who was strung out on speed to contrast Burroughs’s fondness for opium products. Mexico was good for Americans with a monkey; even one of Barlow’s fellow teachers kept powdered codeine in a box of bicarbonate of soda and would add spoonfuls of it to his tea at staff meetings.

Barlow hadn’t been able to find out anything about Guy Smith or Audrey Carsons. They were young beautiful wild boys—they had Midwestern accents as well. All three seemed to be remittance men. Barlow had decided that he would spill the beans on the codex caper.

His apartment was huge. He had two sitting rooms, kitchen, full bath, and a large bedroom. He showed Burroughs and the boys into the inner sitting room, which served as a library. They were book people all right. Burroughs picked up and glanced at several anthropological texts as well as his collection of William Hope Hodgson and Arthur Machen. Barlow offered them Mexican hot chocolate and sweet tortillas. Small talk was engaged in largely until twilight fell. The boys had come at tea time.

“So, Professor, what can you tell us about Zushakon?” asked Guy Smith.

“He was a centipede god living in a dark realm beneath the earth—probably somewhere in the United States,” he added with a smile.

“America is an old and evil land,” said Burroughs. “There was serious shit there before the Indians came.”

Barlow continued. “When the priests convicted someone of a serious crime, they said the Ugly Spirit had chosen him. They didn’t want to piss off the Ugly Spirit, so they treated the criminal real courteously—until his execution. Then they would heat a copper centipede shell as long as the miscreant was tall. As they heated the shell, they skinned the criminal alive and then forced him into the shell, now glowing cherry-red. As he died great bells were rung that had a special property—probably due to infrasound—that made the room suddenly become black. When the anomalous darkness vanished, it was always found that the victim’s body was gone from the shell.”

At this point loud knocking came from Barlow’s outer door. He rose and, after closing the door to his library, answered the door.

Burroughs and the two boys could hear much of what went on.

On the other side a drunken male voice, high with anger, kept denouncing Barlow for “having made him this way” and saying he would “tell the dean” and be sure Barlow was “ridden out of town on a rail.”

The ranting became repetitive, so Burroughs began telling his friends about Bishop Landau, who had burned all the Mayan codices to kill their civilization. Burroughs said four codices escaped the fire. The whereabouts of three of them are known—Paris, Dresden, Madrid. The angry voice became more incoherent and Audrey Carsons said perhaps they should intervene. Burroughs said no. It sounded like a lovers’ spat.

The front door slammed. There were five minutes of pure silence, then Barlow appeared at the door. His face was white as the chalk he taught with.

He walked in and slumped down in a large rattan chair.