LIFE'S
A BITCH – AND THEN YOU DIE
I
didn't remember much of the accident... the sudden smashing metal and
glass sound of the impact, somewhere behind me, and I'd have thought
it was someone else's car except that I was suddenly slammed
backwards into my seat with a rattling thump while my old Chevy was
shoved forward and outward, towards the shoulder of the road, and I
saw the rusty metal guardrail filling the right side of the
windshield and the passenger side window and then –
--
a long hallway. Dark, but there was an open door at the end and a
bright light shining out of it, and me hurrying up the hall, jogging,
running, sprinting, except I wasn't breathing hard and can't remember
now the feel of my feet hitting the floor, my arms pumping, sweat on
my forehead –
But
I reached the doorway and stepped through it, and... here I was...
all
stories copyright 2019 D.A. Madigan
A
Bentley Book
For
John Auber Armstrong
“But
the war's still going on, dear
and
there's no end I can see
And
I can see forever...”
one
damned
thing
after
another
&
OTHER TALES OF LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR
D.A.
MADIGAN
Introduction
– Eldritch Musings 1
The
Webbing Between The Worlds 11
Good
Cop, Bad Cop 85
Filters 111
The
Cubicle Beyond Time And Space 125
The
Night They Drove Cro Magnon Down 130
The
Darkness Between The Stars 143
The
Final Incantation 175
The
White House Cylinders 216
Fish
Out of Water 239
The
Fifth Season 286
One
Damned Thing After Another 318
Lovely,
Dark and Deep 333
Which
Can Eternal Lie 342
Charlie
In The Box 354
Pop
Up 384
ELDRITCH MUSINGS
I
admit it – I came to Lovecraft relatively late in life.
I
first read “The Color Out of Space” when I was a 19 year old
college student at Syracuse University. At that time, all
Lovecraft's work had been reissued in a series of paperbacks with
stunning Michael Whelan covers that you couldn't help but come across
in any chain bookstore's SF/FANTASY section.
Strangely,
given the stuff's prevalence – I mean, some publisher must have
thought it would sell, right? -- I didn't know many people who
actually read Lovecraft. I mean, all my acquaintances read sci fi
and fantasy, we all had extensive personal libraries, but there
seemed to be a universal distaste for Lovecraft that, looking back on
it now, I still don't understand. I can remember a vague feeling
that his work was 'really old' – much the same feeling I still have
towards Poe – and perhaps it was this sense of antiquity and
obsolescence that fueled the general lack of enthusiasm for his work
that pervaded in the geek/nerd circles I ran in back then.
I
did know one guy who loved Lovecraft, though... to the extent that I
could never get this guy to read any Colin Wilson, because, he said,
Wilson had pretty savagely ripped Lovecraft in some review, and this
my buddy could never forgive. It was this same buddy, Dick Pero, who
loaned me a much older hardcover anthology of Lovecraft's stories,
and it was within the pages of that lovingly worn collection that I
first discovered “The Color Out of Space”.
I
was impressed, on that first reading, by the palpable aura of
disquiet and unease that permeated the story... that creeping sense
of nervousness that increases by steady increments into dread and
then goes straight into full fledged terror, not because there are
monsters leaping out of basements and dragging screaming victims off
to be tortured and devoured, but because... things just... aren't...
right.
Still,
at the time, it didn't hook me. When I gave the book back to Dick he
was clearly disappointed when I told him, yeah, I'd read “The Color
Out of Space” (which he'd told me was a great introduction to
Lovecraft) but I hadn't liked it enough to want to read anything
else. The antiquated phrasing hadn't done anything for me, and
Lovecraft's writing style seemed to me, at that time, to be
cumbersome and lumbering, as compared to the simple, point to point
prose I was more accustomed to in the writers I liked – Heinlein,
King, MacDonald, Laumer. Plus, at that time in my life, I was looking
for something more upbeat, something where, yeah, you could drag your
hero through hell if the story required it, but goddamit, I wanted a
happy ending. And “The Color Out of Space” certainly doesn't
have a happy ending, and in point of fact, although I didn't know it
then, there are no happy endings in the Lovecraft Mythos. (Well –
Nathaniel
Wingate Peaslee kind of has a happy ending in “The Shadow Out of
Time” – he gets put back in his body after being mind-napped by
the Great Race, and later proves to himself that the experience
really happened, which sends his reason tottering to the very edge of
the abyss of madness. That's about as close to a 'happy ending' as
anyone gets in a Lovecraft tale.)
At
the time, I was not sophisticated or mature enough to understand that
some stories don't provide us with a pleasant escapist experience
because the setting is so much cooler than the real world, or the
characters are so much more interesting and fun, or the resolution of
the story is so upbeat and cheerful – what we would call today a
'feel good ending'. Some stories provide a different service –
they take us to an imaginary world and show us people and events that
make us appreciate the real world we all live in by comparison.
Lovecraft's
universe is very much one of those that makes you shudder in relief
when you re-emerge from it into mundane reality.
When
I eventually did start reading a lot of horror, I found most authors
were anything but subtle. They'd come at me with gore and violence
and psychos and monsters shambling in and out of the shadows, shaking
severed heads and bloody scythes at me.
When
I once more picked up a volume of Lovecraft, on the other hand, in my
mid 40s, I found his approach to be entirely different. Lovecraft
preferred to tease and torment me with descriptions of things that
seemed completely, prosaically mundane, utterly normal, screamingly
typical... except that, somewhere, somehow, he always managed to
imply that there was something terribly, terribly wrong going on...
something awful and horrible and unthinkable and unimaginable, behind
the paneling, or at the bottom of the stairs, or down the hallway
behind that nearly closed door.
Lovecraft
certainly had his limitations as a writer. His characterization is,
to be kind, rudimentary and basic (to be cruelly truthful, it is
generally just kinda shitty). And his plotting isn't much... in his
better stories, there is little plot at all, just a really incredibly
atmospheric description of a horrifyingly creepy situation where
nothing much happens, but still, you're completely freaking out about
it anyway. In his longer stories, where he has to give us some kind
of plot, I usually got the impression he really had little idea what
he was doing - this is especially true of “At The Mountains of
Madness”. Although one of these novellas, “The Case of Charles
Dexter Ward”, is, to my mind, probably Lovecraft's masterpiece in
spite of all his failings and problems with his craft.
As
I've said, I didn't give Lovecraft another serious try until I was in
my mid-40s. I'd been out walking in the Highlands section of
Louisville and come across a small, local bookstore called
Carmichael's. Inside, on the remaindered table, was a huge black
volume bound in cheap fake leather that said COMMEMORATIVE EDITION –
NECRONOMICON – THE BEST WEIRD TALES OF H.P. LOVECRAFT. It was
marked down to $9.95, and, hey, I'd been a sci fi/fantasy reader and
writer for thirty years or so at that point so of course I'd heard a
lot about Lovecraft – maybe, I figured, it was time to give him
another shot.
The
first story in that volume is “Dagon”. I started reading it, and
I was lost to the world around me.
Lovecraft
is a great writer, a brilliant writer, a historical and important and
seminal and frankly epic writer... but for all that, all Lovecraft
really has going for him, beyond his brilliance as a world builder,
is his ability to create mood, to evoke setting, to enact atmosphere.
But he's such an utter master at this, he's so incredibly,
astoundingly good at it, he is, in fact, so utterly without peer at
accomplishing this not insignificant literary task, that it doesn't
matter that his characters are two dimensional at best and his plots
are often sadly muddled and meandering things. In fact, if he were
better at characterization it might get in the way; the very flatness
of affect of Lovecraft's hapless heroes often makes it easier for the
reader to identify with them.
Lovecraft
is generally credited as being the first writer to create a
consistent imaginary backdrop in which his poor heroes not only never
win, but honestly simply never could. Lovecraft's universe is a
cruelly indifferent one, populated with hideously alien and ancient
entities of incomprehensible power who care no more for humans than
humans care for the dust beneath our feet.
In
a Lovecraft story, you 'win' if you manage to die quickly, and in
your right mind.
Very
few people in a Lovecraft story 'win'.
For
all his limitations, what Lovecraft did well, he was unsurpassed
at... and still remains so, nearly a century later.
In
my previous anthology, The
Zombie Ray From Outer Space And Other Pulp Tales,
I've discussed at length my love of 'pulp fiction'. Lovecraft was
certainly a pulp writer; he wrote of larger than life events and his
talent lay in evoking a visceral emotional response in his reader.
As I mentioned there, I love reading pulp and I love writing it, and,
in fact, several of the stories that I included in TZRFOSAOPT were
overtly inspired by Lovecraft, and because they're already in that
volume, they do not appear here. If you want to read “The
Eldritch Horror From Beyond The Nether Void", "The
Captain and the Queen", "In The Service Of The Queen",
or "Clowns",
you'll have to look them up there. And you'll find a lot of other
cool stuff there, too, and I hope you like it.
But
there's a great deal of stuff in this anthology that didn't make it
into ZOMBIE RAY, stuff that, while it's certainly in the Lovecraftian
tradition, isn't written in a particularly pulpy style. (And, on the
other hand, there's at least one story – “The Webbing Between The
Worlds” – that definitely is. But I hadn't written “Webbing”
at the time I put together ZOMBIE RAY.)
I
love to try to follow the roads that Lovecraft has surveyed and laid
out, if not quite fully paved, for me. There is a special pleasure
for me in trying to follow in Lovecraft's literary tradition, because
the challenge there is to construct that sense of tangible dismay and
unease that, increment by increment, one delicate shade of slowly
increasing fear after another, builds into dread, and then alarm, and
then, utter helpless horror... and to do it with some subtlety,
through a sense of deepening, thickening atmosphere and steadily more
ominous and creepy nuance.
I
don't do it as well as Lovecraft. I don't even come close. But I
enjoy the hell out of trying. And hey, nobody else does it as well
as Lovecraft, either, although a lot of us keep on keepin' on.
Lovecraft
has, of late, become tediously controversial to some who choose to
dwell on the things that made him an ordinary man of his ordinarily
unpleasant time (although, really, all times are unpleasant when
examined by outsiders; it's the human condition). Yes, it's hard for
a person of modern and enlightened sensibilities to read “Herbert
West, Re-Animator” and not feel repelled and sickened by the
obvious, awful racism redolent in some of its passages. That
Lovecraft was reflexively, unthinkingly a believer in the
reprehensible things his reprehensible culture took for granted –
awful things like the supremacy of whites over non-whites, and males
over female - can't really be debated. But we don't revere our
geniuses for the things that made them like everyone else. We
respect them for the things that set them apart from their peers, and
that still set them apart from us. Lovecraft the man was much like
his writing – for all his flaws, he towered above his
contemporaries, and he still casts a long shadow over the horror
fantasy realm he helped to invent.
I've
enjoyed reading every Lovecraft story I've encountered, and I've
enjoyed writing every story in this collection, and I'm sharing them
with you in the hope that you will enjoy them as well.
In
the end, that's really all the justification any writer needs, isn't
it?
D.A.
Madigan, December, 2019
INTRODUCTION
– THE WEBBING BETWEEN THE WORLDS
My
opening story in this antho is a pretty straightforward Lovecraft
pastiche. It does take some liberties with some established Mythos
canon – or, as I like to think, it fleshes the “Starry Wisdom”
out just a little bit more.
But
in writing this I did my best to ape Lovecraft's own writing style as
closely as possible – so much that between the archaic textual
technique and the length of the tale I find it doubtful I'll ever be
able to place this story anywhere but here.
Still,
I enjoyed writing it and as always, I hope you, whoever you may be,
will enjoy reading it.
I
do think I addressed one failing the Lovecraft Mythos has always had
– a pronounced dearth of one of my favorite kinds of monster.
You'll see what I mean as you read.
THE
WEBBING
BETWEEN
THE
WORLDS
I.
Before
Attercop House stood on it, the land was still thought to be
accursed. Before the Attercop clan, with all their peculiarities and
oddities and strangenesses bought the acreage, it already possessed a
dark reputation as a place of peril, wherein one ventured only at
hazard to one's life and limb.
The
origins of this particular parcel of land's ominous aura are nebulous
at best. Yet even before a half acre of dense woodland in that eerie,
tree entangled vale was cleared for the construction of the House,
the site was already primordially dim and gloomy, drenched in shadow
and darkness even at high noon on the clearest day, heavily overgrown
with ancient, malevolent seeming timber that huddled almost sullenly,
fiercely guarding its root-embedded earth from the invasive rays of
the sun. The heavy drifts of elderly mulch, mold, and murky moss
that shrouded the ground beneath the shielding trees hid brambles,
deadfalls, and quickbogs beyond number. There was no telling how
many hunters, berry gatherers, explorers, or merely curious hikers
had gone down to their screaming or silent dooms in those tenebrous
tangles.
