Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

“A car?”

“Parked down the street. You’ll find it. Not as nice as the other one, but it will take you wherever you need to go. How do you feel?”

“Fine.” Her voice rose uncertainly. “I feel fine,” she said, steadier. “It’s what I make of it.”

The younger woman smiled. “That’s right.” She reached into her bag and slid the cigarettes across the table. “Here. I should go. Enjoy your food. Enjoy the day. You have time.” She picked up her sunglasses, and plastic eclipsed her eyes. One hand rested briefly against her stomach.

“Like a sea inside,” she murmured.

She toed off her expensive, impractical shoes and hooked them with two fingers. Her toes dug into the warm sand as she walked away.

A woman sat alone at the picnic table. The shutters had been pulled down on the shrimp shack, and a Closed sign shifted in the breeze. A glass of beer sweated at her elbow. After a moment she lit a cigarette and took one deep drag. She laughed, high and wild, and the sound and the smoke drifted away in the salty air. The cigarette burned down between her fingers as she watched the sea.

She continued to laugh while her shoulders trembled, and tears tracked slowly down her cheeks.

John Langanis the author of three collections of short fiction: Sefira and Other Betrayals, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (both from Hippocampus), and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime). He has written a novel, House of Windows (Night Shade), and with Paul Tremblay, co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (Prime). He lives in upstate New York with his wife and younger son.

For Langan, one of the key elements of Lovecraft’s stories is the forbidden text. “To be exposed to this text is to have your eyes opened to another world, one whose intersection with ours leaves your perspective forever changed, generally for the worse. I suppose ‘The Necronomicon’ is the best-known example of this, but there are other stories — ‘Pickman’s Model,’ ‘The Music of Eric Zann’ — where another means of expression is the source of revelation. We’ve all had the experience of the tune that will not leave us alone. What, I wondered, if there was more to it than that?”

Dear Sam,

I know: who writes a letter, anymore?

I suppose you’re used to the mail as a conduit for care packages from your mom and Steve, or Liz and me, but if you’re anticipating any written communication from us, you’ll check your email, or your Facebook account, or even Twitter. I thought about sending this as an email. Actually, I did more than think about it. In the “Drafts” folder on my laptop, there are a couple of paragraphs I obsessed over for several hours after our last conversation, then for several more hours the following night, before I decided it would be better to sit down at my desk with a pad of legal paper, an extra-fine Precise V5 (black), and compose a letter to you. (For reasons you’ll understand later, the social media options never were.) This is the way I plan out a case, spread all my notes around me and arrange the facts they relate into a coherent structure.

I don’t have any notes, now. What I have is your question, “What’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to you — I mean, the weirdest ?” which (I admit) I speculated might have been prompted by your experimentation with substances I probably don’t want to know about. Yet the answer that instantly occurred to me seems to come directly from such an experience. To be honest, I’m almost embarrassed to tell it to you. For one thing, it’s so extravagant you may suspect I’ve finally started the novel I’ve been threatening. For another, it doesn’t show me in the best light, and while I know you’ve been aware of my clay feet for a long time, I’m reluctant to call attention to them. At the same time, there’s a part of me that’s been desperate to relate this story to someone since it happened. I thought I had long since learned to control that urge, to suppress it, but your question threw open the doors and let it loose. By writing this, I suppose, I’m giving in to my need to confess; although I’m doing so in such fashion that I still have the option to delete it once I’m finished.

So: it begins with the answer to your question: at the beginning of the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, I attended a concert by a band called The Subterraneans at The Last Chance, which was a club in what I guess would have been called downtown Poughkeepsie. There weren’t many other people present. Aside from me and the friend I’d met there, maybe two dozen bodies filled the space in front of the stage. At the beginning of the show, I had positioned myself toward the rear of the open area. About halfway through the band’s set, in the midst of a keyboard solo that went on and on, I felt a breeze tickle the back of my neck. I glanced behind me, and saw the section of the club there, under the balcony, had changed. It was completely dark, except for a strip in the middle opening into a narrow alley right through what had been the club’s bar. I was not hallucinating — at least, I hadn’t ingested anything that would have allowed this to be a possibility. The breeze blew out of the alley against my face, carrying with it the smell of the ocean, brine and baked seaweed. I looked away, but the odor persisted. When I turned around, the alley was still there. I took a step toward it. Around me, the keyboard, sounding like a manic pipe organ, continued its solo. Bright moonlight picked out scraps of paper skittering across the alley’s cobblestones. At the far end of the passage, a group of tall figures stood in silhouette. I advanced another step. I didn’t like the way the moonlight slid over those tall shapes, but this didn’t stop me from continuing in their direction. I was wondering why none of the rest of the audience was noticing this when Jude, the friend I’d met here, shoved past me and walked right up to the verge of the alley, where he stopped — waiting, I realized, for me to join him.

There isn’t a great deal more — though there is something — but what I’ve related is incomplete, devoid of the context that brought me to that moment. If I’m being frank, then I have to admit, I’m not certain how much those details explain the events of that night. But it feels wrong to relate this portion of the narrative without what came before. I need to back up, to an aging manila envelope I’ve kept for twenty-five years, through moves from apartments to rental houses to my own house. It contains an audiocassette tape, a ticket stub, and a Polaroid faded almost beyond visibility. The tape has been unplayable since it unspooled in my car stereo and became so hopelessly entangled in the deck’s mechanisms that I had to snap it in several places to extract it. Although I spent I can’t tell you how many hours attempting to repair it, smoothing its creases, gluing its ends together, winding it back onto its wheels, it was too far gone. Nor could I replace it, since it was a copy of a bootleg recording of which, as far as I know, there was only one original. (I’m not even sure about that, since I never saw the tape it was copied from.) And yes, I’ve searched online for it, and no luck. When it still played, the tape contained fifty-nine minutes of the band I mentioned, The Subterraneans, performing a live show at The Last Chance. The ticket stub is for another concert by the same band at the same place on 21 June 1986.

The Polaroid is not a picture of the band. It’s of a group of people I spent Friday and Saturday nights hanging out with during the spring of my junior year of high school. Even with the damage two and half decades have done to it, I can identify everyone in the photo; though my memory supplements details that have deteriorated beyond recognition. Were you to look at it, I imagine you’d see a collection of pale ovals like a talented child’s approximation of faces, each one ornamented with a tag screaming “Eighties!” Long hair hair-sprayed into exaggerated pompadours in the case of the guys; short hair spiked and/or dyed purple in the case of the girls. Short leather and denim jackets festooned with buttons displaying the names of bands, the anarchist “A,” slogans like “Sticks and stone may break my bones, but whips and chains excite me.” Jeans and Doc Martens, or ankle-length skirts and Keds, or leather miniskirts and fishnet stockings with Docs or Keds. Clunky jewelry. It was Punk meets New Wave meets Proto-Goth.