Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Instead, I collided with one of the bouncers, who was first annoyed with my clumsiness, then panicked by my shouting about what had happened to my friend. Drugs, I’m sure he thought. He ejected me from the club, and told me to get lost before he called the cops. I did, because I couldn’t think of what else to do. I’m not sure how I made the drive home. The following morning, after rising for church with my family, I claimed a bad stomach and spent the day in bed. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t fall asleep for any length of time. The image of those tall figures lifting their cloaks, their masks flowing into blades like scythes, would not leave me. When I did sleep, I dreamed of crows, hunched around some poor, pale thing, their beaks poised to strike. I was horrified, by what I’d seen and was certain had happened to Jude, and by the prospect of his parents, or worse, the police, showing up at the front door and asking me what I knew about his disappearance. Alongside my horror, guilt gnawed at me. I wasn’t responsible for Jude’s fate, not directly, but I hadn’t done anything to stop it, had I? Probably a lawyer could argue the case for my innocence, but I knew better. I was complicit in what had befallen my friend.

Secretly, I wanted the cops to ring the doorbell. I wanted to confess my role in the events at The Last Chance and be punished. For all my disagreements with the Church over the years, I have always granted it the power of the sacrament of Confession, and the penance that accompanies the rite. It’s what the law provides, or can provide, on the secular side of things. No police appeared, however. If Jude’s parents knew he’d intended to meet me at the club, they chose not to follow up on it. I actually went to Confession the next Saturday, but after listening to an abbreviated version of what I’ve written here, the priest gave me a prolonged lecture on the perils of drug use. Had I attempted the same thing with your grandparents, the result would have been approximately the same.

I considered trying to find my way back to that alley; though I’m not sure what I thought I would find. Jude’s remains? Evidence he was still alive, held captive in some alien prison? Whatever I hoped for, the other world was closed off to me. In the days after the concert, I realized that The Subterraneans’ music was no longer playing its endless loop in my mind. When I listened to the cassette, the songs refused to stay in my memory. In the weeks to come, as the summer unfolded, I continued to play the tape, hoping the air in front of me would waver, and I would once again see the alleyway opening in front of me. It appeared Jude had been right, though. Whatever had been started by the recording of the band’s music had been completed by its live performance. Eventually, the week before my senior year was to begin, the cassette unspooled in my car’s tape deck, and was so badly damaged as to be unplayable, its songs lost to me.

For years afterward, every time I was in a record store, I kept my eyes open for a copy of The Subterraneans’ tape. At the same time, I was on the lookout for information on the band, itself, who its members were, where they were located. I had no luck with either search. Last year, I spent a couple of days researching the band and its music online, but found little of any use.

As for Jude: at the start of senior year, I joined Lorrie for lunch in the senior lounge. We exchanged pleasantries about our respective summers, the classes we would be taking. I turned the conversation to Jude. How was he doing? I asked. Oh, she said, no one had seen him around for a while. Supposedly, he’d left for Boston, which he’d been talking about doing for years. Boston, I said. Yeah, she said. He wasn’t very happy here. He had a lot of stuff going on at home. Well, I said, wherever he was, I hoped he was happier. “I doubt it,” Lorrie said. “Some people just aren’t, you know?”

I said I did.

As I told you at the outset, I’ve never shared this story with anyone, not your mother, not Liz. Maybe I shouldn’t have with you. If it’s easier — if I send this letter to you — you can trash it, pretend I answered your question in some other, innocuous way. That might be better. I’m not sure what more there is to say about any of it. That is, except for the questions I still can’t answer.

Love,

Simon Strantzassays of “Alexandra Lost”: “The story may take its title from Leonard Cohen, but it takes its trappings from old Howard Phillips. I found myself thinking of ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’ and of the essential salts that so many are reduced to in that tale, and I began to wonder about how much salt there was in the world, and the part it played. There’s an inevitability in ‘Alexandra Lost’ as there is in the best of Lovecraft, and a suspicion that we are all cast in a play we don’t know the ending to, and our lines are being written by something beyond our comprehension. I hoped to explore that here, while also drilling into the head of someone who has never been anything but lost. Perhaps it’s that, the sense of never belonging, that cuts most to the heart of Lovecraft. All I can say for sure is it cuts most to the heart of me.”

The author of four collections of weird and strange fiction, including the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated Burnt Black Suns (Hippocampus Press), Simon Strantzas is also the editor of Aickman’s Heirs (Undertow Publications), Shadow’s Edge (Gray Friar Press), and guest editor of The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 3 . His writing has been reprinted in various “best of” anthologies; has been translated into other languages; and has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award. He lives with his wife in Toronto, Ontario.

The sunlight through the windshield bounced and refracted, filling Alexandra Leaving’s eyes with wriggling stars. Leonard drove his Chevrolet across upstate New York with his foot pressed firmly to the floor, and though she pleaded with him to slow down, he met her protests with further, more dangerous weaving. She eventually stopped asking, and instead kept her eyes focused on the map.

“How much longer do you figure before we reach the coast?” he said.

She checked the clock.

“It’s about ten hours from Buffalo, but we hit that traffic so now I have no idea.”

The map in her hands was the most important thing she owned. She clung to it: her tether as she drifted out into the unknown. She would not use a GPS — technology could not be trusted to tell her where she was going. Only a paper map made sense, something on which she could chart their route, drawing for hours before they left. Every hour on the page marked; she knew where they were supposed to be each step of the way. Her father had become lost when she was seven; lost and never found. She was terrified the same might happen to her. Having their journey carefully plotted made her feel safer. But she hadn’t anticipated how fast Leonard would drive, and how that speed would compromise the work she’d done. “We’ll get there faster,” he assured her, but it was impossible — they didn’t have a clear idea where they were. If they missed the ramp to the next highway, she worried they would never realize it and simply drive on forever.

“There’s an end to the highway,” Leonard said, reading her thoughts. “As long as we keep driving we’ll get there. At the end of every highway there’s an ocean waiting to be found.”

She smiled, anxious. For a moment, she forgot how much of a mistake she’d made. For a moment, she remembered why she’d let Leonard take her so far from home. She did it for him. To prove that despite the anxieties and worries that clouded her head, she was good enough for him — even if she didn’t believe it. When he realized she had never seen the ocean, he spontaneously decided he had to take her, and she pretended she was spontaneous enough to go.