My Lovecraftian story collection That At Which Dogs Howl is now available all over the place from Raven Canticle Press.
Here are the beginning passages of the fourteen stories therein!
THE WOOD OF EPHRAIM (The mighty men of King David hunt the rebel Prince Absalom into a very peculiar forest)
2 Samuel 18:8 – For the battle was there spread over the face of all the country; and the forest devoured more people that day than the sword.
The Judean soldiers had run all day previously from Mahanaim, plunging into the wooded hill country of Gilead, where they surprised the massing forces of the rebel prince Absalom.
The fighting was bitter and terrible. The outnumbered Judean loyalists of King David drove into the heart of the wayward Israelite tribes, beguiled by the king’s son into open revolt. All day they fought a confused, bloody skirmish. By nightfall Absalom’s forces broke and scattered across the countryside.
Just what had brought about their overwhelming victory was a matter of excited debate between the ten Gibborim, David’s elite warriors who had spearheaded the attack behind General Joab.
They talked around the fire as they broke their evening bread, stuffing their bellies with old Barzillai’s kine cheese, there being no game to be found.
“We’ve the craftiness of the king to thank for this victory,” Zalmon the Ahohite mumbled as he chewed. “Had he not secretly sent his man Hushai into Absalom’s council, the old wizard Ahithophel would surely have advised the prince to run us down as we fled Jerusalem.”
“Be careful when you mention Ahithophel, idiot,” hissed Elez the Paltite, who looked up just then from rubbing balm into a cut on his forearm. “You know the wizard’s son Eliam fought for us today. I hear Ahithophel went home and hung himself because he knew what David would do to him when Absalom failed.”
“What you don’t see with your eyes, don’t say with your mouth,” Zalmon admonished, waving Elez off. “Anyway, Eliam is loyal to David. He can’t help his father was a sorcerer or a traitor.”
“It was General Joab’s might that swung the day for us,” Naharai of Beeroth gasped, having just taken his lips from a bulging wineskin. “I was at the siege of Kinsali, when the army was threatening to desert, and Joab ordered himself slung over the wall. Ten days later blood flowed under the city gate and Joab threw it open. The Amalekites thought Asmodeus was loose in their streets!”
“I’ve heard that story,” said Zalmon, shaking his head.
“No story,” Naharai insisted. “I was there.”
He raised the skin above his head.
“To Joab, a hero great enough to knock the rebels back across Jordan!”
Several raised their cups toward the general’s dark pavilion and roared their assent.
Gareb the Ithrite added, “And to we Gibborim, who played no small part!”
“To the Lord of Hosts,” said young Obed the archer solemnly.
“The Lord of Hosts!” they all agreed.
A figure stepped into the firelight. He was grim garbed and odd-eyed, with a wild, white flecked beard and a dented helm, testifying to the work he’d done that day. It was Eliam bar Ahithophel himself, the son of Prince Absalom’s old wizard.
Zalmon shot a hard look at Elez, who shrugged as if to say ‘as I told you.’
“What if,” said Eliam, in the awkward silence, “it was none of those things?”
“What do you mean?” asked Naharai.
Eliam stared into the fire.
“Did any of you…see anything strange during the battle?”
“I saw an Israelite cleaved with an axe from his beard to his balls,” said one called Hiddai, laughing.
“That’s not what I meant,” said Eliam, his dark eyes lifting from the fire to look over their heads. “Where are the stars tonight?”
Naharai and the other Gibborim craned their necks to peer with mild interest at the night sky through the camp smoke. It was a black hole, lined with the bare branches of the trees that ringed the clearing.
“What are you talking about?”
“It is very dark,” said Eliam, after a moment. “Dark as the Olam ha-Tohu, the waters of chaos that preceded the first day.”
“As you say,” said Naharai smirking.
“My father told me once that in Noah’s age men heard the whispers of the Old Ones in their dreams, and moved the great Even ha-Shetiya, the Foundation Stone with which the Lord had stoppered them up. The waters of chaos burst forth and flooded the earth, and many things that knew nothing of man were loosed.”
“The Old Ones?” Obed asked.
“Those that swam in the darkness before the light.”
“Blasphemy,” warned Joshaphat the Mishnite.
“Yes,” said Eliam quietly, turning from the fire. “But let us keep the fire burning. I’ll take first watch.”
THE LADY OF THE AMOROUS CITY (Young Arthur and his foster brother Kay, in the absence of their father Sir Ector, accompany a strange lady to a remote kingdom to deal with the monstrous Fish Knight plaguing her lands.)
Arthur withdrew, putting up his wooden sword while his elder brother Kay cursed and sucked at his throbbing knuckles.
“Yield?” he panted, jamming the dull point into the soft black earth.
He’d bested Kay three out of five times now, by his count.
Kay mumbled something around his fingers.
“What?”
“I said a rap on the fingers can hardly be counted as a hit,” Kay repeated more clearly.
“You dropped your sword!” Arthur said.
“I’ve got two hands,” he said, as he stooped to retrieve it.
“You’re going to fight me left handed?” Arthur chuckled.
“A knight should know how to fight as well with both,” said Kay. “I wouldn’t expect a squire to understand.”
Arthur bit his lip.
“Unfortunately, you do fight about as well with your left as you do your right.”
Kay lunged.
Arthur checked the blow with a loud crack that resounded across the field. He would never have dared to vet such arrogance against any opponent but his foster brother. To do so would be decidedly unseemly. This was just play. But they both knew it would be a long time before Arthur saw knighthood. He was the adopted younger son of a noble knight. Caer Gai and the honor of peerage rightly belonged first to Kay, regardless of his martial skill.
It wasn’t that Kay was a bad fighter. They were both of them hardly out of boyhood, but already Arthur was a consummate swordsman. He had won the lake tournament of squires twice in two years. A novice would call him fearless, but any man who had been at war would know he was brash. Both the sons of Sir Ector had that defect. It came of spending most of their days beating straw dummies and each other. Neither of them had been bloodied in a fight, and so they fought like young, untried lions.
The last real threat to the peace of the land overseen by Ector at the southern edge of foggy Pemble Mere had been the Romans who had left their stout castrum to tumble down long before Vortigern’s time. The feuding of the rival kings and the Saxons raged far from here. They knew of it only from what news Ector brought home from the campaigns.
The smack of wood elicited a nervous whinny from the direction of the road, and Arthur and Kay disengaged to peer through the arch of the stone gate situated between the old earthworks which marked the boundaries of Caer Gai.
A dream of maidenhood drifted up the lane through the rolling mists that spilled across the valley off Pemble Mere. She was Arthur’s age, and wore her stark, white-blonde hair unbound. Her marble skin was blemished with the cold, her long neck, encircled by a green knit muffler against the chill air, plunged into a tangle of pine colored fabric which attended her slight form. She rode a smooth-gaited white palfrey, its black mane braided with silver bells that tinkled as she came.
“Is this Caer Gai?” she called to them in a clear voice as she neared the gate. “The home of Sir Ector?”
She was not a classic beauty. She was too thin, and her oil black eyes were overlarge and bugged a bit in her narrow face. The slope of her nose was a bit too dramatic. Yet Arthur found attraction in her strangeness.
“It is,” answered Kay, stepping in front of Arthur. “I am his son, Sir Kay.”
Arthur rankled at the lie. Kay had not earned his accolade nor sworn his oath yet. He was only a few years older than Arthur.
“I am Harddwch heb Drwg, daughter of Count Valsin,” she said, tossing back her hair, “and the Lady of the Amorous City. I have come to ask the aide of your father, Sir Ector.”
Arthur glanced at Kay, and was relieved to see the brute had no more idea who she was than he did.
Nevertheless, Kay ploughed along, fists planted on his wide belt impressively, though Arthur knew it was to hide his bloody knuckles.
“My father is away, campaigning with King Bernant against the Saxons,” said Kay. “In his absence, I am lord of Caer Gai. How may I be of assistance?”
Harddwch looked dubiously from Kay to Arthur, and Arthur became keenly aware of the state of his own appearance. In the absence of their father and with no one but an elderly maid to order them bootlessly to their chores and ablutions, the two of them had been mucking about all day, riding and fighting. They were mud splashed, and Kay’s torn tunic was anything but regal.
“I came seeking a champion of Uther’s table, not a boy.”
“King Uther’s day is passed, my lady,” Kay said impressively. “What need have you of a champion?”
“My city is besieged by a monster.”
Arthur said nothing. A monster? Monsters were bodachs and redcaps, changelings and will ‘o wisps; stories to keep children in line, not anything to be spoken of seriously in the light of God’s day.
“A what?” Kay said, smirking, decidedly less diplomatic.
“My father told me that the knights of Uther fought dragons and giants. Was your father the exception?”
“Oh yes, he won all this from a giant,” Kay said, sweeping the land with the point of his wooden sword. “He used to tell us all about it…at bedtime.”
“There are monsters,” the girl said sharply. “I have seen them. I have seen drawn out specters all aglow, swept along like leaves in a current on the shrieking Helm Wind. I have heard them, clicking claws in the blackness beneath the shrubs along these benighted roads. I have felt them, scraping at the bottoms of boats on the lakes. And among all I have seen and heard, he is a monster to be remembered.”
“Who?” Arthur asked.
“Marchog Psygod, the Fish Knight. He rose from the bottom of Blencarn Lake, where many a worm has been content to wage secret wars in the murky depths against sightless enemies. Maybe he looked up and caught a glimpse of the moon and was tantalized, or maybe Joseph of Arimathea sunk a devil into Blencarn and it wove a vehicle of fish carcasses together for his black soul to ride out onto the lands and do evil. Whatever he is, Marchog Pysgod roams the countryside, and leaves the corpses of men, women, and children in the slime of his wake from Mallerstang to the Eden Valley, even in the sight of the Amorous City. Sixty knights have faced him and sixty knights he has laid low.”
BROWN JENKIN’S RECKONING (The cats of Arkham convene in Ulthar to deal with the problem of the dead witch Keziah Mason’s troublesome familiar and its army of vermin.)
As some men dream of Dylath-Leen and the marble walls of lost Sarnath, all cats dream of Ulthar, the little cobblestone village on the winding River Skai where no cat may be harmed.
The dreaming cats of Arkham met in Ulthar at the old temple on the hill, in the little stone amphitheater-shrine whose top tier was arranged with graven images of the Elder Gods of Earth. The clowder seated itself before the greening brass statues of their patrons, Uldar, and the cat-headed goddess Bast, to discuss the depradations of the rats of Arkham, which had, for unknown reasons, intensified as of late.
The old priest Atal filled the stone bowls of the twelve respected master cats of the ninth incarnation with cream.
One of the housecats, a regal Maine coon spoke;
“The rats are on the offensive. Many new holes gnawed in the homes of man, particularly in French Hill. Food stolen. There are even little bites on the limbs of the sleeping children.”
Children sometimes wandered into the Dreamlands in their carefree slumber, and it was the duty of cats to guide them out again, to keep them safe from the various minions of the Outer God Nyarlathotep, who would steal them for vile ends. This oath of child-herding extended into the waking world. It was a matter quite serious to the cats, particularly those fortunate to have human homes.
“Why are the mousers not curbing this behavior?” demanded a haughty, fat orange housecat.
“If it is the rats doing these things,” said one of the alley cats, a mangy tabby of the fifth generation, “then they are moving by avenues we cannot tell. The humans have not been idle. They’ve been blowing poison down into the rat nests for weeks. Most of the warrens have emptied into the hills west of town.”
“It’s not a rat,” said a voice from the shoulder of the statue of Bast. “Though I’d be amazed if any fat bellied housecat could hear a rat lapping from his milk bowl in the kitchen over the sound of their own complacent purring.”
A rough looking tomcat, nip-eared, broad shouldered, the color of pipe smoke with white socks, jumped down from his high perch on the statue and went to the center of the shrine. He bore some limp, bleeding shape in his teeth, which he deposited on the floor for all to see.
It was a rat, and it had been subjected to such tortures as only a half-feral alley cat can devise. The tomcat laid one paw on its back.
This tomcat was notorious across the neighborhoods of Arkham as a scrapper and a night yowler, a scavenging rover who had sired kittens as far away as Innsmouth. He was also grudgingly recognized as the best mouser in the Miskatonic Valley.
Yet he was also a master of the ninth incarnation, the only one among the alley cats. Only a master could drag the dream avatar of another creature all the way to Ulthar. By their ninth and final incarnation, most cats, having lived several lifetimes of adventures, were content to settle into extended retirement like pampered mandarins, safely exploring their future Dreamland abode from the comfort of some warm human house where they could safely sleep all day, undisturbed in a forgotten hutch.
Not so, this tomcat. His behavior befuddled the other masters, for he had not attended a clowder in the Dreamlands in recent memory. In the waking world, he slashed the knuckles of hands that sought to stroke him, and pissed on proffered bedding. He would rather lie dead in a road than on his back in a soft lap. No one knew where he slept.
Beneath his paw, the mangled rat twitched. The cats licked their chops at its squeal, tasting fear.
“Tell them,” the tomcat hissed.
“Brown Jenkin!” squeaked the rat.
The cats stirred uneasily. The reputation of the creature called Brown Jenkin, the prowling monster rat with the heads and hands of a man, vile familiar to the witch Keziah Mason, servant of the Outer Dark, was well known. Keziah and Brown Jenkin, fugitives of the Salem trials, had haunted Arkham from the upper rooms of the Stinking House on the corner of Pickman and Parsonage for three hundred years, stealing out in the dead of night to snatch children to bleed on the altars of the Old Ones.
“The witch is dead, and her pet with her,” said the Maine coon dismissively.
This was true. The violet witch light had not been seen in the upper windows of the Stinking House for many months. Even the old landlord had at last abandoned it.
“You’re wrong,” wheezed the rat, sounding slightly pleased, even in his pathetic state, to know more than the cats. “Brown Jenkin lives!”
“Tell them the rest,” urged the tomcat, spreading his claws.
“The witch is dead,” croaked the rat miserably. “But our master sustains himself with the blood of children, and through the sacrifice of we faithful.”
“One of a mischief that lives in the walls of the Stinking House,” explained the tomcat. “Fanatics who worship Brown Jenkin as a god. What is your master preparing to do now?”
But the rat would not answer, for all the tom’s persistent cruelty.
At last it cried out in hoarse agony;
“The Crawling Chaos comes! Ia! Ia…!”
The tomcat nipped the base of the rat’s skull. Its blasphemous hosanna died in its throat.
THAT AT WHICH DOGS HOWL (Lovecraft’s Whisperer In Darkness retold from a different point of view)
Sargent and Spitz rode up front with the old man and his rifle all the way from Brattleboro, saying not a word to us, but when the car halted, Sargent turned and barked;
“On the ground, recruits! Keep it orderly!”
The old man and his guards got out, stepped around, and opened the door.
The first thing I noticed when I jumped down was the smell. Underneath the clean mountaintop air, underneath the late summer grass and the pine forest, there was blood. But under even that, something elusive and foul; fouler even than the musk and piss heavy cells at Brattleboro, something that raised my hackles and niggled at me. I couldn’t quite place it, but it was familiar.
The place reminded me of the farm where I’d grown up, but for all the trees adjoining the rear of the property’s generous lawn, there was no chirruping of nesting birds or squirrel chatter. No mice occupied the sheds, and though there was the smell of a cow pen somewhere near the windmill in the back, no sound of cattle.
The old man, flanked by his alert guards, wasted no time in leading us to our new accommodations.
We passed the path lined with stone boulders up to the big white house, and proceeded around back in a line.
We were not, it seemed, to be put up in the house. That was fine by me, but one of the other recruits, a shiftless old gray hair who had hoarded his rations and shat almost where he lay, Bâtard, immediately began to whine;
“He’s not going to have us sleep out in the cold, is he? That house looks too big for just one man.”
“Just be happy with whatever we get,” counseled one of the others, a rusty haired female who went by Sam. “If nothing else, at least the food’ll be better.”
“Quiet back there!” Sargent growled.
For my part, I preferred the sky to a roof, and grass beneath my feet to cold tiles or an ill-smelling carpet. My father had taught me an open door was better than a locked one, and no door at all best of all.
The old man was harried looking, gray bearded, but, I sensed, of a kindly disposition. The whole time he led, he clutched his rifle at the ready and looked fitfully to the tree covered hills behind the property, as if expecting assault from that quarter at any moment. Sunset was underway. I saw no movement in the forest but the shifting light from the trees, no danger in their stretching shadows sliding over the brown lawn.
“What’s he need so many of us for anyway?” Bâtard whispered, despite Sargent’s warning. “I don’t like it.”
The old man had become a familiar face at Brattleboro, returning weekly at first, then almost daily to requisition new inmates for his unknown cause. The lady at the desk had remarked when he’d signed them out that they could hardly keep the cells filled to meet his demand.
Köter, the nervous German in the cell next to mine, who had departed with the old man a few days ago, had told me he had the look of a doctor to him, and he shouldn’t doubt that the old man was looking for subjects for medical experimentation, an unfortunate practice he had been subjected to himself in the past.
But the old man didn’t strike me as clinical. Doctors, in my experience, washed themselves regularly. The old man had not bathed for several days, nor changed his clothes. There was fear all over him, emanating from in his pores. Though I had not yet been bound to him by the Pact, I nonetheless felt an overwhelming wave of protectiveness towards him.
My mother had taught me the Law of course from an early age. She had told me that it was devout adherence to the Pact which had made my father a decorated war hero, and rewarded us with the idyllic life into which I had been born. My parents had always encouraged me to nurture my sense of duty, gratitude, and loyalty, and to live a life of usefulness.
The old man had taken me from the white, bleach-reeking purgatory of Brattleboro. That was good enough for me. I did not really believe he meant to intentionally abuse us. I was willing to render whatever service he did require, but I did wonder what had become of Köter and the numerous others he had liberated.
Retrograde to Köter’s doom heavy speculations, the boundlessly optimistic youth we called Skippy, ever existing solely in the present moment and even now fairly bouncing at my heels, eager for whatever was ahead and probably only dimly aware now of his previous incarceration at Brattleboro, suggested that the old man was simply a charitable fellow who would turn us loose in the countryside to do as we please. He had stared wide-eyed out the window the entire ride, pointing out the sights and declaring repeatedly to us with simpleminded assurance that everything was going to be fine.
I suspected the truth lay somewhere between the two extremes.
IT CAME TO MODESTO (A 50’s drag racer survives a spectacular wreck thanks to the intervention of an oddball doctor and his alluring daughter.)
“I never see you around after school.”
“I work late at my dad’s garage. I get off early on Saturday though. Wanna see me then? Maybe catch a flick at the State?”
Georgie Calato saw the punch coming in the reflection of the big glass window of Burge’s.
Debbie Lomax had put down her copy of Look and giggled to her two friends as they smiled around their milkshake straws at his approach, which was the sign that had emboldened him to ask her out.
Debbie was in his biology class. Even though he was a new kid, she’d been easy with the smiles for him. She was a beauty, long necked and blonde, with big doe brown eyes and creamy skin that flashed between the hem of her poodle skirt and the cuffs of her pink bobby socks, and on the slender, hairless arms that slipped out from under her angora sweater.
Georgie took the punch on his shoulder. It was a glance, but it stung, coming from a guy like Jimmy Lucas, wide receiver for the Downey football team.
Jimmy and his cronies, that asthmatic toady of a towel boy Babe Wilkes and the big shouldered tackle, Dombrowski, had formed a semi-circle around him and the girls, blocking the way to the parking lot, looking like a gang in their blue and silver Knights jackets.
Jimmy had one of those pasty faces you could see the blood move through. His cheeks were flushed like somebody had slapped him.
“I told you not to talk to my girl, paisano,” Jimmy snarled.
That was only partly true. Georgie wasn’t really a paisano. There was no Indian in him that he knew of, though his mom had been part Mexican and his dad was Italian. But Jimmy had slammed him against a locker after gym and told him plainly to keep his garlicky hands off his girl.
“We were just talking, Jimmy,” Debbie said, annoyed.
“Yeah well now you can say goodbye,” said Jimmy.
“Cool out, man,” Georgie warned.
“Or what?”
“Big tough guy when you got your friends with you,” Georgie muttered.
“Least I got friends, Pancho.”
“You got a car?”
“Yeah I got a car,” Jimmy said, folding his big arms. “So what? You writin’ a book?”
Georgie knew Jimmy had a car. He had seen it in his dad’s shop when it had come in for an oil change. A spanking new Studebaker Golden Hawk, cherry red with white fins and a big 352 bent eight under the hood.
“Cut the gas, man. What do I gotta do, spell it out for you?” Georgie said coolly.
“This feeb wants to race!” Babe exclaimed, smacking his gum like a tough guy in a gangster movie.
“What d’you got, greaser? Your grandma’s old Plymouth or something?”
“That’s my car,” Georgie said, pointing over Dombrowski’s shoulder to the silver Rambler Rebel with the copper stripe, catching and smearing the pink neon glow of the Burge’s sign in the parking lot.
Again, this was only partly true. The car had been left at his dad’s shop by a guy who had skipped town. Georgie’s dad had kept the thing covered in the back parking lot in case the guy showed up, but it had been a week and a half. Georgie had started taking the car out for a spin late at night. He hadn’t bugged his dad yet about claiming it. A four door, it didn’t look like much compared to Jimmy’s Golden Hawk, but it was still a beauty. 327 V-8 engine, Holley 4 Barrel, stainless steel dual exhaust (he had flipped the mufflers backwards himself for an extra kick), it had 6-ply Goodyears that cornered like nobody’s business. He’d got it up to a hundred and thirty out on Route 99.
He was pretty confident that despite the smaller engine, he could beat Jimmy’s Golden Hawk. His car, fast as it was, was as-is. Jimmy was a cruiser, not one of these motor heads that raced out at Laguna Seca. He didn’t even change the oil himself. The car was probably a birthday present from his daddy, who owned a chain of shoe stores in the valley, chosen for the look, not what was in the guts.
Like most things in Modesto.
SNEAK PREVIEW (A shlock mogul hires a blacklisted avant garde director to film a revolutionary horror movie)
Billy Schloss needed a blockbuster.
Thirteen years he had been at Liberty Pictures, and forty films later he was still a B-movie producer, a B-movie director. He’d been working since he was twelve years old, fighting tooth and nail to eke out a living in the picture business. Every day of his life had been a fight.
He had earned a big house, a pretty wife, a couple nice cars in the garage, and his name over the credits, but those sons of bitches in Variety still called him a hack, and the honchos at Liberty passed him over for the Oscar-caliber work.
After years of running for donuts, girls, and smokes, he had finally got his start churning out cheap and fast potboilers, one reel oaters, and jungle serials, and had gotten a reputation for bringing in the goods fast and under budget. He’d really carved out a name for himself in the shock-horror business, doing crazy, schlocky monster pictures on the cheap for big returns. Of course, matinee drek wasn’t enough to really make a name. He’d taken a page from P.T. Barnum and added a lot of sideshow shenanigans to the admitted crap he put out. He’d thought up gimmicks to get the audience interested, everything from running ghosts on wires over their heads (till the goddamned kids had caught on to it and started pitching their Abba-Zabas at the thing and trying to yank it down), to passing out life insurance policies to ticketholders and hiring plants in the theaters to scream, feign spells, and get carried out.
His crowning achievement though, had been Scream For Your Life, filmed in ‘Perceive-o.’ He’d gotten a hold of a lot of Army surplus buzzers and paid theater owners to let his boys wire them under every third or fourth seat in the joint. The movie was about some creepy crawly thing that attached itself to your backbone, and could only be killed by sonic waves. At a certain point in the picture, Victor Priest, the actor, turned to the audience and warned them that the creature was loose in the theater. At that point the projectionist would throw a switch and set the buzzers off, getting the popcorn flying and the ladies shrieking. It was a gasser, and though it had added two hundred fifty large to the budget, the picture had raked in the dough.
He put his name right out in front on these things, and went personally to the little Podunk towns to give the audiences a thrill, make each one feel like a Hollywood premiere for a day. It was exhausting, but it had kept him working, kept him in the public eye, parked butts in seats.
But Jesus Christ, it was 1959 and trouble was coming.
The respected limey director Abner Heathcliff had sniffed out the dough he was making, and bought up the rights to Bobby Cube’s lurid bestseller ‘Schizo,’ about some lunatic transvestite who went around murdering broads with a butcher knife while wearing his old mother’s clothing. He had started preproduction work on his own version, tentatively titled ‘Screwy,’ but his heart hadn’t been in it.
He didn’t want to be known as the poor man’s Abner Heathcliff.
He wanted to break out of the old mold. He wanted something that as an orphan kid running out to grab coffee for every schlub in a canvas chair with his name on the back he never thought he’d want.
He wanted respect, goddammit.
No more rubber chicken sideshow carnie bullshit.
He wanted to black suit and tie it. He wanted to hold one of those little golden statues and read his name across the base.
And since Liberty wasn’t gonna give him A-list material, by God, he’d decided to go out and do it himself.
So he’d mortgaged his big house and sold off some of his cars, all to personally fund this latest gimmick picture, with an eye towards using the proceeds to bankroll a real deal f-i-l-m next.
He had a property in mind, a book somebody had tipped him to, The Veterans, about a couple of bosom war buddies who come home from an overseas hospital after getting blasted by a Nazi artillery strike and struggle to adjust to civilian life. In the end, it turns out one of them was a ghost the whole time. It was a helluva story, a real tearjerker, yet still in the supernatural vein people had come to expect from him, so it wouldn’t entirely isolate the rubes that loved him. He’d bought the rights a year ago while it was still a manuscript. It was due to hit the shelves next weekend, and he was confident everybody was gonna be clamoring to make the thing.
Boy would Harvey Cohen at Liberty be sore when he figured out Billy had bought the thing up right out from under his nose!
But first things first, this latest picture had to be a hit. His biggest hit.
He was taking an awful gamble on it.
He had hired this German director, Kurdt Knock, one of best of the old-time expressionist guys who had been huge in the silent era and the early talkie years, a critical darling. He had gone missing for about twenty five years, resurfacing in the States just in time to get blacklisted for his weirdo religious beliefs. Knock must have been making his pictures when he was eleven, because he didn’t look much older than sixty. He was an oddball Kraut, with a shock of silver hair, and looked like an aging beatnik in his black turtleneck and sunglasses. He claimed to be part of a witch coven or something. Knock had come to him beret in hand looking for work, and the witch angle had appealed to Billy right away. Who wouldn’t come to see a Billy Schloss monster picture directed by a legendary filmmaker who claimed to be a witch?
THE CRAWLIN’ CHAOS BLUES (Two bluesmen head to crossroads to find their fortune and call up something worse than the Devil).
For Chester – this is where the soul of man never dies.
‘It’s like a spirit from some dark valley, something that sprung up from the ocean–like Lucifer is on the Earth…’ – Howlin’ Wolf, 1968.
Don’t nobody remember King Yeller. The Delta folks don’t like to talk ‘bout him like they do Muddy or BB or Robert Johnson, though I ‘spect he was as good as them if not better. I don’t know no white folks ever heard of him. They ain’t a page on him in all the blues books ever written.
I ‘spect I’m the only one alive knows why.
I met him in sixty-four in Chicago. In them days, the draft was in full swing, and I didn’t see no way out of it, so I figured I’d do some drivin’ around before Uncle Sam come callin’.
I’d always wanted to hear that ‘lectric blues played, so I filled up the tank of my daddy’s ’52 Catalina, bought me a sack of ta-males and a jar of moon off my cousin, and drove up there from Quito, Mississippi. I got to Maxwell Street on a Saturday when the Jew Town market was open. The sidewalk buskers and the gutbucket players paid the shop owners out they tips to run ex-tension chords from the shops to they amps, and you could hear that ragged, powered sound goin’ all up and down the market like a rattletrap Ford with a cryin’ drunk at the wheel, crashin’ into the songs of the Gospel singers, street hustlers, and the yellin’ of the rummage sellers. A lady drummer let me blow my harp with her and her husband for pocket money. She told me ‘bout a place called Silvio’s on Lake and Kedzie where Howlin’ Wolf played on the weekends. I went over there to see him.
I seent King Yeller when I pulled up. He was a little younger than me, skinny, high yeller, and red headed; a sharp dresser. A more troublesome lookin’ nigger you never did see. Had shifty, light-colored eyes and a way of talkin’ out the side of his mouth.
When I first seent him, he was leanin’ on a beer sign watchin’ that Lake Street L clackin’ overhead, one bent Kool stuck in his lips, beatin’ out I Ain’t Superstitious as best he could on a rusty ol’ National with a pocket knife for a slide.
“What we got here?” he said, when I come up on the curb.
I figured he meant to hustle me and I wasn’t ‘bout to have it. “You got Harpoon Elkins here,” I said.
“Harpoon,” he grinned, trying my name out. It wasn’t my Christian name sure, but I didn’t wanna go throwin’ that ‘round Chicago anyhow. “See you got Mississippi tags,” he said, noddin’ to my car.
“Tha’s right,” I said. “You up from the Delta?”
“Quito,” I said.
“Man, I ain’t never heard of no Quinto.”
“Quito. What that got to do with me?”
“Ease up now, blood,” he said. I seent he had that pocket knife still between his bowin’ fingers.
“Sound better you used a bottleneck,” I said.
“My uncle taught me with a knife. You play the slide?” he asked, slappin’ his guitar.
“Naw. I blow a little harp.”
“Who don’t?” he held out his hand. “Name’s King. No relation to Martin Luther. Yeller’s what they call me. King Yeller.”
FIVE TO ONE (A draft riot on the Miskatonic University campus in the 1960’s diverts attention from an even more dangerous threat)
The jeep squealed to a stop at the south end of the Miskatonic University campus, just ahead of the National Guardsmen of Battery B of the 101st Field Artilley.
Lt. John Iwanicki watched the column of inky smoke rising from the west half of the quad.
He had done all he could to get away from Arkham, from a drunken, brutal father. Now here he was, back again, about to march on his old alma matter.
Iwanicki shaved twelve men off to hold back the pressing crowd gathered there so the rest of the men could pass through. It was a mix of camera-faced press and rubberneckers, with some campus administrators and students.
Past the dormitories and athletic fields the campus dipped into a grassy, tree-lined depression in which Armitage Commons was centrally located, with the administration building and lecture halls to the north, and various specialty buildings clustered all around. Down the hill, across the quad and to the west, the brick ROTC building was awash in streaming flame. The crowd of students held back a respective distance around the old bronze statue of Professor Armitage. A team of Arkham firefighters were bustling about their engine, attacking the fire with a deluge cannon to little effect.
“Goddammit, the little shits used napalm,” Sgt. Pasternack said, snorting the air. “I can smell it. Don’t those dumbass yokels know water ain’t gonna put it out?”
Pasternack was a veteran of Korea who’d done two tours in Vietnam and then entered the Guard when a leg wound had kept him from re-upping for active duty again. He spent all his off time cussing at the rec room television. When the priests who had marched into the draft office in Catonsville and burned all the draft cards had been on the news last May, the MP’s had had to stop him from taking his .45 to the TV. He was a crew-cut John Wayne type, only a few outbursts shy of a Section 8.
Despite his leg, Pasternack scooped up his M1 and vaulted out of the jeep before it had completely stopped. He tucked the strap of his campaign hat under his boxy jaw and barked for the men to form up, pointing to the burning outbuilding and the multicolored cluster of young protestors. Orders were to make a buffer between the students and the firefighters.
Captain Bishop had issued twenty M-79 grenade launchers, and Iwanicki noticed Sgt. Pasternack pulling the men carrying those aside and forming a separate column to the right with a few riflemen.
He got out of the jeep and went over.
“What’s this, Sergeant?” he demanded.
“Just getting a jump on the secondary objective, El-tee,” he said.
“What secondary objective?”
THE BOONIEMAN (A forward firebase in Vietnam bears witness to the furious vengeance of a Tcho Tcho shaman)
Firebase William stood on a bare hill shorn clean of the emerald jungle that covered the remote Chư Prông District.
Five years ago in ’66, Sikorsky CH-54’s had played the barbers with ten thousand pound daisy cutters. Buzzing Chinooks had dropped in the men, trenchers, and bulldozers that had finished the job, adorning the hill with a ring of sandbags, berms, and barbed wire. The whole shebang had been capped off with six 105mm Howitzers arranged in the standard star pattern, one in the center to fire illumination rounds during night attacks, five at the points.
Designed as a temporary fire support base for special missions near and occasionally over the Cambodian border, William had for some reason remained when its garrison had changed from marines to Army special forces. Now it was home to an element of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or would be, once the A-Team of American MACV-SOG advisors officially turned the place over to Captain Dat Quách next month.
Lt. Jatczak wondered how long the ARVN would hold out before the North Vietnamese Army overran William. Nixon was pulling the plug on Vietnam, and the NVA was wondering how committed the US was to withdrawal. They’d been dropping sporadic, harassing mortar fire on William for the past two weeks, nothing serious, just trying to goad their jumpy southern cousins into expending the precious ammunition Major Dyer was writing off as field lost.
The major had been at William longer than anybody. He claimed to have suggested the name of the place to the original CO, after his uncle, who’d been a geologist and explorer. Nobody knew if it was Bravo Sierra or not. Dyer had served with the 1st Marines in Korea, and done five combat tours in ‘Nam, two as an Airborne Ranger, and three in the 10th Special Forces Group attached to various units, including a stint in the A Shau valley. He looked it too, with his odd, shock white beard crisscrossed by wandering scars like old wagon trails, and eyes that looked as if they’d never found anything funny ever. He was a real boonie rat, and didn’t bullshit.
BLACK TALLOW (A book translator aides a wealthy ritualist in deciphering a book that will grant the reader whatever he most desires)
I hadn’t physically seen my old university roommate Paul Woodson in more than a decade, not since a few years after graduation when our lives really started to radically diverge. His became a rocketing climb that culminated in his establishment as the grand high financial wizard of a Fortune 500 multinational, whereas mine nosedived in a steady, occasionally desperate and perennial flounder that has left me what I always was, a translator of antique books, respected in circles much, much smaller than his, but nowhere near as successful financially.
We kept in touch, of course, over the years, mainly via e-mails and the occasional phone call, perhaps mostly because of my extensive contacts in the rare book field, a subject which has never ceased its fascination for Paul.
That’s because he believes everything he has achieved has been thanks to the practice of magic.
That was how we met, as furtive, over-serious young initiates, dabbling in Tarot cards and the intricacies of the Goetia, pretentiously spelling magic with a ‘k.’ We pored over the writings of John Dee, Simon Magus, and Eibon, and the three A’s of our higher education were Abramelin, Al-Hazred, and Alistair Crowley.
Yet when I, in my senior year, finally pronounced the whole business utter bullshit, and argued with Paul that no man can hope to harness and steer the chaotic winds of the universe by engaging in embarrassing tantric orgies and messy black chicken assassinations, Paul merely refrained from countering me, and continued on his path.
Time may judge which of us was correct.
ANAPARAGOGI (Hell week at Miskatonic University’s rowdiest and most prestigious frat involves more than a young pledge ever expected).
It was the end of the best week Wiz would never want to experience again. No girlfriends, no cellphones, no lifelines.
Hell Week at Miskatonic University.
He had spent the past fifteen weeks enduring the most grueling hazing the ultra-exclusive Delta Gamma Alpha fraternity had to offer, everything from licking the accrued bar funk from the soles of Brother Pigpen’s topsiders to bows and toes over bottle caps while Brother Ahab basted him with stinging habanero sauce.
Yet he had persevered, diligently hunting down the autographs of all eighty active brothers in his ratty signature notebook, joining his fellow pledges hurrying up and down the stairs of the frat castle in his underwear and an oversized papier-mâché seahorse cowl with a sloshing five gallon water jug of Natty Lite strapped in a baby carrier to the calls of ‘Beer Boy! Beer Boy!’, and submitted to a paddling at the hands of the apt-named Brother Spank so bone shuddering he felt sure his grandfather had felt it in his grave.
Nothing had prepared him or his pledge class for the dire tribulations of Hell Week, the seventh inning stretch before the claiming the brass ring of initiation. He had slept perhaps six hours in the past seven days. The actives allowed them no respite. They were ordered to stand in the TV room holding a couch over their heads through the entirety of Titanic. Blindfolded with used toilet paper, they were goaded stumbling down a Slip ‘N Slide that began the trial coated with expired guacamole and was greased with their own vomit by its end. Air horns and bullhorns constituted their morning alarm. ‘Morning’ was ill-defined, as it could be anytime between midnight and day, somehow always at the very outset of fitful REM sleep.
Much of what they endured, he knew, was technically illegal in the State of Massachusetts, and apparently unheard of in fraternities north of the Mason-Dixon line, but the Delta Gammas, the first and most prestigious Greek society to plant its chapter flag at Miskatonic, had deep south origins and accompanying sadistic traditions. The tantalizing rush party, the socials with the smoking hot sorostitutes of the Zeta Zeta Zeta sisterhood, the various impromptu bottomless keggers, had caught Wiz up in an exciting whirlwind of beer, sex, and coke bumps.
The actives promised him a college experience like no other, acceptance in an elite, sacred brotherhood that would mark him forever apart from lesser men till the end of his days. The alumni of Delta Gamma Alpha were men of respect and legend; medical and scientific wunderkinder, affluent lords of international commerce. Their name plaques adorned not only the fraternity house, but several foundation stones on campus and about Arkham, even a landmark on the National Mall. Despite the whiny platitudes of the misanthropic, lib-art-leg-up GDI’s and the patchouli smelling SJW hippies about campus, such privilege didn’t come without blood and sweat. It had to be earned. Not even legacy pledges were guaranteed a spot in the house. The clay must be fired, the wheat separated from the chaff, the effigy hewn from the marble block. Pledges were put through their paces with militaristic intensity, forging at the end a more sacred bond than any of the lesser societies on campus could boast.
THE THEOPHANY OF NYX (Earth’s first lunar colony slides into a crack in the moon and a pervading darkness settles on the earth’s atmosphere…)
Everyone remembered exactly where they were the day the moon cracked open and Selene slid inside. It was like 9/11, or Challenger, or as the elderly said, the day President Kennedy was shot.
The establishment of the lunar colony had been the biggest event in the past hundred years. It had taken a decade to excavate and build, and every waxing night all of mankind looked up to watch the construction progress, growing slowly but steadily like a little gray spider web on the far south end. People talked about how it was before there was a mark on the moon. They showed their children pictures, because the little ones didn’t believe it.
The waiting list for resettlement had begun months before the project was even officially announced. Hundreds of hopefuls died on that list without ever seeing it completed.
They were the lucky ones.
THE ALLCLEAR (In the far future a colony of subterranean dwelling humans send their annual volunteer to the surface of the earth to scout its wasted environs only to have the previous years’ scout unexpectedly return).
Two hundred and fifty six Scouts had come and gone since the Pox Eclipse, when the enemies of Usgov walked the Path O’Jen and brought the Bleeding Cough, and Potus of Usgov and the Joint Chiefs of the Staff called the sky bullets and planted the holy mushrooms to try and burn the sickness from the Upper World. But the mushrooms turned the enemy into Ray Dio, and the Upper World became the Hellabove.
Baxter, the last of the Scions of Tist, had led the people down to the bunker, to Greenbriar, two thousand all told, and they’d buttoned up and waited there in the gray steel rooms eating cans and sleeping through the endless horrors of the New Clear Winter, the riots of the idiot blind and the raids of the gutmunchers and all the ones burned by Ray Dio.
But Baxter had prepared. He’d known the cans and the jugs would run out one day, so he’d taught the gardeners the sacred ways of the Hydraponix and Ree-Sigh-Clean, and he gave the people a way to live without killing.
Then Baxter had burned the books and papers, and smashed the old idols of Teevee and Ray Dio, them whose worship he said had brought about the Pox Eclipse as much as anybody, and he taught them the Ways, and appointed Alberta first Scout.
The Scout was the offering to the Hellabove. Baxter knew that it was in the nature of man to be discontent even with the paradise of Greenbriar; that eventually they’d unbutton and go see the Upper World, to try and find Potus of Usgov.
The Hellabove, Baxter said, was a place of fire and cold and Ray Dio’s sickness and black darkness. It was not a place a man could go and return from, at least not until the Allclear day came, that prophesied time when the ash clouds blew away and the snow melted and the poison of Ray Dio was no longer active. Only then could they venture out and reunite with Potus of Usgov.
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Delirium Tremens 