The Wanderer (37 page)

When I’d done, the witch said, her voice hoarse, ‘That explains the things rumoured about you.’

She nodded to herself.

‘Well, I
will
help you, best I can. Perhaps that’s the true meaning of my dream, that I’m meant, with the last of my fading strength, to aid you in gambling with history.’

Taking one of her limp, burning hands in mine, I thanked her.

‘Can I ask,’ I said, ‘how you’ll do it? It is an old magic or a new?’

She laughed.

‘I suppose I can trust you?’

I nodded.

‘Well, I’ll show you.’

And she reached beneath her bedding, took out some kind of gizmo. It was small, fitted into her palm, was made of metal, rusting in spots, had lights fluttering weakly down the side.

‘It’s that kind of magic,’ she said, then she hid the device away again. ‘Its secrets will die with me, for it can do terrible ill as well as good.’

I touched her hand.

‘Of course.’

‘There’s something else,’ she said. ‘Another vision I’ve had. I thought it merely an ill fever dream before, but now…’

She broke off, spluttered. I started from the stool in concern, but she waved for me to sit back down, took up a rag, hawked, spat a dark clot into it. Then groaned, went on.

‘In this dream, I saw a man without a head scrabbling at the earth. Beneath dark, gnarled branches.’

I shuddered.

At that moment, one of the holy woman’s nephews came over, implored me not to keep her from sleep longer. The witch looked up at him.

‘Thank you. I’ll rest in a moment, but there’s something I must explain to my friend first.’

I left the roundhouse a little after, clutching a large cloth bag. The witch had told me to put my typescript in it, seal it up, bring it back to her so she could cast a ‘charm’ on it. She urged me to haste. I found Rashmi breakfasting with some villagers, related to her what had passed, and we returned here. I sat down at my typewriter to compose this afterword, as soon as we arrived back.

So now it comes time to finally conclude this memoir. Once I’ve sealed this document in the sack the holy woman gave me, taken it to her to be ‘enchanted’, it may not be opened again, for to do so would break the ‘spell’. When I asked her what I should do with it after, she told me it didn’t really matter, but suggested I might bury it. After some thought, I’ve decided I’ll leave it in the stacks of the British Library, beneath London’s ruined streets; I feel that will be a fitting resting place.

Besides, we’ve another reason to go back to that desolated city. When I told Rashmi of the witch’s second vision she suggested we return, with haste, to either prevent Elliot from putting himself back together again, or, if we should be too late, find him, attempt once more to best him.

‘I don’t,’ she said, ‘want to live in fear, in hiding, ever again, even for a moment.’

I agreed with her. Though we’re sure the end of all things is coming, we wish the short time remaining to us to be as calm, as happy as it can be. We also feel we should attempt to prevent Elliot’s fleeing the eschaton by going into Tartarus.

This, then, is truly the end of my story. Rashmi, I hope you’ll
forgive me if (while in my heart I inscribe it to you) I dedicate it to the hoped for, though doubtless chimeric reader who’s been so faithful to me (who may, perhaps, be some version of you). Reader, if you do exist, you’ll live on a new world, one sprouted from the germ of this frozen Earth. I’m sure it’ll be a world where good and ill vie for dominance, just as they did on this; I urge you to thresh grain from chaff, plant and nurture the seeds, burn the husks.

But I’ve waxed sententious. I must now curtail these foolish ramblings, place this text in the sack the holy woman gave me. After that’s done, Rashmi and I will climb to the peak of this mountain, spend some time gazing at the welkin’s tapestry, telling each other stories of the things we see sketched in the weave, the tales of our own sidereal mythos, a common pastime of ours. Then, tomorrow, we’ll leave behind this cave we’ve spent a long happy time in, and, after seeing the witch on her deathbed, will strike out for that place once known as London, on what, I think, may well be our final journey. Homeward bound once more.

Endnotes

Appendix I

Editor’s Note on Peterkin’s Emendations to the Text

After my second, and thorough, read through of
The Wanderer
, I passed it to Fiona G. Ment, to get her opinion. I told her I’d been fretting over the authorship and provenance, indicated to her those elements I thought uncanny. When she’d finished the typescript, she came back to me to say she was, herself, certain it was a work of fiction.
¹
She’d come up with a thesis. The preponderance of evocations of the works of Edgar Allan Poe had started her thinking about their significance (though the text alludes to other works, largely in the Gothic tradition, references to Poe’s corpus outnumber those to any other writer’s).

Ment noted three things. First, the number of Poe allusions, in and of themselves, point to Peterkin as the author, for he was a Poe obsessive, had stated in interviews that it was reading ‘The Mask of the Red Death’ as a teenager that had infected him with the desire to write, had even composed two tales, ‘Reynolds’ (collected in
The Black Arts
(1999)), and ‘Bottle Found in a MS.’ (collected in
The Blood Cults of Bognor Regis and Other Weird Tales
(2003)), that fictionally account for Poe’s lost last days.

Second, there are the references to Poe’s tales ‘The Angel of the Odd’ and ‘The Sphinx’. The first, a short story of 1844, describes the narrator’s encounter, while in a drunken stupor, with the eponymous entity, a creature entirely composed of various alcohol receptacles and appurtenances, who announces, in heavy-accented tones, that he’s the ‘the genius who preside[s] over the contretemps of mankind, and whose business it [is] to bring about the odd accidents which are continually astonishing the skeptic.’ The Angel has manifested before the narrator because he’s scoffed at the likelihood of such strange and terrible
coincidences after reading a report in a newspaper of a bizarre death which he believes ‘a poor hoax.’ The protagonist pays scant attention to the Angel, his contempt, after a time, driving the odd creature away. As a punishment, this avatar of chance then subjects the narrator to an increasingly absurd series of trials. The story superficially seems a warning to those who’d sneer at the weird, but this ostensible meaning is undercut by comic absurdity and the unreliability of its soused protagonist; its suggestion would, in fact, seem to be that the odd happenings arise, not from an eldritch cosmos, but from the idiotic imagination of the sottish narrator. And, taken with this reference, that the characters of
The Wanderer’s
inset tales are all drunk, or half-drunk at least, or drugged, or high when they have their dread experiences, intimates that much in the novel is intended to be delusion, or so Ment believed. In ‘The Sphinx’, a tale from two years later, the morbid narrator’s vision from a window of a fearsome behemoth ponderously clambering up a distant hillside, taken to be a harbinger of his death, is revealed, by a clear-headed friend, to be accountable by his having seen a tiny moth climbing a gossamer thread hanging before the glass, and to have been a quirk of perspective. It’s the story of the triumph of reason over the eldritch, and the mention of it another hint from the author of the typescript, according to Ment.

And third, and in her opinion, most conclusively, Ment felt that the allusions were pointing at Poe’s well-known reputation as a hoaxer. Poe framed a number of his fictions, including ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’ and the novel,
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
, both referred to in
The Wanderer
(though the mention of
Arthur Gordon Pym
is one of Peterkin’s later emendations), as true accounts, and, in 1844, published an article in the
New York Sun
, an account of a balloon trip across the Atlantic Ocean, that though presented as reportage, was a fiction. Ment suggested, therefore, that, in invoking Poe, the author of
The Wanderer
, whom she assumed to be Peterkin, was subtly drawing
attention to the typescript’s status as an invention.

At the time, I was convinced by her arguments, and
The Wanderer’s
grip on me slackened for a short while. But pondering the matter subsequently, I’ve grown unsure again. A number of things have eroded my peace, troubled me, in particular Peterkin’s three alterations to the manuscript, the three book titles interpolated,
At the Mountains of Madness, The Sphinx of the Ice-Fields
, and
Arthur Gordon Pym
, and the strange jotting, stressed by being underscored three times, in the margin of the page on which the last change occurs, ‘Both Verne’s and Lovecraft’s formulations vitiate the horror of Poe’s original conception.’

As I noted in a footnote, Jules Verne’s
The Sphinx of the Ice-Fields
is a sequel to
Arthur Gordon Pym
. It’s also a rationalization of that work. It posits Poe’s novel as a mostly true narrative, but either accounts for, by scientific principles, or rejects, as hallucinations, all the horrors and wonders of the American writer’s imagination.

H.P. Lovecraft’s
At the Mountains of Madness
is also, in some ways, a sequel to
Arthur Gordon Pym;
it contains references to Poe’s novel, is likewise presented as a true account, a testimony, and takes from it the haunting call of the gigantic white birds of the polar regions seen by Pym, ‘Tekeli-li!’, which becomes, in Lovecraft’s novel, the cry of the vile, terrible shoggoths the narrator’s party find beneath the Antarctic wastes, a cry the shoggoths learnt from their old masters, the Elder Ones. Lovecraft’s approach to the material differs significantly from Verne’s, though. In
At the Mountains of Madness, Arthur Gordon Pym
is asserted to be a fabrication. It is one, though, that may have had its origins in Poe’s reading of ‘unsuspected and forbidden sources’, notably, it’s hinted, that dark book of Lovecraft’s fabulation, the
Necronomicon
of the Mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred. Lovecraft subsumes Poe’s tale into his nihilistic cosmology, which, though terrifying, has a certain coherence, a
certain logic. This is perhaps because, for Lovecraft, the ludic chaos of Poe’s fragmentary, incomplete, and amorphous text would have been insupportable; Lovecraft’s real fear, as many commentators have noted, was of disorder; in his writings the approach of the monstrous and grotesque is often heralded by a Dionysian piping of flutes.

By inserting references to
Arthur Gordon Pym, The Sphinx of the Ice-Fields
, and
At the Mountains of Madness
into
The Wanderer
typescript, Peterkin was perhaps indicating to any reader perceptive and thorough enough that, just as Verne’s scientistic approach and Lovecraft’s alignment of the text with his relatively stable mythology, rather than ravelling out, just cut through the knots of Poe’s enigma, so rationalizing or fabulous readings of
The Wanderer
are false, are simplifications. Perhaps he sought to indicate, clandestinely, he felt the document an authentic account of things that had really happened, or were to happen…