Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft (3 page)

Two weeks later I got a note from Addison. He said he was doing well, although he thought it would be a month or so before he could search his boxes again. Could I send him the story conclusion so that when he found the first part he could read all of it?

I had been feeling very guilty over the incident so far, so I Xeroxed the tale and mailed it off to him. Addison wrote in a couple of days that he had received the story and had begun researching Carter’s life and writings. It turned out that Carter did have a small career in pulp writing that later became a career of writing cheap paperbacks. He had a burst of that sort thing in the paperback revolution of the Sixties—
The Truth about Mummies, The Truth about Werewolves, UFOS in Colonial America,
etc. Addison was going to make a box of stuff for me when he was well.

Another week passed and I got the following note:

Dear Reynman,

CARTER IS ALIVE. He’s still in the rest home he mentions in
The Moon Lily,
which turns out to be less than fifty miles from here. I am going to visit him this Sunday for his 107th birthday party!

Best,

Addison

On Saturday I got another note.

Dear Reynman,

FOUND IT!! I’m going to give a copy of both parts to Carter tomorrow, and then mail you a copy as well. This is so exciting!

Best,

AES

After a couple of months I had heard nothing, and then a friend of Addison posted a small obituary. Addison had had a heart attack, ironically while visiting the world’s oldest pulp writer at a rest home in Bayou Goula (White Castle), Louisiana. A little research told me that Bayou Goula is something of a ghost town, absorbed by the more lively village of White Castle, and its claim to fame is having the world’s smallest chapel. The little burg lay on LA1 near Baton Rogue. It had exactly one rest home—the “I Did It My Way” home.

The whole idea itched in my brain. It was like a tooth beginning to twinge. You forget about it and then there it is again. You are showering or about to lie down for bed or putting the brass key in the door of your shop, and the idea is there. That’s a seven-and-a-half-hour drive. Now gas is certainly not the cheapest of commodities, but how many 107-year-old pulp writers are you ever going to meet? I could justify the trip in that I might find rare books (or at least eBay-resalable books) at junk stores on the way. Haidee is always telling me to slack off some. I work at the store almost every day. I hadn’t been on a vacation in forever. I would fight the idea down as foolishness, and then the twinge would hit me again. Finally in late September the foolishness won out. I reserved a room in a Baton Rogue Best Western and turned my wheels to the east with copy of
The Moon Lilly
in hand.

It was a trying and uneventful Monday. Haidee and Ben would work the store until Thursday. I drove through White Castle and located the tiny chapel, the nursing home, and the Cora-Texas sugar mill, which seemed to be the village’s biggest industry. I would sack out for the night and see Mr. Amos Carter Tuesday morning.

I had vague and unpleasant dreams, but nothing like the nightmares I secretly hoped for.

The I Did It My Way Retirement Home was a foul-smelling twenty-room facility on the corner of Bayou Street and Andrew Jackson Avenue. It had been painted a pale green and had dark brown trim. Two old white women were on metal porch rockers. “Good morning, youngster!” the oldest of them cackled. I smiled back, “Lovely day, ladies!” I stepped inside. The reception area was paneled in what had no doubt once been brown wood veneer that had faded to gray. The receptionist nurse was an African American woman in her fifties, about my age. She looked tired and it was only 9:00 in the morning. I guessed her shift had begun in the wee hours of the morning. Her black glossy plastic nametag read Kassandra.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“I am looking to visit Mr. Amos Carter.”

Her expression would have done justice to the pubgoers in a werewolf movie. “Mr. Carter has no visitors except his grandson.”

“I know that is not correct. A friend of mine, Mr. Addison E. Steele, visited not long ago,” I replied. The moment I felt her resistance this suddenly became important to me. The vague sense of a Quest that had been calling to me since I had glanced at
The Moon Lily
suddenly crystallized. I needed to see this 107-year-old man.

“I am sorry about your friend. Mr. Carter can be violent. Normally we leave him tied to his gerry chair.”

“The man is 107,” I began.

“Nobody here believes that. You’ve never seen him. You are like that man from New Orleans, the one that died. Look, the whole Carter family stinks. They’re weird and awful. If I had my way we throw old man Carter out.”

“Why?”

“There’s something about him that just isn’t right. Not Amos, the other one.”

“Don’t you worry about your job saying things like that?” I asked. I could hear the sounds of
The Jerry Springer Show
from down the hall. She gave me a look. “You couldn’t get someone else to work in this dump. I lost my job in New Orleans after Katrina. This town is literally where my car broke down.”

“My friend was from New Orleans.” I said.

“Yes, I know; he ran a bookshop in the Quarter. Court of the Dragon. My son used to like that stuff. Look, mister, I am trying to save your white butt. Don’t mess around with Mr. Carter or his grandson or any of them.”

“I am not worried by an old man.”

“Do you know what the problem with white people is? They live in denial. That’s why they screwed up the world. That’s why they hate us.”

I was about to give my Austin knee-jerk reaction, which would no doubt have included being an Obama supporter, when the phone buzzed at the desk saving me from looking foolish. Kassandra said, “Number 13.” And waved me toward one wing.

The old-people smell intensified as I headed to my left. An almost bald old man was pushing a walker down the hall, his toothless mouth agape and drool pouring out in streamers. His dingy white bathrobe was partially open, displaying his shrunken member to God and the world. I passed the TV lounge where Springer’s half-man was pulling the chair out for a three-hundred-pound transvestite while two-blue haired women laughed to see such fun. There was a computer room on the other side. A one-legged man about my age was looking through eBay, a palsied woman tied in her gerry chair was unsuccessfully trying to contact a Bible site, another woman, very large with bright red lipstick and a fabric rose behind her left ear, was looking at a JPEG of a family at the beach in Maui or some other tropical paradise. My God, Carter has been here at least forty-one years. I walked on to the end of the hall. Some rooms were open. A woman restrained on a bed screamed as I went by, wanting Alfred. In another, two gray-haired black gentlemen in threadbare flannel robes bent over a chessboard.

There were two twin beds in room 13. They were nicely made and to my amusement had Spiderman bed covers. A wall clock with large numbers told me it was almost 10:00. There was a small painting of a green-skinned ghoul sitting on a tombstone, contemplating some gnawed-upon Yorrick. The painting could have been from a sci-fi convention where it had not taken home any awards. On the opposite wall hung a framed faded print of Albrecht Dürer’s
Praying Hands.
There was a small bookshelf under the ticking clock. There were a few paperbacks,
The Truth about Black Magic, The Secret of the Great Pyramid, Teach Yourself Typing, Hunza Valley Health Secrets, UFOs in Colonial America, How to Make and Sell Macramé, Houses That Kill,
and
The Truth about Ghouls.
All by Amos H. Carter. The room being empty, I crossed to the shelf to examine the last volume. The atrocious painting had provided the cover art for this collection of forgotten lore. In the room I saw his gerry chair, the filthy white bondage belts hanging loosely at its sides.

“Amos is out by the bayou,” came a frail feminine voice.

In the doorway was a shrunken old woman in a wheelchair. Her cornflower blue eyes twinkled, her cheeks were rouged, and her thinning hair nicely coiffed. Her attendant, an ebon black young man with cornrows, had a white orderly’s uniform which had a nametag ALFRED and incongruous blue bandana in the shirt pocket. He looked all in all like the Platonic form of boredom.

I addressed the helpful woman. “Isn’t he supposed to stay in his room?” I nodded toward the gerry chair.

“Bonds don’t hold Amos when he doesn’t want them to. We discussed that when you were here last.”

“I am afraid you are mistaken, sweetheart,” I said. “This is my first visit.”

“No. You were here that other time. The time there was all that blood,” she said. Alfred began to wheel her away.

“Wait,” I said.

“She just gonna get crazy, don’t get her going,” said Alfred.

“What blood?” I asked.

“All that blood everywhere and Alfred’s grandmother made him scour it off the floors and I told him he looked like Cinderella.”

“See, I told she crazy.”

“Where did the blood come from?”

Alfred was wheeling her down the hall.

“Where did the blood come from?”

“From New Orleans, I reckon.”

I left the nursing home and struck out for the bayou. There was a path through the tall Johnson grass and scrub oak. Even in October the air was hot and humid, and a bright green moss covered the tiny trunks of the little trees. Insects hummed and buzzed, the water gave off a sour and stale smell. The sky had begun to cloud up, and the sun looked a lead disk. The path cut round and back again like a water moccasin. I could only see a few feet ahead. I couldn’t believe how quickly I seemed to be in a primeval jungle, even though I knew I could only be a few hundred yards from Lee Street. Large butterflies with purple and black wings fluttered by. I was tempted to step off the sandy path and crush one, changing millions of years of the future, when I saw a middle-aged white man in blue shirt and Levis sitting on a stump about sixty feet ahead of me. He was resting his hands on a walking-stick with an elaborate ivory handle, apparently in deep conversation with the butterflies. For some reason I decided that must be the grandson. “Mr. Carter.” I yelled, “I am looking for your grandfather.” He looked up and grinned at me, then waved his stick like a bishop blessing the faithful with his crozier.

I hurried along the path. I slipped on a muddy patch and kept from falling by grabbing the rope like branches of willow. I struggled to regain both balance and dignity, and when I looked up the man had left. I went to where he was, and then followed the path into deeper woods where trees with real height stood, large-trunked live-oaks with Spanish moss beards. I couldn’t figure out where he had gone, and the sense of wildness bothered me. I am not given to fear generally, especially not on lightly overcast Monday mornings, but this place suddenly seemed very alien. It was not the glistening sundews or the brightly colored mushrooms. It was not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that was imagined. I found myself
listening,
but I couldn’t say for what. Maybe it would be better to meet Mr. Carter in the home, in his well-lit room at night.

I returned to my silver PT Cruiser and drove away from the I Did It My Way retirement home.

After an afternoon of semi-successful bookstore crawling, I felt foolish about my feelings in the bayou. I drove back to the home after catching a barbecue sandwich from a restaurant called The Pig Stand. I took my copy of
The Moon Lily,
and after a few seconds of deliberation my .45 as well. I didn’t know if my Texas concealed weapons permit worked in Louisiana, and I was ashamed to be afraid of a 107-year-old.

The smell of piss and disinfectant seemed stronger by night. To my surprise, Kassandra was still behind the desk. She must have a crazy shift.

She shook her head and pursed her lips. “My grandson told me you were getting Mary riled up. You don’t need to bother her. If you want to hang out with the Carters that’s your own fool business. Leave everybody else out of it.”

“I am sorry if I upset the old lady. She was talking about blood.”

“Old people talk about a lot of things; that’s because they’ve seen everything and done everything. You can go on back, he’s with his grandson now.” She said the last with a truly hateful smirk.

It took me a few seconds to take in the scene before me.

The man I had seen earlier today was tied to a gerry chair. His silver and black hair, reddened skin, and cauliflower nose would lead me to think he was an alcoholic in his seventies, but his eyes—his eyes were dead. They moved, but they had no light to them. No love, no joy, no anger, nothing. They seemed to suck in the light of the room. It almost seemed as if he had a shadow on his face. The walking-stick with its yellowed ivory handle lay against the bed, just out of his reach. The cane’s head was a thick disk showing what seemed to be a veiled man crawling through a geometrical figure. Its wood was dark and scratched up from a great deal of use. Sitting in a wooden chair, probably a dining room chair because of the elbow supports, was an older man with thinning silver hair and a turkey neck. He wore a faded pink Izod shirt and khaki pants jerked too far up on his frame, held by a brown belt that had a few new notches punched in it, probably by a pocket knife. He was reading from a yellowed paperback.

“The King’s Chamber was not a tomb as modern Egyptologists tell us. Instead, it was a shrine to a headless demon, called in Arabic
Yaji Ash-Shuthath
, meaning ‘No Peace at the Gate.’ This all-seeing being is symbolized in Masonry as the All-Seeing Eye, but because of its gift of immortality it is likewise called
Tawil-at’Umr,
which means ‘Prolonged of Age.’ The Egyptians themselves called it
Ur sutthoth,
which means the ‘Primal Dazzler Time Reckoner.’ The shape-waves of the chamber were utilized by Aleister Crowley . . .”