Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft (6 page)

My SUV was no longer on blocks. It had been incorporated into a carhenge down the street. I saw the Cussons’ kid’s red CRF230 Honda leaned against his pink stucco house. That little street bike looked prettier to me than Pamela Anderson. I could hotwire it and make it to Dallas. I made my move at midnight. I ran across the pavement and up on the lawn feeling as though the nearly full moon was a spotlight aimed directly at me. Then I marveled at something as miraculous as Mona Lisa’s smile—
keys
. People don’t always take their keys in villages the size of Flapjack. I pushed the rice rocket away from the concrete porch, hit the juice, and off I went. Two roads later I would be on the highway.

The moon seemed to get brighter and brighter as I sped away. Liberty does things to moonlight, just as moonlight does things to liberty. I saw stones everywhere, and stumps, and trashcans, and PVC pipe, and bones. Something seemed to flash in the sky above me, and I looked up. A small stone hit me. I had crashed through a tiny Stonehenge in the middle of the highway; it was made out of pebbles and orange lane markers.

The tiny circle launched me into space. I seemed to be heading toward an oranging sky, and then my belly scraped the ground and I heard people yelling.

They dragged me to the center of town, to the middle of the largest circle, where Scott was their king. He wore a crown made of stainless steel knives and forks that he had welded together in a strange fashion.

They reflected the orange light from the sky where the moon had begun to melt, and the stars had become prismatic ovals.

The villagers sat me in a camp chair. I was expecting Scott to leer and act like a movie villain. Instead, he was sad. I was the dull pupil who couldn’t quite do the lesson.

“Do you know what your problem is, Dr. Huff? You don’t ask the right questions.”

His country bumpkin accent was gone.

“What questions should I have asked?” I asked.

“Well, cousin of mine, you should have asked how a mentally ill guy in central Texas sells his art to famous places. You think I’m a Ray Johnson?”

This seemed to be a rather random thread to pursue while the moon melted, but I asked anyway.

“I did great work on my M.F.A. Hell, I didn’t even go crazy until my doctorate. I had a Question. All great Quests start with a Question. You know what my question was?”

“Stone circles?” I asked.

“Oh, thank God for that. I was beginning to think there were no smart genes in your part of the family. Yes. Between four thousand and two thousand BC mankind couldn’t make enough of these things. Fred Flintstone should be calling Barney Rubble and saying, ‘Hey, Barn, want to come over and make a whopping big stone calendar this weekend?’ ‘Gee, Fred, sounds great! I’ll bring Bam-Bam.’ I asked why—why the obsession with time.”

“Can we talk about the sky instead?”

“You’ll have a long time to talk about the sky. At least I think so. As the comic villain in this post-Shakespearian tragedy, I am allowed one monologue.”

The air had begun to shake as though a thousand fans had been turned on. Some of them were inside my lungs. A few of the Flapjackers began to cough and sneeze. My mad cousin continued.

“So why the obsession with time?”

I answered, “Crops. It was the big breakthrough.”

“I thought so at first, but then my art history professor directed me to certain older books. Pre-human books actually. Mankind wasn’t the first species interested in the big calendars. There were
things
that had begun big stone works on Earth millions of years before. Time is a dimension that life oozes through like a slug on a dew-wet leaf.”

The chair had begun to squirm under me. I started to stand, but something had wrapped itself around my wrist. For a crazy moment I thought that I was back in the hospital bed—that my wrists were still bound but that my bandages were coming off and I was really going to see the world. Everything lunged at me, then relaxed back into its normal spatial relationships.

“You see, the calendars form a bigger shape. A series of angles that directs things. Imagine the things you call dimensions—length, width, time, and so forth—were not as interesting as life, senses, consciousness. Imagine all that bio-stuff as one big slug. You make one path of ground glass and salt and one path of wet slime and slug food. Where does sluggy go?”

I could feel things sprouting at the base of my spine. My teeth had begun to move independently. I felt emotions that were analogues of lust and fear and the part of you that waits to plummet down on the roller coaster. It felt like the rush of smoking
salvia divinorum
or whiffing roach killer.
I am still in my house dying, none of this is happening.
But for once in my life, denial didn’t work.

“I got the big picture, cousin. I saw all the angles. I saw every angle from Yr to Nhhngr. I could control the path of all that bio-stuff. I could use God’s technology. I’m not rightly sure what god—here is where it gets tricky. I don’t know if I am delivering cows to the slaughterhouse door or helping beautiful butterflies out of their cocoon. That was when I lost it. I just had to find out, so I made the little box for Fenster to find. I mixed an old Baptist hymnal with the
Typhonian Tablet,
tossed in a little Albert Pike and a smidgen of the
Fifty-Book.
Then I made simple diagrams showing all the angles. Humans picked up where they had stopped four thousand years ago. Now little sluggy is almost there.”

“So you are giving me the Scooby Doo speech and now the monster comes along and eats me? That’s my life?” I asked.

He smiled. “I’d’ve made it too if it weren’t for you meddling kids! No, neither Fred nor Wilma will save the day. No Mystery Machine. Nein, ein Held wird kommen. Auf vier Pfoten, although I suspect some of us will have more than four paws.”

“If it weren’t for whatever drugs you have given me, I could deny this whole scene. What did you slip me, DMT with salivinorm chaser? Maybe a little old-fashioned LSD so I’ll be as crazy as you when you slice me with a butcher knife?”

“You are very stupid. This is not about you being a little sacrificial lamb, cousin. It is about a new world. For one instant as an artist I saw I could sculpt the whole world, so I did. I used family money and a little Texas town, and then fate threw me you as the first person to visit my gallery. Well, not fate really; when our great-granddad James Scott began playing with weird notions about Druids, someone in England sent him the
Typhonian Tablet.
Some poor soul had translated them for certain English Rosicrucians, then hanged himself. Dr. James couldn’t read them very well, but he didn’t have my advantage of being crazy. You will be changed to be able to view my art. It is what I sold my soul for; so to speak, I am making you into the perfect audience.”

With his left hand he pointed to the sky, which shone pure and orange and smelled of burning wax; with his right hand he pointed down at the earth, which was weeping greenish mercury. “So tell me, cousin, what hath God wrought? Slaughterhouse or paradise? Did our ancestors’ ancestors stop making the stone circles because they were unworthy, or because they were afraid? What do you see and smell and hear that a little crazy human like me can’t? Do you worship my sculpture of space and time, mind and soul? Or should I worship you?” He fell to his knees before me, and as he bowed his head the weird crown of flatware fell from his head.

I could feel what all the angles were doing to me; my perception shattered and then re-formed in more dimensions than before. Goodbye, 3D.

And the air smelled sweet like souls separating into their separate parts, and I could hear the gentle pops of the eyes of the mealy little humans around me, and the hairs on my arms began to move independently, and I began to see into time, just shallow pools at first, and there was great-granddad getting his package from England, and his chestnut mare rearing in fear of the book, and there was the One who would Come in Its polychromatic polychronic poly-gendered terror-beauty.

I stood free from the chair, my feet sinking a few inches into the mercury-like liquid. I breathed in the new heaven through my hollow teeth and I sucked in the newly charred earth through my roots and I called out to my Beloved who lures me into a thousand painful deaths of ecstasy, now at the end of Time.

(
For James Ambuehl
)

Even my own cunt

was a mystery to me

brought up without wommin folk.

(You cannot imagine what it was like in

Massachusetts in those days.)

I just knew that boys were Different from me.

I had had a few giggling conversations

With girls on nearby farms.

Then came my wedding day

And my father called down

My husband-to-be.

In waves of colors, not of this Earth

In angles not of man’s world

He came

and he had me

and he had every cell of me.

I bore Him twins as He willed.

One for the world of men

One for the world-to-be.

I died but my soul did not go

to my lover.

I wait in the rotting earth

for the Gate to be Opened.

Come, dreamer, and eat the fruit of

This rotting orchard.

Come, poet, and cast the words as

Word that sets all free.

Tonight I want a warm flop. I can’t take the cold anymore. It makes a skeleton out of you. Freezes you down to the bones. And if I don’t make three bits selling pencils . . . I’ll make it somehow. I hitched to Telluride ’cause I’m on my way to in Arizona. It’s supposed to be warm in Arizona. I read in the
Amarillo Globe News
that last year in ’31 Arizona had 420,000 boxes of citrus. You gotta be pretty warm to put up 420,000 boxes.

See, I’m an educated man. I shouldn’t be selling these damn pencils. I’m an astronomer—just what the country needs in this Depression.

Yesterday I had a chance to make some real money. But I turned it down. A man’s got to be soft in the head to work at the Brunckow Mine. The beautiful bronze yellow ore called calaverite has long since played out. Told you I was an educated man. Calaverite is a gold telluride, hence the name of this burg. This city of death, too many hoboes and bums died here. Even a newcomer hears about that. Even in this city of death. Fifteen deaths. Maybe more. Captain Macphedius and Slim aren’t as choosy as I. Maybe they’ve just been hungry longer. Telluride ain’t got a soup kitchen and damn few churches to beg by.

It’ll be morning soon. And warmer.

“Say, Mister, you want to buy a—oh, sorry, Captain, I didn’t recognize you in your new duds.”

“Pencil business looks pretty thin, Robert. Care to let me buy you breakfast?”

I’d never seen Captain Macphedius without his army coat. He’d been in the Expeditionary Force. To listen to him, he was the one who won the war. We walked to Mary’s Hashatorium.

“Anything you want, Robert. Anything.”

I wanted ham and eggs but I knew I couldn’t keep down proteins on an empty stomach. So oatmeal with butter and sugar. And God’s own brew, coffee.

“You should’ve joined us out at the mine. I could still get you on. Mr. Brandon listens to everything I say.”

“You seem to be getting along pretty well, Captain.”

“I never thought I’d be wearing new clothes again. It’s like Walter Winchell said yesterday, ‘If we have four more years of Hoover, Gandhi would be a well-dressed man.’”

The captain was too loud. Too nervous. It didn’t jibe with his prosperity. I asked, “What are you really doing out at the mine?”

A cold light flashed in the captain’s eyes.

“Why, we’re mining for gold, son.” He pulled a small leather bag from his shirt pocket. “See?” It was full of golden nuggets. Probably pyrite. He sounded as if he were trying to convince himself.

“You’re paid very well for a miner.”

“Oh, Mr. Brandon doesn’t care for gold.” He’d said too much. He put some money on the table. “That should cover it.” He left. I finished my oatmeal and risked finishing his biscuits and gravy. It was a mistake.

Have you ever thought about Colorado? You have lots of time to think when you’re trying to sell writing sticks as a step above charity. Alexis de Tocqueville thought the gigantism made this an inhuman land. The great rocks and valleys. The San Juan Mountains are old ice-dissected volcanoes standing 13,000 feet above sea level. It’s a mite hard to breathe up here, or maybe that’s a lifetime of living in the lowlands for you. The Ute are full of sky gods. You’re closer to the sky up here, maybe too damn close, maybe it don’t take a lot to achieve escape velocity, especially if you aren’t weighed down by food. There is something strange in Colorado; it does not belong to the rest of the planet. You can see it in the eyes of the settlers—especially the miners who spend most of their time alone. They are confronting the spirit of the place, that great psychic entity. And like the Ute before them—it has conquered them.

Speculation is a great thing. It takes the edge off poverty and misery. Some rich folks figure that there’s nothing in the minds of us down-and-outers. But they’re wrong. The mind grows keen as the body withers. I kept wondering what they were mining at the Brunckow that was more precious than gold.

It was a week before I saw the captain again. Mr. Inschloss the pharmacist had been letting me flop in the back of this store in exchange for sweeping up. I was putting a green cardboard Christmas tree in the window when the captain walked in. His face was yellow rather than the miner’s red. His eyes were glassy and he pitched forward slightly as though drawn by a different gravity from the rest of us. He asked Mr. Inschloss for a hundred quinine sulfate tablets, four tins of Paris green, and five bottles of beef tonic. I picked up my broom and walked outside to sweep up the cold boards. As the captain left I said, “Are you fighting the plague out there, Captain?”