"To Nyarlathotep, Mighty Messenger, must all things be told. And He shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides, and come down from the world of Seven Suns to mock.»
It was not surprising that it was my voice speaking on the record.
Wilmarth/Lovecraft took no notice.
Suddenly, we jumped forward and I was in Akeley's cabin. Wilmarth/Lovecraft was talking to Akeley, who was sitting in the opposite chair and covered in his huge robe. Akeley was describing Yuggoth with its great cities of black stone. After awhile, Wilmarth/Lovecraft went to bed and I took his place.
"So," Akeley said in that queer, disjointed voice, "what are you looking for?"
"Not much," I answered. "It's just that I've always wondered — a lot of us have wondered — who are you really? Under that mask.
Who are you? Are you one of the Fungi? Are you Nyarlathotep?"
"Why don't you see for yourself?"
I reached over and took off the mask. It was Lovecraft. "Of course," he said, "who else would it be?"
I never developed a taste for Clark Ashton Smith. I knew he was a good writer, but just something about his work never clicked with me. Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith were touted as Weird Tales' "three musketeers." And yet it was often said that Seabury Quinn was more popular with the readers than any of them. Lovecraft never got a cover. Guess Margaret Brundage just couldn't bring herself to paint Cthulhu and, after all, there were no half-naked damsels in distress in Lovecraft. Maybe he would have been more successful if there had been.
The next few days passed strangely.
I don't need to say that I didn't show up for the operation. Dr. Lyons called once, demanding to know where I was and why I didn't come in. He didn't call again. In fact, nobody called after a while. I got to the point where I had to pick up the phone and check it regularly to make sure it was still working.
I stopped doing that when a thick, guttural voice came on the empty line and said, "YOU FOOL, WARREN IS DEAD!"
The dreams went back and forth then. Sometimes I'd have them when I was sleeping. Sometimes I'd have them when I was awake. I'd be walking down Thayer Street and suddenly I'd be walking down a street in Arkham, heading for the Witch House.
Were they real? Was anything real at this point? I remember all those stories where everyone knows that the dreams are real except for the dreamer. In Pet Sematary, the main character (whose name escapes me but he was played by Dale Midkiff in the movie, which wasn't a bad adaptation — King had suffered far worse) goes for a midnight walk with the spirit of the dead student. The student leads him down the path to the Pet Sematary and then tells him not to go beyond the wall. He might as well have put a big neon sign saying, "This way to the Wendigo's Zombie grounds." When he wakes up, he's stunned to find his feet covered with mud and sticks. When I read that, I wasn't overcome with fear. Of course the dream was real. Aren't they always? My first thought was, "Damn, that's gonna be hard to clean up."
The dreams. Eventually the dreams are the only things that are real. In the dreams there's no cancer, only monsters, gods, demons, ghouls, and things you can grab and hold with your hands. Something you can fight and batter into submission. Ever try to grab a cancer?
I stopped eating after a while. Didn't know why I was bothering anyway. Everything tasted the same and had that metallic, coppery taste to it. Lovecraft approved of that. We talked a long time about things and only occasionally would something creep through the woods or the walls. I kept taking the herb/vitamin potion along with Dr. Lyons's medication until it ran out. The Hounds of Tindalos ran through every once in a while but stopped coming when I ran out of food to give them. The cats of Ulthar never bothered to come at all, preferring to stay on the moon until everything was over.
"Am I dying?" I asked Lovecraft.
"Maybe. Who knows? What is death? Don't ask me."
"But you're dead."
"Am I?"
…
I finally found the section in The Ghost Pirates that Lovecraft was talking about.
The good ship had been plagued by the appearance of ghost pirates who are making away with the sailors. There were ghost ships following them through the mist. The narrator tries to explain what's happening:
"Well, if we were in what I might call a healthy atmosphere, they would be quite beyond our power to see or feel, or anything. And the same with them; but the more we're like this, the more real and actual they could grow to us. See? That is, the more we should become able to appreciate their form of materialness. That's all. I can't make it any clearer."
I was spending more time away. I couldn't remember what day it was or what month. The cable was shut off eventually, which was okay because the electricity followed shortly after. I lay in bed, fumbling through my mind. Things and places wandered through me until, eventually, I found myself spending less and less time in that small room in Rhode Island. When I was there, my head was one large hurt. I had begun to think of my brain as a big black stain. If I could lift my head and look in the mirror, I felt sure that my eyes would be completely black.
Lovecraft accompanied me most of the time, but sometimes I was alone walking through the worlds. I was solid, with form and substance. Here, I was thin and ghostly. The people there welcomed me. They grabbed my hand, slapped me on the back, and brought me along. Here, only Lovecraft stayed at my side and, eventually, I woke up and even he wasn't there anymore. He had moved beyond and to see him, I'd have to let myself drift away.
I didn't float off like you hear in those near-death shows. I fell away from myself, sinking through the earth. I was going beyond and following old Joe Slater to that strange place that was a star far away that shone upon Olathoë aeons ago.
The ground below me became a solid deck of a ship. I felt it move through the water as we raced forward into the strange and forbidding water where an island had suddenly appeared.
Asenath looked at me through Edward Derby's eyes. I sent six bullets into his brain.
I reached for the smooth surface of polished glass.
I thrilled to the sound of Erich Zann's music as the dead, mute man called to something outside the window.
I tore through Capt. Norrys' body while the sounds of the rats ran off in the distance.
I unfurled the photo at the corner of Pickman's painting.
I cringed in Nahum Gardner's farmhouse as the colour sprang free.
I… had become… fiction.
The Broadsword
Laird Barron
Laird Barron is the author of the acclaimed short story collection The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (Night Shade, 2007). His stories have appeared in Sci Fiction and Fantasy & Science Fiction and have been reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, The Year's Best Fantasy, and Best New Fantasy 2005. He is now at work on his first novel.
Lately, Pershing dreamed of his long lost friend Terry Walker. Terry himself was seldom actually present; the dreams were soundless and gray as surveillance videos, and devoid of actors. There were trees and fog, and moving shapes like shadow puppets against a wall. On several occasions he'd surfaced from these fitful dreams to muted whispering — he momentarily formed the odd notion a figure stood in the shadows of the doorway. And in that moment his addled brain gave the form substance: his father, his brother, his dead wife, but none of them, of course, for as the fog cleared from his mind, the shadows were erased by morning light, and the whispers receded into the rush and hum of the laboring fan. He wondered if these visions were a sign of impending heat stroke, or worse.