“Leng” copyright 2009 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Lovecraft Unbound (2009), edited by Ellen Datlow.
BEYOND 2010: OVER THE INFLUENCE
Several years ago, contrary to the evidence of most of the stories in this section, I made a conscious decision to stop imitating other writers. I swore off Lovecraft; I gave up Philip K. Dick as a guide to reality-based plot-twists; I kicked my thousand volume set of Jack Vance novels out of bed. (Just kidding, I cradled them to me tenderly.) I set out blindly, or mutely, to find my own voice.
Imitation has always been part of my method. I unconsciously mimic voices, as a defense mechanism or a way of empathizing with others, or perhaps a bit of both. Like many writers, I hear voices in my head when I am writing, a professional hazard that helps me write dialog and create characters, but also makes it substantially harder to tell when my loved ones are asking for help with the housework. But while I am a sucker for stylists, and forever trying to write like my idols, this has come at the cost of rarely paying attention to my own voice.
I have tried to accept the fact that to some extent my voice is a misshapen melange of everything I’ve loved. Perhaps no distinct, unmistakable style will ever emerge from the mishmash I call me; I remain as unsure as ever of exactly how this process of being a writer is supposed to work (aside from the writing part).
The fact is, when I swore off mimicry, I did it in a terrible Arnold Schwarzenegger voice.
Maybe I shouldn’t listen to myself after all.
The rest of you definitely shouldn’t.
POKKY MAN
VERNOR HERTZWIG
FILMMAKER
In 2004 I was contacted by Digito of America to review some film footage they had acquired in litigation with the estate of a young Pokkypet Master named Hemlock Pyne. While I have occasionally played boardgames such as Parchesi, and various pen and paper role playing games involving dwarves and wizards, in vain hopes of escaping the nightmare ordeals that infest my soul, I was hardly the target audience for the global phenomenon of Pokkypets. I knew only the bare lineaments of the young man’s story—namely that he had been at one time considered the greatest captor of Pokkypets the world had ever known. Few of these rare yet paradoxically ubiquitous creatures had escaped being added to his collection. But he had turned against his fellow trainers, who now hurled at him the sort of venom and resentment usually reserved for race traitors. The childish, even cartoonish aspects of the story, were far from appealing to me, especially as spending time on a hundred or so hours of Pokkypet footage would mean delaying my then-unfunded cinematic paean to those dedicated paleoanthropologists who study human coprolites or fossil feces. But there was an element of treachery and tragedy that lured me to look more carefully at the life and last days of Hemlock Pyne, as well as the amount of money Digito was offering. I found the combination irresistible.
HEMLOCK PYNE
POKKY MASTER
To be a Pokky Captor was for me the highest calling—the highest calling! I never dreamed of wanting anything else. All through my childhood, I trained for it. It was a kind of warrior celebration… a pokkybration, you might say, of the warrior spirit. I lived, ate, breathed, drank, even pooped the Pokky spirit. Yes, pooped. Because there is dignity in everything they do. When it comes to Pokkypets, there is no room for shame—not even in pooping. In a sense, I was no different from many, many other children who dream of being Pokky Captors. The only difference between me and you, children like you who might be watching this, is that I didn’t give up on my dream. Maybe it’s because I was such a loser in every other part of my life–yeah, imagine that, I know it’s difficult, right?–but I managed to pull myself free of all those other bonds and throw myself completely into the world of Pokkypets. And I don’t care who you are or where you are, but that is still possible today.
VERNOR HERTZWIG
Hemlock Pyne’s natural enthusiasm connected him ineluctably with the childish world of Pokkypets—the world he never really escaped. The more I studied his footage, the more I saw a boy trapped inside a gawky man-child’s body. It was no wonder to me that he had such difficulty relating to the demands of the adult world. In cleaving to his prejuvenile addictions, it was clear that Pyne hoped to escape his own decay, and for this reason threw himself completely into a world that seems on its face eternal and unchanging. The irony is that in pursuing a childish wonderland, he penetrated the barrier that protects our fragile grasp on sanity by keeping us from seeing too much of the void that underlines the lurid cartoons of corporate consumer culture, as they caper in a crazed dumbshow above the abyss.
PITER YALP
ACTOR
I think we knew, and assumed Hemlock knew, where was this was probably heading. And it’s hard to see a person you care for, a friend of many years, make the sorts of decisions he made that put him ever deeper into danger. It didn’t really help to know that it was all he cared for, that all this danger was justified in a way by passion, by love. And when you saw him light up from talking about it, it was hard to argue. He’d never had anything like that in his life. I mean, he’d been through a lot. Coming back to Pokkypets, sure it seemed childish at first, but he was so disconnected from everything anyway, we had to root for him, you know? But we still feared for him. He never did anything halfway, you know? Whenever he started anything, you always knew he was going to push it past any extreme you could imagine. So it was only sort of… sort of a shock, but more of a dreaded confirmation, when we heard the news. I remember I was in the kitchen nuking some popcorn for dinner, and the kids were watching Pokkypets on, you know, the Pokkypets network… and then our youngest said, “Look, it’s Uncle Hemlock!” Which seemed weird at first because why would he be on their cartoon? But then I saw it was the Pokkypets Evening News, and even though the sound was turned up full, I found I couldn’t hear what the anchorman was saying. I just stared at the picture of Hemlock they’d put up there… the most famous shot of him, crouched in the Pokkymaze, letting an injured Chickapork out of a Poachyball… and from the way the camera slowly zoomed back from the photo, I knew right then… he wouldn’t be coming back to us this time.
AUGUSTINE “GUST” MASTERS
SEAPLANE PILOT
I was friends with Hem for years and years, used to fly him out here to the Pokkymaze in midsummer, come and collect him before fall settled in; I’d check in from time to time to see how he was doing, and drop off the occasional supply. He was a special sort of guy, and there won’t never be another like him. For one thing, he was fearless, as you can imagine you’d have to be to try living right here like he did. From where we’re standing, you can watch the migratory routes of about 150 different types of Pokkypets; everything from the super common Pecksniffs, to the Gold-n-Silver Specials, to the uniques like Abyssoid, who comes up out of this here lake once a year for about thirty seconds at 8:37 a.m. on September 9, and only if the 9th happens to fall on a Tuesday. Really it’s a Captor’s dream, or would be if it wasn’t a preserve. Hem came out here every year, and never once tried to capture or collect a single one of the Pokkys… in fact they were more likely to collect him. He got adopted by Chickapork to the extent you couldn’t tell who belonged to who. Anyway… he made it a point of pride that he never carried a Poachyball, that he was here to protect the Pokkypets, to prevent them from being collected. When he was young he was a heck of a Captor, but once he put that aside, that was it. He didn’t try charming them with flutes or putting them to sleep; he didn’t freeze or paralyze them with any of Professor Sequoia’s Dust Infusion, or Thunderwhack a single one. He came out empty handed, and tried to make a Pokky out of himself, I guess. If I had to pick one thing, I guess I’d say that right there was his undoing. That and Surlymon.