A Mountain Walked
Edited by S. T. Joshi
(2015, Dark Regions Press)
❖
Far Below by Robert Barbour Johnson
Way leads unto way for the easily distracted reader. Prior to yesterday I'd never heard of "Far Below" by Robert Barbour Johnson, even though I have an anthology in which it is collected. My thanks to Tor dot com for shining a light on it.
"Far Below" is a spectacular weird story mixing folk and urban horror. It is far richer than my favorite NYC Lovecraft work, "The Horror at Red Hook." The narrator records the words of Gordon Craig, head of the NYPD special detail in the subway tunnels under Manhattan. Craig commands a hi-tech unit keeping subway riders safe from gory death.
....And yet I flatter myself that it's been rather a socially useful career at that; perhaps more so than stuffing animals for dusty museum cases, or writing monstrous textbooks that no one ever bothers to read. For I've a science of my own down here, you know: the science of keeping millions of dollars' worth of subway tunnels swept clean of horror, and of safeguarding the lives of half the population of the world's largest city.
"And then, too, I've opportunities for research here which most of my colleagues above ground would give their right arms for, the opportunity to study an absolutely unknown form of life; a grotesquerie so monstrous that even after all these years of contact with it I sometimes doubt my own senses even now, although the horror is authentic enough, if you come right down to it. It's been attested in every country in the world, and by every people. Why, even the Bible has references to the 'ghouls that burrow in the earth', and even today in modern Persia they hunt down with dogs and guns, like beasts, strange tomb-dwelling creatures neither quite human nor quite beast; and in Syria and Palestine and parts of Russia …
"But as for this particular place—well, you'd be surprised how many records we've found, how many actual evidences of the Things we've uncovered from Manhattan Island's earliest history, even before the white men settled here. Ask the curator of the Aborigines Museum out on Riverside Drive about the burial customs of Island Indians a thousand years ago—customs perfectly inexplicable unless you take into consideration what they were guarding against. And ask him to show you that skull, half human and half canine, that came out of an Indian mound as far away as Albany, and those ceremonial robes of aboriginal shamans plainly traced with drawings of whitish spidery Things burrowing through conventionalized tunnels; and doing other things, too, that show the Indian artists must have known Them and Their habits. Oh yes, it's all down there in black and white, once we had the sense to read it!
"And even after white men came—what about the early writings of the old Dutch settlers, what about Jan Van der Rhees and Woulter Van Twiller? Even some of Washington Irving's writings have a nasty twist to them, if you once realize it! And there are some mighty queer passages in 'The History of the City of New York'—mention of guard patrols kept for no rational purpose in early streets at night, particularly in the region of cemeteries; of forays and excursions in the lightless dark, and flintlocks popping, and graves hastily dug and filed in before dawn woke the city to life …
"And then the modern writers—Lord! There's a whole library of them on the subject. One of them, a great student of the subject, had almost as much data on Them from his reading as I'd gleaned from my years of study down here. Oh, yes; I learned a lot from Lovecraft—and he got a lot from me, too! That's where the—well, what you might call the authenticity came from in some of his yarns that attracted the most attention! Oh, of course he had to soft-pedal the strongest parts of it—just as you're going to have to do if you ever mention this in your own writings! But even with the worst played down, there's still enough horror and nightmare in it to blast a man's soul, if he lets himself think on what goes on down there, below the blessed sanity of the earth's mercifully concealing crust. Far below...
[I'm reminded of Dick O'Neil's character in The Taking of Pelham 123 when he says "What do the riders want for their lousy ten cents?" or something to that effect.]
Barbour tells the story with a slick and gratifying swiftness. He mercifully keeps the Lovecrafting to two nods and the Jim Crow-era racism to one.
***
Only the End of the World Again by Neil Gaiman
An overly clever and self-indulgent pastiche, with keywords like Innsmouth, Marsh, and "The Opener" all checked-off.
There needs to be a moratorium on execrable mashups of Hammett and Chandler with fannish caricatures of Lovecraftian form and content. Cast a Deadly Spell has been done (and all the way back in 1991!).
***
The Phantom of Beguilement by W. H. Pugmire
....The older woman smiled with thick mauve lips and lightly swept thin fingers through thick hair. "Mothers are such a wonderful invention," cooed the phlegmatic voice. "With some exceptions. His didn't understand him at all." She pointed a tattered nail to the painting.
"You told me his name was Jeremy Blond."
"Aye, that it was. Poor sod. A nervous young artist, with dark wounded eyes and pale lifeless hair. We get the type in Kingsport, but I've never known one to look so hunted, poor lad."
"And this is the only work of his that you have?"
"It is, love. His mum collected the rest after his vanishment. Aye, she had a lonesome look about her as well. She hated that her only child had chosen to be a painter and poet, but when his body was never found, well, his art was all she had to remember him by. But this piece she never saw, for he gave it to me. I found the wee photo frame and popped it in there, nice as you please. So, you'll be taking it off my hands?"
"Yes, please," Katherine answered, reluctantly surrendering the painting. "It's almost like an experimental photograph, so indistinct and surreal. Is it a woman on a raft, surrounded by shadow and eerie mists of light? And those things that float above her, like a flock of primeval psychopomps—are they gulls, and if so, why so disfigured? He had a wonderfully unique style. How old was he?"
"Little more than a child, miss. But bright. Very preoccupied with them strange books...."
Is all Pugmire pitched at this level? I ask because I haven't read him before, and I'm surprised a story of no more than fan-fiction quality has been professionally published. The world of Lovecraft pastichists, I suspect, is fueled by logrolling.
This story cannot be dismissed as a narrator's "pastel in prose" written in first person. This is authorial third person:
....Katherine pressed her palms onto damp wood and leaned toward the apparition that stopped just inches from where she trembled. The figure bent to her. Its ropy hair writhed and reached for her, then wove into her own. Spectral claws wrapped around her shaking hands as stagnant shadow filled her pores and sank into her soul. With phantasmagorical motion she shivered with mutation, stretching a tingling mouth so as to sing new sounds that writhed within her throat....
***
...Hungry...Rats by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
Clichéd first-person tight-lipped tough-guy argot, mixing Spillane, Carver, Gordon Lish, and an MFA seminar free-write. Mixed with a soupçon of horrors-of-"the 'Nam."
Rats.
Scabs and scars. Matted fur, skin blistered with pox and bites. Teeth needle-sharp. Shit right outta nightmares. Evil shit those teeth. Blades, ravenous blades to rend and tear prey. Rip it to shreds and devour it. Teeth. Needle-razors. Fast and hungry. Always hungry. Always at war with its own stomach and the horde. Slinking, leaping, running. Fast and fast and faster. Eat first or starve, the law of the horde. Eat first and be strong. Grow. Or be eaten....
***
Sigma Octantis by Rhys Hughes
A vigorous exercise in scientific romance.
In 1928 a translator of arcane documents is hired by a Patagonian magnate to sort through his library of lore. First-rate, and a merciful breather after the finger-exercises of Pugmire and Pulver.
....I borrowed a horse and rode off into the wilderness to relax.
A few peons dug irrigation canals outside the grounds of the palace, a motley collection of sulky individuals, hired workers from the forests on the far side of the Andes, tough and silent; and they barely acknowledged my presence as I cantered past. Usually placid, they were known to burst suddenly with long-repressed fury. The first overseer employed by Jones ended his last working day with his head on an improvised pike, nodding slowly to the saraband steps of his murderers.
Deep down I sympathised with these oppressed vassals.
But in those times, those callow and vicious days, open prejudice was regarded as normal behaviour and nobody else voiced support for natives, whether local or imported, and so I kept quiet. To rant against justice and fair play was considered good manners. Jones regarded it as the height of learning to quote Gobineau or Bismarck on the natural inequalities of the various races; but to whisper a word expressing approval of diversity was an offence that would earn instant exile....
***
The Wreck of the Aurora by Patrick McGrath
A mature and compelling story. Though barely more than an anecdote, it is miles ahead of some of the stories in this collection.
The adult daughter of a lighthouse keeper visits the rock where the old man's sanity deserted him. McGrath tells the story with an obsessive attention to physical sensation in very few pages. It is a fine achievement on a subject of historic sublimity.
….I hauled myself into the lighthouse and lay a few moments gasping on the stones. Then I scrambled to my feet and was at once overwhelmed by the stench of stale dank air and, too, by a kind of sudden mental shock from which I recoiled as though struck in the face by a bucket of cold water: Doc was here. My father was here. This was where he worked, where he lived. Where he went mad. But it was a sad place now, that tower, intact but derelict because uninhabited and reeking not only of old seaweed and birdshit but neglect and a kind of moral death. There was a lantern up top, operated by electrical circuitry under the control of automatic timers, but the tower was a dying body on life support with its quiet buzz, its discreet blinking lights on gunmetal boxes attached to the wall, tangled cable spilling out; it was a structure that crackled with electricity but had no life of its own. I was astonished at the thickness of the wall. It aroused an idea of the force and strength of the storms it was built to withstand....
❖
Jay
10 June 2020
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