John Langan's story "Outside the House, Watching for the Crows"

I found the John Langan story "Outside the House, Watching for the Crows" in Paula Guran's anthology The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu (2016). It is by far the most professional story in the book, a tale behind which we sense with gratitude a real organizing aesthetic intelligence.

In it the narrator writes a letter to his son about his only supernatural experience. The narrator circles the subject, going back to adolescence.

Once upon a time, a kid named Jude handed him an audio cassette of music by a band called The Subterraneans. It's the kind of music that seems at first ephemeral; only later does he realize the album has snaked completely through his consciousness.

At which point he again meets Jude:

"Then you're fine," he said. "Holy shit. You know you're the first person I've met who actually saw something? Amazing."

"I don't understand," I said. "I'm sorry. I mean, I get that something important has happened – to me – but I don't know what it is."

"It's the music. It thins what's around you, lets you see beyond it."

I had read and watched enough science fiction to think I understood what Jude was talking about. "You mean to another dimension?"

"Sure," he said. "Dimension, plane, iteration, it's all just a way of saying someplace else. Someplace more essential than all of this." He waved his hand to take in the cars, the parking lot, the college, us.

"How— who are these guys? The Subterraneans? How did they do this?"

"I don't know. There are rumors, but they're pretty ridiculous. A lot of bands have messed around with occult material, usually as an occasion for some depraved sex. Fucking Jimmy Page and his sex magic. This is different. These guys are into some crazy mathematics, stuff that goes all the way back to Pythagoras and his followers. What they tried wasn't a complete success. Most of the people I've handed the tape to played it once and ignored it. A few became obsessed with it. Like I said, though, you're the first to see anything."

"Have you?" I said. "You have, haven't you?"

"Twice. Both times, I saw a city. It was huge, spread out along the shore of an ocean for as far as I could see. The buildings looked Greek, or Roman. A lot of them were in ruins, which made the place seem old, ancient. But there were people walking its streets, so I knew it wasn't abandoned. The ocean was immense. Its water was black. Its waves were half as tall as some of the buildings."

"Where is it?" I said. "Do you know what it's called?"

"No." He shook his head. "I spoke to a folklorist over at SUNY Huguenot. He'd heard of the city. He said it was called the Black City – also the Spindle. He thought it was another version of Hell. He was the one who told me about the Watch, the guys in the bird masks. Said you did not want to attract their attention."

"Why not?"

"He didn't spell it out. I'm guessing a fate worse than death."

"Oh."

"They're coming here, you know."

For a second, I thought Jude was referring to the Watch, then I understood he meant the band. "Here? Where?"

"They're playing a show at The Last Chance. Late June, I forget the exact date."

"Are you going to go?"

"Are you kidding? You have to come, too."

"Me?"

"Look at the effect a recording of their material had on you. Imagine what hearing it live could do."

"I don't know." To be honest, I was as worried by the prospect of what your grandparents would say as I was any further visions. Depending on their moods, they had a way of making a request to do something new sound as if it were a personal injury to them.

"You cannot be serious," Jude said. "You're standing on the verge of . . ." He threw up his hands.

"Of what?"

"Does it matter?" he said. "Really? Does it? Even if this place is a district in Hell, isn't that more than you're ever going to find, here?"

Jay

13 April 2019

A hint of the uncanny on the Appalachian trail: A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson (1999)

....We walked for a week and hardly saw a soul. One afternoon I met a man who had been section hiking for twenty-five years with a bicycle and a car. Each morning he would drop the bike at a finishing point ten miles or so down the trail, drive the car back to the start, hike between the two and cycle back to his car. He did this for two weeks every April and figured he had about another twenty years to go. Another day I followed an older man, lean and rangy, who looked to be well into his seventies. He had a small, old-fashioned day pack of tawny canvas and moved with extraordinary swiftness. Two or three times an hour I would sight him just ahead, fifty or sixty yards away, vanishing into the trees. Though he moved much faster than I did and never seemed to rest, he was always there. Wherever there was fifty or sixty yards of view, there he would be—just the back of him, just disappearing. It was like following a ghost. I tried to catch up and couldn't. He never looked at me that I could see, but I was sure he was aware of me behind him. You get a kind of sixth sense for the presence of others in the woods, and when you realize people are near, you always pause to let them catch up, just to exchange pleasantries and say hello and maybe find out if anyone has heard a weather forecast. But the man ahead never paused, never varied his pace, never looked back. In the late afternoon he vanished and I never saw him again.

Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods (1999).

State of Fear by Michael Crichton

State of Fear
Michael Crichton
2004

State of Fear has many typical Michael Crichton elements: Time restriction. Characters out of their depth. Conspiracy. High-level incompetence.

In it, Crichton presents us with NGO climate experts preparing terrorist attacks using high-technology to show that dangerous climate change is occurring today, not 100 years from now.

Motivation? Anxious for contributions from those crazed by such attacks, the baddies dream of donation plenty.

Crichton is particularly strong on bourgeois liberals attracted to environmental catastrophism:

....Ted Bradley looked out the window. "Isn't it beautiful?" he said. "Truly unspoiled paradise. This is what is vanishing in our world."

Seated opposite him, Kenner said nothing. He, too, was staring out the window.

"Don't you think the problem," Bradley said, "is that we have lost contact with nature?"

"No," Kenner said. "I think the problem is I don't see many roads."

"Don't you think," Bradley said, "that's because it's the white man, not the natives, who wants to conquer nature, to beat it into submission?"

"No, I don't think that."

"I do," Bradley said. "I find that people who live closer to the earth, in their villages, surrounded by nature, that those people have a natural ecological sense and a feeling for the fitness of it all."

"Spent a lot of time in villages, Ted?" Kenner said.

"As a matter of fact, yes. I shot a picture in Zimbabwe and another one in Botswana. I know what I am talking about."

"Uh-huh. You stayed in villages all that time?"

"No, I stayed in hotels. I had to, for insurance. But I had a lot of experiences in villages. There is no question that village life is best and ecologically soundest. Frankly, I think everyone in the world should live that way. And certainly, we should not be encouraging village people to industrialize. That's the problem."

"I see. So you want to stay in a hotel, but you want everybody else to stay in a village."

"No, you're not hearing—"

"Where do you live now, Ted?" Kenner said.

"Sherman Oaks."

"Is that a village?"

"No. Well, it's a sort of a village, I suppose you could say…But I have to be in LA for my work," Bradley said. "I don't have a choice."

"Ted, have you ever stayed in a Third-World village? Even for one night?"

Bradley shifted in his seat. "As I said before, I spent a lot of time in the villages while we were shooting. I know what I'm talking about."

"If village life is so great, why do you think people want to leave?"

"They shouldn't leave. That's my point."

"You know better than they do?" Kenner said.

Bradley paused, then blurted: "Well, frankly, if you must know, yes. I do know better. I have the benefit of education and broader experience. And I know firsthand the dangers of industrial society and how it is making the whole world sick. So, yes, I think I do know what is best for them. Certainly I know what is ecologically best for the planet."

"I have a problem," Kenner said, "with other people deciding what is in my best interest when they don't live where I do, when they don't know the local conditions or the local problems I face, when they don't even live in the same country as I do, but they still feel—in some far-off Western city, at a desk in some glass skyscraper in Brussels or Berlin or New York—they still feel that they know the solution to all my problems and how I should live my life. I have a problem with that."

"What's your problem?" Bradley said. "I mean, look: You don't seriously believe everybody on the planet should do whatever they want, do you? That would be terrible. These people need help and guidance."

"And you're the one to give it? To 'these people?'"

"Okay, so it's not politically correct to talk this way. But do you want all these people to have the same horrific, wasteful living standard that we do in America and, to a lesser extent, Europe?"

"I don't see you giving it up."

"No," Ted said, "but I conserve where I can. I recycle. I support a carbon-neutral lifestyle. The point is, if all these other people industrialize, it will add a terrible, terrible burden of global pollution to the planet. That should not happen."

"I got mine, but you can't have yours?"

"It's a question of facing realities," Bradley said.

"Your realities. Not theirs."

_____________

Jay

7April 2019

House of souls on the planet of the apes.

'I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?

The White People

***

Planet of the Apes
Pierre Boulle


Scientists perform brain experiments on human women. Unsettling ancestral memories emerge.

Hardly Machen, I know, but the male tinkering with women's "doors of perception" is a common and uncanny element.

Jay

7 April 2019

***

CHAPTERTHIRTY-FOUR

I entered the room and at first could see nothing to justify this air of mystery. The equipment was the same as in the previous room: generators, transformers, electrodes. There were only two subjects, a man and a woman, lying strapped down on two parallel divans. As soon as we arrived they started observing us with a strange intensity.

The gorilla assistant welcomed us with an inarticulate grunt. Helius and he exchanged a few words in deaf-mute language. It was a far from commonplace experience to see a gorilla and a chimpanzee moving then" fingers like this. I do not know why, but it seemed to me the height of absurdity and I almost burst out laughing.

"All is well. They are quite calm. We can begin a test right away."

"What sort of test?" I implored.

"I'd rather keep it as a surprise for you," Cornelius grinned.

The gorilla anesthetized the two patients, who presently fell asleep, and started up various machines. Helius went up to the man, carefully unrolled the bandage that covered his skull, and, aiming at a certain spot, applied the electrodes. The man remained absolutely still. I was questioning Cornelius with my eyes when the miracle happened.

The man began to talk. His voice echoed around the room with an abruptness that made me start, rising above the buzz of the generator. It was not an hallucination on my part. He was expressing himself in simian language, with the voice of a man from Earth or that of an ape on this planet.

The faces of the two scientists were a study in triumph. They looked at me with a mischievous glint in their eyes and reveled in my stupefaction. I was about to utter an exclamation, but they motioned me to keep quiet and listen. The man's words were incoherent and devoid of originality. He must have been captive in the institute for a longtime and kept repeating snatches of sentences he had heard spoken by the nurses or the scientists. Cornelius presently put a stop to the experiment.

"We'll get nothing more out of this chap. But the main point is, he talks."

"It's amazing," I stammered.

"You haven't seen anything yet," said Helius. "He talks like a parrot or a gramophone. But I've done much better with her."

He indicated the woman, who was sleeping peacefully.

"Much better?"

"A thousand times better," said Cornelius, who showed the same excitement as his colleague. "Just listen. This woman also talks, as you'll soon hear. But she doesn't merely repeat the words she has heard hi captivity. Her talk has an exceptional significance. By a combination of physico-chemical processes, of which I shall spare you the details, this genius Helius has succeeded hi awakening hi her not only her own individual memory but the memory of the species. Under electrical impulse her recollections go back to an extremely distant line of ancestors: atavistic memories reviving a past several thousands of years old. Do you realize what that means, Ulysse?"

I was so amazed by this extravagant claim that for a moment I really believed the learned Cornelius had gone mad; for madness exists among the apes, particularly among the intellectuals. But the other chimpanzee was already handling his electrodes and applying them to the woman's brain. The latter remained inert for some time, just like the man, then she heaved a deep sigh and started talking. She likewise expressed herself in simian language in a rather low but extremely distinct voice that changed from time to time, as though it belonged to a number of different persons. Every sentence she uttered has remained engraved on my memory.

"For some time," said the voice in a slightly anxious tone, "these apes, all these apes, have been ceaselessly multiplying, although it looked as though then" species was bound to die out at a certain period. If this goes on, they will almost outnumber us . . : and that's not all. They are becoming arrogant. They look us straight in the eye. We have been wrong to tame them and to grant those whom we use as servants a certain amount of liberty. They are the most insolent of all. One day I was jostled hi the street by a chimpanzee. As I raised my hand, he looked at me in such a menacing manner that I did not dare strike him.

"Anna, who works at the laboratory, tells me there have been a great many changes there as well. She dares not enter the cages alone any more. She says that at night a sort of whispering and chuckling can be heard. One of the gorillas makes fun of the boss behind his back and imitates his nervous tics."

The woman paused, heaved several anguished sighs, then went on:

"It's happened! One of them has succeeded in talking. It's certain; I read about it in Woman's Journal. There's a photograph of him, too. He's a chimpanzee."

"A chimpanzee, the first! Just as I thought," Cornelius exclaimed.

"There are several others. The papers report fresh cases every day. Certain biologists regard this as a great scientific success. Don't they realize where it may lead? It appears that one of these chimpanzees has uttered some ugly threats. The first use they make of speech is to protest when they are given an order."

The woman fell silent again and resumed in a different voice, a somewhat pedantic man's voice:

"What is happening could have been foreseen. A cerebral laziness has taken hold of us. No more books; even detective novels have now become too great an intellectual effort. No more games; at the most a hand or two of cards. Even the childish motion picture does not tempt us any more. Meanwhile the apes are meditating in silence. Their brain is developing in solitary reflection . . . and they are talking. Oh! not very much, and to us hardly at all, apart from a few words of scornful refusal to the more intrepid men who still dare to give them orders. But at night, when wearer not there, they exchange impressions and mutually instruct one another."

After a long silence a woman's voice continued, in anguish:

"I was too frightened. I could not go on living like this. I preferred to hand the place over to my gorila. I left my own house.

"He had been with me for years and was a loyal servant. He started going out in the evening to attend meetings. He learned to talk. He refused to do any work. A month ago he ordered me to do the cooking and washing up. He began to use my plates and knives and forks. Last week he chased me out of my bedroom. I had to sleep in an armchair in the sitting room. Not daring to scold him or punish him, I tried to win him over by kindness. He laughed in my face and his demands increased. I was too miserable. I abdicated.

"I have taken refuge in a camp with other women where they are in the same plight. There are some men here as well; most of them have no more courage than we have. It's a wretched life we lead outside the town. We feel ashamed and scarcely speak to one another. During the first few days I played a few games of patience. I haven't the energy any more."

The woman broke off again and a male voice took over:

"I had found, I believe, a cure for cancer. I wanted to put it to the test, like all my previous discoveries. I was careful, but not careful enough. For some time the apes have been reluctant to lend themselves to these experiments. Before going into Georges', the chimpanzee's, cage I had him held down by my two assistants. I got ready to give him the injection—the cancer-producing one. I had to give it to him in order to be able to cure him. Georges' eyes looked resigned. He did not move, but I saw his crafty eyes glance over my shoulder. I realized too late. The gorillas, the six gorillas I was holding in reserve for the infection, had escaped. A plot. They seized us. Georges directed the operation. He copied my movements exactly. He ordered us to be tied down on the table, and the gorillas promptly obeyed him. Then he picked up the hypodermic and injected all three of us with the deadly liquid. So now I have cancer. It's certain, for though there may be doubt as to the efficacy of the cure, the fatal serum has long since been tested and proved effective.

"After emptying the hypodermic, Georges gave me a friendly pat on the cheek, as I often did to my apes. I had always treated them well. From me they received more caresses man blows. A few days later, in the cage in which they had locked me up, I recognized the first symptoms of the disease. So had Georges, and I heard him tell the others that he was going to begin the cure. This gave me a new fright. What if it killed me off more quickly! I know I am condemned, but now I lack confidence in this new cure. During the night I succeeded hi forcing the bars of my cage and escaping. I have taken refuge in the camp outside the town. I have two months to live. I am spending them playing patience and dozing."

Another feminine voice succeeded his:

"I was a lady animal tamer. I used to do an act with a dozen orangutans, magnificent beasts. Today I'm inside the cage instead of them, together with some other circus performers.

'To give them their due, the apes treat us well and give us plenty to eat. They change the straw of our bedding when it becomes too dirty. They are not unkind; they punish only those of us who show reluctance and refuse to perform the tricks they have taken it into their heads to teach us. These are extremely advanced! I walk on all fours; I turn somersaults. So they are very good tome. I'm not unhappy. I have no more worries or responsibilities. Most of us are adapting ourselves to this regime."

This time the woman fell silent for a long time, during which Cornelius gazed at me with embarrassing insistence. I could read his thoughts only too well. Had it not been high time for such a feeble race of men, who gave in so easily, to make way for a nobler breed? I grew flushed and looked away. The woman continued in a more and more anguished tone:

"They now hold the whole town. There are only a few hundred of us left in this redoubt and our situation is precarious. We form the last human nucleus in the vicinity of the city, but the apes will not tolerate us at liberty so close to them. In the other camps some of the men have fled far off, into the jungle; the others have surrendered in order to get something to relieve their hunger. Here we have stayed put, mainly from laziness. We sleep; we are incapable of organizing ourselves for resistance. . . .

"This is what I feared. I can hear a barbaric din, something like a parody of a military band. . . . Help! It's them, it's the apes! They are surrounding us. They are led by enormous gorillas. They have taken our bugles, our drums and uniforms, our weapons, too, of course. . . . No, they haven't any weapons. Oh, what bitter humiliation, the final insult! Their army is upon us and all they are carrying are whips!"

Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle

I was eight when I went ape-crazy.

Nothing compared to the Star Wars infection of age 11-14, but still deep.

The first Apes film had just made its TV premiere. I filled sketchbooks with imagined scenes of conflict. The next Easter I got action figures. Then the coloring and activity books. Then the Marvel magazine came out.Then they started a live-action TV series. Swoony times...

But I never cracked the novel. There was no crash-landing, and no misanthropic Taylor to keep me reading.

Pick it up today and try to imagine yourself at age eight gobbling this Gallic sci-fi missal.

***

At the beginning of 2019 I made a list of books I tried to read in my youth.

I think undiagnosed HFA explains my reading failures in early life. So I wanted to go back and see what I missed.

Boulle has a lovely style, reminding me of Malraux in its precision and coldness. The human space explorers recall some of Verne's protagonists, though Boulle metes out death much more promptly.

A favorite early scene, after the explorers land on a planet orbiting Betelgeuse, ends with one of those cardinal images in literature: the discovery of a single human footprint in the sand:

....There was no doubt that we were on a twin planet of our Earth. Life existed. The vegetable realm was, in fact, particularly lush: some of these trees must have been over a hundred and fifty feet tall. The animal kingdom soon appeared in the form of some big black birds, hovering in the sky like vultures, and other smaller ones, rather like parakeets, that chased one another chirping shrilly. From what we had seen before landing, we knew that a civilization existed, too. Rational beings—we dared not call them men yet—had molded the face of the planet. Yet the forest all around us appeared to be uninhabited. This was scarcely surprising; landing at random in some corner of the Asiatic jungle, we should have had the same impression of solitude.

Before taking a further step, we felt it was urgent to give the planet a name. We christened it Soror, because of its resemblance to our Earth.

Deciding to make an initial reconnaissance without delay, we entered the forest, following a sort of natural path. Arthur Levain and I were armed with carbines. As for the professor, he scorned material weapons. We felt light-footed and walked briskly: not that our weight was less than on Earth—there again the similarity was complete—but the contrast with the ship's force of gravity prompted us to scamper along like young goats.

We were marching in single file, calling out every now and then to Hector, but with no success, when young Levain, who was leading, stopped and motioned us to listen. A murmur, like running water, could be heard in the distance. We made our way in that direction and the sound became clearer.

It was a waterfall. On coming to it, all three of us were moved by the beauty of the site. A stream of water, clear as our mountain torrents, twisted above our heads, spread out into a sheet on a ledge of level ground, and fell at our feet from a height of several yards into a sort of lake, a natural swimming pool fringed with rocks mingled with sand, the surface of which reflected the light of Betelguese, which was then at its zenith.

The sight of this water was so tempting that the same urge seized both Levain and me. The heat was now intense. We took off our clothes and got ready to dive into the lake. But Professor Antelle cautioned us to behave with a little more prudence when coming up against the system of Betelguese for the first time. Perhaps this liquid was not water at all and might be extremely dangerous. He went up to the edge of it, bent down, examined it, then cautiously touched it with his finger. Finally he scooped a little up in the palm of his hand, smelled it, and wetted the end of his tongue with it.

"It can't be anything but water," he muttered.

He bent down again to plunge his hand into the lake, when we saw him suddenly stiffen. He gave an exclamation of surprise and pointed toward something he had just discerned in the sand. I experienced, I believe, the most violent emotion of my life. There, beneath the scorching rays of Betelgeuse that filled the sky above our heads like an enormous red balloon, visible to all of us and admirably outlined on a little patch of damp sand, was the print of a human foot.

Jay

23 March 2019

Bendigo Shafter (1979) by Louis L'Amour

Bendigo Shafter: A Novel

Bendigo Shafter (1979) by Louis L'Amour is a great novel about a young man coming of age in the South Pass area of Wyoming in late 1860s. He and his sister arrive with a wagon train fraction that decided not to risk the Sierras so late in the season.

Bendigo's older brother Cain is a blacksmith and miller. Bendigo only begins to figure himself out during the first harsh winter, when he and two fellow townsmen hunt to feed their community and stave off disaster. Bendigo learns from the older men how to act.

L'Amour's great lesson here is that leadership is not granted, it is taken. Bendigo acts, and in consequence is looked to. He is deliberate, careful  to study his friends and neighbors. He hungers for books as another means of understanding the world.

There are many thrills in the novel. Anyone looking for winter adventure will appreciate the blizzard-bound train or the flight up into the Windrivers to elude claim-jumpers.  By far the most poignant scenes, and the most uncanny, describe
Bendigo's growing fascination with the Medicine Wheel site.

Excerpt:

....When we stopped again to let our horses rest, Uruwishi gestured toward the Big Horns, which lay off to the east. "Many days' journey to the north there is a place, a place to see. It is a stone wheel…a Medicine Wheel."

"A wheel?"

"Many days. It is high…a high, far place where a man can look all around. The Wheel is of stones."

"Standing up?" I was incredulous.

"On the ground. Many stones maybe so high"—he showed his hands two to three feet apart, moving them slightly as he spoke—"and many spokes."

"Who built it?"

He shrugged. "Who knows? The People Who Came Before It Was Light…maybe the Little People. They were there."

"Have you been there?"

"Once…when I was a papoose. My father prayed there, to the Great Spirit."

He turned his horse slightly. "I think it is a Medicine Wheel…I think it is big medicine. I think many moons, many lifetimes ago people came there to pray, to sit in thought upon the grass around the Wheel.

"On some of the ridges there are stone arrows that point the way."

"You say it was built long ago?"

"Long, long ago…it was built when the animals with long noses and long teeth were hunted. Men carved their bones then, and scratched upon them to count the moons, and to remember the planting times."



L'Amour's style of storytelling brilliantly conveys the episodic toing and froing of adolescence for both Bendigo and his world. Parts of the frontier open, others close. Towns grow and thrive, and then are bypassed. Only the women and men made in the process go on

Jay
13 February 2019