Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror (41 page)

  "Nobody understands it yet," he told me. "That's why my research is important. We understand how genes function as a protein factory, and the associated pathology of most cancers, but we don't understand the heredity of structure and behavior nearly as well. The process controlling the manner in which the fertilized ovum of a whale turns into a whale, and that of a hummingbird into a hummingbird, even though they have fairly similar repertoires of proteins, is still rather arcane, as is the process by which the whale inherits a whale's instincts and the hummingbird a hummingbird's. Most of human behavior is learned, of course— including many aspects of fear and horror—but there has to be an inherited foundation on which the learning process can build. The fact that Pickman's recessive gene, once somatically activated, caused a distinctive somatic metamorphosis rather than simple undifferentiated tumors indicates that it's linked in some way to the inheritance of structure. It's a common fallacy to imagine that individual genes only do one thing—usually, they have multiple functions—and the genes linked to structural development routinely have behavioral effects too. I suspect that the effects Pickman and his relatives suffered weren't just manifest in physical deformation; I suspect that they also affected the way he perceived and reacted to things."

  "You think that's why he became an artist?"

  "I think it might have affected the way he painted, and his choice of subject-matter—his understanding of the anatomy of the terrible and the physiology of fear."

  "That's interesting," I said. "It took your grandfather differently, of course."

  Mercifully, he wasn't holding his tea-cup. It was only his fork that he dropped. "What do you mean?" he asked.

  "Art isn't a one-way process," I said, mildly. "Audience responses aren't created out of nothing. Mostly, they're learned— but there has to be an inherited foundation on which the learning process can build. It's right there in the story, if you look. Other people just thought that Pickman's work was disgustingly morbid, but your grandfather saw something more. It affected him much more profoundly, on a phobic level. He knew Pickman even better than Silas Eliot—they, your grandfather, and Reid were all members of the same close-knit community. It must have been much easier for you to obtain a sample of his DNA than Pickman's, and you already had your own for comparison. Are you carrying the recessive gene, Professor Thurber?"

  A typical academic, he answered the question with a question: "Would you mind providing me with a sample of your DNA, Mr. Eliot?" he asked, reaching the bottom line at last.

  "You've been trampling all over my house for the last two hours," I riposted. "I expect you probably have one by now."

  He'd picked up his fork automatically, but now he laid it down again. "Exactly how much do you know, Mr. Eliot?" he asked.

  "About the science," I said, "not much more than I read in your excellent book and a couple of supplementary textbooks. About the witchcraft . . . well, how much of that can really be described as
knowledge?
If what Jonas Reid understood was vague, what I know is . . . so indistinct as to be almost invisible." I emphasized the word
almost
very slightly.

  "Witchcraft?" he queried, doubtless remembering the allegation in Lovecraft's story that one of Pickman's ancestors had been hanged in Salem—although I doubt that Cotton Mather was really "looking sanctimoniously on" at the time.

  "In England," I said, "they used to prefer the term
cunning
men.
The people themselves, that is. Witches was what other people called them when they wanted to abuse them—not that they always wanted to abuse them. More often, they turned to them for help—cures and the like. The cunning men were social outsiders, but valued after their fashion—much like smugglers, in fact."

  He looked at me hard for a moment or two, then went back to his lunch. You can always trust an American's appetite to get the better of his vaguer anxieties. I watched him drain his tea-cup and filled it up again immediately.

  "Is the ultimate goal of your research to find a cure for . . . shall we call it
Pickman's syndrome?"
I asked, mildly.

  "The disease itself seems to be virtually extinct," he said, "at least in the form that it was manifest in Pickman and his models. To the extent that it's still endemic anywhere, the symptoms generally seem to be much milder. It's not the specifics I'm interested in so much as the generalities. I'm hoping to learn something useful about the fundamental psychotropics of phobia."

  "And the fundamental psychotropics of art," I added, helpfully. "With luck, you might be able to find out what makes a Pickman . . . or a Lovecraft."

  "That might be a bit ambitious," he said. "Exactly what did you mean just now about
witchcraft?
Are you suggesting that your cunning men actually knew something about phobic triggers—that the Salem panic and the Boston scare might actually have been
induced?"

  "Who can tell?" I said. "The Royal College of Physicians, jealous of their supposed monopoly, used the law to harass the cunning men for centuries. They may not have succeeded in wiping out their methods or their pharmacopeia, but they certainly didn't help in the maintenance of their traditions. A good many must have emigrated, don't you think, in search of a new start?"

  He considered that for a few moments, and then demonstrated his academic intelligence by experiencing a flash of inspiration. "The transfer effect doesn't just affect diseases," he said. "Crop transplantation often produces new vigor—and the effect of medicines can be enhanced too. If the Salem panic was induced, it might not have been the result of malevolence—it might have been a medical side-effect that was unexpectedly magnified. In which case . . . the same might conceivably be true of the Boston incident."

  "Conceivably," I agreed.

  "Jonas Reid wouldn't have figured that out—he wouldn't even have thought of looking. Neither would my grandfather, let alone poor Pickman. But
your
grandfather . . . if he knew something about the traditions of cunning men . . . "

  "Silas Eliot wasn't my grandfather," I told him, unable this time to repress a slight smile.

  His eyes dilated slightly in vague alarm, but it wasn't the effect of the unfiltered water in his tea. That wouldn't make itself manifest for days, or even weeks—but it
would
make itself manifest. The contagion wasn't the sort of thing that could be picked up by handling a book, a damp wall, or even a fungus-ridden guardrail, and it wouldn't have the slightest effect on a local man even if he drank it . . . but Professor Thurber was an American, who'd probably already caught a couple of local viruses to which he had no immunity. The world is a busy place nowadays, but not that many Americans get to the Isle of Wight, let alone its out-of-theway little crevices.

  I really didn't mean him any harm, but he had got too close to the truth about Pickman, and I had to stop him getting any closer—because the truth about Pickman had, unfortunately, become tangled up with the truth about me. It wasn't that I had to stop him
knowing
the truth—I just had to affect the way he looked at it. It wouldn't matter how much he actually knew, always provided that the knowledge had the right effect on him. Pickman would have understood that, and Lovecraft would have understood it better than anyone. Lovecraft understood the true tenacity and scope of the roots of horror, and knew how to savor its aesthetics.

  "You're not claiming that you
are
Silas Eliot?" said Professor Thurber, refusing to believe it—for now. His common sense and scientific reason were still dominant.

  "That would be absurd, Professor Thurber," I said. "After all, I haven't got the fountain of youth in my cellar, have I? It's just water—it isn't even polluted most of the time, but we have had a very wet August, and the woods hereabouts are famous for their fungi. Some poor woman in Newport died from eating a deathcap only last week. You really have to know what you're doing when you're dealing with specimens of that sort. The cunning men could probably have taught us a lot, but they're all gone now—fled to America, or simply dead. The Royal College of Physicians won; we—I mean
they—lost."

  The trigger hadn't had the slightest effect on him yet, but my hints had. He looked down at his empty tea-pot, and he was already trying to remember how many taps there had been in the kitchen.

  "Please don't worry, Professor Thurber," I said. "As you said yourself, the disease is very nearly extinct, at least in the virulent form that Pickman had. The attenuated form that your grandfather had, on the other hand . . . it's possible that you might still catch that—but what would it amount to, after all? You might become phobic about subways and cellars, and your acrophobia might get worse, but people mostly cope quite well with these things. The only that might be seriously inconvenient, given your particular circumstances, is that it might affect your attitude to your hobby. . . and to your work. Jonas Reid had to give it up, didn't he?"

  His eyes were no longer fixed on me. They were fixed on something behind me: the painting that he had mistaken, understandably enough, for a Pickman. He still thought that it
was
a Pickman, and he was wondering how the mild fear and disgust it engendered in him might increase, given the right stimulus. But biochemistry only supplies a foundation; in order to grow and mature, fears have to be nurtured and fed with doubts and provocations. Pickman had understood that, and so had Lovecraft. It doesn't actually matter much, if you have the right foundation to build on, whether you feed the fears with lies or the truth, but the truth is so much more
artistic.

  "Actually," I told him, "when I said that I knew who'd painted it, I didn't mean Pickman. I meant me."

  His eyes shifted to my face, probing for tell-tale stigmata. "You painted it," he echoed, colorlessly. "In Boston? In the 1920s?"

  "Oh no," I said. "I painted it right here in the chine, about twenty years ago."

  "From memory?" he asked. "From a photograph? Or from life?"

  "I told you that there aren't any photographs," I reminded him. I didn't bother shooting down the memory hypothesis—he hadn't meant that one seriously.

  "You do carry the recessive gene, don't you?" he said, still the rational scientist, for a little while longer.

  "Yes," I said. "So did my wife, unlikely as it might seem. She was Australian. If I'd known . . . but all I knew about then was the witchcraft, you see, and you can't really call that
knowledge."

  His jaw dropped slightly, then tightened again. He was a scientist, and he could follow the logic all the way—but he was a scientist, and he needed confirmation. Our deepest fears always need confirmation, one way or another, but once they have it, there's never any going back . . . or even, in any meaningful sense, going forward. Once we have the confirmation, the jigsaw puzzle is complete, and so are we.

  "The chance was only one in four," I said. "My other son's body is a veritable temple to human perfection . . . and he can drink the water with absolute impunity."

  Now, the horror had begun to dig in, commencing the long and leisurely work of burrowing into the utmost depths of his soul.

  "But I have a family of my own at home in Boston," he murmured.

  "I know," I said. "They have the Internet in Ventnor public library; I looked you up. It's not really that contagious, though— and even if you do pass it on, it won't be the end of the world: it'll just engender a more personal and more intimate understanding of the anatomy of the terrible, and the physiology of fear."

Philip Haldeman

Philip Haldeman has written for a wide variety of publications. His fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, The Silver Web, Weirdbook, and others. His novel
Shadow Coast
was published in 2007. For ten years he was a classical music critic for American Record Guide. He has been a spokesperson on science vs. superstition for local and national media and has retained a lifelong love of the supernatural in fiction.

 
 
he inside of our 1920s apartment building was intersected with Oriental-carpeted hallways that might have been those of a luxurious mausoleum; except that these particular passages were haunted not by dead souls, but by living ones. I lived there, at the age of six, with my two grandparents and an aunt, but it wasn't the building's faded elegance or its aging tenants that was the focus of my childhood imagination. For some reason, in that peculiar four-story structure, I began to have disturbing, surrealistic dreams. The images were vague at first, then became more distinct, vivid, and aggressive. Over several nights of quiet terror, I came to believe, without any previous associations, that huge white worms were tunneling up from far under the ground beneath the apartment building.

  My grandparents, who had recently moved from Billings, Montana, explained how common such nightmares were in the mind of an imaginative six-year-old. My aunt Evelyn was some what more blunt and disapproving: "Well, you mustn't worry. They can't tunnel up into your room if we're on the fourth floor." My grandmother merely said, "Now go back to bed and don't let such nonsense bother you."

  Grandfather sat in his velvet-flocked overstuffed chair, his head resting against the embroidered antimacassar, listening to Amos 'n' Andy. It was 1950. He had recently been a lumberman in Montana and Minnesota, and it was reputed that he could tell on sight how many board feet of lumber were on a given railroad flat car. But in the late '40s, he decided to come to Seattle, partly to work at another lumber mill, and because he was in the habit of moving from one place to another. His greatest desire was to visit Sogndal, Norway, his birthplace. Grandfather was the sort of person you could depend on for advice.

  "They're real," I said, shifting toward a whine. "If I let my hand out over the edge of the bed they'll bite onto it and pull me under the ground."

  "Don't let your hand dangle over the edge of the bed," said Grandfather.

  In the winter, Grandmother and I had built a snowman in the open courtyard at the front of the gabled apartment building. Mrs. Murphy peered down disapprovingly from her window because we were destroying the coat of virgin snow with our galoshes, rolling snowballs, and acting as if the courtyard were our own private domain. Perhaps because the building was in an old section of the city, it contained no children other than myself, at least none I can recall.

  I remember that the hallway on the fourth floor was carpeted with an intricately patterned, wine-red runner, and it led down the hall to the corner I did not travel beyond. Near the end of the hall was Mr. Worklan's apartment. Mr. Worklan was a journeyman fur worker who spent much of his time in the cool storage vault of Weisman's Clothing on Third Avenue. One day he stared at me for a long time as I went up the main staircase (a dark forest of polished mahogany posts and railings). On the landing between floors, I saw him finally walk down toward his door like a drunken man lost in the depths of a sinking ocean liner, certain that only women and children would be saved.

 
 
Grandmother put her hand gently on my forehead. "Goodnight, David."

  "When will Mother be back?" I asked, as I had asked every night. And Grandmother answered, as she had answered every night, that she didn't know.

  "Where is she?"

  "We're not really sure, dear, but we love you and you'll stay with us. Go to sleep now and I'll leave your door open a crack."

  With the narrow column of light coming from the short hall outside my room, I put my cheek on the cool pillow and began to sleep, and to dream about Mother.

  When Mother and I had moved in, Mother shared a bedroom with my aunt. Father had moved "across town," I was told. We had left him, actually. Since I'd only a nursery-schooler's experience with Father, no one felt obligated to explain our flight and the subsequent divorce. As for my mother, one day she'd been in the apartment helping Grandmother with the ironing; the next day she was gone. Her disappearance was a shock, but after several days of confusion I decided to just wait for her to come back. Each night I would ask about her, and each night I perceived in my grandmother's answer a lingering doubt.

  Mr. Worklan knocked on our door one night that summer. Grandfather let him in, and from my room I could hear their agitated voices. Worklan spoke in low, worried tones, his voice rising in fearful expressions, then subsiding into barely audible whispers. Grandfather spoke calmly; then I heard something like ". . . happened so fast" when the door of my room was closed, blacking out the secure crack of light from the hall. For several minutes I lay awake in the dark. I fell asleep listening to muffled voices.

  Again, I dreamed of the big white worms tunneling up from under the ground. Their thick, blind, segmented bodies, unused to light, smelled like water in a limestone cave. Nothing in my humble experience prepared me for their existence, and my repeated nightmare became more terrifying and vivid with each occurrence. To ease my mind, Grandfather described the Orson Welles radio broadcast of
The War of the Worlds
in 1938, and how everyone thought Martians had landed in New Jersey. "We may be frightened by strange ideas, but sometimes we have to ignore them."

  The creatures in my dreams were only as real as those Martians, I told myself, and they couldn't find their way into my room.

  The next week, Grandmother, in her brown plaid overcoat, walked with me to Caroline's Bakery on 15th Avenue, where I stared into the long glass cases that contained fresh-baked birthday cakes. The baker often decorated these cakes with small plastic cowboys and Indians. We came for the homemade cinnamon rolls, however, and left quickly, passing Fire Station No. 7 on the way home. The back of our apartment house bordered an alley directly behind the fire station, and the gridded metal fire escape, whose uppermost platform was outside our kitchen window, could be seen winding downward to the alley where the garbage cans were grouped like big aluminum mushrooms near a brick wall. A fireman named John often threw a tennis ball back and forth to me in the alley. He had become a father figure, encouraging me to catch the ball and throw straight.

  "He's learning to be a real ball player," John had told my grandmother.

  At the front of the apartment building, I opened the tall, woodframed glass door to the entry hall. Grandmother took a key out of her purse to check the mailbox.

  That day, as we reached the second floor, Mrs. Schulte came running down the hall. She held my grandmother not so gently by the arm.

  "Mr. Worklan in 8 is moving out!" Her face, not as aged as my grandmother's, nevertheless looked older right then. She might well have been announcing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

  "Oh?" said Grandmother, looking significantly down at me for a brief moment.

  "Yes . . . he . . . told us this morning. I thought you'd like to know." She backed away. "It's too bad when people want to leave," she said emphatically, and walked back down the hallway.

  The next day, movers began to take furniture out of Mr. Worklan's apartment. Some of the tenants, including my grandfather, gathered on the hot summer sidewalk near the moving van to talk to him. I sneaked into the alley to listen to them from around the corner of the building.

  "No, I won't stay. I won't stay now," said Mr. Worklan angrily.

  "They couldn't have found us so soon," said Mr. Sorensen, an older tenant on the second floor.

  "We've got to
do
something this time," said Mrs. Schulte in a violent whisper, and I could hear an edge of hysteria in her voice.

  "Look, I know we've kept from meeting each other—since
we
aren't the only people in this building—but we sure as hell can't meet on the sidewalk," said Sorensen. He stared at Worklan. "The movers are coming out again. Why not go inside and talk? Why couldn't you wait, Worklan?"

  Worklan stood there, stiff and straight, eyeing the apartments, his lips quivering slightly, his gaze scanning the courtyard and the windows as if trying to recall some lost or forgotten memory. He shook his head.

  "Come on, Worklan," said Sorensen. "We should stay together."

  "You're making a mistake," said Worklan. "We've been safe. But
all
of us should move now."

  The movers came out carrying a mirrored bureau that brilliantly reflected the windows and brick of the apartment house. They brought it down the steps and across the courtyard toward the sidewalk while the small group of tenants made room. A determined Worklan shook hands with Grandfather, then nodded to the others. "Goodbye."

  By sundown, the movers had gone, and Mr. Worklan's apartment at the end of the second-floor hall was empty.

  "He's left, and we might not hear from him again," said Grandfather that night.

  "We won't really know . . . " said Aunt Evelyn.

  "Keep your voices down," said Grandmother. "David might hear."

  "He's asleep," said Aunt Evelyn.

  But instead, I lay awake listening, thinking, wondering anxiously. Was there an essential fact about our lives I didn't know, that no one talked about? Would everyone leave? Where would I go?

  "If we just stick together . . . " said Aunt Evelyn. "We should never have left Billings."

  "You don't
mean
it, Evelyn," said Grandmother. "We got away."

  "What about Worklan?" said Aunt Evelyn. "There aren't as many of us now. It's not fair."

  "Is it supposed to be
fair?"
said Grandfather. "For Chrissake!"

  "Please keep it down," said Grandmother. For a moment there was silence, and I thought someone would come to check on whether I was still asleep, but no one did.

  "Worklan could turn up missing like Lars Johnson," said my aunt. "Remember Johnson, the boss on the East River side?"

  "I remember them all," said Grandfather.

  "They run away," said Aunt Evelyn nervously. "Why don't they stay? They run away and eventually they disappear. What happens if . . . "

  "I don't blame them," said Grandfather.

  "Oh, why can't we just get someone to help us?" said Aunt Evelyn. She was crying. Her fretful, harsh sobs drifted through the hall into my room, where this time the door had been accidentally left ajar.

  "We've been through that, too," said Grandmother resignedly.

  "We should find David's father," said my Aunt. "We should get David to his father."

  "He thought we were insane."

  "Please keep it down," said Grandmother.

  "Sorry," said Grandfather in a barely audible voice. "But Evelyn's right. It was fine as long as David was living with his mother and father, but now he's not safe with us, and we're getting too old to move again. We have to make a stand."

  "God," said Aunt Evelyn, "I don't know."

  "This time we'll have to wait," said Grandfather.

  "What will we tell David?" said Aunt Evelyn. There was a long silence, and during the silence I struggled to keep from yelling in terror, rushing into the living room and pleading with them to tell me what was happening to us. Eventually, I fell asleep exhausted. And in my dreams
they
came again from below in their tunnels— slick, pasty horrors without eyes . . . .

  In the morning I watched Grandfather sitting in his chair, smoking his pipe, occasionally looking toward me where I played grimly with toy horses. His gray features were a cruel poker face. I fought with the determination of a chess player to stay calm. I was afraid to speak.

  When the sun was low one day and the light glared through the front-door glass into the building's entry hall, I sat on the lower step of the staircase. Mrs. Turnbull was cleaning her apartment and had made one or two trips out the back door behind the main staircase, now carrying a grocery bag of garbage that smelled of used coffee grounds. I heard the garbage can lid rattle onto the can in the alley, and from Mrs. Turnbull's open apart ment door I could hear the soap-opera voices of
Stella Dallas
coming from her radio. I heard the back door close, watched Mrs. Turnbull start back down the long hallway, then turn.