Gathered Dust and Others (2 page)

JET: Could you provide us with a little more background, if you would?

WHP: Tell my sad little life story? I was a weird kid. Believed I was a Witch when very young, as did my older sister. She and I used to practice what we thought was magick. Grew up knowing I was a sissy (loved playing house with the neighborhood girls, but always dressed LIKE them, wearing play dresses &c) and being tormented for it by grown-ups, kids at school, and thus I became an introvert and created my own realms of reality where I could be safe. My best friend in high school was Jewish, and that began a Jewish identification. Later I learned that I AM Jewish on my mom’s side of the family. Fell in love with Streisand while in high school, where I was heavy into drama and was certain that I wanted to be a professional actor. Did theatre for a while when I returned from my mission, but more and more I wanted to be a Mythos writer professionally. Began to visit with Harold Munn, who as a young man used to hang out with Lovecraft, driving HPL around sightseeing in New England. Came out as queer and everyone freaked out, got kicked out of the church, kicked out of home. Dropped out of the Lovecraft scene and everything and moved in with my granny. Discovered punk rock, and it saved my soul. Did my famous fanzine, PUNK LUST. Returned to writing and sent “Pale, Trembling Youth” to Jessica Salmonson for her FANTASY & TERROR magazine. She added a new beginning to it and sold it to CUTTING EDGE. Returned to writing full-time around 1985, the same time I discovered how much fun it was to walk around Seattle dressed like Boy George, blending drag with punk, safety pins and mini-skirts. Some Mormon missionaries knocked on my door some seven years ago. I told them ain’t no way I’m returning to Mormonism. They said try praying about it. Alone, I got on my knees and had such a violent, overwhelming, shocking experience, felt my dead father and grandfather in the room with me, shaking, weeping, howling, telling God, “Don’t do this, I don’t want to change my life!” But I learned beyond personal doubt that God lives and that he’s a Mormon, so I returned to the church, which has made life extremely interesting, difficult, absurd, wonderful.

JET: You only recently went online, with email, joining message board conversations, and so on. Why now, and how are you liking it?

WHP: I said Never Never Never. Beginning with THE FUNGAL STAIN, S. T. Joshi became my “official” editor. When Jerad Walters of Centipede Press said he wanted to publish an omnibus of my best weird fiction, S. T. hinted that it was time I get email so that I can send him my work electronically instead of sending him typed MSS that needed to be scanned. My patron hooked me up, and I’m totally fucking addicted. Such a cliché. I LOVE meeting Lovecraftians online, talking about Cthulhu Mythos, &c. …

3: Broken Off

From here, the interview went on to list books that Pugmire had already seen released or was anticipating. While the information related in the interview to this point is general and remains pertinent, the information that follows might now be dated: incomplete or inaccurate. One book’s title was changed, book contents were altered, projects in the works have been completed and more added. A more up-to-date bibliography of Pugmire’s work to the
present day
, taken from the author’s Wikipedia page, would now read:

TALES OF SESQUA VALLEY, 1997, a chapbook released from my own Necropolitan Press, similarly with an introduction by yours truly.

DREAMS OF LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR, 1999, Mythos Books.

SONGS OF SESQUA VALLEY, 2000, a chapbook from Imelod Publications.

TALES OF LOVE AND DEATH, 2001, a chapbook from Delirium Books.

A CLICKING IN THE SHADOWS AND OTHER TALES, 2002, a split release with Chad Hensley from Undaunted Press.

SESQUA VALLEY AND OTHER HAUNTS, 2003, a hardcover from Delirium Books.

THE FUNGAL STAIN AND OTHER DREAMS, 2005, Hippocampus Press.

SESQUA VALLEY AND OTHER HAUNTS, 2008, a revised edition of the 2003 release with three additional stories, from Mythos Books.

WEIRD INHABITANTS OF SESQUA VALLEY, 2009, Terradan Works, with another introduction (and cover art) by yours truly.

THE TANGLED MUSE, 2010, a massive omnibus from Centipede Press.

With SOME UNKNOWN GULF OF NIGHT, Arcane Wisdom Press, due in 2011.

In any case, I now had the meat of an introduction, but that didn’t answer the question of why my longest-running and closest writer friend was now not responding to my messages, when throughout the editing of his book we had been in constant contact. Had I inadvertently offended him, alienated him somehow? It hardly seemed like Wilum to hold a grudge, so curious as to whether this silence had to do with me alone, I checked his frequently updated page at the social networking website, Facebook, only to find he had no longer been frequently updating it. For more than a week, he had not written what is called a status update, and several friends had posted on his “wall” asking about his whereabouts before me. His last status update had been exceedingly brief and cryptic, and maybe it was just my own overactive imagination that imparted inflections of bewilderment, awe, perhaps even terror into its single typed word:
“Night-gaunts?
”

4: The Video

I decided to check another venue where Pugmire has created a presence for himself; the video-sharing website YouTube, at which, as “MrWilum,” he has posted many “vlog” entries – a vlog being a video blog. Here, he has discussed his current projects, and the works of other authors he admires such as, of course, H. P. Lovecraft.

But again, I was to find that the most recent video Pugmire posted was over a week old. Videos up to that point had discussed his work on this very book, with titles such as:
W. H. Pugmire reads from his work in progress; ‘Depths of Dreams and Madness’ – a reading
; and the second-to-last last video posted
: A Weary, Rambling Vlog
. But even that video, with its perhaps significant title, turned out to contain nothing more alarming than Pugmire – as always, speaking intimately to his webcam in the basement of his mother’s place, with a mundane wall hanging of two extinct Kennedy brothers peering over his shoulder – again discussing his work on the collection GATHERED DUST AND OTHERS. No, it was only the most recent vlog entry uploaded to the site that caused me concern.

The video, which was untitled, showed nothing much more than a field of shifting static, like a sandstorm of volcanic grit raging just beyond a thin glass windowpane. I persisted and stared at this video throughout its full fifteen minutes, however, and gradually I could just make out a head and shoulders somewhere behind all that static, darker as the vague figure apparently leaned in closer to the camera -- but then it would fade entirely from view again, before once more briefly surfacing. I had never before known Pugmire to use any special effects such as my own webcam possesses to make his videos look bizarre, but that isn’t to say he might not experiment thus.

Even so, wouldn’t he at least want his viewers to hear his voice? And yet the sound accompanying the blizzard of pixels was also just a sizzling, hissing barrage of static. Only when the vague figure almost became a familiar outline did I hear half-drowned, greatly distant snatches of words. I believe I heard: “
Sesqua Valley…I made it feel (
or
, I made it real?)…she wants her mask back…seven worlds…Gershom! This is Gershom!
”

The only other thing I discerned occurred at 14:52 in the video, just before it ended. In a corner of the video window, I caught a brief glimpse of several faces. Surely, those portraits of John and Robert Kennedy on the wall hanging behind Pugmire, as always. But when I played the video back and paused it at 14:52, freezing those obscure visages, they proved to be something else. Something not quite human – gazing back at me with mouths open far too wide in hunger.

No…no…again, surely this was a product of my own writer’s imagination.

I can only
– I must!
– assume that Pugmire erred somehow in uploading this video, or that the video itself was corrupted, unbeknownst to him. I can only hope that he will delete this disturbing fifteen minutes soon, and in its place leave one of his more familiar videos, in which his soft voice reads enthusiastically from whatever wonderful new piece of work he is bending his talents to.

Though I cannot wait until then to complete this introduction and submit it to my publisher, I will check back constantly for that next video to appear. Hoping, yes, hoping that it will show more clearly Pugmire’s own face next time, and not reveal more clearly, instead, those other faces I believe I glimpsed floating hungrily in the raw stuff of unknown dimensions.

–Jeffrey Thomas, Massachusetts, 4/25/11

Gathered Dust

(Dedicated to ye memory of J. Vernon Shea)

I.

I never solved the mystery of how my Uncle Silas came to own Elmer Harrod’s haunted house in Arkham, but I suspect it had something to do with his fondness for campy horror films.  Harrod owned an impressive collection of such cinematic silliness, which filled the area that had been turned into a tiny movie house where he invited guests to view his favorite films as well as his own home movies that had been filmed in the nearby cemetery.  These homemade efforts served as Harrod’s introductions to horror films on the television program where he served as horror host, and I used to love watching them when, as a teenager, I would spend two weeks of every summer with my uncle; and I recall how something caught my attention, an expression reflected in Elmer Harrod’s shadowed eyes, momentary hints of authentic mental disturbance and bewilderment and subtle fear.  Harrod’s local fame as weekend host to televised horror films was matched by the legend of his haunted house, a mammoth Victorian pile that had been the subject of nameless rumors for decades in Arkham.  Harrod was less renowned for the paperback anthologies of weird fiction that he had edited over the years, short-lived titles with lurid covers; nor was his one novel,
Underneath Witch-Town
, what could be called a success, although I had found it an enthralling read after having found a box of copies after my uncle had purchased the residence and its contents.  It was the library of the place that really influenced me, however, for it was stuffed with the horror host’s extensive collection of weird phantasy.  I spent summer after summer poring over those books, and it was under the spell of their authors that I became determined to join their ranks and write horror fiction professionally.  It was while stumbling through the high grass of Old Dethshill Cemetery that I came up with my pen name, Deth Carter Hill.  There were many Carters buried in the forsaken place, but I had been peculiarly drawn to the hidden grave of Obediah Carter, whose tabletop tomb dated 1793 to 1887 was decorated with a faded photograph of the elderly gentleman beneath an oval of glass that has been fastened to the slab of stone.  There had long been legends that the Carters of Arkham had been tainted with witch blood, and one could well believe it when examining the stern and satanic countenance of Obediah Carter as it peered from its aged photograph.

I came to inherit the queer Victorian residence after my uncle’s insane suicide, and I happily made the move from my cramped apartment to the spacious abode, where I was surrounded by elements of ghastly horror collected from various pockets of the globe by the two previous owners, things that I knew would aid my career as a weaver of weird tales.  It did not deter me to bask in the notoriety that came my way, to the aid of my creative reputation, by the scandal that arose from my uncle’s incomprehensible self-extinction.  The papers had been full of it for a little while, of how my uncle’s corpse had been discovered hanging from a strong length of vine attached to a hideous tree in Old Dethshill Cemetery, and of how the end of the vine that had tightened around his broken neck had implanted itself into the flesh of Uncle’s ravished throat.

I found, during my first two months of residence in Arkham, that Uncle Silas had gained a curious reputation in the town, for it was whispered that he never ate, was never known to shop for groceries or dine out; and the fact that he was often seen haunting the abandoned cemetery at night gave way to gossip of vampirism and other such nonsense.  It was when I discovered my relation’s own home movies that I learned how uncanny truth can eclipse the wildness of paltry rumor; for Uncle Silas had followed Elmer Harrod in the practice of being filmed within the wild confines of the haunted burying ground; but where the horror host had brought in a film crew to record his outlandish behavior among the tombs, it seemed that my uncle’s was a one-madman’s crude operation.  On one spool of film he had recorded himself dancing among the rotting stone slabs and speaking the most outlandish gibberish I have ever heard, in what must have been a language of his own invention.  He seemed almost to chew his lips as he drooled and muttered a name I could not quite make out.  I found a film that showed him reclined on the slab beneath which Obediah Carter slept, and the dim electric light that he had somehow been able to set up caught to perfection the weirdness of his facial distortions, with which he mimicked the actual visage of the dead sorcerer.  The most disturbing images that I found, however, were caught on the three rolls of film that showed my old relation twitching before the unwholesome tree on which he had ended his life.  On one spool of celluloid he is shown wrapping the tree’s weird pale vines around his arms and ankles and then pirouetting like some deranged puppet; and it was so disturbing to see how the withered old tree, in the uncanny light of my uncle’s source of illumination, took on the imagined semblance of a gigantic bestial claw that curled its grotesque distended digits in night air. 

My uncle’s experiments with filming seemed to incorporate some kind of trick photography near the end, for on the last spool of film he is shown in close up, dangling from the vines of the tree, vines that resembled cloudy veins through which a dark substance flowed in the direction of my uncle’s upraised arms, into which the vines had penetrated.  Uncle Silas did not regard the camera as he muttered, “More, more – my arms are hungry.”  I watched all of these films with a sense of growing horror, and then I stored them away and tried to forget them; but the memory of their images haunted my dreams, and I knew that the only way to expel them from my mind was to use them as fictional fodder.  Thus it was that I composed my first novel,
Beneath Arkham
, the publication of which brought me a modicum of fame.