He hypothesized the shining trapezohedron must be the focus for some sort of communication. But could he withstand the daemonical truth such communication—dare he think it,
communion
could bring?
He reached out and picked up the stone. It tingled; some energy was contained within and began to have a direct effect on his nerves. At once he became aware of a vaster sensory range than his human evolution had prepared him for. First, the tiny chamber in the steeple, which had been fairly dark, now blazed with light. Second, he could hear a sweet distant breathing or perhaps the sounds of flutes playing a magical but incoherent pattern. Third, he became aware—as much through the sense of
taste
as of sight—of a colour that floated in the air above him. He could not name this colour, it was not a colour of earth, not belonging to the neat spectrum Newton’s prism had revealed. This colour moved within itself, fashioning itself by rules not native to earth, but of another part of space. It was sentient, and somehow
informed
or taught those possessed of it. It must be the medium through which the Martians communicated with one another. It sensed that Howard sensed it and it became violently agitated. Suddenly it shot a tentacle into Howard’s brain. It pulled his soul free from its moorings.
For a moment he was suspended in the colour out of space. He could hear the colour, taste the colour, think as the colour.
The colour asked him, “Are you one of us?”
“I do not know what you mean.”
“We prepared for the invasion by sending forth the minds of the greatest telepaths of our race. They dwelt among men as spies living in the bodies of men. Most returned to us, but some lost memory of their being enchanted by the revelations received in human flesh. Are you one of us?”
Howard did not know. He had felt that there was much from outside of the world of men in him.
The colour began to pulsate, pushing him along. He wondered that he had sensation separate from his body.
“You are in a body of your thoughts. When we have transported you to Mars it will be made semi-material for two purposes. You will be able to handle and sense physical objects, and we will be able to examine your true mental form.”
Howard considered that he might be a Martian. He had always felt that the day-to-day world partook of a phantom character. The only things that seemed real to him had been his dreams, certain tales in the
Arabian Nights,
and certain suggestions of a grander world which he saw in certain architectural features revealed in sunsets. Surely Mars was a sunset world, gold and red in its martial glory. What wonders a civilization older than mankind might possess! The colour, sensing his thoughts, began to show him images.
The “Martians” had come from another world to settle in this solar system. Eons ago they had crossed space in cylinders like those they had so recently employed. They settled upon Mars and earth’s South Pole. The latter colony had vanished, perhaps succumbing to the violent climatic changes that earth had suffered. The former began a specialized eugenics program. Worshipping no god save their own intellects, they sought to eliminate all the glands that cause emotion (save for fear, the emotion necessary for survival), and remove all enzymes that cause aging. The Martians had likewise eradicated all forms of microbial disease, leading to a practical immortality. The coming of immortality necessitated a specialized training of the will. The Martian had to cultivate those intellectual and aesthetic pursuits which could sustain an interest that would span the strange eons through which they would live.
This training of the will had an unexpected side effect: the Martians discovered that some of the stronger minds of their race could project themselves across the void without mechanical aid. These astral travelers came in contact with the various races of the solar system, including the feeble-minded men who dwelt upon the noisome green world of earth, and a race of what could be best described as fungoid beings inhabiting a dwarf planet on the rim of the solar system.
The Martians traded with the fungi, and Martian civilization reached its height of material prosperity. The Martians covered the ruddy surface of their world with labyrinthine Cyclopean structures, whose sole function was to express certain aesthetic, mathematical, or metaphysical formulae. The Martians waxed great in pride. Surely no race had reached such success.
This golden age gave way to a certain decadence. One of the first symptoms of this decline was a decrease in reproductive powders. The Martians had long since given up sexual reproduction in favor of a less distracting asexual budding. Fewer and fewer Martians came into being. Art became debased, and the objective art of the past was increasingly replaced by an outrageous subjectivity.
Perhaps the Martians would have gone into a long and steady decline had it not been for the discovery of the vast underground vaults at Syrtis Major.
The “Martians” discovered that uncounted eons ago, an almost godlike race had dominated their planet. The fungi confirmed this, claiming that they were in fact not dead, but had entered into a sort of undead sleep, waiting for a certain modulation of cosmos rays that would allow them to resume their play in glory and terror. The fungi were unsure when the elder gods would return and hinted darkly at the
method
of their remanifestation. The “Martians” were neither the oldest nor the last of Mars’ masters.
Great energy was turned toward the excavation and destruction of the vaults, but despite their mighty heat rays and lightning machines the Martians were unable to cut through the curious metal of the vaults. The dread of the creatures who would return was heightened by the discovery of their image carved into certain remote peaks that overlook the haunted deserts, whose baleful influence the Martians had shunned for millennia.
These elder gods with their long, ghoul-like faces and star-destroying eyes were soon all the Martians could think of. For a season unreason held sway, and the normally logical Martians destroyed as many images of these horrors as they could find. But reason returned and the remaining specimens of statues were gathered at the capital, and controlled debate on the course of action began. A decision was made to invade Earth and safely leave Mars for the elder gods.
A few minds had crossed to Earth to observe its affairs, and the Martians reasoned that he might be one of their own—since his mind had the strength to activate the shining trapezohedron.
The colour seemed to be exerting less pressure, and Howard realized that he would soon be on the surface of Mars. He had found his people. His long exile from those around him would be ended! Soon their superior skill in psychology and surgery would free him to walk among his own kind—his vast pulsating brain attached to a shiny metal machine!
Movement stopped and the unearthly color began to fade. Howard found himself at the gates of a huge red building whose wings stretched in all directions—perhaps covering the planet. The slowly moving red weed covered the ground. From within he heard the mathematically perfect music of the Martians.
He went through the great gate into a hall filled with great brains whose tentacles worked every strange device, whose construction clearly revealed their kinship to the technology that had produced the heat ray. But as soon as Howard had entered the hall a great cry went up. The Martians were not shambling toward him in greeting as he had imagined. Instead, they began a disorderly march to the exits. Howard looked about for the source of their fear.
There on the other side of the hall, through a trapezoidal doorway, came the figure of one of the elder gods. The Martians had not had time to relocate to Earth. Howard advanced toward the figure; perhaps he could slow its progress by engaging in hand-to-hand combat.
But soon came the shock that sent his mind hurtling back to Earth, a revelation about the nature of the elder gods and the time and form of their return. This shock deprived Howard of all clear memories of this adventure; indeed, years later he was one of the skeptics who maintained that the Earth had not been invaded at all—for when he reached out toward the eldritch figure of the elder god, his hand had encountered
a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.
(
For Howard Waldrop
)
After Alhazred
In the smoky darkness of my lover’s
Heart I find written my hidden name
On a ventricle wall in invisible Flame,
Written there before the birth of our mothers.
Silently I draw away my dream gaze
and cast it ’round the dying night world
amid the cenotaphs and crypts of eld.
Our love survives death and will live on to other days.
Can I explain to the other sleepers a love
that burns beyond death and maggot’s kiss?
Can I explain that we as living flames hiss
Into an eternal space darker than abyss above?
That which is not dead can eternal lie,
and after strange aeons death may die.
Lovecraft’s Pillow
Nothing had gone right in the week before the Con.
Edgar Wagner’s son Mike had come out as gay, and Edgar could handle that, he really could. Mike also decided to leave Stanford mid-semester and live with his lover. Edgar’s wife of twenty years asked that “they take a break.” Edgar’s doctor was not happy about his blood pressure or his bad cholesterol. Edgar’s latest novel,
Those Outside,
had a mixture of a couple of bad reviews—and, worse still, NO reviews from some of the big newspapers that had lauded him for the last decade. There were big stacks of the book at various dealers tables at World Horror, and the adoring lines of fans asking for an inscription had died down to the few asking for an autograph as a possible eBay investment. Edgar was wondering what it would be like to go back to teaching at his age.
It was fall and it was Providence, Rhode Island, so it meant that every other panel Edgar was on had to do with Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Every writerly virtue (“My God, his imagination!”) and every writerly vice (“Do you really need to use the word eldritch twenty-three times in one story?”) of Mr. Lovecraft was being discussed again and again. But Edgar Scott Wagner was not getting the panel he needed. He needed the panel called “What do you do if have an idea for four horror novels and you are writing your ninth?” It was late afternoon, and Edgar walked out of the hotel and took off his badge and headed downtown. He always loved to walk. There was lots of walking in his books. He wrote a novella about walking, called “Walking,” which (as almost every reviewer pointed out) owed a great deal to Stephen King’s
The Long Walk.
There were four things that Edgar Wagner loved: walking, pawn and thrift shops, history, and horror stories. He had taught social studies at the high school level for twelve years before he had his first successful novel, about haunted Civil War cannons starting a war between two museums—
Blue and Gray and Red All Over.
It wasn’t a good book, but damn, it made a good movie. It was an OK plot, Borges had used it for Chrissakes, and it did OK for his fifth book about haunted swords,
Sabers of Doom.
And for the haunted airplane novel
Lucifer’s Aces.
At home he had written almost ten thousand words of the haunted car novel . . .
He would have been a great fanboy. He had rewritten Lovecraft, Matheson, King, and Jackson. He didn’t really think anybody noticed. Or cared. But with the last two books people had noticed. There were no movie deals—options but no actual films—and Mike went off to Stanford and Sue had a swimming pool put in. People even called his vampire novel “
’Salem’s Lot
in Colorado”—even Sue called it that once because she couldn’t remember its name. Fewer people called
Those Outside
“The Whisperers in Darkness,” because fewer people had read the Lovecraft original. Except at this convention.
When he was a history teacher nobody cared that he hadn’t made up the history. He was supposed to just tell what had happened and make it seem relevant. That had been his same approach to writing. He picked a story that he knew well and told in a relevant fashion. He used TV shows and pop cultural references and made his heroes into white middle-class novel readers. Wagner’s style was accessible, and the first three books had the great good luck of becoming blockbuster movies. Wagner could walk away from the Chicago high school that was cold in the winter and smelled the rest of the time. Wagner had seen broken windows patched with cardboard and tin without seeing new glass for ten years. All his idealism froze out there, and every year he would call from his Dallas home when the snow was two and three feet deep—he would call the math teacher or the English teacher just to hear the snow in their voices.
Last year it had still been warm enough in October to swim in his pool and like it. He could jump in his pool and light jack-o’-lanterns the next day. He could wake up to oldies rock and drinking coffee in his white terrycloth bathrobe and typing his four pages before noon. He could surf the Web while his window was open and listen to the song selections of the mockingbird, and no high school punk told him to fuck himself. He could plan on going to England and meeting Ramsey Campbell. He could see his own movies on Netflix. Life was good. Not just OK, good. If the Muses would just start singing to him again . . .
Wagner walked along following an inner drive that took him toward the seedier parts of Providence, toward the reality of the high school he once taught at. He noticed the nip in the air and the city smell, and he knew he was being one of his characters in his own damn books—walking and recapitulating his life until something sinister (stolen from some other guy’s or gal’s books) snagged his attention like a fancy fly for a big-mouthed bass. He was twelve or thirteen blocks from the convention hotel. He was Dante lost in the middle of his life in an urban forest. He saw the three brass balls of St. Nick and turned into Gamble Brothers PAWN. And all the chunky pieces of other human’s history displayed in their glass cases took him away from his problems as they always did.