Gothic Lovecraft Read online

  Is it possible that things will change in the next century? I think not. Man always has a reason to kill.

  The crowd parts by the Entre Carceles, the street between the jails, and here comes the bull, a big brute, this one, older than most and much heavier. Its hide is ripped already, swords and picks dangling from bloody holes on its flanks. They have injured the bull to make it angry, more ferocious, and more dangerous to Eliseo.

  I float back into the air. I leave the flesh sack of Martina and all the nails in the dust. The crowd gasps and points at Martina’s corpselike husk, dry and without blood. For a moment, the husk distracts Eliseo, and the bull rushes at him. Startled, he dashes to the right, narrowly escaping death. He whirls, his arm jerks up, then plunges down, and his bandero stabs the bull in its left flank. The animal’s eyes go red. It stomps, and dust rises and mingles with me, and I taste death in that dust. Death for the bull? Death for Eliseo?

  “Q’weerilpuman-kwat-an-q’ulsi’kattum u q’ulsi kattum.” The words flare in gold above the towering cathedral-like jail. The words burn into the arms and legs and faces of the crowd, and everywhere people cringe, slap hands on faces, shriek in pain. Black black black. Blood blood blood. These two words bang inside and against me, an internal mantra.

  Short and small, Eliseo looks like a young boy. It is hard to believe he has already lost a family. It is hard to believe such a tiny creature can stab and hurt something as large and powerful as this bull, but Eliseo does: he plunges the second, and now the third bandero, into the upper flanks of the beast.

  Three banderos beribboned with red and blue cloth wobble on the bull. Blood pours down the animal’s hide. Front legs paw the dust, back legs buck. Whirling—the bull is whirling—and dust heaves up in a might wave and mixes with me, and the bull’s anger permeates my very cells.

  Eliseo is one of my faithful. He knows the words that free me. I feel no compassion for him, no loyalty in return. This is our nature, his and mine.

  If I had a spine, it would tingle.

  I reach for Eliseo with a thousand tendrils, I reach…

  I am whisper-thin, gossamer, colorless to those around me, I wrap myself around him and squeeze. His limbs jerk, he tries to clutch his throat but cannot raise his arms. I squeeze harder. His face grows dark, then pale. His eyes bulge, I see the veins in them, and now there is blood, only blood, in those eyes, with black black black in their centers.

  His heart contracts. It is beating too quickly. Several thousand pounds of beast rut the ground, exploding it into dust and exposing raw the underlying structures of the Square: rocks long and hard like ribs, skeletons from all the Jews and Moors and Catholics whom the bishop has condemned.

  Eliseo writhes in my grasp, the breath squeezed from his lungs. The bull bellows as he nears us, now yards away, now a few feet away.

  I loosen my grip and caress Eliseo. I soothe him. It won’t hurt, not for long, don’t worry, I tell him, but his eyes are almost shot, glazed and flat, unseeing, and I know he cannot hear me. His fist eases, and the razor tip of a bandero grazes me then drops to the heaps of bones and rock.

  I hug Eliseo, and as I smell the meat-rot breath of the bull, I race from its path and thunder like a storm across the Square.

  The bishop and his priests leap to their feet. The guards race after the bull, trying to bring it down with swords and clubs. Pummeled, beaten, stabbed, the bull totters, then drops. Dirt and bone bits billow, and when they settle, the bull lies in its death throes, a twitching mass of black hide coated in blood.

  They bring the hooks. They drag the carcass from the Square. Fat jiggles. The bones are cracked at odd angles.

  Within me, part of me, is Eliseo’s torso, and what he does not know cannot hurt him.

  But then it dawns on me. He must know. This is why he uttered the special incantation, the one reserved for times like these. This is why he never uttered the incantation before now. He was not ready. Today, he knew that for him, there would be no tomorrow. Today, he was ready for me.

  All I see are his lips, a gash of red, and his face, a broken smear of mottled flesh as if the Inquisitors have beaten him close to death. But they have not touched him, and they never will.

  Fuck them all.

  Eliseo is mine.

  The matadors before Eliseo drew strength from my broken flesh but cared nothing about the real me. The nails in my body excited them. The rapes excited them. My pain excited them.

  Eliseo is different. He is a true believer of those of us who dwelt before time, have always been here, and will remain here—like the roaches—long after the last human dies.

  Eliseo uttered the words that released me from the flesh and returned me to my true state.

  I bring him into the fold, deep within, where hatred of humanity burns worse than the pain. I give Eliseo the only form of salvation I know. One with me and all the Old Ones. I release him from the flesh.

  As Eliseo’s eyes shift from black to empty, I think I see a smile play across his twisted lips.

  The Rime of the Cosmic Mariner

  John Shirley

  About, about, in reel and rout The

  death-fires danced at night; The

  water, like a witch’s oils, Burnt

  green, and blue and white.

  —The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

  Highgate

  November 17, 1833

  To Mr. Thomas Penson De Quincey

  Glasgow, Scotland

  My dear De Quincey!

  I write to you in a curiously Arctic fever, cold and febrile at once, and on a cryptic mission of mercy. I would save you from the ponderous but imponderable darkness, indeed the cosmic chaos that descends upon me.

  I can almost hear you laughing, my former friend, but this is no hyperbole and certainly no jest. You will, I trust, forgive this presumption after some years of silence, and forgive, too, my shaky hand, my lines as uncertain as rain patterns in sand—and doubtless as unwanted as an icy rain upon a walking tour. Pace tua, De Quincey, I am not insensible to our differences of civic philosophy; marching through the decades you have become the Tory’s very own Tory, and at this remove it may be you think me a secret Jacobin, a Guy Fawkes reborn, despite the moderation I have shewn these many years since my boyish days of planning American Utopias. I have moderated my views considerably; but even so, we would strike sparks at disputation over a bowl of punch, I’m sure, within minutes after the nostalgic niceties concluded.

  Despite our widening political divide, De Quincey, we yet have much in common: a love of the streaming effusion of language, the surge of contention like a river driven upon a boulder, the flow bifurcated by obstacle—by objection.

  We are like brothers who are doomed to disagree, but brothers we are, in our tragic affiliation with opium. On our first meeting, in your youth, when you shewed such enthusiasm for my poetry, the poppy’s poison was much upon my mind. I sought day by day to escape laudanum’s warm embrace; but, more seductive than Calypso or Circe, opium would not let me go—not for long. Hence I spoke of it too freely, complaining to you quite tiresomely of the opium eater’s burden of costiveness, of the erosion of the foundations of love, the sickness of withdrawal, certainly— but also I held forth about opium’s revelatory powers. You were quite young, scarcely twenty and two! And it may be you absorbed the report of laudanum’s good and shed the greater evidence of its evil; perhaps I tilted you toward opium. Much later I certainly read your Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: No man better comprehends the pleasures and pains of laudanum than you. But, quite beyond its known evils, opium leaves a man like you and I vulnerable to something cosmically ruinous …

  In veritate, amicus, I have reason to believe you might be in danger of succumbing to something more than opium. You may find ourself visited by a Particular Something that intrudes itself into a narcotic dream; on occasion, it stops by in person, appearing to be Man. Once, in 1804, I glimpsed it while gazing raptly into the crater of Mt. Etna. It was as if the
bottom dropped away from the crater; as if of a sudden its smoky depths plumbed infinity, passing through the whole earthly sphere; and for a few moments it shewed me an unspeakable heavenly oddity crouching within a cluster of stars visible from the unnatural opening on the other side of the Earth. Then, it was gone; the infinite shaft snapped shut. But I had seen the Thing That Waits, and it had seen me.

  Now, this Thing has an agent, a watcher; a servant, which appears to us as a large bird of no known species. It is the blacker, the bloodier albatross. It is the messenger, the deed-doer, of Nyarlathotep, arriving from a very great distance; it flaps wings broader even than the span of a great albatross. O, perhaps it’s more like a gigantic raven than an albatross, yet it’s not like an earthly bird at all, in truth. It has no true beak—and no true color. Ever and again it’s quite black; yet it ventures to shift, as the light does, and it becomes dark sea green; and yet again it becomes dark purple, or a sanguinary crimson. It flies where no bird should be able to fly, pressing its wings against the fabric of space, instead of the air; it arrives upon the benumbed Earth, gazing down to consider, and then it soars away. But when the messenger has parted from the likes of thee and me, it is only biding its time.

  Let us trek onward, De Quincey, and, I fear, downward …

  It began when I met Al-Azizi. It was Carter, Renwald Carter, an importer of fine goods from the Levant and descendent of the magician Sir Randolph Carter, who introduced me to the curiously articulate and elegant Monsieur Al-Azizi.

  Carter sent me a hasty note from his hotel; in sum, he would be honoured to introduce to me a wealthy admirer, one “M. Al-Azizi” who was drawn to my poetry, especially the epic verses. Al-Azizi, he said, was not a Mussulman, despite his Levantine heritage. Carter was perhaps sensible that, as I sink toward my own last judgment, my former deism becomes ever more Christian.

  I welcomed Carter’s missive. A wealthy admirer of my poetic amusements? I hastened to affirm he meeting for tea.

  When Carter and his exotic companion arrived at Number 3, The Grove, Highgate, ushered in by our housekeeper Bethesda, I was, for a rarity, out of my dressing gown; I was almost splendid in red silk smoking jacket, matching trousers, and my eternal down-at-heel slippers. I had even made shift to scrape my face of superfluous foliage, for I had hope of a new patron—a final patron, I suspected, as my health has for a time been in leisurely but steady decline. Clutching his hat, looking appraisingly at the Persian carpet in the drawing room, and then at me, Carter said, “Ah—Coleridge. I have brought you a living marvel. May I present Monsieur Feruz Al-Azizi, of Paris and Cairo.”

  I gave my bow and Al-Azizi returned it stiffly, the straight line of his lips flickering with the most transient of smiles. Tall and gaunt and dark, he wore a pristine white suit, a red necktie, a red felt fez; even without the elongation of the fez, he was at least a foot taller than Carter. He had a jet-black mustache, like a line on aged foolscap, and once I thought it writhed quite apart from the working of his face. I assumed this was a product of the laudanum I had just taken as a restorative—the measured dose left to me by Dr. Gillman.

  “Dr. Gillman is not at home?” Carter asked, looking around the drawing room, licking his thick lips.

  “My host is with his patients,” I said. I might have said “his other patients”—Dr. Gillman has taken it upon himself, these many years, to house me, to physic me, to dose me as he sees fit. He is a man of great patience.

  I glanced at Al-Azizi—and felt caught, for a moment, in the gaze of his heavy-lidded, deep-black eyes, which seemed to regard me with a ravenous fixity.

  I looked quickly back at Carter, marking that my old acquaintance had changed since I’d seen him last: his face was now blotchy, his lips bluish, his eyes yellow and flickering; he as h aphazardly u nshaven, a nd h is stubby fingers clasped ver his stained weskit in what appeared a failed effort to restrain their trembling.

  Carter’s gaze darted about the small sitting room. “So—we are in essence quite alone here? I have no wish to be unsociable but—Monsieur Al-Azizi prefers … a small party.”

  “We are alone but for the housekeeper. She keeps discreetly to the pantry.”

  I noticed for the first time that Al-Azizi carried a large bag of crocodilian leather, rather like a physician’s satchel; I could have sworn he had not the bag when he first came in.

  “Please sit down, gentlemen,” I said, eyeing the bag. They sat in Gillman’s settee across from my armchair. Al-Azizi stroked the settee’s leather arm with a long-fingered hand. “What an exquisite piece of furniture,” he said. “The skin of a fine animal—as comfortable as the arms of a beautiful woman.” His accent was both Egyptian and French, to my ear, his voice by turns rumblingly low-pitched and intermittently high, and tremulous as if keeping laughter on a leash.

  “Ah, yes,” I said, “it is one of the original pieces designed by the Earl of Chesterton; it has resided for some time with Dr. Gillman’s family.”

  My eyes returned to the black crocodilian bag on the Egyptian’s lap, as Al-Azizi exclaimed, chuckling, “Why, it is my old friend George!” I thought at first he meant the crocodile, but then he gestured at the oval portrait of King George III on the wall to my right. “How well I remember our talks. George and I went to the roof and gazed upon the stars together—and they gazed upon us!”

  “Did you, indeed?” I asked, smiling indulgently. “What year was your interview with the late king?”

  “Why, it was 1788, I believe, on a previous trip to your jewel-like isle. Yes!” He flashed grey teeth in a smile that came and went like the tail of a Nile fish, surfacing and gone.

  Carter visibly grimaced, and I raised my eyebrows. Of course this putative interview with the King would have been forty-f ve years ago, De Quincey—but this fellow looked no older than his middle thirties! Was it, I wondered, some dreamy vanity on his part, imagining an interlude with George III?

  “Was it 1788, for a fact? Well! The very year His Majesty first succumbed to the … to his malaise.” I suppose I could have said madness, as he is long gone, but I am rooted in an earlier era of delicacy—when I am not in my cups.

  “Al-Azizi,” Carter began hoarsely. “Perhaps this is not the time. I had hoped—”

  His gaze still upon me, Al-Azizi raised a hand with the suddenness of a dagger raised to strike, and Carter fell silent, his sentence severed.

  “So few men can survive gazing upon the stars with unveiled eyes,” said Al-Azizi, shrugging. “Your King—sadly he could not bear it. But …” He put his hands on the clasp of his bag. “But you, sir! When I consider the letter you wrote to your other Sara, Sara Hutchinson, in 1802, Coleridge! Surely you would be capable of gazing past the veil and coming away whole!”

  I fairly gaped at the man. “Letter, sir? 1802?”

  “Why, yes.” He closed his eyes a moment—how like parchment the lids of his eyes! He seemed to read out the words from some inner scroll. “‘All this long Eve, so balmy and serene, Have I been gazing on the western Sky and its peculiar Tint of Yellow Green—And still I gaze, and with how blank an eye! And those thin Clouds above, in flakes and bars, That give away their Motion to the Stars; Those Stars, that glide behind them, or between, Now sparkling, now bedimm’d, but always seen …’” He opened his eyes— yet his eyes seemed almost closed to the world, so empty were they of fellow-feeling. “Yes? Do you recall?”

  I cleared my throat. “That letter—why, yes. That passage later became part of an ode. I believe I was on the pinnacle of a tor when I first … But Monsieur Al-Azizi, has the lady’s family given over my letters to her? I don’t recall their … that is…”

  “Oh, they’re written in the Akashic Record, as some call it, with all else, Mr. Coleridge!” he crowed, amused. “I looked them up!”

  “He is a marvel indeed, as you said, Carter,” I murmured. “However, I—”

  That is when Al-Azizi opened his crocodilian bag, a flash of his hands opening it so quickly I thought of a reptile ope
ning its mouth to snap at prey before it could escape. “Here, sir,” he said, reaching into the bag, “I have three scientific instruments you will not have seen before, I wager.” He took up a device with his right hand, the instrument resembling a cut-glass doorknob but asymmetrically festooned with brass spikes—and I noticed, for the first time, the ring upon that hand, its large tablet-shaped face of carnelian engraved with the image of a double-headed crystal growing out of a snarl of serpentine shapes. I was distracted from the ring when he snatched the end table, on which stood the Argand lamp, nearly rocking the lamp onto the floor. I made to catch it, but the lamp settled down as he set the table in front of him and placed the instruments on in it the small pool of lamplight. There was the spiked, crystalline knob; beside the festooned crystal was something like a pair of spectacles made of twists of wire, possibly copper, but without lenses. The third instrument was in the shape of a serpentine figure of some silvery alloy; the figure was rather like the engraving on his ring. The instrument stood on one of its coils, its head pointed at the ceiling. Looking closely I saw that it was not precisely a serpent, for its head was eyeless and it seemed to have feathers instead of scales.

  “This one,” I said, indicating the coiled serpentine instrument, “more resembles jewelry than a scientific instrument. I fancy I have seen something of the sort on a lady’s arm, by way of a bracelet.”

  “Oh, but no lady could long bear to wear this as a bracelet, Coleridge—and no bracelet will do this!” Al-Azizi reached out and carefully pinched the serpentine figure just under its jaws—and immediately the light in the room became a thick luminous liquid, as if amber had melted. The liquid light swirled about us, the whirlpool centering on the serpentine instrument, and I saw, with gathering trepidation, the light was sinking away into the coil, as if the serpent were consuming it. At the ceiling and corners, darkness increased, itself a liquid, something heavier than light forcing it into the genii’s bottle of the serpentine instrument. The lamp flickered and dimmed. Al-Azizi’s eyes had quite vanished away; there was only a shifting blackness in the sockets, as in a skull seen by the feeble light of a taper.