Lovecraft Ezine Mega-Issue 4 Rev1 Read online

  Mandy Rawlik is the full-time inspiration of Pete Rawlik, and generally functions as a no-holds-barred editor and critic making sure the nonsense that comes out of his head and on to pages is suitable for public consumption. Occasionally, she finds that his depictions of women and how they think to be so ludicrous that she has to step in and do significant rewrites, thus earning herself several co-authorships. She much prefers to work behind the scenes, taking pot shots at her partner and the band of Lovecraftian misfits he associates with. She is currently hard at work on Reanimatrix, a Lovecraftian novel of love, life and the undead.

  Pete Rawlik has been collecting Lovecraftian fiction for forty years. In 2011 he decided to take his hobby of writing more seriously. He has since published more than twenty stories. Reanimators, a labor of love about life, death and the undead in Arkham during the early twentieth century, is his first novel. He lives in Royal Palm Beach, Florida, with his wife and three children. Despite the rumors he is not and never has been wanted by maritime authorities for crimes on the high seas.

  Story illustration by Nick Gucker

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  The Chamber

  By Jonathan Richardson

  One day my hand will slip onto the handle and I'll enter that room. I doubt I'll return. As I age, as my memory slips and the redness of my face glows that bit brighter each day, I know I'm losing the fight. I tell myself that perhaps I am being pessimistic, that I may enjoy it, but in moments of increasingly rare clarity I know it's not true.

  Rooms are not alive, yet inside it is warm - it knows my moods and miseries. Carpet and oak should not flow with the warmth and feeling of something living, like that of a horse just finished the gallop. Bricks and mortar do not choose when to be - they are either there or they are not, they do not choose their timings with menace.

  I remember first entering because I recall its colour, the vivid red walls with a warm glow of their own. Like most of my generation, I was raised in a house three generations removed from its foundation, but one generation from restoration. Our terrace was not crumbling, but the interior had ripened to varying degrees of brown.

  Yet the unpretentiousness suited the puritanical bent of my parents, for whom decoration was a distraction from the righteous life, along with television, holidays and drink.

  However, the reflective nature of their lives had not yet affected me at age six. The whole world was still to be explored, so a strange, wood-panelled room was to be entered without hesitation. Inside was what seemed at the time to be a gigantic desk and chair - nothing of interest to a small child, so I soon wandered back out. I may have forgotten this had I not asked my mother why we had a room with such big furniture - I think I called it the giant's room - but she dismissed my question as the product of an overactive imagination. I saw the room two more times in that house when I was slightly older, and on both occasions I refrained from entering.

  We - my mother, father and I - moved house and I thought no more of it until I went to Crete with some friends from university. That holiday was one of discovery for me - of the other sex, and the joy I found in a new way of opening up. Though the hangovers pained me, I enjoyed the confidence and loquaciousness I gained. With this group of friends - acquaintances really, keen to have another body to save costs on the room - I did things I'd never done before. Chatting up girls, hitting up bars - even laughing out loud - were things I had once avoided. But in the morning, when I had recovered, I was my usual, quiet self. More quiet than normal, as I recalled some of the things I had said and done, inwardly reprimanding myself.

  A few nights in, when the ouzo flowed ever more generously - more in fact than I'd ever drunk in my short life - I took back a local girl I’d met in one of the clubs. Drink clears my memory, but I recall her waking to ask for the bathroom and me gesturing to some door or other.

  When she didn't return I assumed that I - neither a particularly handsome nor confident man - had been left on the night of his first experience. Yet on our final trip into town I saw a sheet of paper with her photo and words in incomprehensible Greek script. Fortunately our flight was that day and I never returned to Crete. I didn't return home much either after that, growing so distant from my parents that even now contact is limited to me posting Christmas cards - their sending of one to a disappointing son being an extravagance.

  From then on the wood-panelled room began appearing in the various houses I moved into after graduation, like it had lost my scent all those years ago but had now regained it, tracking me with vigour. One night I awoke to find a door I'd never had before on my wall. I pulled the covers over my head and was soon back asleep.

  A few months later I saw it again. Fearful - yet curious - I turned on the light, and once my eyes adjusted to the brightness the door had disappeared. So the next time I saw it I left the light off and padded to the door. It took several attempts, with me flinching back each time, before I could confidently grab the handle, but I could not turn it. Yet by grasping the round knob, I felt a release: I felt the door relax somehow, as if flexing to make my opening as smooth as possible, that it wished to atone for the mistake of being shut.

  After this the haunting stopped and once more I forgot. It was not until after another decade and several new homes that it returned. And this time I saw the full danger of it. I'd had a fiancée, but it hadn't worked out - I thought a proposal would show Lisa I was fairly serious - and for several days I'd taken to home, whisky and tobacco. Several bottles in, she returned to claim her belongings but I was in a belligerent mood and she soon fled.

  I passed out and awoke to find a man stuffing clothing into bags. Lisa sauntered into the room, now smug rather than afraid to find me in such a state. I roared at them to leave but the man took the nod from Lisa to continue. I leapt on him but after being hurled into the sofa I was resigned - bar a few more curses - to what was happening and asked for a bottle to be passed from my sideboard. Her man tossed a small flask my way.

  I uncapped it but then froze. The door was there. Lisa was saying something, trying to return the engagement ring, but I knocked her hand away. They left. I think it was through the door.

  The police came and investigated, but in the end nothing was proved. I still don't know if Lisa and her man exited via that door. She’d always said she wanted a new life, so perhaps she is enjoying the sun in some expat ghetto. She was always the spiteful type, and with no family of her own to worry about her, I imagined it was she who reported herself missing. Yes, they are out on the coast in Thailand, or South America, still laughing about it. At me.

  The room returned. Sometimes the door was open, but the furniture that was once gigantic was now designed for a midget. There were things on the desk: a ledger, and a pen in an old holder. I stumbled up to the door but had the sense to push myself off the frame. So it continued, the room toying with me, appearing when it wished, in daylight now as well as night, secure of its quarry, playing until it tired.

  Life continued normally, sometimes with girls, but they always got home safely - I made sure I showed them the door, no matter how intense the row or tiresome the hour. One night, alone, I was startled awake and for an instant, in the dark, I feared I had awakened in that room. But before I hit the light, I heard the clump of someone walking into something solid and knew I was in my own house.

  Keeping the bedside light off, I patted around for a discarded bottle and held it as a club as I rose from bed. There was a man at my door - my bedroom, normal, door. I screamed, not in rage but terror, yet rather than run as I would have had I been in his position, he swung at me with a crowbar.

  I was on the floor and inched backwards to the wall, a trapped animal. But when I leant against the wall - for I could not take my eyes off his face, waxy in the streaming streetlight - I felt a warmth. It was the door, my special door, and without a second thought I opened it, went through and threw it back.

  The door was an inch from closing when it halted. The intruder's
shoe jutted over the frame. With a thud, he'd pushed the door open, but this was a mistake. He must have been expecting me to be pushing against it, but I was too terrified even for that. He tumbled into the room.

  With him still on the floor, I dashed back into my bedroom and the door slammed behind me. Though bed was tempting, I ran down out of my house, past the smashed window, and called to my long-suffering neighbour who, accustomed to my noisome appearance at late hours, took some convincing but eventually agreed to call the police.

  When they arrived they found no trace of the burglar and assumed that, if it wasn't another drunken escapade, any intruder had long since escaped. But I know he could not, for I never heard any steps behind me on the stairs. I know he is in that room, the room.

  The door was open this morning. Something glinted on the desk and there was a faded stain on the carpet, a deep, rich, reddened brown. Many times now the door has appeared next to my own, and the last time I nearly grabbed its handle.

  Perhaps it will claim me. I have wondered:what if it can appear in place of my normal door? Since that thought struck me I have checked and triple-checked handles, feeling for warmth or sensation when I grab them. Perhaps if I give up alcohol I'll escape, but I couldn't give up drinking for Lisa, so why should I for this? The room was warm, it was cosy. I have a hipflask with me in case I do go. I don't want to, but it has haunted me too long to quit.

  I hope that it is my body you find, rotten or damaged - I don't care about its condition, as long as it's found. But if not, you know where to look. Behind the oak door with the brass, round handle.

  Feel it before opening.

  Jonathan Richardson is a writer and journalist based in London. He worked on the BBC website for several years and on the production of radio dramas and comedy. He has had sketches and plays produced and continues to write essays, stories and scripts.

  He writes about writing, data and people at www.consideredwords.com

  Story illustration by Jihane Mossalim

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  The Carrion Birds and the Drone

  by Harry Baker

  Danny came back from Afghan with little black hollows in his eyes, and a dead man’s pallor. He didn’t talk much about it, and said he didn’t want to.

  That I understood. My granddads were soldiers, both of them in the War – the big, capital W war that didn’t end all others after all – and I knew from my parents that they had never spoken about what they saw, in Italy and in North Africa. That was a generational thing, perhaps, but my dad didn’t speak much about the Falklands either, certainly not in detail, and certainly not to me.

  So I had an idea from the start that Danny wouldn’t want to talk, and I didn’t mind when that idea turned out to be right. He was grateful to be home, and I was grateful to have him. He told me that he loved me, and that he wasn’t going back. I didn’t need him to say anything more than that.

  We muddled along. We had some friends round, and opened some bottles and put some music on, and it was nice. Danny smiled and shook hands and chatted to people, and if his conversation tended to nervously peter out after a while, that was something we could all excuse. But after a while he got quiet and stopped looking at people who spoke to him. A slow unease spread across the room when he got like that, gossamer-thin and unacknowledged.

  No one said anything but Mike. Mike was an old friend of Danny’s.

  “I don’t think he’s well,” Mike said to me, as he was leaving. “He looks bad. Like, really bad.”

  He was right. Danny had tanned as you’d expect, but there was a funny pale quality to his face that I couldn’t explain, and which had never gone away. “I’m just tired,” he had said when I first pointed it out.

  “You’ve looked like that for weeks,” I said.

  “I’ve been tired for weeks,” he said. Which was maybe true. He would wake up and lie quiet most nights. Sometimes he woke up and screamed. One time he hit me before he woke up, and after that he spent a week in self-imposed exile on the sofa before I could convince him that I didn’t blame him for my black eye, and took him back into my bed. At work I said I’d walked into a door, and worried that someone would notice the cliché.

  After that, I began to wish that he would talk about it. It’s not that I wanted him to break down and cry on my shoulder. I didn’t. I don’t like sentiment, and I don’t like soap operas. In times of touchy-feely crisis, I quietly mourn the stiff upper lip. But Danny’s silence had stopped being natural. It didn’t feel like he was trying to be strong, anymore. It felt like he was behind enemy lines, and terrified that he would give himself away when he opened his mouth.

  I didn’t raise it until after Jon died. Jon had been in Danny’s unit, and though I hadn’t known him well before I got the sense that they’d been close. He was in fatigues when he rang the doorbell, on his way to the barracks. He said he was flying back out in a week.

  “Danny’s not here,” I told him. Danny was visiting his parents and sister that day. I offered Jon a cup of tea anyway.

  “How’s he been?” Jon asked. I shrugged and told him as best as I could.

  “We saw some fucked up stuff,” Jon said. “Him especially.”

  “What kind of stuff?” I asked. Dead people, I guessed – mutilated women and bombed wedding parties, headless corpses, autistic children strapped with explosives and sent into market places. All the horror stories you heard.

  “I shouldn’t talk about it,” Jon said. You could tell he was not quite at home with himself either, though not to the same degree. “Did he say anything about Boyle, though?”

  “I heard.” Boyle had been Danny’s sergeant. He’d had some kind of breakdown. Now he was dosed out of his head in a psychiatric ward somewhere.

  “He took it the worst,” said Jon, as if that wasn’t obvious. Then he shrugged and finished his tea. “I should go.”

  “You can stay if you want,” I said. He smiled, looking a little sad.

  “I’d love to. But I can’t, really. Tell Danny-boy I called.”

  “I will,” I said, and I did.

  “Jon’s going back?” he asked that evening.

  “Yeah. That’s what it looks like.”

  “Good luck to him,” Danny said.

  Two days later the radio had a report about a soldier shooting himself in a barracks. There was confusion over whether it was an accident or suicide. Two days later, the Ministry of Defence named Jon. The statement stressed that investigations were ongoing, but Jon hadn’t left a note and he didn’t have a family, and the suggestion was that he had been careless with a loaded rifle.

  Danny quietly left the room when the news came on, and I found him in our bedroom watching the little TV I kept upstairs. It was a re-run of a bad American sit-com, the kind of thing he once wouldn’t have been caught dead in front of.

  “Are you all right?” I asked him. He shrugged.

  “Come on,” I said. “Talk to me. He was your friend.”

  “Yeah. I guess he was.”

  “You guess?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  You couldn’t talk to him when he was like that. I sat on the bed beside him, put my arm around him, and we watched crap comedy for twenty minutes without laughing. When the episode finished another one started. By now it was getting dark and the light from the TV was stronger than that from the window.

  “There was an American with us,” Danny said, and he put a hand to his chin and rubbed it. “He knew what was going on.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was afraid he’d shut up if I reminded him I was listening.

  “We called him Hank,” he said. “Hank the yank. That was Jon’s joke, because he wouldn’t tell us his first name. He was some kind of Special Forces, I guess. He spoke Pashto, anyway.

  “He was with us because there was a manhunt. An insurgent commander called Alhazred was supposed to be in our sector. Lots of guys like Hank got assigned to our units. They were called liaison officers. Tha
t was bullshit. They were there to give us orders.”

  “Is that allowed?” I asked, after he’d been quiet a long time. Danny shrugged.

  “Probably not.” He looked at me then, for what seemed like the first time in ages. “Do you want to hear all this?”

  “Yes.” I found his hand and squeezed it. “Yes, I want to hear.”

  “Okay,” he said. So I listened as Danny talked in a low monotone over a soundtrack of bad one-liners, and the room got dark as Danny told his story.

  “We were going out a lot, then. Showing our faces around the local villages. Hearts and minds. The Americans had a joke about how that meant two to the chest and one to the head. Not Hank. He didn’t make jokes.

  “So anyway. That’s Hank, and that’s what we were doing. And what happened was that as we were leaving one of those villages, this guy comes up to us – a young guy, a farmer, I guess. He goes to Sergeant Boyle and they speak – Boyle knew a little Pashto, enough to get by. This farmer tells him that the guy we want is in a compound in the hills north of the village. And then he says he can’t be seen with us and buggers off. Not a word about reward money or any of that.

  “I thought he was probably trying to settle a grudge, when Boyle told me. Real informants want paying for it, and we get phony tips all the time. But Hank seemed to take it seriously. He wanted to go take a look at this compound.

  “Now, there’s a procedure for this kind of thing. If you get tipped off, you report it, and the officers think about it, and if they decide to go in you do it with helicopters and armour and lots of people, so you can swat anyone who resists. Boyle told Hank this. Hank didn’t say anything. A little further up the road, I saw him on his radio, and a couple of minutes later we got a transmission of our own. The order was to check the compound.”