him.
Brandon stepped forward. He’d unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a copper medallion thick with runes and sigils and Ute signs. He beckoned the blue light, and it hit him hard just above his amulet. He turned toward me, a soft glow coming from his skin.
He said, “You see, I was prepared. I had made myself a crucible for the Great Work.”
His smile left. He grabbed for his heart. “No, no. That isn’t the way. Help me.”
I moved forward. There was a great fight going on within him. He lifted his Colt to his temple and fired. The light exploded from him. Before I could run, it was upon me. It burned with icy fire as it poured in through my nerves. It felt like a huge alien shape had been stuffed into my body. My skin would tear and my bones break under its pressure. It had radiated its strangeness into the desert here for centuries, millennia. It was trying to rebuild a world it had known. Change space and time into something it understood. It was no longer imprisoned, but this whole sector of space was bad for it. It burned. It cut at my neurons with strangely angled saws.
I began to think of the discovery of Pluto. It paused. It had seen Pluto, seen strange beings building castles out of solid argon. I thought about Einstein’s discoveries, about rocketry and man’s desire to leave the planet, Lowell and his theories of Martian canals. It pushed itself into my thoughts, but my thoughts weren’t big enough. I thought of the Big Dipper and the procession of pole stars. I thought of the Milky Way. I thought of the vast darkness between galaxies. There. It flowed into that darkness. That darkness inside my own mind. I had found a place big enough for it. It could dwell in that darkness forever. It and I were one.
The electric lights came back on. I left the mine. I gave one last long look at the desert. At the world. Then I lifted my arms and sailed silently into space.
( For Ray Bradbury )
The Doom That Came to Devil’s Reef
Among Lovecraft’s papers at Brown University was a large manila envelope containing a school exercise notebook and a newspaper clipping. The notebook’s owner, Miss Julia Phillips, had been mistakenly identified as a cousin of American horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937). Over four-fifths of the pen and pencil entries are rather commonplace, detailing Miss Phillips’s life as a seamstress in the Providence of the 1920s, her growing depression, and her commitment to Butler Hospital. As both of Lovecraft’s parents had ended their years in the selfsame institution, Julia had been perceived as another branch of a less than mentally healthy tree. It wasn’t until Lovecraft’s biographer S. T. Joshi read the volume that it was seen as anything other than a rather dreary memento. It is in the last few pages of the book wherein Julia’s dreams or waking fancies take an amazingly cosmic tone that the book became of interest to Lovecraftian scholars. The relationship of Julia and Howard is unknown. Lovecraft had little interest in psychiatry, aside from his occasional denunciation of Freud in his letters. No one has been able to discover how Lovecraft came into possession of the book.
What is clear is that Julia’s fantasies became Lovecraft’s inspiration for his 1931 novella “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Lovecraft’s notes in the volume are slight, but he occasionally erased Julia’s words altogether and wrote in his fictional equivalents. For example, Julia records that she is writing about the real-world Massachusetts town of Newburyport where she had spent her childhood. Lovecraft erased all but one instance of “Newburyport” and wrote in “Innsmouth.” Likewise, certain demons or gods of Julia’s delusions have been replaced with Cthulhu, Dagon, and Mother Hydra. It is tempting to speculate that Lovecraft had considered the diary as a sort of objet trouvé or ready-made to continue the mythic patterns that he begun in earlier work, especially “The
Brandon stepped forward. He’d unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a copper medallion thick with runes and sigils and Ute signs. He beckoned the blue light, and it hit him hard just above his amulet. He turned toward me, a soft glow coming from his skin.
He said, “You see, I was prepared. I had made myself a crucible for the Great Work.”
His smile left. He grabbed for his heart. “No, no. That isn’t the way. Help me.”
I moved forward. There was a great fight going on within him. He lifted his Colt to his temple and fired. The light exploded from him. Before I could run, it was upon me. It burned with icy fire as it poured in through my nerves. It felt like a huge alien shape had been stuffed into my body. My skin would tear and my bones break under its pressure. It had radiated its strangeness into the desert here for centuries, millennia. It was trying to rebuild a world it had known. Change space and time into something it understood. It was no longer imprisoned, but this whole sector of space was bad for it. It burned. It cut at my neurons with strangely angled saws.
I began to think of the discovery of Pluto. It paused. It had seen Pluto, seen strange beings building castles out of solid argon. I thought about Einstein’s discoveries, about rocketry and man’s desire to leave the planet, Lowell and his theories of Martian canals. It pushed itself into my thoughts, but my thoughts weren’t big enough. I thought of the Big Dipper and the procession of pole stars. I thought of the Milky Way. I thought of the vast darkness between galaxies. There. It flowed into that darkness. That darkness inside my own mind. I had found a place big enough for it. It could dwell in that darkness forever. It and I were one.
The electric lights came back on. I left the mine. I gave one last long look at the desert. At the world. Then I lifted my arms and sailed silently into space.
( For Ray Bradbury )
The Doom That Came to Devil’s Reef
Among Lovecraft’s papers at Brown University was a large manila envelope containing a school exercise notebook and a newspaper clipping. The notebook’s owner, Miss Julia Phillips, had been mistakenly identified as a cousin of American horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937). Over four-fifths of the pen and pencil entries are rather commonplace, detailing Miss Phillips’s life as a seamstress in the Providence of the 1920s, her growing depression, and her commitment to Butler Hospital. As both of Lovecraft’s parents had ended their years in the selfsame institution, Julia had been perceived as another branch of a less than mentally healthy tree. It wasn’t until Lovecraft’s biographer S. T. Joshi read the volume that it was seen as anything other than a rather dreary memento. It is in the last few pages of the book wherein Julia’s dreams or waking fancies take an amazingly cosmic tone that the book became of interest to Lovecraftian scholars. The relationship of Julia and Howard is unknown. Lovecraft had little interest in psychiatry, aside from his occasional denunciation of Freud in his letters. No one has been able to discover how Lovecraft came into possession of the book.
What is clear is that Julia’s fantasies became Lovecraft’s inspiration for his 1931 novella “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Lovecraft’s notes in the volume are slight, but he occasionally erased Julia’s words altogether and wrote in his fictional equivalents. For example, Julia records that she is writing about the real-world Massachusetts town of Newburyport where she had spent her childhood. Lovecraft erased all but one instance of “Newburyport” and wrote in “Innsmouth.” Likewise, certain demons or gods of Julia’s delusions have been replaced with Cthulhu, Dagon, and Mother Hydra. It is tempting to speculate that Lovecraft had considered the diary as a sort of objet trouvé or ready-made to continue the mythic patterns that he begun in earlier work, especially “The
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