Thirst

I grew up in a community of eighty or so houses built on a hill leading up from a small man-made lake. In the winter you could see the lake from our house and watch skaters in the distance, if there happened to be any; in the summer the view was mostly occluded by trees. At the summit of the hill there was a water tower, which I suppose is where our water must have come from, after having been pumped up to it from a well somewhere.

The tower, which was set in a patch of woods not far from the uppermost stretch of road, wasn't particularly imposing; I suspect it was only twenty feet high or so. Nevertheless, there was a tale connected with it, of the kind that was told to (or by) half-believing kids around the fire on summer nights when some of us got together to camp out.

The story was that the tower, the inside of which no one I knew had ever seen, was inhabited by some kind of water-dwelling creature of an unknown but uncongenial kind. In normal circumstances it remained safely inside the tower and bothered no one, but it was said that one year, when there was a drought and the water level in the tower fell precipitously and stayed low for a good part of the summer, desiccated bodies — squirrel, cats, who knew what else — were found in the surrounding woods. We avoided the area at night, just to be sure.

American Nightmares

A friend of mine recommended this volume of short stories, by an author whose name was unknown to me, and although I'm perhaps not the easiest person to suggest books to she hit the money on this one. Maybe she just knew that "lake" and "monster" are a combination I can't resist.

Actually, there's only one lake monster in the collection, and it's a doozy, but there's horror of some kind in all nine tales. I won't get into the question (a fairly tired one at this point) of whether Nathan Ballingrud is a "horror writer" who happens to set his stories among down-and-out, emotionally drained working-class Americans, mostly in the South, or whether he's essentially a "realist" who likes to draw on the horror playbook for material; let's just say that his approach, which is leavened by a good bit of subtle black humor, is his own, and a refreshing one at that. So here on the one hand you have convincing characters who are waitresses, building contractors, oil rig workers and the like, and on the other you have vampires, werewolves, and the undead. There's one story ("S.S."), dealing with a young New Orleans man dawn to a Neonazi group, that appears to have no fantastic element in it, although it may be as uncanny as any of the others. One tale ("The Crevasse"), the only one not set in the US, is a kind of homage to Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness.

Ballingrud is quite deft at juxtaposing these elements, and also in the way that he works into the stories an underlying substrate of guilt, much of it connected with family members who have let each other down in one way or another. There's a father whose neglect may have led to his son's kidnapping, another father who is struggling to revive his relationship with his family after a stint in prison, and a number of characters who are simply overwhelmed by their family responsibilities. In "The Good Husband," for example, a man wakes in the middle of the night and finds his wife's body in the bathtub, the result of the last of multiple suicide attempts, and decides to go back to bed without calling for help. (What happens next I won't reveal, but it's one of a number of stunning plot twists in this collection.)

North American Lake Monsters is available from Small Beer Press. Ballingrud has published one other book, a novella entitled The Visible Filth, which is published by This Is Horror in the UK.

More Japanese Gothic

Satori Ediciones in Spain has published its second collection of translations into Spanish of the Japanese writer Izumi Kyōka (1873-1939), following in the wake of El santo del monte Koya, which I discussed here last year.

As with the previous volume, all of the stories (there are four) are fantastic in manner and draw on the long tradition of Japanese supernatural literature and lore. The title story is available in English (as "Of A Dragon in the Deep") but the edition is difficult to obtain and I haven't seen it; the longest of the tales, "El fantasma que esconde las cejas" (The Ghost Who Hid Her Eyebrows) has been translated by Charles Shirō Inouye and can be found in a volume entitled In Light of Shadows: More Gothic Tales by Izumi Kyōka, published by the University of Hawai'i Press. As far as I know the other two tales are not available in English.

Kyoka was a fascinating but sometimes difficult writer, who made of use of what Charles Inouye calls "an eccentric, highly convoluted narrative method that precluded his participation in the more mainstream attempt to accomplish an objective description of an exterior world and a psychologically depicted realm of an interior one." "His narratives," Inouye continues, "neither maintain a consistently stable and omniscient point of view nor do they present time as a steady flow of logically connected events that are contained in the past." Writing at a time when many of his contemporaries were embracing the conventions of the Western realistic and psychological novel, Kyoka held to his own way.

Two of the stories in Sobre el dragón del abismo describe the encounters of children with a unpredictable but not necessarily hostile supernatural world; the third, "La historia de los tres ciegos" (The Story of the three Blind People) is classic horror tale of the perils that lie in wait for those who trangress. The last narrative, "El fantasma que esconde las cejas," is a ghost story so many-layered (and impossible to summarize here) that Inouye includes a diagram in his edition to help visualize its intricately nested levels.

I've now read this final story twice in English and twice in Spanish, gaining insight into it with each reading, but I wouldn't pretend to have mastered it. Because of the richness of cultural allusions in Kyoka's tales, as well as the inherent difficulties of translating from Japanese into a European language, it's interesting to compare the two translations, Spanish and English. Since I know no Japanese, I naturally can't comment on their relative accuracy, but while they're generally complementary (and mutually clarifying) there are numerous passages that show fairly radical differences in interpretation. Below is just one sample passage; what follows is 1) Alejandro Morales Rama's Spanish-language text; 2) my rough English translation of the Spanish into English; and finally 3) Inouye's version:

1) Las montañas y el cielo estaban tan nítidos que parecía que los estuviese viendo a través de una capa de hielo. Los brillantes rayos del sol hacían que las agujas de los pinos y los árboles secos resplandecieran. Al mismo tiempo se veía volando una figura de un blanco cegador y en las profundides de la montána, donde el oso vive alejado de los hombres, la nieve se había tornado en una ventisca punzante como agujas.

2) The mountains and the sky were so clear that it seemed as if one were seeing them through a covering of ice. The brilliant rays of the sun made the needles of the pines and the dry trees shine. At the same time, a figure of blinding white was seen flying, and in the depths of the mountain, where the bear lives apart from men, the snow had turned into a blizzard as sharp as needles.

3) The mountains and sky became clear as ice. While the sun sparkled brilliantly in the pines and other wintering trees, something white began to fall from the sky. In the deep mountains, where bears stood on their rear legs like human beings, the snow came down like needles.

Inouye's "wintering trees" is a nice touch, but I don't much like "rear legs" (rather than "hind"). What's interesting, though, is the very different ways in which the reference to the bear or bears is understood. Whatever the truth of its accuracy, Rama's donde el oso vive alejado de los hombres (where the bear lives apart from men) is a beautiful lyrical touch, suggesting a fundamental if estranged kinship between the two species. Reading the two translations side-by-side provides an unstable but rewarding reading of an intricate masterwork of modern Japanese literature.

Unearthly Loves

I started reading modern Japanese literature in Spanish translation because there were a couple of books I wanted to read that didn't seem to be available in English, but at this point I'm just doing it for fun — or perhaps in part because the psychological effect of reading a book in a foreign language — any foreign language — gives me the illusion that I'm reading it "the original," which in the case of Japanese is something I'm utterly unable to do. Plus I just like these editions from Satori in Spain. Putting aside such eccentricities, three of the four stories in Izumi Kyōka's El santo del monte Koya are readily available in English in a volume entitled Japanese Gothic Tales, translated by Charles Shirō Inouye and published by University of Hawaii Press.

And they're great stories, intricately told, shocking at times, richly atmospheric; each of them rewards — in fact demands — a second reading. I'll pass over the two shorter ones, as good as they are, and say a few words about the title story, which in Inouye's translation is called "The Holy Man of Mount Koya," and the novella-length "Un día de primavera" ("One Day in Spring"). Both can be found in the Inouye translation mentioned above.

The former follows a classic Japanese storytelling pattern: a lone traveler — here, a Buddhist monk — hiking through the remote countryside encounters a figure — in this case, a woman — who turns out to be other than what she appears. Kyōka, who died in 1939, was adept at nesting stories within stories, and the events in the tale are actually narrated by the monk to a traveling companion he shares a room with much later. As the monk recalls, during the original journey he had fallen in with a traveling salesman whose vulgar behavior had offended him; the two come to a fork in the road and the salesman chooses a path which, the monk is subsequently informed, will lead him to great danger, perhaps even certain death. After some hesitation, the monk decides that his Buddhist principles require that he set out to persuade the salesman to turn back, since allowing his personal antipathy to sway his duty towards the man would be a great sin. The route he thus follows subjects him to gruesome, skin-creeping horrors — told in vivid detail by Kyōka — but eventually he makes it through, only to find himself the guest of a kind of Japanese Circe, with whom he almost decides to remain forever.

As exemplary a tale as "The Holy Man of Mount Koya" is, it can't quite match the measured, uncanny beauty of "One Day in Spring." Again we have nested narratives, although in this case it is the frame-tale that involves a traveler, a lone figure who arrives at a remote temple and hears from the resident monk a bizarre tale about an earlier pilgrim, who had taken up residence in a nearby cottage and become obsessed with a beautiful woman with whom he had — in this world, at least — only the most fleeting of encounters. Drawn to an isolated spot by the sound of music, the pilgrim had witnessed an oneiric pageant in which he and the woman — or their semblances — appeared as the principle players; a few days later he is found drowned at the edge of the sea. Having heard this strange tale, the second traveler has his own encounter with the woman, then witnesses an appalling and unexpected denouement.

There's at least one additional collection of Kyōka's tales in English, also translated by Charles Inouye and published by the University of Hawaii Press; it's entitled In Light of Shadows: More Gothic Tales. I've ordered a copy.

Survivors

Chile, the slender nation that lies along the Pacific margins of South America, has faced more than its share of disasters, natural and otherwise. This neat road novel by the Mexican-born writer Andrés Pascoe Rippey imagines an apocalyptic future in which a nuclear war between the great powers has wiped out modern communications and the electric grid worldwide, even in countries — like Chile — that are far from the center of the conflict. As the authorities lose control, rioting and looting break out, and are followed in turn by the rise of brutal paramilitary units, and, more disturbingly, by armies of crazed, cannibalistic merodeadores (marauders) in whom we — although not the characters, at least initially — recognize the characteristic traits of the zombie.

The novel's central character, Alberto, is a left-wing Mexican journalist living in Santiago. As violence breaks out, he at first withdraws to the security of his apartment, but when the situation in the capital becomes increasingly grim he flees south in a commandeered Range Rover, acquiring two companions along the way. One, Max, is a teenager from a wealthy and conservative Catholic family; the other, Valentina, is an Argentinian woman who is both a formidable hand-to-hand fighter and a sexual powerhouse. Hoping to find shelter in an isolated region, they find that little they encounter along the way — a pious farm family, a neohippie commune — is what it seems; moreover, the paramilitaries and merodeadores are also swiftly making their way south. Much of the latter part of the novel takes place among the idyllic scenery of Chile's Alerce Andino National Park, though the events that transpire there — including, of all things, a cavalry charge, are anything but tranquil.

The novel's political and social overtones are obvious and at time explicit, and memories of the violent dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet are never far from the surface, but the novel also draws on the conventions of horror cinema, as well as, I suspect, books like John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids and the disaster novels of J. G. Ballard. It manages to be well-written and astute in its observation of society and character while supplying a ripping, well-paced narrative.

Todo es rojo is, thus far, available only in Spanish. It has been published, in a handsome edition, by a tiny Chilean press, Imbunche Ediciones, and appears to have limited distribution outside that country. (It is, however, available as a PDF download from Lulu.) Hopefully it will eventually gain wider exposure and translation into other languages.

The lake

For a while after I retired from teaching one of my former colleagues invited me back once a year to give a guest lecture at a summer seminar he ran. I had moved to the city by then, but as it was an afternoon class and I was an early riser I usually took back roads because they were quieter and because I liked the drive along the Housatonic. When my talk was over my host would invite me to dinner -- we were both widowers and I at least was past the age where I thought there was much likelihood of my marrying again -- and we would reminisce for a while over a stew and a glass of wine before I headed home.

It was on one of these evenings that I took a wrong turn in the dark somewhere on the way back to the city. The students had seemed a bit unresponsive earlier in the day and I was mulling over the question of whether they were the ones to blame – as any academic can tell you, some crops of incoming students are more promising than others -- or whether I had just been doing this for so long that other people were catching on to the fact that I was maybe getting a bit tired of it by now. My colleague had seemed a bit subdued as well; he hadn’t mentioned retirement but I suspected that the eventuality probably wasn’t far from his mind. There had been rain as I drove up but it had ended by late morning; the sun had steamed the moisture off the lawns but a few puddles still remained in the low places. I don’t know how I mistook my course, a moment’s inattention I suppose, as I knew the roads in that part of the Berkshires well and made a point of never drinking enough to affect my judgment. It was a darker night than usual, with no moonlight and little traffic, and maybe a sign had been knocked down or removed since the last time I drove that way. There aren’t many landmarks on the back roads, just miles of green woods broken by cornfields and the occasional mailbox, and so it was a while before I realized that I had gotten off my regular route. I was a little annoyed at myself but not alarmed; I had a full tank and I figured that eventually I’d come to a town or an intersection I recognized.

I was only doing about forty-five at this point. There were a lot of twists and turns and ups and downs in the road, and there was always the chance of a deer blundering out of the woods. After five miles or a bit more the gloom of the overhanging woods began to thin out on my left side, and I realized that I was driving along the edge of a body of water – not just a pond but a good-sized lake from the look of it. My headlights picked up the brown rippling of waves along the surface. I vaguely remembered there being a lake on the map in the area – it had a long Indian name I couldn’t come up with -- though it was off the main drag and I didn’t think I'd ever actually seen it before. I knew it was long but quite narrow from east to west, and that if I just skirted its shore I would come out into familiar territory in due time. I passed a tiny hamlet – really just a gas station and bait shop, set in a cluster of four or five clapboard houses, all with darkened windows -- and a mile beyond that the road split. There were no signs; the apparently less traveled thoroughfare – I was no Frost fan but the inevitable allusion popped into my head nonetheless – lay off to the right and up an incline, and I quickly dismissed it as a secondary road and bore to the left, keeping to the shore. It was only after driving another three or four miles, as the roadway seemed to narrow and the weeds on the shoulder grew more and more obviously untended, that I suspected I had been mistaken, and that the road I chosen led out to some uninhabited peninsula I didn’t remember from the map.

The barrier appeared suddenly, just around a bend. Luckily I had just slowed, having that moment determined to turn around and backtrack to the fork in the road, or I might have struck it. It was just a couple of wooden crosspieces, painted with black and yellow stripes and set on steel posts sunk in concrete disks; there was a single dangling battery-operated lantern, not that it cast much light. The road surface beyond seemed drivable enough, though creepers had begun to encroach on the edges and a few weeds poked through. I suspected there might be a bridge further on that had been dismantled or condemned as unsafe, never to be rebuilt for lack of funds or just because it was no longer deemed to be worth the trouble. It struck me there was something about the scene I didn’t like. It seemed to resuscitate memories from an impressionable period of my childhood, of watching war movies with roadblocks manned by grim helmeted soldiers who rode motorcycles with sidecars, things like that. I stopped the car and got out – the truth was that at this point I needed to empty my bladder – but left the engine running and the lights on, figuring that since I hadn’t seen another car for at least twenty minutes there was little danger of being rear-ended.

I stepped around the barrier and saw that there was a little path leading down to the shore of the lake, which I had lost sight of in the woods moments before but which now lay just twenty paces off. Above the lake there was a patch of lawn on an artificial embankment, though there was no sign of a house or any other building nearby, and I rested there for a moment. The air was warm and calm; on the far side of the lake there were some distant lights, but not many. A bullfrog bellowed not far away, then another, and I heard what sounded like falling water a little further down the shore. I picked my way in that direction, climbing over dead branches, mossy stones, and brambles, until I could get a better view. A few yards further out the lake's edge was bordered with a crescent of neatly dressed stone. Glowing faintly in the night, it topped a spillway through which the lake overflowed; to my great surprise I saw a lone human figure – it was a man, I could see, in spite of the darkness -- standing at the exact center of the crescent, his back turned toward me. He was about my height and I thought about my age, and wore a fedora and a brown coat that was much too heavy for the time of year, even at this hour. He was staring down into the stream that flowed out of the bottom of the chute some twenty feet or so below him. He hadn’t noticed my approach – or gave no sign of having done so – but just as I saw him begin to lean – too far for safety – over the edge of the spillway I shouted at him and he started and turned in my direction.

Though I couldn’t quite make out the man's features, what I did see filled me with terror. I won’t attempt to describe the lifeless, inhuman horror that peered out from under the brim of that dark felt hat, but I can see it in front of me now as clearly as I did at that moment, and will bear that awful memory to my grave. The figure took first a tentative step then several determined strides towards where I stood. I backed away, shaking with fear, and was about to turn and make a run for it when something called out of the dark waters of the lake.

When I say that it called I don’t mean to say that I heard it; there was no sound, at most there was only the opening of a hollow in the silence where a sound might have been, but the figure bearing down on me heard the summons, as if beckoned by a lover, and instantly froze in his tracks. He cocked his head towards the lake and listened; the call was repeated and he turned sharply and walked down to the water’s edge. To my astonishment, instead of stopping there he kept going, striding forward at the same pace, until the water rose up around him and he leaned into it and began to swim. For a moment or two, as he swam out towards the deepest part of the lake, I could make out the sound of his limbs breaking the surface; then there was utter stillness except for the burping of the frogs.

I don’t know why I didn’t immediately run back to my car, but somehow I knew the danger was past. I stood on the shore for a while, staring out into the blackness above the lake, until I thought I heard something moving at my feet. I knelt down; it was the man’s fedora, being gently nudged ashore by the lapping of the waves. I left it where it lay.

I turned my car around, eventually found the main road, and returned home without further incident. That winter my colleague passed away unexpectedly after a brief illness. His replacement was a younger man I had never met, and I was never invited back to campus to speak to his class.

The Woman on the Wharf

A number of years ago, before the harbor was dredged and deepened and the entire surrounding district modernized to accommodate container ships, an old man lived in a kind of cramped cabin or shack on one of the long wharves that used to jut out into the bay. He was employed as watchman and fire warden by an import-export firm that held a long-term lease on many of the harborside properties; in lieu of a salary he received free tenancy of the shack and daily meals and as much acrid coffee as he could drink in the firm's commissary. The work was undemanding -- walking the docks several times a night, keeping a lookout for suspicious activity -- and he found it preferable to life in a mission or the poor house. As he made his nightly circuit he carried a kind of staff or cudgel that he would, if necessary, wave in the air to persuade straying drunks to move on, as well as a switchblade in his pocket should real trouble arise, but the waterside was generally deserted once night fell, and it was no longer certain that much of value was passing through the wharves in any case.

Even in the fairest weather it was cold and misty by the water in the evenings, and the old man never left his lodgings without an ancient leather coat, a snug felt cap, and a pair of heavy work gloves. Though a series of pale electric lights had been strung overhead along the length of his route he carried a kerosene lantern with him at all times; his vision was beginning to fail and he held a particular loathing for the formidable rats that sometimes scuttled in front of him as he walked. He did not drink -- had never done so, even in all his travels in his younger days -- never mentioned family and had not been known to be ill or to request a day off. When he had occasion to engage in conversation, which was infrequently, it was noted that he spoke with a faint trace of an accent, though one that was hard to place. It was rumored that he might have been born in Norway or perhaps Orkney or the Hebrides, but no one knew for sure and no one ever took the trouble to inquire.

One particular October evening, after eating his supper in the half-deserted mess and catching a brief twilight nap in his cabin, the watchman dressed, collected his staff and lantern, and stepped out into the night air to begin his rounds. The moon was two nights past full, and its light was diffused by a thin, lingering mist. There were few ships moored at the docks that night, only a listing German freighter -- the Marut -- whose crew had made themselves scarce a few days before, as well as a pair of dark barges piled with scrap iron. Out on the water a long low coaler was steaming further up the harbor, guided by a pair of tugs, and its wake was rocking up against the moorings along shore. It sounded its horn, once, and the muffled echo repeated several times across the bay before dying out.

He passed beneath the dark belly of the freighter, listening to the slapping of the waves against its side, and began walking slowly out towards the end of the wharf. The slanted-roof warehouses that had been constructed along most of its length were now largely empty and stood in need of a coat of paint and more than a few fresh boards. Here and there a window had been broken and boarded up; the rest were dull with salt spray. Between the buildings lay collections of abandoned things: empty barrels and rusting coils of cable, a broken block-and-tackle and an old propeller.

As he approached the opening of the alley between the two outermost buildings he heard an unfamiliar sound that he thought for a second might have been a footfall. He was not alarmed; there was nothing out this far on the wharf to interest a prowler and he suspected it was really just the breaking of the surf, but almost immediately he heard it a second time -- it was unmistakable now -- and then once more again. It didn't sound like the solid tread of a booted workman -- more the light slap of a bare foot on wet wood -- and he wondered if a dog had gotten lost or had wandered out in search of a refuse pail to knock over for scraps. He turned and passed through the narrow alley, and just as he emerged and started for the end of the wharf he caught a fleeting glimpse of a slight figure, dressed in light-colored clothing, who was moving steadily ahead of him.

He called out, but the figure had already disappeared around the corner. He hastily adjusted his lantern, widening its pale glow, and followed, quickening his step. As he came to the end of the warehouse he saw that the fugitive had once again crossed to the opposite side of the wharf and was now heading outwards along the twenty yards of empty deck that remained at its tip. When he called again the figure turned, just for a moment, and to his considerable surprise he saw that it was a woman, whose long, light brown hair flowed down the back of a plain white dress that was not nearly warm enough for the season. In the instant before she turned her back to him again and resumed her course she gave him a frank stare unmarked by either fear or evident curiosity, and as she did so he observed that she was quite strikingly pretty but also not nearly as young as her stride would suggest -- a woman, to all appearances, well into her middle years.

He knew at once that there could be only one explanation for her presence at such an hour, and with more annoyance at her for trespassing on his domain than concern for her welfare he immediately resolved to frustrate her intent. He hurried forward -- not at a run, as the surface of the wharf was slick and treacherous, but as quickly as he could walk -- but she was moving swiftly herself and the distance was too great. When she reached the end of the wharf, just a few yards ahead of him, he nearly caught up with her and lunged for her arm, but it was too late. She did not jump into the bay but instead simply continued walking until the last metal girder was no longer beneath her feet and she plunged downwards and out of sight, making a hollow sound as she broke the surface. The watchman held his lantern up and looked out. A few yards out, the woman had begun to swim calmly and purposefully into the bay; he ordered her to return but she either didn't hear or chose not to heed. He hesitated; there was a dinghy hauled up at the shore end of the wharf but he knew that the oars were locked in a shed and he would have had to find the key. Deciding there was no time, he set the lantern down on the end of the wharf, hurriedly shed his coat and cap, then unbuckled and drew off his boots. Before he leapt he yelled as loud as he could for help, knowing there was little chance that anyone would be within earshot.

As he hit the water the shock of the cold convulsed him and it was a moment before he could regain control of his limbs. Treading water until he had caught his breath, he drew a bead on the woman, illuminated by the moonlight now some thirty yards offshore, and began his pursuit.

He was an experienced swimmer, though no longer as strong as he had once been, and though he quickly drew up to within a few yards of the woman he could not overtake her. Even as he was appalled by her recklessness he could not help but marvel at her practiced stroke. He had never known a woman to swim so well, certainly not in the cold and powerful currents of the bay. She looked over her shoulder briefly and caught sight of him, but gave no indication that his presence affected her or would alter her plan. There were lights on the far shore and on the boats pulled up alongside, casting shining trails across the water, but they were too far away for anyone there to be able make out the two swimmers, even had someone chanced to look, and at that distance the chopping of the waves would muffle even the loudest cry for help. There was nothing for it but to follow the woman until she began to tire, and then hope to persuade her to return with him to shore, assuming his own strength did not give out first.

As she reached the midpoint between the near and far shore, where the channel was cut the deepest, she began to change her course, swinging around until she was parallel to the current, bearing outwards towards the mouth of the bay. For a moment he persuaded himself, with relief, that she was about to make a full circle and return to the wharf and that her madness had, after all, some limit, but all too soon it was clear that that was not at all her purpose. She kept to the center of the bay and even seemed to redouble her pace. He felt fury rising in him at her perverseness and obstinacy, but fascination as well, as he wondered about the mettle of a woman whose strength and determination were more than a match for his own.

They continued swimming and soon had left the busiest part of the harbor behind. The surface of the water was darker here, lit only by the haze-shrouded moon, and the waves began to pick up and slap around him and into his face, but still he maintained a fixed eye on the woman ahead. He could not fathom what purpose she might have in acting as she did; if it were to drown herself she could have done so simply and far closer to shore, unless perhaps his unexpected interference had spoiled her design.

By now, he was no longer swimming to save her -- at this point he no longer thought he could -- nor even to save himself, but still he followed her without knowing why, as if, having already pursued her so far, he had surrendered his will and forfeited the right to turn back. Curiously, he felt no fear. As the cold penetrated his muscles his limbs began to tire and the water felt heavier and darker around him. The steady pull of the falling tide was taking hold, drawing him out into the widest part of the bay. He had begun to swim more slowly now; she seemed to sense this and relaxed her pace as well, turning her head every few strokes as if to gauge where he was. He called to her and for once he thought he saw her listen and consider his words, but still she swam outward, outward...

At last he was exhausted and could do nothing but float. As the current bore him along the woman swam in time with it, still showing no sign of feeling either cold or fatigue. The waves began to break over his head and he gasped for breath, unable to move. The figure ahead of him stopped swimming and turned towards him one last time, treading water, observing him silently, intently, without emotion. As he felt himself being drawn down into the dense, deep water her face was the last thing he saw.

Two days later the crew of a fishing boat spied the watchman's body drifting a few yards offshore at the outermost point of the bay. They notified the harbor patrol, who gaffed him out of the water and brought him to the city morgue. He was buried in an unmarked grave.

The sea

The boats are returning to the harbor now, one by one, the reflection of their torches flaring across the water in the last moments of twilight. Tired and grim-faced -- it's been a bad day's haul, it seems -- the fisherman will pull along the docks, tie up, and silently unload their catch. From where I stand, along the rocks where the jetty meets the long, grey beach, I can't see their faces, but I know each one of them by name, I know their thoughts, I know their wives, and I teach most of their children.

The policemen have completed their enquiries and have left town. They haven't said as much, but I know they won't be back. They will file their report -- missing person, no evidence foul play -- the folder will be neatly tucked into a cabinet in the district office, and no one will ever look at it again. It's always the same. As far as the authorities are concerned, keeping track of the activities of the living is responsibility enough; expecting them to bother with the affairs of those who have disappeared without trace would be asking too much, and in the end what good would it do, anyway?

My mother was the first person in the long history of this village to be able to read and write, and had she not given birth to me she could very easily have been the last. She wasn't from here, naturally. Her birthplace was twelve miles inland, in a real town with lamps and cast-iron fences, newspapers and brightly lit cafés. When she was nineteen, having already lost both parents, she came here with some friends on a lark and, as the result of a series of circumstances the nature of which I was never allowed by my mother to have more than the vaguest knowledge, never left. It would be appealing to be able to say that she stayed because she fell in love with the village or with my father, but I'm not sure that either was ever true. Be that as it may she remained all the same, and in time I was born.

My mother was never able to teach my father to do anything more than write his name -- a skill I'm quite certain he never employed when he was out of her sight -- but she saw to it, in spite of our poverty, that I was supplied with books, paper, and writing implements, and she pointedly neglected my instruction in the tasks that in the village are customarily allotted to girls, namely gathering seaweed and shellfish, tending to the gardens, and looking after infants, one's own or those of other people. My mother put on no airs about her own original station in life nor did she entertain any illusions about how far she had descended from that condition in consenting to marry my father, but she regarded herself as a civilized women and civilized women did not muck about in tide pools and lazy beds. My mother performed her obligatory household duties, the unending cycles of cooking, cleaning, and laundering, without complaint, but she never suggested to me that these activities were sufficient to constitute one's mission in life. Since it seemed unlikely that I would ever leave here or find a suitable husband, her fixed intention was that I become the village's teacher and instruct the children in the rudiments of literacy, arithmetic, and religion. Had it not been for the burden of attending to me and my father, a burden that increased after my father's health began to fail, she might well have taken up the task herself. As it was, by the time my father went to his grave her own health had begun prematurely to decline. I was already sixteen and therefore, in my mother's judgment, sufficiently prepared to see to the village's education. She persuaded her neighbors -- with what kind of arm twisting I will never know -- to entrust their offspring to my tutelage in exchange for a few coins a week, enough to pay for a few supplies and my own very modest requirements for food, firewood, and other necessities. I have never harbored any illusions about the lasting effect I have had on my charges, but at the very least I know that they will not be as ignorant as their parents.

There were two policemen this time. The older one, the one who seemed to be in charge, seemed familiar, though he didn't appear to remember me. They always come around to me eventually. The villagers are a close-lipped lot, and even when they do decide to let on a bit their ramblings don't appear to make much sense, at least to outsiders. I, on the other hand, know everyone in this village, I understand their ways, and I'm happy to tell the policemen whatever it is they want to know. The missing man lived in a cabin along the harbor; he lived alone; he drank no more than anyone else; he had no enemies one night that might not be his friends again the next. And so on. They enquire, as discreetly and indirectly as they can, about his relations with women; I tell them plainly what I know or may have heard.

In the end I really haven't told them very much at all, but it's all they need or want to hear. What they don't want to hear is what no one has told them but what everyone in the village knows: that no trace of the man will be found, that no witness to his fatal last moments will come forward, that no bloody footprints will be found leading into the brush.

For the most part, the people who live in this village die in one of three ways: by drowning, by drinking, or at the point of a knife. Little given to reflection or sentiment, they fear none of the three. What they do fear has no name -- for how can you name something that no one has ever seen? -- and if the police have gotten wind of it, one way or another, as they make their way around the village, through some slip of the tongue or muttered aside, they lift their pencils from their notebooks and pretend they haven't heard. Only later, perhaps at the very end of their interview with me, as they stand awkwardly before the door, their questions concluded but still held back as if by magnetic force, will they allude to what people are hinting but what of course is nothing but ignorant nonsense and superstition, that the disappeared man has been taken by something silent and unseen, something that visits the shore only after long intervals and only on the blackest, coldest, mistiest nights, something that lifts latches and subdues without sound and that leaves no evidence of a struggle behind. And I'll tell them that yes, that's what the people think, and that's what they have always believed, and if they ask me if I believe it I'll tell them that what I believe or don't believe doesn't matter. And the younger policeman might suggest that couldn't it be true that the vanished man might simply have succumbed to madness and alcohol, that he might have lost his mind in the depths of night and strode out into the sea and drowned, and I will tell them that yes he might well have but that they can scour the shoreline from now until doomsday and nobody will ever find his body.

The rower

One warm August night, unable to remain asleep, I rose, dressed, and went outside, hoping that a walk by the water's edge would help calm my thoughts. I set out along the gravel path that leads to the bay, my footfalls crunching on its pebbled surface, guided forward by moonlight and memory. Not until I had passed the last house did I begin to hear the faint lapping of wavelets on the rocks along the shore. Ahead of me, across the water, stretched the long, low peninsula on the other side of the bay; if anyone out there was, like me, stirring at that hour, their lights were too distant and too dim to be seen from where I stood. There were lobster boats moored here and there alongshore, bobbing in the waves as if rocking in their cradles, but the only sign of maritime activity in the offing was far out, beyond the limits of the bay, where one or two large vessels, with drafts too deep for our little harbor, were churning through the open sea, parallel to the coast, bound for Boston or Halifax.

I turned onto the narrow footpath that runs along the shore and headed away from town, keeping my chin down and my eyes on the path's uneven surface, which is broken in places by gullies, washouts, and exposed roots. The tide was high but had crested and begun to ebb away again out of the bay; only a few yards of boulders and patches of coarse sand lay between the path and the water. The wind off the bay was not particularly brisk, but even so it bore a pleasing and welcome chill, though I was not sorry to have picked up my windbreaker before I left the house. On the inland side, as I walked, I passed a succession of wealthy summer homes with long, carefully tended lawns, some of them terminating in low masonry walls adorned with electric lanterns. Though here and there a floodlight shone down on the path the houses were silent, the occupants either asleep or perhaps reading or drinking quietly in solitary inner rooms. After a mile or so the houses gave way, first to a thicket of beach rose and sumac, then beyond that to aspen and stunted white pine, the overgrowth of what had once been burned over in a great fire many years before. The path climbed away from the shore, which briefly disappeared from view, before descending again to skirt a narrow horseshoe of stony beach that was rarely discovered by visitors, even during the height of the season when it seemed that the whole area swarmed with hikers and weekenders.

It was when I had made my way around and was approaching the far limit of the cove that my eye caught something moving in the water, thirty yards or so offshore. It was low in profile and partly hidden by the waves, and at first I thought it might be either a log or a surfacing dolphin, an animal not uncommon in these waters in the summer months. I stood still and watched the shape as it glided through the reflected pallor of the moon, and only after a moment or two had gone by could I identify it as a kind of lifeboat or dinghy, in which a solitary pilot, seated at the middle bench, could be seen steadily rowing with the outgoing current. The craft bore no lantern nor any sign of cargo or tackle, and the silent figure working the oars, dressed in a gray cloak with the hood down, appeared, from its long hair and slightness of build, to be a woman. Her head was bent down from the exertion and her face was turned away from the shore; she rowed as if she had some familiarity with the task but not powerfully, pacing herself, being evidently in no hurry to get where she was going.

I continued along the shore path, matching my advance to the progress of the boat. Beyond the cove the bay widens, but the rower maintained her distance from the shore and did not venture out into the deeper channel. The wind was beginning to pick up and I zipped my windbreaker, but kept my hands out of my pockets to assist my balance on the stony path. Once or twice I stumbled and knocked loose a stone, but the sound that echoed as it struck onto the cobbles below either failed to reach the boat or did not concern its occupant. She rowed on at the same fixed pace, occasionally casting the briefest half glance over her shoulder to hold her course. I began to wonder where she could be heading at that hour. There were no docks or houses to the end of the point, and if she had been so reckless as to go boating alone, for recreation, at night, it seemed high time for her to reverse her heading and make for the shelter of the town. Up ahead, at the end of the point, barely discernible in the darkness, lay the long thin breakwater that sheltered the bay from the heavy surges and swells of the ocean. For an unaccompanied boatman -- or boatwoman -- to venture into those waters at night in such a craft, even in favorable weather, would be an act of almost suicidal folly.

The path shook off the last patches of woods and scrub and descended directly to the water's edge; at the same time it became rockier and more irregular. I clambered ahead as fast as I could manage, clearly visible now on the shore if the woman were to turn, but still she kept her head averted, tucked into her far shoulder. She began to gain ground on me; her way was smoother and she was gaining momentum as the tide drew her along. I stumbled, turned my ankle slightly, and scraped my hand on a rock, then I righted myself, rubbed off the sting in my palm, and hurried forward. She was nearing the breakwater now and beginning to veer away from the shore. I hoped that she was about to turn and circle back, but instead she rowed steadily onward, shooting towards the churning gap.

I stepped onto the breakwater and leaped along its skeleton of immense stones, keeping an eye on the boat as our courses swiftly converged. In seconds I was almost at the jetty's end, and the woman, as she hurtled forward, was now no more than ten yards away. At last I saw that there was no doubting her course, nor hope of stopping her, and in desperation I shouted to her, and at that moment, for the first time, she heard me and turned her face -- or should I say, what remained of her face --in my direction.

Below the thin and tangled filaments of her hair the woman's eyes were so deeply sunken they might well have been hollow sockets. Her nose was eaten away entirely, and all that remained of her lower jaw was a jagged shard of bone and a few exposed and broken teeth. As the craft shot through the gap into the ocean she fixed her gaze on me, but her expressionless face did not once move or twitch and no sound issued from that grotesque maw. Her hands and arms kept to the rhythm of their rowing; I turned my body and met her gaze, watched her recede into the distance, until she suddenly snapped her head down and away from me once more, vanished into a swell, re-emerged, vanished again, and was almost instantly swallowed by darkness.

I did not want to consider what errand might have brought the silent rower into town, whether she had visited some inconceivable lover there or was perhaps searching vainly for a lost paramour or child who had been dead for generations. I stood on the end of the breakwater for some time, trembling and unable to move, petrified that I might lose consciousness and topple into the water and be drowned and battered against the rocks. When I had sufficiently gathered my composure I began gingerly to retrace my steps, buffeted by the wind and the salt spray, until once again I was standing alone on the shore at the end of the point. I fell to my knees for an instant, feeling tears of horror and anguish well up in my eyes, then I collected myself, shook off the chill, and began to make my way back to town.

At the Mountains of Madness

It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.

H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

I managed to find a paperback edition of At the Mountains of Madness in an American-style drugstore on our way to the Savoie restaurant, where we are now banqueting on oysters. The cover displays a fur-covered skull with two yellowed, rodent-like teeth and from the hollow eye-sockets there burn two pairs of bright eyes belonging to formless Kafkaesque beasties. A furry worm is crawling in and out of the sockets.

Josef Škvorecký, The Engineer of Human Souls

I remember that cover, which, if I'm not mistaken, belonged to a Ballantine edition in circulation in the early 1970s. I first saw it in a paperback bookstore in central Connecticut; it was the kind of place where much of the stock — the Lovecraft being among the exceptions — consisted of books whose covers had been torn off and returned to the publisher, the subsequent sale of which was a contractual violation. There were other Lovecraft titles in the same rack, with similarly gruesome cover treatments. I don't think I had ever heard of the author; they certainly didn't teach his books in high school (we endured Catcher in the Rye instead), and nobody I knew read Lovecraft the way some of us read Vonnegut or (wince) Richard Brautigan. I wouldn't catch up to him until years later, and then just a little here, a little there, until, eventually, and probably in fact because of the allusion to it in Škvorecký's novel, I read At the Mountains of Madness, which I suspect is the only Lovecraft I would go out of my way to read a second time — as I lately have done.

"A kind of hack writer," I say. He imitated Poe. Wrote macabre stuff. In fact he wrote only a few brilliant pages in his life. Only one scene."

The Engineer of Human Souls

Today, there's even a Lovecraft volume in the Library of America, which actually is pretty funny considering how awful a writer he was, even when he was at his best. Lovecraft isn't for everybody, and I wouldn't want to read too much of him, but it's impossible to deny the pleasures his work can provide. He may have been a sick, racist creep as a human being, but then so was Poe, his great model. Both vipers are safely dead ("aeon-dead," I can hear Lovecraft intone) and their venom has lost its potency.

At the Mountains of Madness narrates a scientific expedition to Antarctica during which the explorers — first an advance contingent, which meets a horrible end, then a smaller party consisting of the narrator and a man named Danforth — encounter the remnants of a vast civilization ancient beyond all human measure. That civilization had been created millions of years previously by a species of migrants from space, beings on the order of giant sentient echinoderms, whom Lovecraft calls "the Old Ones." It had collapsed long before our own epoch under the twin pressures of the advancing Antarctic ice and the revolt of their slave creatures, the immense, hideous Shoggoths. Or something like that. It doesn't do to get bogged down in the "mythos," though some people have done just that and gone on to make a career of it. The bottom line is that something hideous, old, and very dangerous, something that would much better have been left undisturbed, gets disinterred from the ice, and that something even worse is out there, somewhere, lurking around.

And of course the damned dogs are hip to it from the beginning. Lovecraft repeatedly hammers us in the head with the fact that the dogs that accompany the advance party know that there's something really nasty about the specimens their masters dig up. The narrator quotes the wireless transmissions that relay the findings to the base camp:

Dogs growing uneasy as we work...

Having trouble with dogs. They can't endure the new specimen, and would probably tear it to pieces if we didn't keep it at a distance from them...

Have brought all to surface, leading off dogs to distance. They cannot stand the things...

Job now to get fourteen huge specimens to camp without dogs, which bark furiously and can't be trusted near them.

He pounds it in so mercilessly that it's actually a relief when we find out that the dogs have been slaughtered by the same unknown horror that has wiped out the advance party — but no, because in fact there are more dogs with the narrator and Danforth when they find the ravaged remains of the camp, and those dogs aren't very happy about the situation either.

The climax of the novel occurs after the narrator and Danforth reach the site, find the remains of their companions, explore the ruined megalopolis (which features miraculously preserved sculptural friezes that, with a cursory inspection, reveal the entire history of the civilization in great detail), and find the savaged bodies of several of the Old Ones near the entrance to a vast subterranean sea. It dawns on the pair that the re-animated Old Ones, as terrible as they are, are not the worst thing they have to fear. There are, incongruously, some rather cute giant blind albino penguins hanging about at this point, but it's the Shoggoths, slayers of the Old Ones and harbingers of the ultimate evil that dwells in the distant, unexplored mountains beyond, that are the real menace. The recognition scene is, perhaps uniquely in all literature, conveyed entirely in olfactory terms:

We realised ... that our retreat from the foetid slime-coating on those headless obstructions [the butchered Old Ones], and the coincident approach of the pursuing entity, had not brought us the exchange of stenches which logic called for. In the neighbourhood of the prostrate things that new and lately unexplainable foetor had been wholly dominant; but by this time it ought to have largely given place to the nameless stench associated with those others. This it had not done — for instead, the newer and less bearable smell was now virtually undiluted, and growing more and more poisonously insistent each second.

Follow that? So at last we find that the snark is a boojum, a creature that only Terry Gilliam could ever animate, half train, half sea-cucumber, a "foetid, unglimpsed mountain of slime-spewing protoplasm whose race had conquered the abyss and sent land pioneers to re-carve and squirm through the burrows of the hills..." — something in fact remarkably like Karl Rove.

To write this badly — and please believe me when I say that I write this without a trace of condescension or irony — requires more than immense talent; it requires absolute genius, divinely inspired, and it is why At the Mountains of Madness is a great bad book — a thing infinitely preferable to any number of bad great books.

When Škvorecký published The Engineer of Human Souls, he selected as chapter titles the names of a select handful of representative American and British writers — Poe, Hawthorne, Conrad, etc. — but ended the novel with "Lovecraft," a bizarre but, I think, entirely defensible choice. Lovecraft deserves his place in the pantheon for making a virtue of awfulness — in both senses of the word.

"Lovecraft didn't have a great range of fantasy, but what he had was intense. It was more like an obsession than a fantasy. Like all prophets."

"What did he prophesy?" asks Irene incuriously...

"The same as all prophets, Nicole. Doom."

The Engineer of Human Souls

Skvorecky quotes one final passage, presumably the one "brilliant" scene cited earlier. It's a dreadful and wonderful bit of writing, a splendid mixture of lyricism and hogwash. At the close of the book the narrator and Danforth fly away to safety, but not before looking back and, in the process, catching a glimpse of the unexplored high peaks in the far distance.

There now lay revealed on the ultimate white horizon behind the grotesque city a dim, elfin line of pinnacled violet whose needle-pointed heights loomed dreamlike against the beckoning rose color of the western sky. Up toward this shimmering rim sloped the ancient table-land, the depressed course of the bygone river traversing it as an irregular ribbon of shadow. For a second we gasped in admiration of the scene's unearthly cosmic beauty, and then vague horror began to creep into our souls. For this far violet line could be nothing else than the terrible mountains of the forbidden land — highest of earth's peaks and focus of earth's evil; harborers of nameless horrors and Archaean secrets; shunned and prayed to by those who feared to carve their meaning; untrodden by any living thing on earth, but visited by the sinister lightnings and sending strange beams across the plains in the polar night — beyond doubt the unknown archetype of that dreaded Kadath in the Cold Waste beyond abhorrent Leng, whereof primal legends hint evasively.

Škvorecký omits the final sentence of the passage, which reads, "We were the first human beings ever to see them — and I hope to God we may be the last." Yeah, well, we all know how that turns out.