Fear

The salon had been shut down a couple weeks from the big flood they had after that frigging incident with the idiot private eye and his voodoo friend, but we were back up and running now and the smell of spilled highballs was thankfully beginning to overpower the faint stench of mould. Wallace hadn’t bought flood insurance, the old cheapskate, so a small army of street kids had been assembled by one of our bartenders to scrub the walls and floors with watered-down bleach. It seemed to be working OK. And anyway it didn’t faze the salon fellows, who don’t get fazed by much except chick lit and twist endings.

Percy sidled up to the bar and said, “Tinker wants to know,” jerking his head at the trembling figure by the half-open door, “whether he can have a bottle of whiskey. And a couple of candles.”

“What?” I said. “Is he going to make fireworks? Tell him to take it outside. Secondly, why’d he send you?”

“Says he wants to keep his back to the wall tonight.”

I dried my hands and pulled up a chair at ‘Tinker’ Taylor’s table. “All right, pal,” I said as kindly as I could manage. “What’d you read?”

“It’s... he’s... an evil vision!” he gulped, hands twisting in his tie. “From out of time! Secret knowledge vouchsafed to no other man!”

Nearby, someone said, “You know, that’s the first time I ever heard ‘vouchsafed’ used in conversation?”

“Me too,” someone else said. “You see it wrote down alla time, you never hear folks use it.”

Tinker barely appeared to hear them. I looked down at his clenched fists and sallow face and said, “H.P. Lovecraft, right?”

He howled at the name and tried to get under the table.

“What’s that stand for, anyway?” said Percy, who had helped himself to a bottle of Star and pulled up a chair of his own. “Horribly Paranoid?”

Spencer, listening in, called out, “Howard Phillips.”

“I know a hooker,” said Amon very solemnly, “named Talented Lovecraft.”

“I’ve met her,” I said. “She ain’t so talented.”

“Maybe not, but she’s well-read.”

“You know, I like his stuff,” the Greek put in. “I do. He’s an inventive guy. Cats on the moon. Races of beetle people. The crawling chaos Nyarlahotep.”

“Dream cities,” sighed Sony. “Sunset Celephais.”

“Journeys and exorcisms.”

“The great Antarctic.”

“Secrets of the northern lights.”

“The other gods. Aliens. The darkness between stars.”>

“Pirates and priests.”

“I read that stuff to my kids,” said handsome Jacob, looking up from his beer. “I know, I know, it’s the future, kids are harder to scare. They love it. Me I find it kinda repetitive. But they tell me: Dad, nightmares repeat too. That’s why his stuff is so repulsively familiar.”

“Must be fun to read, though,” said Spencer. “Zoogs and gugs and ghasts and shoggoths and whatnot. Do you do sound effects?”

“Yup.”

“Y’hear that, Tink?” Percy said, nudging the table. “Sixty years from now, you can read that shit to an eight year-old.”

“His mind will be warped and he will mature in the grip of a terrible madness!” the table shrieked. “Pass me a drink!”

I handed down a glass and said, over the frantic slurping, “Terrible madness. Now there’s a signature phrase.”

“You gotta have signature phrases!” protested the Greek. “He uses cyclopean a lot too.”

“Unnatural.”

“Hideous.”

“Mysterious.”

“Titan.”

“Does anyone here even know what cyclopean means?”

“Big, I think,” I said vaguely. “Oh, and Amon, ‘titan’ has a long ‘i.’ You’re thinking of Teton, that French hooker on Twenty-Second street.”

“So I am.”

“I heard he was some kinda racist,” said Percy thoughtfully.

“You see that sometimes,” said Jacob. “I never did ‘The Horror at Red Hook,’ but it keeps popping up when you least expect it. My daughter is particularly horrified by ‘blackfellows’ in that story where they go to Australia. Plus all the talk about those jolly, fat, retarded, doomed black men from Parg. She’s got one friend in each of those categories ‘cept from Parg.”

“Including doomed?” I said. “Isn’t she five years old?”

“Her buddy Chris has a chromosome disorder,” he muttered.

“He named his dog Nigger, didn’t he?” someone said in the back.

“I like this guy,” announced Brightman, whacking his cane on the floor for emphasis. “Ain’t no such thing as racism anyway. Down with the black man! What’d he ever accomplish, eh? Send him back where he came from.”

There was a general murmur of demurral. How’re you supposed to tell a blind bigot that he’s black? Man rode a bus twelve hours last year to apply at the KKK, came back in a towering rage: “Didn’t accept me just ‘cos I’m from the north!”

“Look, Taylor,” I said, putting my head reassuringly under the table. “What you got to understand with Lovecraft is that the standard of horror is going to shift after he’s gone. The ancient evils won’t be so evil. They won’t even be ancient. It’ll be men and pain and torture. Lovecraft is out to disgust you into fear. He’ll only frighten you if you happen to have a basalt phobia. Later they’ll be trying to really scare you. Much later.”

Percy said, “For now, read him as wonderful science fiction; let the waves of madness wash right over you. His ancient evils won’t go bump in the night. You have to seek them out.”

“Hear hear,” said the Greek, raising his Manhattan.

“Tink?” I said, reaching out. “Come on, man. I’ll get you another drink.” My hand swept through the air and hit the chair legs. “Tink?”

But when we crawled under the table he was gone; only his glass remained, lightly coated in phosphorescent blue slime.