Black Man with a Horn

T. E. D. Klein

1.

The Black [words obscured by postmark] was fascinating—I must get a snap shot of him.

—H. P. LOVECRAFT, POSTCARD TO

E. HOFFMANN PRICE, 7/23/1934

There is something inherently comforting about the first-person past tense. It conjures up visions of some deskbound narrator puffing contemplatively upon a pipe amid the safety of his study, lost in tranquil recollection, seasoned but essentially unscathed by whatever experience he’s about to relate. It’s a tense that says, “I am here to tell the tale. I lived through it.”

The description, in my own case, is perfectly accurate—as far as it goes. I am indeed seated in a kind of study: a small den, actually, but lined with bookshelves on one side, below a view of Manhattan painted many years ago, from memory, by my sister. My desk is a folding bridge table that once belonged to her. Before me the electric typewriter, though somewhat precariously supported, hums soothingly, and from the window behind me comes the familiar drone of the old air conditioner, waging its lonely battle against the tropic night. Beyond it, in the darkness outside, the small night-noises are doubtless just as reassuring: wind in the palm trees, the mindless chant of crickets, the muffled chatter of a neighbor’s TV, an occasional car bound for the highway, shifting gears as it speeds past the house….

House, in truth, may be too grand a word; the place is a green stucco bungalow just a single story tall, third in a row of nine set several hundred yards from the highway. Its only distinguishing features are the sundial in the front yard, brought here from my sister’s former home, and the flimsy little picket fence, now rather overgrown with weeds, which she erected despite the protests of neighbors.

It’s hardly the most romantic of settings, but under normal circumstances it might make an adequate background for meditations in the past tense. “I’m still here,” the writer says, adjusting to the tone. (I’ve even stuck the requisite pipe in my mouth, stuffed with a plug of latakia.) “It’s over now,” he says. “I lived through it.”

A comforting premise, perhaps. Only, in this case, it doesn’t happen to be true. Whether the experience is really “over now” no one can say; and if, as I suspect, the final chapter has yet to be enacted, then the notion of my “living through it” will seem a pathetic conceit.

Yet I can’t say I find the thought of my own death particularly disturbing. I get so tired, sometimes, of this little room, with its cheap wicker furniture, the dull outdated books, the night pressing in from outside…. And of that sundial out there in the yard, with its idiotic message. “Grow old along with me….”

I have done so, and my life seems hardly to have mattered in the scheme of things. Surely its end cannot matter much either.

Ah, Howard, you would have understood.

2.

That, boy, was what I call a travel-experience!

—LOVECRAFT, 3/12/1930

If, while I’m setting it down, this tale acquires an ending, it promises to be an unhappy one. But the beginning is nothing of the kind; you may find it rather humorous, in fact—full of comic pratfalls, wet trouser cuffs, and a dropped vomit-bag.

“I steeled myself to endure it,” the old lady to my right was saying. “I don’t mind telling you, I was exceedingly frightened. I held on to the arms of the seat and just gritted my teeth. And then, you know, right after the captain warned us about that turbulence, when the tail lifted and fell, flip-flop, flip-flop, well”—she flashed her dentures at me and patted my wrist—“I don’t mind telling you, there was simply nothing for it but to heave.”

Where had the old girl picked up such expressions? And was she trying to pick me up as well? Her hand clamped wetly round my wrist. “I do hope you’ll let me pay for the dry cleaning.”

“Madam,” I said, “think nothing of it. The suit was already stained.”

“Such a nice man!” She cocked her head coyly at me, still gripping my wrist. Though their whites had long since turned the color of old piano keys, her eyes were not unattractive. But her breath repelled me. Slipping my paperback into a pocket, I rang for the stewardess.

The earlier mishap had occurred several hours before. In clambering aboard the plane at Heathrow, surrounded by what appeared to be an aboriginal rugby club (all dressed alike, navy blazers with bone buttons), I’d been shoved from behind and had stumbled against a black cardboard hatbox in which some Chinaman was storing his dinner; it was jutting into the aisle near the first-class seats. Something inside sloshed over my ankles—duck sauce, soup perhaps—and left a sticky yellow puddle on the floor. I turned in time to see a tall, beefy Caucasian with an Air Malay bag and a beard so thick and black he looked like some heavy from the silent era. His manner was equally suited to the role, for after shouldering me aside (with shoulders broad as my valises), he pushed his way down the crowded passage, head bobbing near the ceiling like a gas balloon, and suddenly disappeared from sight at the rear of the plane. In his wake I caught the smell of treacle, and was instantly reminded of my childhood: birthday hats, Callard & Bowser gift packs, and afterdinner bellyaches.

“So very sorry.” A bloated little Charlie Chan looked fearfully at this departing apparition, then doubled over to scoop his dinner beneath the seat, fiddling with the ribbon.

“Think nothing of it,” I said .

I was feeling kindly toward everyone that day. Flying was still a novelty. My friend Howard, of course (as I’d reminded audiences earlier in the week), used to say he’d “hate to see aeroplanes come into common commercial use, since they merely add to the goddam useless speeding up of an already over-speeded life.” He had dismissed them as “devices for the amusement of a gentleman” —but then, he’d only been up once, in the twenties, a brief $3.50 flight above Buzzard’s Bay. What could he have known of whistling engines, the wicked joys of dining at thirty thousand feet, the chance to look out a window and find that the earth is, after all, quite round? All this he had missed; he was dead and therefore to be pitied.

Yet even in death he had triumphed over me….

It gave me something to think about as the stewardess helped me to my feet, clucking in professional concern at the mess on my lap—though more likely she was thinking of the wiping up that awaited her once I’d vacated the seat. “Why do they make those bags so slippery?” my elderly neighbor asked plaintively. “And all over this nice man’s suit. You really should do something about it.” The plane dropped and settled; she rolled her yellowing eyes. “It could happen again.”

The stewardess steered me down the aisle toward a restroom at the middle of the plane. To my left a cadaverous young woman wrinkled her nose and smiled at the man next to her. I attempted to disguise my defeat by looking bitter, as if to say, “Someone else has done this deed!” —but doubt I succeeded. The stewardess’s arm supporting mine was superfluous but comfortable; I leaned on her more heavily with each step. There are, as I’d long suspected, precious few advantages in being seventy-six and looking it-yet among them is this: though one is excused from the frustration of flirting with a stewardess, one gets to lean on her arm. I turned toward her to say something funny, but paused; her face was blank as a clock’s. “I’ll wait out here for you,” she said, and pulled open the smooth white door.

“That will hardly be necessary.” I straightened up. “But could you—do you think you might find me another seat? I have nothing against that lady, you understand, but I don’t want to see any more of her lunch.”

Inside the restroom the whine of the engines seemed louder, as if the pink plastic walls were all that separated me from the jet stream and its arctic winds. Occasionally the air we passed through must have grown choppy, for the plane rattled and heaved like a sled over rough ice. If I opened the john I half expected to see the earth miles below us, a frozen grey Atlantic fanged with icebergs. England was already a thousand miles away.

With one hand on the door handle for support, I wiped off my trousers with a perfumed paper towel from a foil envelope and stuffed several more into my pocket. My cuffs still bore a residue of Chinese goo. This, it seemed, was the source of the treacle smell; I dabbed ineffectually at it. Surveying myself in the mirror—a bald, harmless-looking old baggage with stooped shoulders and a damp suit (so different from the self-confident young fellow in the photo captioned “HPL and disciple”) —I slid open the bolt and emerged, a medley of scents. The stewardess had found an empty seat for me near the back of the plane.

It was only as I made to sit down that I noticed who occupied the adjoining seat: he was leaning away from me, asleep with his head resting against the window, but I recognized the beard.

“Uh, stewardess—?” I turned, but saw only her uniformed back retreating up the aisle. After a moment’s uncertainty I inched myself into the seat, making as little noise as possible. I had, I reminded myself, every right to be here.

Adjusting the recliner position (to the annoyance of the black behind me), I settled back and reached for the paperback in my pocket. They’d finally gotten around to reprinting one of my earlier tales, and already I’d found four typos. But then, what could one expect? The anthology’s front cover, with its crude cartoon skull, said it all: Goosepimples: Thirteen Cosmic Chillers in the Lovecraft Tradition. On the back, listed among a dozen other writers whose names I barely recognized, I was described as “a disciple.”

So this was what I’d been reduced to—a lifetime’s work shrugged off by some blurb-writer as “worthy of the Master himself,” the creations of my brain dismissed as mere pastiche. My meticulously wrought fiction, once singled out for such elaborate praise, was now simply—as if this were commendation enough—“Lovecraftian.” Ah, Howard, your triumph was complete the moment your name became an adjective.

I’d suspected it for years, of course, but only with the past week’s conference had I been forced to acknowledge the fact: that what mattered to the present generation was not my own body of work, but rather my association with Lovecraft. And even this was demeaned: after years of friendship and support, to be labeled—simply because I’d been younger—a mere disciple. It seemed too cruel a joke.

Every joke must have a punchline. This one’s was still in my pocket, printed in italics on the folded yellow conference schedule. I didn’t need to look at it again: there I was, characterized for all time as “a member of the Lovecraft circle, New York educator, and author of the celebrated collection Beyond the Garve.”

That was it, the crowning indignity: to be immortalized by a misprint! You’d have appreciated this, Howard. I can almost hear you chuckling from—where else? —beyond the garve….

Meanwhile, from the seat next to me came the rasping sounds of a constricted throat; my neighbor must have been caught in a dream. I put down my book and studied him. He looked older than he had at first-perhaps sixty or more. His hands were roughened, powerful looking; on one of them was a ring with a curious silver cross. The glistening black beard that covered the lower half of his face was so thick as to be nearly opaque; its very darkness seemed unnatural, for above it the hair was streaked with grey.

I looked more closely, to where beard joined face. Was that a bit of gauze I saw, below the hair? My heart gave a little jump. Leaning forward for a closer look, I peered at the skin to the side of his nose; though burned from long exposure to the sun, it had an odd pallor. My gaze continued upward, along the weathered cheeks toward the dark hollows of his eyes.

They opened.

For a moment they stared into mine without apparent comprehension, glassy and bloodshot. In the next instant they were bulging from his head and quivering like hooked fish. His lips opened, and a tiny voice croaked, “Not here.”

We sat in silence, neither of us moving. I was too surprised, too embarrassed, to answer. In the window beyond his head the sky looked bright and clear, but I could feel the plane buffeted by unseen blasts, its wingtips bouncing furiously.

“Don’t do it to me here,” he whispered at last, shrinking back into his seat.

Was the man a lunatic? Dangerous, perhaps? Somewhere in my future I saw spinning headlines: JETLINER TERRORIZED… RETIRED NYC TEACHER VICTIM… My uncertainty must have shown, for I saw him lick his lips and glance past my head. Hope, and a trace of cunning, swept his face. He grinned up at me. “Sorry, nothing to worry about. Whew! Must have been having a nightmare.” Like an athlete after a particularly tough race, he shook his massive head, already regaining command of the situation. His voice had a hint of Tennessee drawl. “Boy”—he gave what should have been a hearty laugh—“I’d better lay off the Kickapoo juice!”

I smiled to put him at ease, though there was nothing about him to suggest that he’d been drinking. “That’s an expression I haven’t heard in years.”

“Oh, yeah? “ he said, with little interest. “Well, I’ve been away.” His fingers drummed nervously—impatiently? —on the arm of his chair.

“Malaya?”

He sat up, and the color left his face. “How did you know?”

I nodded toward the green flight-bag at his feet. “I saw you carrying that when you came aboard. You, uh—you seemed to be in a little bit of a hurry, to say the least. In fact, I’m afraid you almost knocked me down.”

“Hey.” His voice was controlled now, his gaze level and assured. “Hey, I’m really sorry about that, old fella. The fact is, I thought someone might be following me.”

Oddly enough, I believed him; he looked sincere-or as sincere as anyone can be behind a phony black beard. “You’re in disguise, aren’t you?” I asked.

“You mean the whiskers? They’re just something I picked up in Singapore. Shucks, I knew they wouldn’t fool anyone for long, at least not a friend. But an enemy, well… maybe.” He made no move to take them off.

“You’re—let me guess—you’re in the service, right?” The foreign service, I meant; frankly, I took him for an aging spy.

“In the service?” He looked significantly to the left and right, then dropped his voice. “Well, yeah, you might say that. In His service.” He pointed toward the roof of the plane.

“You mean—?”

He nodded. “I’m a missionary. Or was until yesterday.”

3.

Missionaries are infernal nuisances who ought to be kept at home.

—LOVECRAFT, 9/12/1925

Have you ever seen a man in fear of his life? I had, though not since my early twenties. After a summer of idleness I’d at last found temporary employment in the office of what turned out to be a rather shady businessman—I suppose today you’d call him a small-time racketeer—who, having somehow offended “the mob,” was convinced he’d be dead by Christmas. He had been wrong, though; he’d been able to enjoy that and many other Christmases with his family, and it wasn’t till years later that he was found in his bathtub, facedown in six inches of water. I don’t remember much about him, except how hard it had been to engage him in conversation; he never seemed to be listening.

Yet talking with the man who sat next to me on the plane was all too easy; he had nothing of the other’s distracted air, the vague replies and preoccupied gaze. On the contrary, he was alert and highly interested in all that was said to him. Except for his initial panic, in fact, there was little to suggest he was a hunted man.

Yet so he claimed to be. Later events would, of course, settle all such questions, but at the time I had no way to judge if he was telling the truth, or if his story was as phony as his beard.

If I believed him, it was almost entirely due to his manner, not the substance of what he said. No, he didn’t claim to have made off with the Eye of Klesh; he was more original than that. Nor had he violated some witch doctor’s only daughter. But some of the things he told me about the region in which he’d worked—a state called Negri Sembilan, south of Kuala Lumpur—seemed frankly incredible: houses invaded by trees, government-built roads that simply disappeared, a nearby colleague returning from a ten-day vacation to find his lawn overgrown with ropy things they’d had to burn twice to destroy. He claimed there were tiny red spiders that jumped as high as a man’s shoulder—“there was a girl in the village gone half-deaf because one of the nasty little things crawled in her ear and swelled so big it plugged up the hole”—and places where mosquitoes were so thick they suffocated cattle. He described a land of steaming mangrove swamps and rubber plantations as large as feudal kingdoms, a land so humid that wallpaper bubbled on the hot nights and Bibles sprouted mildew.

As we sat together on the plane, sealed within an air-cooled world of plastic and pastel, none of these things seemed possible; with the frozen blue of the sky just beyond my reach, the stewardesses walking briskly past me in their blue-and-gold uniforms, the passengers to my left sipping Cokes or sleeping or leafing through copies of InFlite, I found myself believing less than half of what he said, attributing the rest to sheer exaggeration and a Southern penchant for tall tales. Only when I’d been home a week and paid a visit to my niece in Brooklyn did I revise my estimate upward, for glancing through her son’s geography text I came upon this passage: “Along the [Malayan] peninsula, insects swarm in abundance; probably more varieties exist here than anywhere else on earth. There is some good hardwood timber, and camphor and ebony trees are found in profusion. Many orchid varieties thrive, some of extraordinary size.” The book alluded to the area’s “rich mixture of races and languages,” its “extreme humidity” and “colorful native fauna,” and added: “Its jungles are so impenetrable that even the wild beasts must keep to well-worn paths.”

But perhaps the strangest aspect of this region was that, despite its dangers and discomforts, my companion claimed to have loved it. “They’ve got a mountain in the center of the peninsula—” He mentioned an unpronounceable name and shook his head. “Most beautiful thing you ever saw. And there’s some real pretty country down along the coast, you’d swear it was some kind of South Sea island. Comfortable, too. Oh, it’s damp all right, especially in the interior where the new mission was supposed to be—but the temperature never even hits a hundred. Try saying that for New York City.”

I nodded. “Remarkable.”

“And the people,” he went on, “why, I believe they’re just the friendliest people on earth. You know, I’d heard a lot of bad things about the Moslems—that’s what most of them are, part of the Sunni sect—but I’m telling you, they treated us with real neighborliness… just so long as we made the teachings available, so to speak, and didn’t interfere with their affairs. And we didn’t. We didn’t have to. What we provided, you see, was a hospital—well, a clinic, at least, two RNs and a doctor who came through twice a month—and a small library with books and films. And not just theology, either. All subjects. We were right outside the village, they’d have to pass us on their way to the river, and when they thought none of the lontoks were looking they’d just come in and look around.”

“None of the what?”

“Priests, sort of. There were a lot of them. But they didn’t interfere with us, we didn’t interfere with them. I don’t know as we made all that many converts, actually, but I’ve got nothing bad to say about those people.”

He paused, rubbing his eyes; he suddenly looked his age. “Things were going fine,” he said. “And then they told me to establish a second mission, further in the interior.”

He stopped once more, as if weighing whether to continue. A squat little Chinese woman was plodding slowly up the aisle, holding on to the chairs on each side for balance. I felt her hand brush past my ear as she went by. My companion watched her with a certain unease, waiting till she’d passed. When he spoke again his voice had thickened noticeably.

“I’ve been all over the world—a lot of places Americans can’t even go these days-and I’ve always felt that, wherever I was, God was surely watching. But once I started getting up into those hills, well….” He shook his head. “I was pretty much on my own, you see. They were going to send most of the staff out later, after I’d got set up. All I had with me was one of our groundskeepers, two bearers, and a guide who doubled as interpreter. Locals, all of them.” He frowned. “The groundskeeper, at least, was a Christian.”

“You needed an interpreter?”

The question seemed to distract him. “For the new mission, yes. My Malay stood me well enough in the lowlands, but in the interior they used dozens of local dialects. I would have been lost up there. Where I was going they spoke something which our people back in the village called agon di-gatuan—‘the Old Language.’ I never really got to understand much of it.” He stared down at his hands. “I wasn’t there long enough.”

“Trouble with the natives, I suppose.”

He didn’t answer right away. Finally he nodded. “I truly believe they must be the nastiest people who ever lived,” he said with great deliberation. “I sometimes wonder how God could have created them.” He stared out the window, at the hills of cloud below us. “They called themselves the Chauchas, near as I could make out. Some French colonial influence, maybe, but they looked Asiatic to me, with just a touch of black. Little people. Harmless looking.” He gave a small shudder. “But they were nothing like what they seemed. You couldn’t get to the bottom of them. They’d been living way up in those hills I don’t know how many centuries, and whatever it is they were doing, they weren’t going to let a stranger in on it. They called themselves Moslems, just like the lowlanders, but I’m sure there must have been a few bush-gods mixed in. I thought they were primitive, at first. I mean, some of their rituals—you wouldn’t believe it. But now I think they weren’t primitive at all. They just kept those rituals because they enjoyed them!” He tried to smile; it merely accentuated the lines in his face.

“Oh, they seemed friendly enough in the beginning,” he went on. “You could approach them, do a bit of trading, watch them breed their animals; they were good at that. You could even talk to them about salvation. And they’d just keep smiling, smiling all the time. As if they really liked you.”

I could hear the disappointment in his voice, and something else. “You know,” he confided, suddenly leaning closer, “down in the lowlands, in the pastures, there’s an animal, a kind of snail the Malays kill on sight. A little yellow thing, but it scares them silly: they believe that if it passes over the shadow of their cattle, it’ll suck out the cattle’s life-force. They used to call it a ‘Chaucha snail.’ Now I know why.”

“Why?” I asked.

He looked around the plane, and seemed to sigh. “You understand, at this stage we were still living in tents. We had yet to build anything. Well, the weather got bad, the mosquitoes got worse, and after the groundskeeper disappeared the others took off. I think the guide persuaded them to go. Of course, this left me—”

“Wait. You say the man disappeared?”

“Yes, before the first week was out. It was late afternoon. We’d been pacing out one of the fields less than a hundred yards from the tents, and I was pushing through the long grass thinking he was behind me, and I turned around and he wasn’t.”

He was speaking all in a rush now. I had visions out of 1940s movies, frightened natives sneaking off with the supplies, and I wondered how much of this was true.

“So with the others gone, too,” he said, “I had no way of communicating with the Chauchas, except through a kind of pidgin language, a mixture of Malay and their tongue. But I knew what was going on. All that week they kept laughing about something. Openly. And I got the impression that they were somehow responsible. I mean, for the man’s disappearance. You understand? He’d been the one I trusted.” His expression was pained. “A week later, when they showed him to me, he was still alive. But he couldn’t speak. I think they wanted it that way. You see, they’d—they’d grown something in him.” He shuddered.

Just at that moment, from directly behind us came an inhumanly high-pitched caterwauling that pierced the air like a siren, rising above the whine of the engines. It came with heart-stopping suddenness, and we both went rigid. I saw my companion’s mouth gape as if to echo the scream. So much for the past; we’d become two old men gone all white and clutching at themselves. It was really quite comical. A full minute must have passed before I could bring myself to turn around.

By this time the stewardess had arrived and was dabbing at the place where the man behind me, dozing, had dropped his cigarette on his lap. The surrounding passengers, whites especially, were casting angry glances at him, and I thought I smelled burnt flesh. He was at last helped to his feet by the stewardess and one of his team mates, the latter chuckling uneasily.

Minor as it was, the accident had derailed our conversation and unnerved my companion; it was as if he’d retreated into his beard. He would talk no further, except to ask me ordinary and rather trivial questions about food prices and accommodations. He said he was bound for Florida, looking forward to a summer of, as he put it, “R and R,” apparently financed by his sect. I asked him, a bit forlornly, what had happened in the end to the groundskeeper; he said that he had died. Drinks were served; the North American continent swung toward us from the south, first a finger of ice, soon a jagged line of green. I found myself giving the man my sister’s address-Indian Creek was just outside Miami, where he’d be staying-and immediately regretted doing so. What did I know of him, after all? He told me his name was Ambrose Mortimer. “It means ‘Dead Sea,’” he said. “From the Crusades.”

When I persisted in bringing up the subject of the mission, he waved me off. “I can’t call myself a missionary anymore,” he said. “Yesterday, when I left the country, I gave up that calling.” He attempted a smile. “Honest, I’m just a civilian now.”

“What makes you think they’re after you?” I asked.

The smile vanished. “I’m not so sure they are,” he said, not very convincingly. “I may just be spooking myself. But I could swear that in New Delhi, and again at Heathrow, I heard someone singing—singing a certain song. Once it was in the men’s room, on the other side of a partition; once it was behind me on line. And it was a song I recognized. It’s in the Old Language.” He shrugged. “I don’t even know what the words mean.”

“Why would anyone be singing? I mean, if they were following you?”

“That’s just it. I don’t know.” He shook his head. “But I think—I think it’s part of the ritual.”

“What sort of ritual?”

“I don’t know,” he said again. He looked quite pained, and I resolved to bring this inquisition to an end. The ventilators had not yet dissipated the smell of charred cloth and flesh.

“But you’d heard the song before,” I said. “You told me you recognized it.”

“Yeah.” He turned away and stared at the approaching clouds. We had already passed over Maine. Suddenly the earth seemed a very small place. “I’d heard some of the Chaucha women singing it,” he said at last. “It was a sort of farming song. It’s supposed to make things grow.”

Ahead of us loomed the saffron yellow smog that covers Manhattan like a dome. The NO SMOKING light winked silently on the console above us.

“I was hoping I wouldn’t have to change planes,” my companion said presently. “But the Miami flight doesn’t leave for an hour and a half. I guess I’ll get off and walk around a bit, stretch my legs. I wonder how long customs’ll take.” He seemed to be talking more to himself than to me. Once more I regretted my impulsiveness in giving him Maude’s address. I was half tempted to make up some contagious disease for her, or a jealous husband. But then, quite likely he’d never call on her anyway; he hadn’t even bothered to write down the name. And if he did pay a call—well, I told myself, perhaps he’d unwind when he realized he was safe among friends. He might even turn out to be good company; after all, he and my sister were practically the same age.

As the plane gave up the struggle and sank deeper into the warm encircling air, passengers shut books and magazines, organized their belongings, and made last hurried forays to the bathroom to pat cold water on their faces. I wiped my spectacles and smoothed back what remained of my hair. My companion was staring out the window, the green Air Malay bag in his lap, his hands folded on it as if in prayer. We were already becoming strangers.

“Please return seat backs to the upright position,” ordered a disembodied voice. Out beyond the window, past the head now turned completely away from me, the ground rose to meet us and we bumped along the pavement, jets roaring in reverse. Already stewardesses were rushing up and down the aisles pulling coats and jackets from the overhead bins; executive types, ignoring instructions, were scrambling to their feet and thrashing into raincoats. Outside I could see uniformed figures moving back and forth in what promised to be a warm grey drizzle. “Well,” I said lamely, “we made it.” I got to my feet.

He turned and flashed me a sickly grin. “Good-bye,” he said. “This really has been a pleasure.” He reached for my hand.

“And do try to relax and enjoy yourself in Miami,” I said, looking for a break in the crowd that shuffled past me down the aisle. “That’s the important thing—just to relax.”

“I know that.” He nodded gravely. “I know that. God bless you.”

I found my slot and slipped into line. From behind me he added, “And I won’t forget to look up your sister.” My heart sank, but as I moved toward the door I turned to shout a last farewell. The old lady with the eyes was two people in front of me, but she didn’t so much as smile.

One trouble with last farewells is that they occasionally prove redundant. Some forty minutes later, having passed like a morsel of food through a series of white plastic tubes, corridors, and customs lines, I found myself in one of the airport gift shops, whiling away the hour till my niece came to collect me; and there, once again, I saw the missionary.

He did not see me. He was standing before one of the racks of paperbacks—the so-called “classics” section, haunt of the public domain—and with a preoccupied air he was glancing up and down the rows, barely pausing long enough to read the titles. Like me, he was obviously just killing time.

For some reason—call it embarrassment, a certain reluctance to spoil what had been a successful good-bye—I refrained from hailing him. Instead, stepping back into the rear aisle, I took refuge behind a rack of gothics, which I pretended to study while in fact studying him.

Moments later he looked up from the books and ambled over to the bin of cellophane-wrapped records, idly pressing his beard back into place below his right sideburn. Without warning he turned and surveyed the store; I ducked my head toward the gothics and enjoyed a vision normally reserved for the multifaceted eyes of an insect: women, dozens of them, fleeing an equal number of tiny mansions.

At last, with a shrug of his huge shoulders, he began flipping through the albums in the bin, snapping each one forward in an impatient staccato. Soon, the assortment scanned, he moved to the bin on the left and started on that.

Suddenly he gave a little cry, and I saw him shrink back. He stood immobile for a moment, staring down at something in the bin; then he whirled and walked quickly from the store, pushing past a family about to enter.

“Late for his plane,” I said to the astonished salesgirl, and strolled over to the albums. One of them lay faceup in the pile—a jazz record featuring John Coltrane on saxophone. Confused, I turned to look for my erstwhile companion, but he had vanished in the crowd hurrying past the doorway.

Something about the album had apparently set him off; I studied it more carefully. Coltrane stood silhouetted against a tropical sunset, his features obscured, head tilted back, saxophone blaring silently beneath the crimson sky. The pose was dramatic but trite, and I could see in it no special significance: it looked like any other black man with a horn.

4.

New York eclipses all other cities in the spontaneous cordiality and generosity of its inhabitants—at least, such inhabitants as I have encountered.

—LOVECRAFT, 9/29/1922

How quickly you changed your mind! You arrived to find a gold Dunsanian city of arches and domes and fantastic spires… or so you told us. Yet when you fled two years later you could see only “alien hordes.”

What was it that so spoiled the dream? Was it that impossible marriage? Those foreign faces on the subway? Or was it merely the theft of your new summer suit? I believed then, Howard, and I believe it still, that the nightmare was of your own making; though you returned to New England like a man reemerging into sunlight, there was, I assure you, a very good life to be found amid the shade.

I remained—and survived.

I almost wish I were back there now, instead of in this ugly little bungalow, with its air conditioner and its rotting wicker furniture and the humid night dripping down its windows.

I almost wish I were back on the steps of the Natural History Museum where, that momentous August afternoon, I stood perspiring in the shadow of Teddy Roosevelt’s horse, watching matrons stroll past Central Park with dogs or children in tow and fanning myself ineffectually with the postcard I’d just received from Maude. I was waiting for my niece to drive by and leave off her son, whom I planned to take round the museum; he’d wanted to see the life-size mockup of the blue whale and, just upstairs, the dinosaurs.

I remember that Ellen and her boy were more than twenty minutes late. I remember too, Howard, that I was thinking of you that afternoon, and with some amusement: much as you disliked New York in the twenties, you’d have reeled in horror at what it’s become today. Even from the steps of the museum I could see a curb piled high with refuse and a park whose length you might have walked without once hearing English spoken. Dark skins crowded out the white, and salsa music echoed from across the street.

I remember all these things because, as it turned out, this was a special day: the day I saw, for the second time, the black man and his baleful horn.

My niece arrived late, as usual, with the usual apologies about the crosstown traffic and, for me, the usual argument. “How can you still live over here?” she asked, depositing Terry on the sidewalk. “I mean, just look at those people.” She nodded toward a rowdy group of half-naked teenagers who were loitering by the entrance to the park.

“Brooklyn is so much better?” I countered, as tradition dictated. “Of course,” she said. “In the Heights, anyway. I don’t understand it—why this pathological hatred of moving? You might at least try the East Side. You can certainly afford it.” Terry watched us impassively, lounging against the fender of their car. I think he sided with me over his mother, but he was too wise to show it.

“Believe me, Ellen,” I said, “the West Side’s changing. It’s on the way up again.”

She made a face. “Not up where you live.”

“Sooner or later that’ll change too,” I said. “Besides, I’m just too old to start hanging around East Side singles bars. Over there they read nothing but bestsellers, and they hate anyone past sixty. I’m better off where I grew up—at least I know where the cheap restaurants are.” It was, in fact, a thorny problem: forced to choose between whites whom I despised and blacks whom I feared, I somehow preferred the fear.

To mollify Ellen I read aloud her mother’s postcard. It was the prestamped kind that bore no picture. “I’m still getting used to the cane,” Maude had written, her penmanship as flawless as when she’d won the school medallion. “Livia has gone back to Vermont for the summer, so the card games are suspended & I’m hard into Pearl Buck. Your friend Rev. Mortimer dropped by & we had a nice chat. What amusing stories! Thanks again for the subscription to the Geographic; I’ll send Ellen my old copies. Look forward to seeing you all after the hurricane season.”

Terry was eager to confront the dinosaurs; he was, in fact, getting a little old for me to superintend, and was halfway up the steps before I’d arranged with Ellen where to meet us afterward. With school out the museum was almost as crowded as on weekends, the halls’ echo turning shouts and laughter into animal cries. We oriented ourselves on the floor plan in the main lobby—YOU ARE HERE read a large green spot, below which someone had scrawled “too bad for you”—and trooped toward the Hall of Reptiles, Terry impatiently leading the way. “I saw that in school.” He pointed toward a redwood diorama. “That too”—the Grand Canyon. He was, I believe, about to enter seventh grade, and until now had been little given to talk; he looked younger than the other children.

We passed toucans and marmosets and the new Urban Ecology wing (“concrete and cockroaches,” sneered Terry), and duly stood before the brontosaurus, something of a disappointment: “I forgot it was nothing but the skeleton,” he said. Beside us a sleepy-looking black girl with a baby in her arms and two preschoolers in tow tried ineffectually to keep one of the children from climbing on the guard rail. The baby set up an angry howl. I hurried my nephew past the assembled bones and through the most crowded doorway, dedicated, ironically, to Man in Africa. “This is the boring part,” said Terry, unmoved by masks and spears. The pace was beginning to tire me. We passed through another doorway—Man in Asia—and moved quickly past the Chinese statuary. “I saw that in school.” He nodded at a stumpy figure in a glass case, wrapped in ceremonial robes. Something about it was familiar to me, too; I paused to stare at it. The outer robe, slightly tattered, was spun of some shiny green material and displayed tall, twisted-looking trees on one side, a kind of stylized river on the other. Across the front ran five yellow-brown figures in loincloth and headdress, presumably fleeing toward the robe’s frayed edges; behind them stood a larger shape, all black. In its mouth was a pendulous horn. The image was crudely woven—little more than a stick figure, in fact—but it bore an unsettling resemblance, in both pose and proportion, to the one on the album cover.

Terry returned to my side, curious to see what I’d found. “Tribal garment,” he read, peering at the white plastic notice below the case. “Malay Peninsula, Federation of Malaysia, early nineteenth century.”

He fell silent.

“Is that all it says?”

“Yep. They don’t even have which tribe it’s from.” He reflected a moment. “Not that I really care.”

“Well, I do,” I said. “I wonder who’d know.”

Obviously I’d have to seek advice at the information counter in the main lobby downstairs. Terry ran on ahead while I followed, even more slowly than before; the thought of a mystery evidently appealed to him, even one so tenuous and unexciting as this.

A bored-looking young college girl listened to the beginning of my query and handed me a pamphlet from below the counter. “You can’t see anyone till September,” she said, already beginning to turn away. “They’re all on vacation.”

I squinted at the tiny print on the first page: “Asia, our largest continent, has justly been called the cradle of civilization, but it may also be a birthplace of man himself.” Obviously the pamphlet had been written before the current campaigns against sexism. I checked the date on the back: “Winter 1958.” This would be of no help. Yet on page four my eye fell on the reference I sought:

…The model next to it wears a green silk ceremonial robe from Negri Sembilan, most rugged of the Malayan provinces. Note central motif of native man blowing ceremonial horn, and the graceful curve of his instrument; the figure is believed to be a representation of “Death’s Herald,” possibly warning villagers of approaching calamity. Gift of an anonymous donor, the robe is probably Tcho-tcho in origin and dates from the early 19th century.

“What’s the matter, Uncle? Are you sick?” Terry gripped my shoulder and stared up at me, looking alarmed; my behavior had obviously confirmed his worst fears about old people. “What’s it say in there?”

I gave him the pamphlet and staggered to a bench near the wall. I wanted time to think. The Tcho-Tcho People, I knew, had figured in a number of tales by Lovecraft and his disciples—Howard himself had referred to them as “the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos” —but I couldn’t remember much about them except that they were said to worship one of his imaginary deities. I had always assumed that he’d taken the name from Robert W. Chambers’s novel The Slayer of Souls, which mentions an Asian tribe called “the Tchortchas” and their “ancient air, ‘The Thirty Thousand Calamities.’”

But whatever their attributes, I’d been certain of one thing: the Tcho-Tchos were completely fictitious.

Obviously I’d been wrong. Barring the unlikely possibility that the pamphlet itself was a hoax, I was forced to conclude that the malign beings of the stories were in fact based upon an actual race inhabiting the Southeast Asian subcontinent—a race whose name my missionary friend had mistranslated as “the Chauchas.”

It was a rather troublesome discovery. I had hoped to turn some of Mortimer’s recollections, authentic or not, into fiction; he’d unwittingly given me the material for two or three good plots. Yet I’d now discovered that my friend Howard had beaten me to it, and that I’d been put in the uncomfortable position of living out another man’s horror stories.

5.

Epistolary expression is with me largely replacing conversation.

—LOVECRAFT, 12/23/1917

I hadn’t expected my second encounter with the black horn-player. A month later I got an even bigger surprise: I saw the missionary again.

Or at any rate, his picture. It was in a clipping my sister had sent me from the Miami Herald, over which she had written in ballpoint pen, “Just saw this in the paper-how awful!!”

I didn’t recognize the face; the photo was obviously an old one, the reproduction poor, and the man was clean-shaven. But the words below it told me it was him.

CLERGYMAN MISSING IN STORM

(Wed.) The Rev. Ambrose B. Mortimer, 56, a lay pastor of the Church of Christ, Knoxville, Tenn., has been reported missing in the wake of Monday’s hurricane. Spokesmen for the order say Mortimer had recently retired after serving 19 years as a missionary, most recently in Malaysia. After moving to Miami in July, he had been a resident of 311 Pompano Canal Road.

Here the piece ended, with an abruptness that seemed all too appropriate to its subject. Whether Ambrose Mortimer still lived I didn’t know, but I felt certain now that, having fled one peninsula, he had strayed onto another just as dangerous, a finger thrust into the void. And the void had swallowed him up.

So, anyway, ran my thoughts. I have often been prey to depressions of a similar nature, and subscribe to a fatalistic philosophy I’d shared with my friend Howard: a philosophy one of his less sympathetic biographers has dubbed “futilitarianism.”

Yet pessimistic as I was, I was not about to let the matter rest. Mortimer may well have been lost in the storm; he may even have set off somewhere on his own. But if, in fact, some lunatic religious sect had done away with him for having pried too closely into its affairs, there were things I could do about it. I wrote to the Miami police that very day.

“Gentlemen,” I began. “Having learned of the recent disappearance of the Reverend Ambrose Mortimer, I think I can provide information which may prove of use to investigators.”

There is no need to quote the rest of the letter here. Suffice it to say that I recounted my conversation with the missing man, emphasizing the fears he’d expressed for his life: pursuit and “ritual murder” at the hands of a Malayan tribe called the Tcho-Tcho. The letter was, in short, a rather elaborate way of crying “foul play.” I sent it care of my sister, asking that she forward it to the correct address.

The police department’s reply came with unexpected speed. As with all such correspondence, it was more curt than courteous. “Dear Sir,” wrote a Detective Sergeant A. Linahan; “In the matter of Rev. Mortimer we had already been apprised of the threats on his life. To date a preliminary search of the Pompano Canal has produced no findings, but dredging operations are expected to continue as part of our routine investigation. Thanking you for your concern—”

Below his signature, however, the sergeant had added a short postscript in his own hand. Its tone was somewhat more personal; perhaps typewriters intimidated him. “You may be interested to know,” it said, “that we’ve recently learned a man carrying a Malaysian passport occupied rooms at a North Miami hotel for most of the summer, but checked out two weeks before your friend disappeared. I’m not at liberty to say more, but please be assured we are tracking down several leads at the moment. Our investigators are working full-time on the matter, and we hope to bring it to a speedy conclusion.”

Linahan’s letter arrived on September twenty-first. Before the week was out I had one from my sister, along with another clipping from the Herald; and since, like some old Victorian novel, this chapter seems to have taken an epistolary form, I will end it with extracts from these two items.

The newspaper story was headed WANTED FOR QUESTIONING. Like the Mortimer piece, it was little more than a photo with an extended caption:

(Thurs.) A Malaysian citizen is being sought for questioning in connection with the disappearance of an American clergyman, Miami police say. Records indicate that the Malaysian, Mr. D. A. Djaktu-tchow, had occupied furnished rooms at the Barkleigh Hotella, 2401 Culebra Ave., possibly with an unnamed companion. He is believed still in the greater Miami area, but since August 22 his movements can not be traced. State Dept. officials report Djaktu-tchow’s visa expired August 31; charges are pending.

The clergyman, Rev. Ambrose B. Mortimer, has been missing since September 6.

The photo above the article was evidently a recent one, no doubt reproduced from the visa in question. I recognized the smiling moon-wide face, although it took me a moment to place him as the man whose dinner I’d stumbled over on the plane. Without the moustache, he looked less like Charlie Chan.

The accompanying letter filled in a few details. “I called up the Herald,” my sister wrote, “but they couldn’t tell me any more than was in the article. Just the same, finding that out took me half an hour, since the stupid woman at the switchboard kept putting me through to the wrong person. I guess you’re right-anything that prints color pictures on page one shouldn’t call itself a newspaper.

“This afternoon I called up the police department, but they weren’t very helpful either. I suppose you just can’t expect to find out much over the phone, though I still rely on it. Finally I got an Officer Linahan, who told me he’s just replied to that letter of yours. Have you heard from him yet? The man was very evasive. He was trying to be nice, but I could tell he was impatient to get off. He did give me the full name of the man they’re looking for—Djaktu Abdul Djaktu-tchow, isn’t that marvelous?—and he told me they have some more material on him which they can’t release right now. I argued and pleaded (you know how persuasive I can be!), and finally, because I claimed I’d been a close friend of Rev. Mortimer’s, I wheedled something out of him which he swore he’d deny if I told anyone but you. Apparently the poor man must have been deathly ill, maybe even tubercular—I intended to get a patch test next week, just to play safe, and I recommend that you get one too—because it seems that, in the reverend’s bedroom, they found something very odd. They said it was pieces of lung tissue.”

6.

I, too, was a detective in youth.

—LOVECRAFT, 2/17/1931

Do amateur detectives still exist? I mean, outside of the pages of books? Who, after all, has the time for such games today? Not I, un fortunately; though for more than a decade I’d been nominally retired, my days were quite full with the unromantic activities that occupy people my age: letters, luncheon dates, visits to my niece and to my doctor; books (not enough) and television (too much) and perhaps a Golden Agers’ matinee (though I have largely stopped going to films, finding myself increasingly out of sympathy with their heroes). I also spent Halloween week on the Jersey shore, and most of another attempting to interest a rather patronizing young publisher in reprinting some of my early work.

All this, of course, is intended as a sort of apologia for my having put off further inquiries into poor Mortimer’s case till mid-November. The truth is, the matter almost slipped my mind; only in novels do people not have better things to do.

It was Maude who reawakened my interest. She had been avidly scanning the papers—in vain—for further reports on the man’s disappearance; I believe she had even phoned Sergeant Linahan a second time, but had learned nothing new. Now she wrote me with a tiny fragment of information, heard at thirdhand: one of her bridge partners had had it on the authority of “a friend in the police force” that the search for Mr. Djaktu was being widened to include his presumed companion—“a Negro child,” or so my sister reported. Although there was every possibility that this information was false, or that it concerned an entirely different case, I could tell she regarded it all as rather sinister.

Perhaps that was why the following afternoon found me struggling once more up the steps of the Natural History Museum—as much to satisfy Maude as myself. Her allusion to a Negro, coming after the curious discovery in Mortimer’s bedroom, had recalled to mind the figure on the Malayan robe, and I had been troubled all night by the fantasy of a black man—a man much like the beggar I’d just seen huddled against Roosevelt’s statue—coughing his lungs out into a sort of twisted horn.

I had encountered few other people on the streets that afternoon, as it was unseasonably chilly for a city that’s often mild till January; I wore a muffler, and my grey tweed overcoat flapped round my heels. Inside, however, the place, like all American buildings, was overheated; I was soon the same as I made my way up the demoralizingly long staircase to the second floor.

The corridors were silent and empty but for the morose figure of a guard seated before one of the alcoves, head down as if in mourning, and, from above me, the hiss of the steam radiators near the marble ceiling. Slowly, and rather enjoying the sense of privilege that comes from having a museum to oneself, I retraced my earlier route past the immense skeletons of dinosaurs (“These great creatures once trod the earth where you now walk”) and down to the Hall of Primitive Man, where two Puerto Rican youths, obviously playing hooky, stood by the African wing gazing worshipfully at a Masai warrior in full battle gear. In the section devoted to Asia I paused to get my bearings, looking in vain for the squat figure in the robe. The glass case was empty. Over its plaque was taped a printed notice: “Temporarily removed for restoration.”

This was no doubt the first time in forty years that the display had been taken down, and of course I’d picked just this occasion to look for it. So much for luck. I headed for the nearest staircase, at the far end of the wing. From behind me the clank of metal echoed down the hall, followed by the angry voice of the guard. Perhaps that Masai spear had proved too great a temptation.

In the main lobby I was issued a written pass to enter the north wing, where the staff offices were located. “You want the workrooms on basement level,” said the woman at the information counter; the summer’s bored coed had become a friendly old lady who eyed me with some interest. “Just ask the guard at the bottom of the stairs, past the cafeteria. I do hope you find what you’re looking for.”

Carefully keeping the pink slip she’d handed me visible for anyone who might demand it, I descended. As I turned onto the stairwell, I was confronted with a kind of vision: a blond Scandinavian-looking family were coming up the stairs toward me, the four upturned faces almost interchangeable, parents and two little girls with the pursed lips and timidly hopeful eyes of the tourist, while just behind them, like a shadow, apparently unheard, capered a grinning black youth, practically walking on the father’s heels. In my present state of mind the scene appeared particularly disturbing-the boy’s expression was certainly one of mockery—and I wondered if the guard who stood before the cafeteria had noticed. If he had, however, he gave no sign; he glanced without curiosity at my pass and pointed toward a fire door at the end of the hall.

The offices in the lower level were surprisingly shabby—the walls here were not marble but faded green plaster—and the entire corridor had a “buried” feeling to it, no doubt because the only outside light came from ground-level window gratings high overhead. I had been told to ask for one of the research associates, a Mr. Richmond; his office was part of a suite broken up by pegboard dividers. The door was open, and he got up from his desk as soon as I entered; I suspect that, in view of my age and grey tweed overcoat, he may have taken me for someone important.

A plump young man with sandy-colored beard, he looked like an out-of-shape surfer, but his sunniness dissolved when I mentioned my interest in the green silk robe. “And I suppose you’re the man who complained about it upstairs, am I right?”

I assured him I was not.

“Well, someone sure did,” he said, still eyeing me resentfully; on the wall behind him an Indian war-mask did the same. “Some damn tourist, maybe in town for a day and out to make trouble. Threatened to call the Malaysian Embassy. If you put up a fuss, those people upstairs get scared it’ll wind up in the Times.”

I understood his allusion; in previous years the museum had gained considerable notoriety for having conducted some really appalling—and, to my mind, quite pointless—experiments on cats. Most of the public had, until then, been unaware that the building housed several working laboratories.

“Anyway,” he continued, “the robe’s down in the shop, and we’re stuck with patching up the damn thing. It’ll probably be down there for the next six months before we get to it. We’re so understaffed right now it isn’t funny.” He glanced at his watch. “Come on, I’ll show you. Then I’ve got to go upstairs.”

I followed him down a narrow corridor that branched off to either side. At one point he said, “On your right, the infamous zoology lab.” I kept my eyes straight ahead. As we passed the next doorway I smelled a familiar odor.

“It makes me think of treacle,” I said.

“You’re not so far wrong.” He spoke without looking back. “The stuff’s mostly molasses. Pure nutrient. They use it for growing microorganisms.”

I hurried to keep up with him. “And for other things?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, Mister. It’s not my field.”

We came to a door barred by a black wire grille. “Here’s one of the shops,” he said, fitting a key into the lock. The door swung open on a long unlit room smelling of wood shavings and glue. “You sit down over here,” he said, leading me to a small anteroom and switching on the light. “I’ll be back in a second.” I stared at the object closest to me, a large ebony chest, ornately carved. Its hinges had been removed. Richmond returned with the robe draped over his arm. “See?” he said, dangling it before me. “It’s really not in such bad condition, is it?” I realized he still thought of me as the man who’d complained.

On the field of rippling green fled the small brown figures, still pursued by some unseen doom. In the center stood the black man, black horn to his lips, man and horn a single line of unbroken blackness.

“Are the Tcho-Tchos a superstitious people?” I asked.

“They were,” he said pointedly. “Superstitious and not very pleasant. They’re extinct as dinosaurs now. Supposedly wiped out by the Japanese or something.”

“That’s rather odd,” I said. “A friend of mine claims to have met up with them earlier this year.”

Richmond was smoothing out the robe; the branches of the snake-trees snapped futilely at the brown shapes. “I suppose it’s possible,” he said, after a pause. “But I haven’t read anything about them since grad school. They’re certainly not listed in the textbooks anymore. I’ve looked, and there’s nothing on them. This robe’s over a hundred years old.”

I pointed to the figure in the center. “What can you tell me about this fellow?”

“Death’s Herald,” he said, as if it were a quiz. “At least that’s what the literature says. Supposed to warn of some approaching calamity.”

I nodded without looking up; he was merely repeating what I’d read in the pamphlet. “But isn’t it strange,” I said, “that these others are in such a panic? See? They aren’t even waiting around to listen.”

“Would you?” He snorted impatiently.

“But if the black one’s just a messenger of some sort, why’s he so much bigger than the others?”

Richmond began folding the cloth. “Look, Mister,” he said, “I don’t pretend to be an expert on every tribe in Asia. But if a character’s important, they’d sometimes make him larger. Anyway, that’s what the Mayans did. Listen, I’ve really got to get this put away now. I’ve got a meeting to go to.”

While he was gone I sat thinking about what I’d just seen. The small brown figures, crude as they were, had expressed a terror no mere messenger could inspire. And that great black shape standing triumphant in the center, horn twisting from its mouth-that was no messenger either, I was sure of it. That was no Death’s Herald. That was Death itself.

I returned to my apartment just in time to hear the telephone ringing, but by the time I’d let myself in it had stopped. I sat down in the living room with a mug of coffee and a book which had lain untouched on the shelf for the last thirty years: Jungle Ways, by that old humbug, William Seabrook. I’d met him back in the twenties and had found him likable enough, if rather untrustworthy. His book described dozens of unlikely characters, including “a cannibal chief who had got himself jailed and famous because he had eaten his young wife, a handsome, lazy wench called Blito, along with a dozen of her girl friends.” But I discovered no mention of a black horn-player.

I had just finished my coffee when the phone rang again. It was my sister.

“I just wanted to let you know that there’s another man missing,” she said breathlessly. I couldn’t tell if she was frightened or merely excited. “A busboy at the San Marino. Remember? I took you there.”

The San Marino was an inexpensive little luncheonette on Indian Creek, several blocks from my sister’s house. She and her friends ate there several times a week.

“It happened last night,” she went on. “I just heard about it at my card game. They say he went outside with a bucket of fish heads to dump in the creek, and he never came back.”

“That’s very interesting, but….” I thought for a moment; it was highly unusual for her to call me like this. “But really, Maude, couldn’t he have simply run off? I mean, what makes you think there’s any connection—”

“Because I took Ambrose there, too!” she cried. “Three or four times. That was where we used to meet.”

Apparently Maude had been considerably better acquainted with the Reverend Mortimer than her letters would have led one to believe. But I wasn’t interested in pursuing that line right now.

“This busboy,” I asked, “was he someone you knew?”

“Of course,” she said. “I know everyone in there. His name was Carlos. A quiet boy, very courteous. I’m sure he must have waited on us dozens of times.”

I had seldom heard my sister so upset, but for the present there seemed no way of calming her fears. Before hanging up she made me promise to move up the month’s visit I’d expected to pay her over Christmas; I assured her I would try to make it down for Thanksgiving, then only a week away, if I could find a flight that wasn’t filled. “Do try,” she said-and, were this a tale from the old pulps, she would have added: “If anyone can get to the bottom of this, you can.” In truth, however, both Maude and I were aware that I had just celebrated my seventy-seventh birthday and that, of the two of us, I was by far the more timid; so that what she actually said was, “Looking after you will help take my mind off things.”

7.

I couldn’t live a week without a private library.

—LOVECRAFT, 2/25/1929

That’s what I thought, too, until recently. After a lifetime of collecting I’d acquired thousands upon thousands of volumes, never parting with a one; it was this cumbersome private library, in fact, that helped keep me anchored to the same West Side apartment for nearly half a century.

Yet here I sit, with no company save a few gardening manuals and a shelf of antiquated bestsellers—nothing to dream on, nothing I’d want to hold in my hand. Still, I’ve survived here a week, a month, almost a season. The truth is, Howard, you’d be surprised what you can live without. As for the books I’ve left in Manhattan, I just hope someone appreciates them when I’m gone.

But I was by no means so resigned that November when, having successfully reserved a seat on an earlier flight, I found myself with less than a week in New York. I spent all my remaining time in the library-the public one on Forty-second Street, with the lions in front and with no book of mine on its shelves. Its two reading rooms were the haunt of men my age and older, retired men with days to fill, poor men just warming their bones; some leafed through newspapers, others dozed in their seats. None of them, I’m sure, shared my sense of urgency: there were things I hoped to find out before I left, things for which Miami would be useless. I was no stranger to this building. Long ago, during one of Howard’s visits, I had undertaken some genealogical researches here in the hope of finding ancestors more impressive than his, and as a young man I had occasionally attempted to support myself, like the denizens of Gissing’s New Grub Street, by writing articles compiled from the work of others. But by now I was out of practice: how, after all, does one find references to an obscure Southeast Asian tribal myth without reading everything published on that part of the world?

Initially that’s exactly what I tried; I looked through every book I came across with “Malaya” in its title. I read about rainbow gods and phallic altars and something called “the tatai,” a sort of unwanted companion; I came across wedding rites and the Death of Thorns and a certain cave inhabited by millions of snails. But I found no mention of the Tcho-Tcho, and nothing on their gods.

This in itself was surprising. We are living in a day when there are no more secrets, when my twelve-year-old nephew can buy his own grimoire, and books with titles like The Encyclopaedia of Ancient and Forbidden Knowledge are remaindered at every discount store. Though my friends from the twenties would have hated to admit it, the notion of stumbling across some moldering old “black book” in the attic of a deserted house—some lexicon of spells and chants and hidden lore—is merely a quaint fantasy. If the Necronomicon actually existed, it would probably be out in paperback with a preface by Colin Wilson.

It’s appropriate, then, that when I finally came upon a reference to what I sought, it was in that most unromantic of forms, a mimeographed film-script.

“Transcript” would perhaps be closer to the truth, for it was based upon a film shot in 1937 and that was now presumably crumbling in some forgotten storehouse. I discovered the item inside one of those brown cardboard packets, held together with ribbons, which libraries use to protect books whose bindings have worn away. The book itself, Malay Memories, by a Reverend Morton, had proved a disappointment despite the author’s rather suggestive name. The transcript lay beneath it, apparently slipped there by mistake, but though it appeared unpromising-only sixty-six pages long, badly typed, and held together by a single rusty staple-it more than repaid the reading. There was no title page, nor do I think there’d ever been one; the first page simply identified the film as Documentary-Malaya Today, and noted that it had been financed, in part, by a U.S. government grant. The filmmaker or makers were not listed.

I soon saw why the government may have been willing to lend the venture some support, for there were a great many scenes in which the proprietors of rubber plantations expressed the sort of opinions Americans might want to hear. To an unidentified interviewer’s query, “What other signs of prosperity do you see around you?” a planter named Mr. Pierce had obligingly replied, “Why, look at the living standard-better schools for the natives and a new lorry for me. It’s from Detroit, you know. May even have my own rubber in it.”

INT: And how about the Japanese? Are they one of today’s better markets?

PIERCE: Oh, see, they buy our crop all right, but we don’t really trust ’em, understand? (Smiles) We don’t like ’em half so much as the Yanks.

The final section of the transcript was considerably more interesting, however. It recorded a number of brief scenes that must never have appeared in the finished film. I quote one of them in its entirety:

PLAYROOM, CHURCH SCHOOL-LATE AFTERNOON.

(DELETED)

INT: This Malay youth has sketched a picture of a demon he calls Shoo Goron. (To Boy) I wonder if you can tell me something about the instrument he’s blowing out of. It looks like the Jewish shofar, or ram’s horn. (Again to Boy) That’s all right. No need to be frightened.

BOY: He no blow out. Blow in.

INT: I see-he draws air in through the horn, is that right?

BOY: No horn. Is no horn. (Weeps) Is him.

8.

Miami did not produce much of an impression.

—LOVECRAFT, 7/19/1931

Waiting in the airport lounge with Ellen and her boy, my bags already checked and my seat number assigned, I fell prey to the sort of anxiety that had made me miserable in youth: it was a sense that time was running out; and what caused it now, I think, was the hour that remained before my flight was due to leave. It was too long a time to sit making small talk with Terry, whose mind was patently on other things; yet it was too short to accomplish the task which I’d suddenly realized had been left undone.

But perhaps my nephew would serve. “Terry,” I said, “how’d you like to do me a favor?” He looked up eagerly; I suppose children his age love to be of use. “Remember the building we passed on the way here? The International Arrivals Building?”

“Sure,” he said. “Right next door.”

“Yes, but it’s a lot farther away than it looks. Do you think you’d be able to get there and back in the next hour and find something out for me?”

“Sure.” He was already out of his seat.

“It just occurs to me that there’s an Air Malay reservations desk in that building, and I wonder if you could ask someone there—”

My niece interrupted me. “Oh no, he won’t,” she said firmly. “First of all, I won’t have him running across that highway on some silly errand”—she ignored her son’s protests—“and secondly, I don’t want him involved in this game you’ve got going with Mother.”

The upshot of it was that Ellen went herself, leaving Terry and me to our small talk. She took with her a slip of paper upon which I’d written Shoo Goron, a name she regarded with sour skepticism. I wasn’t sure she would return before my departure (Terry, I could see, was growing increasingly uneasy), but she was back before the second boarding call.

“She says you spelled it wrong,” Ellen announced.

“Who’s she?”

“Just one of the flight attendants,” said Ellen. “A young girl, in her early twenties. None of the others were Malayan. At first she didn’t recognize the name, until she read it out loud a few times. Apparently it’s some kind of fish, am I right? Like a suckerfish, only bigger. Anyway, that’s what she said. Her mother used to scare her with it when she was bad.”

Obviously Ellen—or, more likely, the other woman—had misunderstood. “Sort of a bogeyman figure?” I asked. “Well, I suppose that’s possible. But a fish, you say?”

Ellen nodded. “I don’t think she knew that much about it, though. She acted a little embarrassed, in fact. Like I’d asked her something dirty.” From across the room a loudspeaker issued the final call for passengers. Ellen helped me to my feet, still talking. “She said she was just a Malay, from somewhere on the coast—Malacca? I forget—and that it’s a shame I didn’t drop by three or four months ago, because her summer replacement was part Chocha—Chocho?—something like that.”

The line was growing shorter now. I wished the two of them a safe Thanksgiving and shuffled toward the plane.

Below me the clouds had formed a landscape of rolling hills. I could see every ridge, every washed-out shrub, and in the darker places, the eyes of animals.

Some of the valleys were split by jagged black lines that looked like rivers on a map. The water, at least, was real enough: here the cloudbank had cracked and parted, revealing the dark sea beneath.

Throughout the ride I’d been conscious of lost opportunity, a sense that my destination offered a kind of final chance. With Howard gone these more than forty years I still lived out my life in his shadow; certainly his tales had overshadowed my own. Now I found myself trapped within one of them. Here, miles above the earth, I felt great gods warring; below, the war was already lost.

The very passengers around me seemed participants in a masque: the oily little steward who smelled of something odd; the child who stared and wouldn’t look away; the man asleep beside me, mouth slack, who’d chuckled and handed me a page ripped from his in flight magazine: NOVEMBER PUZZLE PAGE, with an eye staring in astonishment from a swarm of dots. “Connect the dots and see what you’ll be least thankful for this Thanksgiving!” Below it, half buried amid “B’nai B’rith to Host Song Fest” and advertisements for beach clubs, a bit of local color found me in a susceptible mood:

HAVE FINS, WILL TRAVEL

(Courtesy Miami Herald) If your hubby comes home and swears he’s just seen a school of fish walk across the yard, don’t sniff his breath for booze. He may be telling the truth! According to U. of Miami zoologists, catfish will be migrating in record numbers this fall and South Florida residents can expect to see hundreds of the whiskered critters crawling overland, miles from water. Though usually no bigger than your pussycat, most breeds can survive without….

Here the piece came to a ragged end where my companion had torn it from the magazine. He stirred in his sleep, lips moving. I turned and put my head against the window, where the limb of Florida was swinging into view, veined with dozens of canals. The plane shuddered and slid toward it.

Maude was already at the gate, a black porter towering beside her with an empty cart. While we waited by a hatchway in the basement for my luggage to be disgorged, she told me the sequel to the San Marino incident: the boy’s body found washed up on a distant beach, lungs in mouth and throat. “Inside out,” she said. “Can you imagine? It’s been on the radio all morning. With tapes of some ghastly doctor talking about smoker’s cough and the way people drown. I couldn’t even listen after a while.” The porter heaved my bags onto the cart, and we followed him to the taxi stand, Maude using her cane to gesticulate. If I hadn’t seen how aged she’d become, I’d have thought the excitement was agreeing with her.

We had the driver make a detour westward along Pompano Canal Road, where we paused at number 311, one of nine shabby green cabins that formed a court round a small and very dirty wading pool; in a cement pot beside the pool drooped a solitary half-dead palm, like some travesty of an oasis. This, then, had been Ambrose Mortimer’s final home. My sister was very silent, and I believed her when she said she’d never been here before. Across the street glistened the oily waters of the canal.

The taxi turned east. We passed interminable rows of hotels, motels, condominiums, shopping centers as big as Central Park, souvenir shops with billboards bigger than themselves, baskets of seashells and wriggly plastic auto toys out front. Men and women our age and younger sat on canvas beach chairs in their yards, blinking at the traffic. Some of the older women were nearly as bald as I was; men, like women, wore clothes the color of coral, lime, and peach. They walked very slowly as they crossed the street or moved along the sidewalk. Cars moved almost as slowly, and it was forty minutes before we reached Maude’s house, with its pastel orange shutters and the retired druggist and his wife living upstairs. Here, too, a kind of languor was upon the block, one into which I knew, with just a memory of regret, I would soon be settling. Life was slowing to a halt, and once the taxi had roared away the only things that stirred were the geraniums in Maude’s window box, trembling slightly in a breeze I couldn’t even feel.

A dry spell. Mornings in my sister’s air-conditioned parlor, luncheons with her friends in air-conditioned coffee shops. Inadvertent afternoon naps, from which I’d awaken with headaches. Evening walks to watch the sunsets, the fireflies, the TV screens flashing behind neighbors’ blinds. By night, a few faint cloudy stars; by day, tiny lizards skittering over the hot pavement, or boldly sunning themselves on the flagstones. The smell of oil paints in my sister’s closet, and the insistent buzz of mosquitoes in her garden. Her sundial, a gift from Ellen, with Terry’s message painted on the rim. Lunch at the San Marino and a brief, halfhearted look at the fatal dock in back, now something of a tourist attraction. An afternoon at a branch library in Hialeah, searching through its shelves of travel books, an old man dozing at the table across from me, a child laboriously copying her school report from the encyclopedia. Thanksgiving dinner, with its half-hour’s phone call to Ellen and the boy, and the prospect of turkey for the rest of the week. More friends to visit, and another day at the library.

Later, driven by boredom and the ghost of an impulse, I phoned the Barkleigh Hotella in North Miami and booked a room there for two nights. I don’t remember the dates I settled for, because that sort of thing no longer had much meaning, but I know it was for midweek; “we’re deep in the season,” the proprietress informed me, and the hotel would be filled each weekend till long past New Year’s.

My sister refused to accompany me out to Culebra Avenue; she saw no attraction in visiting the place once occupied by a fugitive Malaysian, nor did she share my pulp-novel fantasy that, by actually living there myself, I might uncover some clue unknown to the police. (“Thanks to the celebrated author of Beyond the Garve…”)

I went alone, by cab, taking with me half a dozen volumes from the branch library. Beyond the reading, I had no other plans.

The Barkleigh was a pink adobe building two stories tall, surmounted by an ancient neon sign on which the dust lay thick in the early afternoon sunlight. Similar establishments lined the block on both sides, each more depressing than the last. There was no elevator here and, as I learned to my disappointment, no rooms available on the first floor. The staircase looked like it was going to be an effort.

In the office downstairs I inquired, as casually as I could, which room the notorious Mr. Djaktu had occupied; I’d hoped, in fact, to be assigned it, or one nearby. But I was doomed to disappointment. The preoccupied little Cuban behind the counter had been hired only six weeks before and claimed to know nothing of the matter; in halting English he explained that the proprietress, a Mrs. Zimmerman, had just left for New Jersey to visit relatives and would not be back till Christmas. Obviously I could forget about gossip.

By this point I was half tempted to cancel my visit, and I confess that what kept me there was not so much a sense of honor as the desire for two days’ separation from Maude, who, having been on her own for nearly a decade, had grown somewhat difficult to live with.

I followed the Cuban upstairs, watching my suitcase bump rhythmically against his legs, and was led down the hall to a room facing the rear. The place smelled vaguely of salt air and hair oil; the sagging bed had served many a desperate holiday. A small cement terrace overlooked the yard and a vacant lot behind it, the latter so overgrown with weeds and the grass in the yard so long unmown that it was difficult to tell where one began and the other ended. A clump of palms rose somewhere in the middle of this no-man’s-land, impossibly tall and thin, with only a few stiffened leaves to grace the tops. On the ground below them lay several rotting coconuts.

This was my view the first night when I returned after dining at a nearby restaurant. I felt unusually tired and soon went inside to sleep. The night being cool, there was no need for the air conditioner; as I lay in the huge bed I could hear people stirring in the adjoining room, the hiss of a bus moving down the avenue, and the rustle of palm leaves in the wind.

I spent part of the next morning composing a letter to Mrs. Zimmerman, to be held for her return. After the long walk to a coffee shop for lunch, I napped. After dinner I did the same. With the TV turned on for company, a garrulous blur at the other side of the room, I went through the pile of books on my night table, final cullings from the bottom of the travel shelf; most of them hadn’t been taken out since the thirties. I found nothing of interest in any of them, at least upon first inspection, but before turning out the light I noticed that one, the reminiscences of a Colonel E. G. Paterson, was provided with an index. Though I looked in vain for the demon Shoo Goron, I found reference to it under a variant spelling.

The author, no doubt long deceased, had spent most of his life in the Orient. His interest in Southeast Asia was slight, and the passage in question consequently brief:

…Despite the richness and variety of their folklore, however, they have nothing akin to the Malay shugoran, a kind of bogey-man used to frighten naughty children. The traveller hears many conflicting descriptions of it, some bordering on the obscene. (Oran, of course, is Malay for ‘man,’ while shug, which here connotes ‘sniffing’ or ‘questing,’ means literally, ‘elephant’s trunk.’) I well recall the hide which hung over the bar at the Traders’ Club in Singapore, and which, according to tradition, represented the infant of this fabulous creature; its wings were black, like the skin of a Hottentot. Shortly after the War a regimental surgeon was passing through on his way back to Gibraltar and, after due examination, pronounced it the dried-out skin of a rather large catfish. He was never asked back.

I kept my light on until I was ready to fall asleep, listening to the wind rattle the palm leaves and whine up and down the row of terraces. As I switched off the light, I half expected to see a shadowy shape at the window; but I saw, as the poet says, nothing but the night.

The next morning I packed my bag and left, aware that my stay in the hotel had proved fruitless. I returned to my sister’s house to find her in agitated conversation with the druggist from upstairs; she was in a terrible state and said she’d been trying to reach me all morning. She had awakened to find the flower box by her bedroom window overturned and the shrubbery beneath it trampled. Down the side of the house ran two immense slash marks several yards apart, starting at the roof and continuing straight to the ground.

9.

My gawd, how the years fly. Stolidly middle-aged—when only yesterday I was young and eager and awed by the mystery of an unfolding world.

—LOVECRAFT, 8/20/1926

There is little more to report. Here the tale degenerates into an unsifted collection of items which may or may not be related: pieces of a puzzle for those who fancy themselves puzzle fans, a random swarm of dots, and in the center, a wide unwinking eye.

Of course, my sister left the house on Indian Creek that very day and took rooms for herself in a downtown Miami hotel. Subsequently she moved inland to live with a friend in a green stucco bungalow several miles from the Everglades, third in a row of nine just off the main highway. I am seated in its den as I write this. After the friend died my sister lived on here alone, making the forty-mile bus trip to Miami only on special occasions: theater with a group of friends, one or two shopping trips a year. She had everything else she needed right here.

I returned to New York, caught a chill, and finished out the winter in a hospital bed, visited rather less often than I might have wished by my niece and her boy. Of course, the drive in from Brooklyn is nothing to scoff at.

One recovers far more slowly when one has reached my age; it’s a painful truth we all learn if we live long enough. Howard’s life was short, but in the end I think he understood. At thirty-five he could deride as madness a friend’s “hankering after youth,” yet ten years later he’d learned to mourn the loss of his own. “The years tell on one!” he’d written. “You young fellows don’t know how lucky you are!”

Age is indeed the great mystery. How else could Terry have emblazoned his grandmother’s sundial with that saccharine nonsense?

Grow old along with me,

The best is yet to be.

True, the motto is traditional to sundials—but that young fool hadn’t even kept to the rhyme. With diabolical imprecision he had actually written, “The best is yet to come”—a line to make me gnash my teeth, if I had any left to gnash.

I spent most of the spring indoors, cooking myself wretched little meals and working ineffectually on a literary project that had occupied my thoughts. It was discouraging to find that I wrote so slowly now, and changed so much. My sister only reinforced the mood when, sending me a rather salacious story she’d found in the Enquirer—about the “thing like a vacuum cleaner” that snaked through a Swedish sailor’s porthole and “made his face all purple”—she wrote at the top, “See? Right out of Lovecraft.”

It was not long after this that I received, to my surprise, a letter from Mrs. Zimmerman, bearing profuse apologies for having misplaced my inquiry until it turned up again during “spring cleaning.” (It is hard to imagine any sort of cleaning at the Barkleigh Hotella, spring or otherwise, but even this late reply was welcome.) “I am sorry that the minister who disappeared was a friend of yours,” she wrote. “I’m sure he must have been a fine gentleman.

“You asked me for ‘the particulars,’ but from your note you seem to know the whole story. There is really nothing I can tell you that I did not tell the police, though I do not think they ever released all of it to the papers. Our records show that our guest Mr. Djaktu arrived here nearly a year ago, at the end of June, and left the last week of August owing me a week’s rent plus various damages which I no longer have much hope of recovering, though I have written the Malaysian Embassy about it.

“In other respects he was a proper boarder, paid regularly, and in fact hardly ever left his room except to walk in the back yard from time to time or stop at the grocer’s. (We have found it impossible to discourage eating in rooms.) My only complaint is that in the middle of the summer he may have had a small colored child living with him without our knowledge, until one of the maids heard him singing to it as she passed his room. She did not recognize the language, but said she thought it might be Hebrew. (The poor woman, now sadly taken from us, was barely able to read.) When she next made up the room, she told me that Mr. Djaktu claimed the child was ‘his,’ and that she left because she caught a glimpse of it watching her from the bathroom. She said it was naked. I did not speak of this at the time, as I do not feel it is my place to pass judgment on the morals of my guests. Anyway, we never saw the child again, and we made sure the room was completely sanitary for our next guests. Believe me, we have received nothing but good comments on our facilities. We think they are excellent and hope you agree, and I also hope you will be our guest again on your next visit to Florida.”

Unfortunately, my next visit to Florida was for my sister’s funeral late that winter. I know now, as I did not know then, that she had been in ill health for most of the previous year, but I cannot help thinking that the so-called “incidents”—the senseless acts of vandalism directed against lone women in the inland South Florida area, culminating in several reported attacks by an unidentified prowler—may have hastened her death.

When I arrived here with Ellen to take care of my sister’s affairs and arrange for the funeral, I intended to remain a week or two at most, seeing to the transfer of the property. Yet somehow I lingered, long after Ellen had gone. Perhaps it was the thought of that New York winter, grown harsher with each passing year; I just couldn’t find the strength to go back. Nor, in the end, could I bring myself to sell this house. If I am trapped here, it’s a trap I’m resigned to. Besides, moving has never much agreed with me; when I grow tired of this little room—and I do—I can think of nowhere else to go. I’ve seen all the world I want to see. This simple place is now my home—and I feel certain it will be my last. The calendar on the wall tells me it’s been almost three months since I moved in. Somewhere in its remaining pages you will find the date of my death.

The past week has seen a new outbreak of “incidents.” Last night’s was the most dramatic by far. I can recite it almost word for word from the morning news. Shortly before midnight Mrs. Florence Cavanaugh, a housewife living at 7 Alyssum Terrace, Cutter’s Grove, was about to close the curtains in her front room when she saw, peering through the window at her, what she described as “a large Negro man wearing a gas mask or scuba outfit.” Mrs. Cavanaugh, who was dressed only in her nightgown, fell back from the window and screamed for her husband, asleep in the next room, but by the time he arrived the Negro had made good his escape.

Local police favor the “scuba” theory, since near the window they’ve discovered footprints that may have been made by a heavy man in swim fins. But they haven’t been able to explain why anyone would wear underwater gear so many miles from water.

The report usually concludes with the news that “Mr. and Mrs. Cavanaugh could not be reached for comment.”

The reason I have taken such an interest in the case—sufficient, anyway, to memorize the above details—is that I know the Cavanaughs rather well. They are my next-door neighbors.

Call it an aging writer’s ego, if you like, but somehow I can’t help thinking that last evening’s visit was meant for me. These little green bungalows all look alike in the dark.

Well, there’s still a little night left outside-time enough to rectify the error. I’m not going anywhere.

I think, in fact, it will be a rather appropriate end for a man of my pursuits—to be absorbed into the denouement of another man’s tale.

Grow old along with me

The best is yet to come.

Tell me, Howard: how long before it’s my turn to see the black face pressed to my window?

∇