To most of society, I am a monster. Oh, I don’t have tentacles, or horns, or goat’s feet, or anything of the sort. Nevertheless, the first entry in Liber Monstrorum, the oldest known Western book of monsters, is a man who dresses as a woman. Sure, I’m a woman who dresses like a woman, but most of society doesn’t believe me about that because trans women are still seen as deceivers. That book was written sometime in the seventh or eighth century, and I’m not entirely certain I can say that much has changed.
It’s strange, then, that I should wind up hunting after monsters. It’s strange that I should be referring to ancient tomes—both real and fictional—as potential sources of truth. It’s strange that I should come to take Lovecraft’s work far too seriously, especially considering what I assume he would make of me. It’s strange that I should be searching in attics for portals into unknown and unknowable dimensions.
Okay, that last bit would be strange for anyone.
I mean to say only that I was a reluctant scholar of the occult—as though any claims I might make of my inherent skepticism will make what I have to relate any more believable.
I want to be clear that I understand H.P. Lovecraft to be a writer of fiction. I don’t think he believed any of what he wrote to be true. His work is fanciful, and while his prose was outdated even for the time, I enjoy his ability to weave stories and touch at the horror hidden inside the human mind.
What I’ve come to believe, however, and what I expect to fail to convince you of, is that H.P. Lovecraft worked from sources—sometimes near to plagiaristicly—that were not nearly so fictional.
◆
It started for me with dreams. I’ve always been a deep sleeper, never bothered much by dreams. No dreams so beautiful that waking life cannot compare; no dreams so horrid I wake screaming. I’ve always had mundane, forgettable dreams. Until two years ago, in my fifth decade of life.
I moved in with a partner, a woman named E—, two years ago. Along with a small group of miscreants and queers, we’d bought a derelict farm in western Massachusetts. Everyone else wanted to build their own houses on the property, so E— and I moved into the old farmhouse. Things were fine for the first six months, when we lived in the library on the ground floor, but as soon as we finished renovations on the master bedroom and moved upstairs, the dreams started.
Most of the dreams, though bizarre, were non-egregious. I had dreams about washing blades and washing bones in a skyscraper overlooking a dead city. The city was always the same, full of brutalist structures shorter than the tower. The tasks I was engaged in changed from dream to dream, but they were always mundane and generally contained enough traces of what I’d done that day to convince me that nothing untoward was happening to my mind as I slept.
At midwinter, I dreamt of carving a living child into quarters. As I dreamt of piercing his skin, my hands shook. The visceral feel of it made me want to retch, or cry, or stop, but I did none of those things. As I pulled bones from sockets, my whole body shook so hard that I woke.
I wanted E— to hold me, but she slept every night with the help of pills—haunted by her own nightmares, as she had been since her youth—so I held her instead and cried into her hair.
Only in the morning did I notice the dried blood beneath my fingernails.
It was E— who told me that my dream reminded her of a Lovecraft story, “The Dreams in the Witch House,” and set me on the terrible path I walk today.
I listened to an audio production of the story the next day while I worked in the garden. Then I devoured book after book after story after poem by H.P. Lovecraft. Every word he’d put to paper felt like it hit some discordant note in my soul—okay, I don’t believe in souls, so let’s say brain. Everything he’d written was so close to, yet so far from, some truth. I knew it in my heart. And by heart, I still mean brain.
In the story, the city of the Elder Things is lit by three stars: one red, one yellow, one blue. In my dreams, that dead, brutalist city had three yellow suns and it had buildings suited for people, not winged demon barrels. So close, yet so far away.
A few weeks later I had another dream, about another human sacrifice. I still didn’t believe the dreams, but I assure you I went over every inch of that bedroom with tape measure to prove the Euclidian nature of its geometry. In the end, I started sharing E—’s medication and the dreams subsided, thank the Lord. And by Lord, I mean pharmacology.
None of my landmates, and least of all my partner, wanted to discuss the matter with me. E— herself had lost a child to SIDS, and I knew better than to push the issue of dead children.
I did what any girl would do in the same situation. I joined a support group for the Lovecraft-obsessed. A few friends from Boston had been into all this occult shit, so I hit them up and started going to meetings, driving the couple of hours every week. They didn’t call them support group meetings, and if there had been twelve steps, they would have been the twelve steps for summoning Yog-Sothoth or something, not the steps for ridding oneself of eldritch nightmares. I still used it as a support group. Everyone had stories about occurrences and observations of the uncanny and arcane. I didn’t believe any of them, and I eventually realized I thought they were idiots for believing me. Still, attending seemed to quiet the growing, nagging sensation in the back of my throat and the back of my mind. It stopped, for a few blissful hours, the ever-present sensation I had under my fingernails of rending and tearing. It stopped the chanting, the demonic mantras, that broke into my consciousness as intrusive thoughts.
A man named Y— was at almost every meeting. He was a young, attractive, light-skinned Black man with old-fashioned spectacles perched perilously at the end of his nose. He always had a different book sticking out of his coat pocket, and he always kept his eye on the door of wherever we met—often a bookstore’s basement or some DIY show space that would never pass fire code. For months, he never said a word. Along with the other women and people of color who came, we shared a sort of illicit bond—we were the sorts that Lovecraft reviled, and that brought us together. At least, I assumed it did. Maybe that was just me, as a white girl, projecting.
One night, in early May, at least fifteen of us crowded into the back room of a punk-owned pizza joint after close. We’d just heard from another woman with dreams of child sacrifice frighteningly similar to my own, though hers took place in a birch forest, when Y— walked to the center of the room to speak.
“I’m going to find the witch-house,” he said. “That’s what Lovecraft called it, right? The witch-house? A boarding house with the bones of children in the walls, with a person-faced rat and a timeless witch? A house with an attic room you can’t measure right? It’s real. I’m going to find it.”
The room got so quiet we heard a bicycle pass on the street.
“Most of you don’t know me well enough to know that I’m a cat burglar by trade, but I am. It pays well enough that I don’t have to work more than once or twice a year, and I’m good enough at my job that even if you ratted me out to the cops, they wouldn’t be able to pin anything on me, I don’t think.” He looked around the room as he talked. Gone was the quiet, shy man I’d seen for months. In his place was a man who was charismatic, outgoing, with a sort of infectious enthusiasm. “I started coming here to this group because of a book I found robbing a place last year in—let’s just say a different city. A real far north city. I’d gotten a tip about a rare book collector who didn’t treat people very well, and I like sleeping at night so I like robbing people like that. I got in the front door, because people think having their locks and alarms and cameras wired into the internet is a good idea, made my way to the library, and took my fill.
“I sold off the esoteric pornography and the overpriced occultist books easily enough, but some of what looked interesting to me was much harder to find buyers for. A few things were so rare I couldn’t safely move them without going through so many middlemen that I wouldn’t make shit, and a few were just so… so weird that I couldn’t figure out how and where to list them, let alone figure out how to advertise them as worth anything.”
He walked back over to his chair, picked up his book bag, and pulled out a stack of pamphlets in plastic sleeves. He held up one. Yellow aged its tattered cover, but in blackletter font I could see the title: “Ruminations On Non-Secular Matters.” He held up another: “The Church of Christ the Weeping Man.” A third: “Underneath the Dreams of Men.” A final: “Inside the Stars of Gods.”
I looked around the room. All of us were almost hungry with desire for those books, whatever they held. That was the sort of obsession this group fostered, that I was participating in.
“All of these works are anonymous. All of them can be dated to the turn of the twentieth century. None of them exists on the internet, even as references or in library catalogs. They’re written in fairly different styles. If I had to guess, I’d say that ‘Dreams of Men’ and ‘Stars of Gods’ have one author, and the other two were written by two other people. And if I’ll cut right to it, the thing is: I am convinced that Lovecraft read these and maybe others in this series. I’m also convinced that these are works of journalism.”
I gasped. I was kind of embarrassed by the gesture and put my hand over my mouth, but there it was.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” one of the more cumbersome of our group asked. That was G—. I think there were three types of people in attendance. The curious, who came for entertainment. The cursed, like myself, who came to find answers. Then there were the true believers, who just wanted something to be interesting in this world and had attached themselves to Lovecraft for whatever reason. G— was a true believer. I should be kinder to the true believers, but they grated on me. G— was the worst of them.
“Like Lovecraft, I assumed they were fiction. But after hearing everyone’s stories during the past months, I found myself doubting. One of these, in particular,” with this he held up “Underneath the Dreams of Men,” “is so startlingly similar… not to Lovecraft’s ‘Dreams in the Witch House,’ but to some of the stories I’ve heard you all tell. I got sort of obsessed.”
Everyone turned to look at me and the other woman with the sacrificial dreams.
“In ‘The Dreams of Men,’ our journalist author relates the story of an old man he meets, known only as X—. He’s ebony black, and he describes himself as a free man, the son of a free woman, the daughter of a slave. When he was younger, before the war, X— took up residence in a boarding house in upstate New York. He’s subject to a fair amount of racial abuse at the hands of the matron of the house, some of the white guests, and even from another Black guest with lighter skin. To get away from everyone, he ends up taking the worst room, the attic room. Things aren’t right up there, and he hears things. He sees things. He can’t make sense of it. He starts dreaming, and in his dreams he’s sacrificing children in a strange city. He wakes up every morning with bones at the foot of his bed, and every morning he packs them into the walls and goes a little bit crazier. One day he wakes up with a statue, about a foot high, of a satyr or a devil, made out of some metal he can’t figure out, with writing across the bottom in letters he doesn’t recognize.”
“Then what happens?” I asked. I’d never woken up to bones, but it still felt like I was asking about my own future.
“That’s about the sum of it,” Y— said. “X— moves out after a year, when he can’t handle it anymore, and settles in Maine. Becomes a lobster fisherman, because lobsters don’t have bones and fishermen don’t have to deal with people much. Throws the statue into the ocean after a couple years of staring at it. The journalist relates his story, adds a couple notes about failing to find any of the people or places he’s referenced, plus some nineteenth-century theories about dreams and their meaning, and that’s it.
“I’ve got a lot of free time, what with my generous work schedule. I never found out the author of the text, but I’ve been trying to track down the subject of the story. Two weeks ago, I found him. He was real. Xavier Day. Thank God his name started with an X, or I probably never would have found him. But a black-as-night lobster fisherman was… let’s go with ‘something of a rarity’ in nineteenth-century Maine, so that helped. He lived in a town near Lubec. He’s buried in an overgrown cemetery on private land—near as I can tell, the town was too racist to bury him in the churchyard, or maybe they considered him a witch. Here’s a photo of his stone.”
Y— passed around his phone. The stone was hard to read and completely unadorned.
“This says he lived from 1812 until 1925,” I said. “That can’t be right.”
“I looked into that,” Y— said. “It’s what he claimed, and no one had evidence otherwise. He told people he figured he was immortal.”
“How’d he die?” I asked.
“Drowned.”
“What’s this in the lower left of the photo?” I asked. There was a blur of yellowish white, a pile of something on his grave.
“Go to the next photo,” Y— said.
I did.
They were bones.
“Bones,” Y— said. “The bones of children.”
For a long moment, no one said a word. I passed the phone on, and everyone stared in disbelief.
Then, theatrically, Y— reached into his bag and pulled out a statuette and placed it on the table.
“I did some diving,” Y— said. “I found this.” It was a devil, in that Christian style of a man with Caucasian features and the legs of a goat. A band of Norse runes encircled the base.
“What does that say?” G— asked.
Y— and I answered at the same time. “Nyarlathotep.”
◆
At our insistence, Y— read each of the four pamphlets to us. We stayed so late that night that we only left when an employee came to open the restaurant in the morning.
For the curious, this was the best entertainment they’d had in ages. For the true believers, it was vindication. For us cursed… well, I didn’t know what to believe or what to think. I still don’t.
Over the next week, we tracked down the boarding house in New York. It’s one of the only parts of this whole thing I can take any credit for. My family is from upstate, and one of my aunts studies regional folklore and another studies regional history. There was a town where kids in the nineteenth century had died young and the old had all seemed to live past one hundred. No one told ghost stories about the place. Every other town in New York had ghost stories about them but this one. It was so conspicuously un-haunted that it was clearly haunted. It wasn’t a town anymore, but a few buildings remained, most of them on the state’s historic registry.
That’s how I found myself in the company of a gentleman thief as we scaled the outside wall of a witch-house under the light of the full moon.
“Old-fashioned security means old-fashioned method of entry,” Y— told me as he opened the storm shutters of the attic window with a crowbar. I’d wanted to take a tour during the day and slip away from the guide, but Y— had insisted what we needed to do required the dead of night.
The attic room was wrong, that much was obvious. It was unnameably wrong, though, indescribably so. Like that feeling when you’re trying to put on fishnets and they’re tangled in more than direction at once and you somehow have to unroll them in both directions at the same time, that’s what it felt like looking at the room. There were four walls and a vaulted ceiling, but sometimes it felt like there were five walls, and when I stood I got a trace of vertigo. Like I was high in the air. Like I was in that skyscraper, looking out over that city, sharpening knives.
I wanted to leave.
“We’ve got to pry open the walls, carefully,” Y— said.
“Let me try.”
He handed me the crowbar.
I smashed it into the nearest wall, putting my hip into it like swinging a bat in Little League. Again. Again. There was no “carefully” left in my body. I needed answers.
Bones came pouring out as the wall fell down. The bones of children.
◆
After that night, I spent a month trying to convince E— and the rest of my friends to sell the land and move somewhere else, anywhere else. It became clear, however, that she didn’t believe me and that she wouldn’t come with me. So I left her.
The dreams haven’t come back, not since I left that place. Instead, I dream of E—, and I miss her.
I live with Y— now, and a few of the other cursed ones from the group. I think investigating this shit is driving me as crazy as the dreams had, but I don’t know what else to do. I can’t get it out of my brain. I can’t forgive myself for the monster I was, in my sleep, in some alien city across the cosmos. I understand, now, that I was sacrificing real children to a devil I don’t believe in.
Now, whenever I cut anything, even vegetables, I think about human flesh. Whenever I see the concrete of a city, I think about the three suns. Whenever I imagine the respite of death, I think about who or what will leave mementos of horror on my grave.
Worst of all, when I see children, I think of their bones.