Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013 Page 2

  “Get up.” He said,. “I’ve made supper.”

  I couldn’t figure out what had happened. My brain was all logy. I drifted into the kitchen, where the small brown dinning table was. He had made dinner. Fish sticks and lima beans. He had poured milk for both of us. We prayed and ate.

  “I thought it would be nice to make dinner for you. You’re always making it for me.”

  “This is nice.” I said. I hated lima beans. Still do.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about exchange lately. Too many things only go one way. You know what I mean?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Well its like this. You do all this work for me and I don’t do anything for you. That’s supposed to be fair because I brought up your mother and her brothers. I bet that doesn’t seem right sometimes does it.”

  I thought about being hit by the cane. I thought about not answering. But maybe this really was the time God was answering prayers.

  “No sir, sometimes that does not seem fair.”

  “Or books. Do you ever think about books Billy? We spend out whole lives reading them, but they never get a chance to read us. Would you like that Billy if a book read you sometime?”

  “I don’t know. I mean I don’t know what it would be like.”

  “Well you’ve heard the expression, ‘He can read a man’s character.’ Haven’t you?”

  “Yes but I don’t really know what it means.”

  “Well Billy being read by a book is about the finest experience there is. Not everyone has when they grow up, but maybe you will.”

  God wasn’t answering prayers. He was crazy, but in a new way. I cleaned the table after dinner and we went to watch the Carol Burnet Show.

  Sleep hit me hard again that night. I woke up to sounds form the living room. I don’t know how long Grandpa had been talking. He was arguing. I couldn’t make out the words, but it scared me. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do if Grandpa went crazy by himself in the middle of the night. Finally I heard one sentence clearly:

  “No I won’t do it. It’s not a fair exchange.”

  I got out of bed. I just wearing my underwear, so I got dressed. I didn’t want to confront Grandpa partially dressed. As I put my clothes on I heard him get up out of his rocker and make his way toward his bedroom. I lay back own on the bed. Even though Grandpa was pretty deaf, I didn’t even dare breathe.

  I would have bet a million bucks that I was not going to go back to sleep that night, but sure enough sleep hit me like a ton of bricks.

  I felt the bed below me melt. I was sinking into half-melted vanilla ice cream, although it wasn’t cold. As it passed my eyes the scene lit up with a terrible whiteness. There was nothing but white, a great white blindness, a great white dark. I could feel myself pulled lower and lower. I couldn’t struggle, couldn’t swim. For a moment I wished I was one of my rich friends who were hanging out at the pool this summer. They would know what to do. They didn’t have to take care of their goddamn grandfathers. The down drift took forever, and it gave me time for a lot of thoughts and none of them were very good. Maybe I was in a children’s story where ad thoughts made you sink.

  Then suddenly it stopped. Although the non-landscape hadn’t changed and all I could see was the thick whiteness; I felt something looking at me. Something big. I tried to analyze what it felt like. I mean I had watched Star Trek and The Night Gallery. But I couldn’t get any feelings for old or young, human or alien, alive or undead. All of those charts were two dimensional schoolbook ideas and this was floating above the white page of the book about nine inches. I felt it wasn’t going to get bored staring at me, and that scared me. It could look at me forever and not blink. For a brief while I wanted to see it, but then I was glad I couldn’t.

  Slowly I felt something congeal under me. I wasn’t floating anymore. Then a tiny speck formed a few feet above my head. It turned out to be the brass nut in the center of the light fixture. I was staring at the white glass of the fixture. The sun was up. I could hear Grandpa making coffee. The bed was dank with sweat. My nightmare had soaked the thick bedspread. I was already dressed, so I went on into the kitchen.

  “Good morning.” I said to Grandpa.

  He just looked at me with hatred. The light and life had gone out of his eyes. We didn’t talk during breakfast. I mowed the lawn afterward even though it didn’t need it. I just didn’t want to be around him. I don’t know if he read his book. Or if the book read him.

  Lunch was worse. He was still not talking, and Mom was so upset to see him regress actually broke down in tears. After lunch she went out to her car and just sat in it and cried.

  I went out to comfort her. I was thirteen and it was the manly thing to do. She rolled down her window to talk to me.

  “Mom are you OK?” I asked. I know it was a dumb question.

  “What happened, Billy. Did you do something to him? “

  I couldn’t believe her response. I knew she was upset, but I wasn’t some kind of miracle worker, some kind of jinni, that could make Grandpa better to worse by blinking my eyes. I got really mad, so I turned away from her car and began running to the park. I knew she was late to work and didn’t have time to follow me. She managed an office and everything depended on her. There were some cedar bushes in the park, about six feet tall. Underneath the green make-out artists had hallowed and hollowed a space over the years. I dove into the cool dry dark to cry. I knew no one would be making out at noon thirty in the heat of the summer. I cried a long time. I messed up my clothes. Great now I had laundry to do as well as the additional job of hating my Mom and feeling guilty. I didn’t give a damn about Grandpa at this moment.

  I headed back to his house. This was going to end today. I would tell my Mom and my Uncle that I couldn’t do this anymore. That I wanted some regular summer job like sweeping out a barber shop which my friend Jerry had. I was going to tell things I had never told before like the cane. I didn’t think I would tell them about the book. That was probably Grandpa’s craziness.

  Sure enough when I got back to his little brick house he was reading his book. He was almost to the end. I had been gone for nearly two hours. I hadn’t cried that much since my grandmother died two years ago. I thought crying was supposed to purge you, make you feel better, but I felt all raw and sticky like parts of my soul had been through a blender and were hanging outside of my body. I didn’t talk to the old man I just went to bed.

  To my initial relief the same magic that had brought sleep the last two times worked again. I was out like a light.

  However the world changed from a fabulous formless darkness to a great white thickness. I knew I sinking into the world of the great white bed. The down drift made me sick this time like a too long downward ride in an elevator. Of course in those days growing up in Doublesign I had never even seen an elevator, but you can’t enter a memory without carrying later memories in with you. Down, down, down.

  It was an abrupt and unpleasant stop. I could hear my Grandpa saying something. It was a precise but muffled voice. The kind of voice you use giving a phone number. I began moving sideways. Slowly at first and then at a pretty good clip. Then the movement stopped again and I was lying next to someone.

  I could move my head a little. It was Granny. She was dead and very, very white. I knew the great Whatever had been watching her for a couple of years, and had never got bored.

  Then I felt the little knives.

  Something was slicing through my feet. I couldn’t raise my head enough to see it, but I could hear it and of course it hurt like hell. About an inch was being cut off. I didn’t think I could stand it. Why didn’t I wake up? Why didn’t I black out?

  Then after that section had been cut clean another cut started about an inch higher. I figured loss of blood or shock would get me. I kept telling myself it was just a nightmare, but that doesn’t really help with that much pain.

  Then another cut.

  Then another.

  And so slowly for
th until my knees had been reached. All I was at this point was tears and pain.

  Then a dark rope dropped down from above. I can’t tell you what a relief it was to see something black in that great white space. It hit my face, snaking over my eyes and mouth, finally it touched my ears.

  “Billy. Billy can you hear me?”

  It was my uncle’s voice. I woke up on the great white bed and then passed out from blood loss.

  The rest of the summer and the fall and the winter and spring were physical therapy.

  I had lost both of my legs up to my knees. This is not a euphemism. There was nothing there. There were no trace of my feet and lower legs anywhere in Grandpa’s house.

  But there were a set a feet and lower legs on his bed in his room. They were cold and embalmed and a couple of years old. They belonged to my grandmother.

  I didn’t find that out until just before my mother’s death last year. It had been decided not to tell everything, as though knowledge could make it any worse. There was no trace that my grandmother’s grave had been disturbed in any way. They had dug up her coffin and put the legs in and burying it as well as any gossip with her. They put Grandpa in a mental ward afterward. Mom never went to see again as long as he lived, but that turned out to be only three months anyway. When Mom got cancer she decided to tell me everything.

  My uncle had dropped by that day because Mom had called him. She felt bad about she had said to me. She couldn’t leave her office, but her brother got off early. Mom told me that she felt guilty about what had happened to me everyday of her life.

  I live in a special home for people with mental and physical disabilities. When she was alive Mom would come see every day at noon. We always ate together just like she used to eat with her father About two months before she died she got too sick to come, but they took me to see her in the hospital a couple of times, that was when she told about Granny’s legs and so on.

  I read and watch TV a lot. It hasn’t gotten better in the last forty years, I can tell you that. I am kept here because I can’t give an explanation of what happened to me that makes sense to anyone. I didn’t get to finish school and I regret that. So I hobble around on my two fake legs. I even keep a little garden. Just flowers, no tomatoes this time. I never learned that Internet thing either; they don’t like us looking things up. The only thing that some people would find odd about me is that I won’t sleep on white sheets or have a white blanket or a white bedspread.

  Mom told me that she searched every inch of Grandpa’s house for the book. She told me that she never believed my story fully, but knew it had to have some truth. She didn’t find the book. Maybe Grandpa found it at the park or bought it in a garage sale. I tried researching occult matters once, but the people running the home thought it was a bad idea for me. One time I had a dream, about ten years ago, of Grandpa lifting the thick white bedspread and looking under the bed for something and just finding the book. That still doesn’t answer the question of where it came from.

  Sometimes in my dreams I smell geraniums and find myself in the great white space. I can’t scream in my dreams and I’ve never woke up my roommate with any odd sounds. I don’t tell my doctor about it as it seems to upset her. But the dreams are rare. I think they’re really not dreams at all, it think it’s just how things are. I think the great Whatever is always watching us.

  And It’s never bored.

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  Interview with Don Webb

  The following interview with Richard Gavin originally appeared on The Teaming Brain, posted 13 March 2013.

  I appreciate your taking time out of your staggeringly busy schedule to chat with me, Don. Let’s start with a basic question: What first sparked your interest in writing fiction?

  I struggled during my first couple of passes at college. At Texas Tech I took a class in “Writing the Science Fiction Short Story.” It was an A if you wrote the story, or you could write a ten-page research paper. Although I was a massive consumer of fiction — everything from Lovecraft to Pynchon, Ovid to Joyce, Edgar Rice to William S. Burroughs — the idea of writing had never occurred to me. I whipped out a Lovecraftian pastiche set in Palo Duro Canyon (in Texas) over a weekend. Many of the students chose the research route, finding writing too hard.

  I sent the story off to a new magazine, Spectrum Science Fiction. An acceptance occurred at once, with the letter telling me that in the first issue I would share print with Isaac Asimov and Ursula K. Le Guin. I quit college immediately and wrote my head off. Months went by and no Spectrum Stories appeared in my mailbox. I called the editor.

  He did not have phone privileges that day. He was in a private psychiatric home. Among his delusions was that he was the editor of various pulp magazines — SciFi, horror, detective etc.

  By that time I had picked up the ugly habit of writing.

  What writers do you consider your primary influences?

  Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, William S. Burroughs, Zulfikar Ghose, P. K. Dick, Ovid.

  Describe your typical writing process. Do you have any particular habits, such as writing at set times of the day or giving yourself a minimum word-limit, etc.?

  During the school year I try to pound out at least five hundred words a day. During summer a couple of thousand. I write better in the mornings or when everyone is asleep.

  One of the remarkable qualities of your work is the way in which you weave so seamlessly from genre to genre. Whether the piece is a space opera, a murder mystery, or a tale of cosmic horror, the Don Webb “voice” is instantly recognizable. Is this something that occurs naturally, regardless of what type of fiction you are writing, or do you find that you have to scope out a particular subgenre until you find that “Webb-like element” that you feel you can work with?

  I have three big interests: wonder (the universe is strange and beautiful), humor (the world is a much sillier place than we give it credit for), and a sort of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” love of odd facts.

  For as long as I’ve known you, you have always been involved with teaching, particularly in the field of creative writing. What benefits does the teaching process have for you as a writer?

  Since I began writing in a classroom environment, I associate writing with teaching/learning. When helping students with their novels and short stories, I am constantly thinking about narrative, about what makes writing interesting, about what a story is. This has no doubt meant that I’ve spent too much time on short stories instead of novels, because I like to try various experiments. I teach frequently for UCLA Extension. Look on their web page for an occasional science fiction writing class.

  What role does fear play in your fiction?

  “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” I heard a guy say that once. I think it was in a gas station. Fear brings two very strong things to perception. First, your character will strive to pay attention to everything — a creak in the house when the wind blows, a passage in an obscure text, words overheard at a party. Secondly, fear demands that everything by examined in a new light. Consider how much you start thinking about your car when the “Check Engine” light comes on as you speed down a highway at night. Fear, lust, and love all work this way.

  I’ve noticed that love is an important and recurring element in your work. I’m thinking in particular of novels like Essential Saltes and Endless Honeymoon. What is it about love that you find artistically inspiring?

  If you love someone three things happen. First, you wish to improve yourself for them. Characters become introspective in a positive way. Second, you strive to see the world as a place you can use to please your lover. Whether it’s buying the lover a rare gift or pointing out an owl in a tree, all things are scanned for the possibility of bringing joy. Thirdly, love motivates. I will risk my life for my wife in a heartbeat. The character in love is willing to do any fool thing the writer conjures up for him or her to do. I also write more whe
n I am in love.

  What influence, if any, does your home state of Texas have on your work?

  Texans love their eccentrics. If you doubt that, watch the documentary Plutonium Circus, about the plutonium industry, Stanley Marsh 3, the Cadillac Ranch, and more. (If you just want to see my part in it, skip till minute 56). Texas loves story-tellers, and I came from a family where one’s status depended on being able to tell great stories. My mom (the lady standing next to me in the film I just cited) is an excellent storyteller at age 90. One of my biggest brags is that I’m in the Norton Anthology of Texas writing, Lone Star Literature. I was born in Amarillo, the home of barbed wire, the world’s largest helium storage dome, and the Big Texan restaurant, where if you can eat the 72-ounce steak and all the trimmings in one hour, it’s free. To understand my hometown look at this.

  Texas is like Dr. Who’s TARDIS. It’s even bigger inside our minds than in the objective universe.

  On the topic of Texas, your fictional town of Doublesign is one of my personal favourites in contemporary weird tales. Can you describe the process that brought this offbeat town into being?

  Doublesign came into being when I heard a little Texas described as “One of them double sign towns” — the “Now Entering” and “Now Leaving” sign are on the same pole. It was modeled after Tyler, Texas, where I used to shoot fireworks professionally. In a small Texas town, everyone’s weirdness is right in your face. Since we are an armed society, there’s a lot of tolerance for weirdness. Various Doublesign businesses, like the Kuntry Kafe, are real Texas businesses given home in my mind. Remember Texas invented Buckminsterfullerene, which is the Texas state molecule, and Deep Fried Butter.

  It is hard NOT to write Weird fiction here.

  All your fiction has an air of otherness to it, a sense of the Mysteries. Do you consciously strive to evoke a general sense of wonderment, or are your tales laced with more specific “teachings” in regards to how you view the universe?