Houses Under the Sea Read online

  Houses Under the Sea Copyright © 2018

  by Caitlín R. Kiernan. All rights reserved.

  Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2012 by Marcela Bolivar.

  All rights reserved.

  Interior design Copyright © 2019

  by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved.

  Signed, Trade Hardcover

  Electronic ISBN

  978-1-59606-955-8

  Subterranean Press

  PO Box 190106

  Burton, MI 48519

  subterraneanpress.com

  www.caitlinrkiernan.com

  greygirlbeast.livejournal.com

  Twitter: @auntbeast

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  This book is dedicated to the four brilliant people who have made it possible for me to do paleontology again – Jun Ebersole (McWane Science Center, University of Alabama at Birmingham), Andrew Gentry (UAB, McWane Science Center), Mary Beth Prondzinski (University of Alabama Museums), and Andrew K. Rindsberg (University of West Alabama). Thank you all very much.

  Table of Contents

  Lovecraft and I

  Valentia (1994)

  So Runs the World Away

  From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6

  The Drowned Geologist (1898)

  The Dead and the Moonstruck

  Houses Under the Sea

  Pickman’s Other Model (1929)

  The Thousand-and-Third Tale of Scheherazade

  The Bone’s Prayer

  The Peril of Liberated Objects, or The Voyeur’s Seduction

  At the Gate of Deeper Slumber

  Fish Bride (1970)

  The Alchemist’s Daughter (A Fragment)

  Houndwife

  Tidal Forces

  John Four

  On the Reef

  The Transition of Elizabeth Haskings

  A Mountain Walked

  Love Is Forbidden, We Croak & Howl

  Pushing the Sky Away (Death of a Blasphemer)

  Black Ships Seen South of Heaven

  Pickman’s Madonna

  The Peddler’s Tale, or Isobel’s Revenge

  The Cats of River Street (1925)

  M Is for Mars

  THE DANDRIDGE CYCLE

  A Redress for Andromeda (2001)

  Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea (1957)

  Study for The Witch House (2013)

  Andromeda Among the Stones

  Publication History and Acknowledgments

  We seem to move on a thin crust which may at

  any moment be rent by the subterranean forces

  slumbering below.

  Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890)

  Lovecraft and I

  (Delivered as the keynote address, 15th Annual HPL Film Festival, Portland, Oregon, October 2, 2010)

  Oh, where to start.

  First off, I think that when you’re a Guest of Honor it means you’re being honored. But, truthfully, I feel very much the other way around about this turn of events, having been invited to appear as a Guest of Honor at the Lovecraft Film Festival. I’m honored to have been asked and honored that the Festival has gone to considerable trouble and expense to get me here. I certainly couldn’t have managed it otherwise. It doesn’t help that I’m a bit of a recluse and not much given to travel. Just getting me out of the house can be a chore. Getting me to cross the country and back, well, that’s something I’ve not done in more than a decade. But when I was asked to be here, I couldn’t very well say no. Lovecraft’s work has been too great an influence on my own writing to have possibly said no, and, as I’ve stated, it is an honor.

  Then, when I was asked to speak at the opening ceremonies, I said yes. After all, it was another honor, being asked, and so again I couldn’t exactly say no. Still, I had no clue whatsoever as to what I was going to say up here at the podium. I’m truly not good at this sort of thing. I’m never sure where to begin or where to end. I ramble. I lose my train of thought. But I pondered and pondered and pondered, and finally at the last minute –  which was Wednesday afternoon –  I figured it out.

  I’ll begin here, with the day I first encountered H. P. Lovecraft. Oddly, I found him in Trussville, Alabama on a yellow school bus. I was seventeen years old. It was a rainy morning in the spring of 1981, and Lovecraft was lying all alone on an empty seat, in the form of a library book from the Birmingham Public Library that someone had accidentally left behind when they got off. It was, in fact, the original 1965 Arkham House edition of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. The black-and-white cover, by Lee Brown Coye (1907–1981), depicts a decrepit, bug-eyed man clad all in rags, a monstrous figure that reminded me at once of Captain Ahab Ceely. The bug-eyed man is wielding a harpoon, which, as one might expect from a decrepit sort of Captain Ahab Ceely, has impaled an albino sperm whale. Turns out, Coye had something of an obsession with Moby Dick, and whales are a recurring motif in his artwork. But the man on the book’s cover was a giant, by comparison to the whale, which, I’d soon learn, echoes a passage from “Dagon.” Lovecraft writes:

  It was the pictorial carving, however, that did most to hold me spellbound. Plainly visible across the intervening water on account of their enormous size, were an array of bas-reliefs whose subjects would have excited the envy of a Doré. I think that these things were supposed to depict men –  at least, a certain sort of men; though the creatures were shewn disporting like fishes in the waters of some marine grotto, or paying homage at some monolithic shrine which appeared to be under the waves as well. Of their faces and forms I dare not speak in detail; for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint. Grotesque beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer, they were damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall. Curiously enough, they seemed to have been chiselled badly out of proportion with their scenic background; for one of the creatures was shewn in the act of killing a whale represented as but little larger than himself. I remarked, as I say, their grotesqueness and strange size; but in a moment decided that they were merely the imaginary gods of some primitive fishing or seafaring tribe; some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before the first ancestor of the Piltdown or Neanderthal Man was born. Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.

  Of course, the figures in the bas-relief are not imaginary, and the proportions are likely not that far off.

  But anyway, for me that’s how the love affair with Lovecraft began –  a stark black-and-white cover, with the name Dagon emblazoned in crimson. As a teenager, I admit that I had the somewhat reprehensible habit of judging a book by its cover. I was even worse about this as a child. Fortunately, I fell in love with Coye’s cover at once. And it was just lying there on the seat of the school bus, with no one in sight to lay claim to it. I checked to see if anyone were watching. Nobody was. I felt a distinct thrill in picking it up and hurrying away with it clutched in my arms. I suppose I should have given it to the bus driver or taken it to the lost and found…or something. But I was too intrigued. I had to know what was inside. So I spent several days and nights devouring Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. I sat up late when I ought to have been asleep. I hid it inside my algebra textbook during class. These things sound horridly cliché, I know, but they’re true. And as I read, I fell for the author of these stories, just as I’d fallen for Lee Brown Coye’s cover art.

  After reading the collection, I’d realize how effectively that cover art evoked the mood of the stories, their atmosphere, the overall frisson. And any admirer of HPL’s knows
that, to him, the success or failure of any weird or macabre tale hinges on whether or not the author has managed to evoke mood, first and foremost. No amount of rotting New England seaports or arcane texts or slithering tentacles can ever take the place of expertly crafted mood. You get the mood right, or you give it up. So, in that sense, Coye’s cover is spot on. It drew me in, and I discovered not only the title story, but such dark gems as “The Hound,” “The Strange High House in the Mist,” “The Lurking Fear,” “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,” and, perhaps, most importantly, the essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” I read Dagon and Other Macabre Tales cover to cover, and some of the stories I read more than once. Then I reluctantly dropped the book into the return bin at the Trussville branch of the library. I have often regretted not keeping it. It’s not like I was the one who carelessly left it lying on the school bus. It’s not like I was the one who’d be in trouble for losing it. But I didn’t keep it. I returned it back into the world.

  So, that was my initiation, my introduction to Lovecraft. A left-behind library book with an odd, grotesque, eye-catching cover created by a man who, by coincidence, died that same year.

  Now, at the time, I had no idea that these were far from Lovecraft’s best stories, and it would be several years yet before I’d figure that out, before I’d discover the wonders of At the Mountains of Madness, and “The Colour Out of Space,” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” I was a voracious reader, but it wasn’t easy finding Lovecraft in Alabama in 1981, and I was very busy with high school, and then college, and many other authors, besides. My life became consumed with my studies in paleontology, geology, and biology, and I didn’t find my way back to Lovecraft until 1988 or so. In part, it was reading T.E.D. Klein’s sublime novel The Ceremonies and then his collection Dark Gods that reminded me of that rainy day on the school bus and what I found there. While at the University of Colorado in Boulder, I found the other Arkham House volumes in the college library, and I devoured them immediately.

  I think it’s no coincidence that my fondness for Lovecraft was cinched about this time. I was working as a paleontologist, and continuing my education in that subject. For me, conceiving of vast gulfs of time and space had become part of my everyday life, though I was aware it was something most people seemed never to pause to consider. Here we are, an infinitesimal speck in a largely unknowable and entirely indifferent universe. Here we are, only a momentary incarnation of matter and energy. Eternity and infinity stretch away all around us. We see it in the stars, and in quantum mechanics, in rocks that were already ancient before the evolution of multicellular life, and we see it in the profusion of plants and animals that inhabited this world before us, preserved now as fossils. We see it in the coming of our own species, and all the ages of human history. For me, this awareness of what geologists call “deep time” was both mundane and marvelous. Still, I wasn’t that accustomed to finding it in literature. But here it was in Lovecraft, and here it was in spades.

  Few other speculative fiction writers, and certainly very few prior to Lovecraft, seem to have so thoroughly comprehended the profundity of deep time and its consequences for humanity. Lovecraft not only comprehended it, he spent his life writing stories that, among other things, sought to convey the truth of our place in the cosmos. Sure, the monsters were great, and the disintegrating ancestral castles, and the mutant fish people –  but for me, it was his appreciation for time and his ability to convey a cosmic perspective in fiction. He knew, instinctively, the power of these revelations. Time and space –  spacetime –  is scary shit. If it weren’t, Galileo wouldn’t have been forced to recant, and we wouldn’t still have creationists yammering about Biblical myths more than a century and a half after Darwin published his great book. Lovecraft didn’t just write creepy stories. In his own way, he subverted religious dogma and said, “Look, we’re so tiny, and we’ll be gone before you know it. And nothing and no one cares. And this is terrifying, but it’s also grand.”

  I should wrap this. I’ve already mentioned the trouble I have finding endings. But here we are, twenty-nine years and a couple of odd lifetimes after that day on the school bus. I now live in Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft’s city, the city he declared himself to exemplify. I certainly never planned for things to work out that way, but fate’s an odd and wondrous and disquieting thing. I regularly walk the same redbrick sidewalks he walked, past houses where he lived, and I visit libraries and museums he visited. On a regular basis, I pass the observatory where a young Lovecraft watched the stars. And I sometimes leave tokens of appreciation on his modest headstone at Swan Point Cemetery.

  My own fiction has been receiving comparisons to his since my second novel, Threshold, was published in 2001. I’ve never quite known what to make of these comparisons, except that I find them flattering. Indeed, I find, when I read them, that I am honored. And humbled.

  Thank you.

  Valentia

  (1994)

  All night tossing and turning on the flight from JFK to Shannon, interminable jet drone and the whole autumn-long night spent sailing through ice-crystal clouds far above the black roil and churn of the Atlantic. Finally, the ragged west coast of Ireland appearing outside her window like a grey-green gem, uncut, unpolished, and then the plane was on the ground. Routinely suspicious glances at her passport from the customs agent – her short hair still blonde in the photograph, but now it’s red, auburn – and Anne was grateful when she spotted one of Morris’ grad students waiting for her with a cardboard sign, DR. CAMPBELL printed neatly in blue marker on brown cardboard. She dozed on the long drive down to Kerry, nodding off while the student talked and the crooked patchwork of villages and farms rolled by outside.

  “It’s so terrible,” the student says, has said that more than once, apologized more than once, like any of this might have been her fault somehow. Máire, pale, coal-haired girl from Dublin with her tourist-brochure eyes, green eyes that never leave the road, never glance at Anne as the car rolls on south and west, the slate-dark waters of Dingle Bay stretching away to the north and all the way down to the sea. Past Killorglin now, and there’s a tall signpost, black letters on whitewashed wood, a white arrow pointing the way on to Cahirciveen, still forty kilometers ahead of them, and so Anne closes her eyes again.

  “Do you have any idea how it happened?” she asks, and “Ah, Christ. I’m so sorry, Dr. Campbell,” the girl says, her voice like she might be close to tears, and so Anne doesn’t ask again.

  Two hours later, and the blue and white car ferry from Renard Point is pulling away from the dock, plowing across the harbor towards the big island of Valentia. Only a five-minute crossing, but the water just rough enough that Anne wishes there was a bottle of Dramamine tablets packed somewhere in her Army surplus duffel in the rental car’s trunk. She stands at the railing because she figures it’s more polite to puke over the side than on the decks, stands with nervous, green-eyed Máire on her left, emerald eyes and wringing hands.

  None of this feels real, Anne thinks. None of this feels the least bit real.

  The girl is clutching a rosary now, something shiny from a sweater pocket, silver crucifix and black beads. Anne turns away, watching the horizon, the indefinite confluence of the grey island and greyer sea. The air smells like saltwater and fish and coming rain, and she concentrates on the questions she’s carried with her all the way from New York, unpleasant thoughts to drown her old dread of seasickness. The questions that began two days earlier with the first news of Morris Whitney’s death, with Dr. Randall’s Sunday afternoon phone call. “Can you come in this evening, Anne?” he said, sounding tired, sleepless, sounding like all his sixty years had finally, suddenly, caught up with him.

  “It’s Morris. Something’s happened. There’s been an accident,” but she didn’t want to hear the rest, said so, made him stop there, no more until she took the subway from her Tribeca apartment uptown to the museum. No more until she was sitting in her tiny, fifth-floor office, l
istening to Arthur Randall talk. Everything he knew, scant and ugly details, and at first none of it seeming to add up – the phone call from the police in Cahirciveen, Morris’ body hauled from the sea by a fishing boat out of Knightstown, the vandalized excavation. But Anne listened silently, the old man’s shaky voice and her eyes lingering safely on the cover of a back issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology lying on her desk – the glossy orange and white cover, black print, the precise line drawing of an Eocene percopsid, all safe and sensible things so she wouldn’t have to see the look on Arthur’s face.

  “Do you have any idea what he was doing out there after dark?” she asks, almost whispering, and Máire turns her head slightly, her eyes still on the rosary in her hands.

  “No,” the girl says. “None of us do.”

  Anne glances back at the mainland, growing smaller as the little ferry chugs diligently across the harbor, and she knows now that she shouldn’t have come, that Arthur was right, and there are probably no more answers here than would have found her in Manhattan. Not if this skittish girl at her side is any indication, and there’s something else, besides, a quiet anxiety beneath the lead-weight ache of her loss, beneath the disorientation. A vague unease as the shores of Valentia grow nearer; but He would have come for you, she thinks, and then Máire is talking again.

  “Dr. Whitney had us back in Knightstown, you know. Me and Billy both. He said he was worried about whether or not the grants would be renewed. Said he needed the solitude to write at night, to work on the progress report for the National Geographic people, but we knew he was havin’ bad dreams.”

  “So you weren’t at the field house Friday night?” and Máire shakes her head, no, “This last week, we’ve been riding out on our bicycles every mornin’, an’ ridin’ back again in the evenings. It’s only half an hour, maybe…”