My first awareness of the other was through my nose. A lifetime of respiratory illnesses has left me with a deficient sense of smell normally roused only by, say, a fine cognac; but this was a smell that even I could notice. Prosaically, it suggested to me a badly refrigerated fish-market—which would have been horror enough for H. P. Lovecraft, who found (almost comically, I once thought) something profoundly horrible in the very notion of fish.
“We could be in the midst of a story by William Hope Hodgson,” said a voice that I almost recognized.
I could not see him clearly, though he was sitting in the next deck chair. I started to say, “You took the words—”
“—From the same source as you,” he concluded. “They used Hodgson. He was one of the first of us. Still the best, perhaps, on the sea, though I had my own touch in the air.”
“Ev!” I exclaimed, and turned to him with that warmth one feels toward a colleague who is a genuine professional.
You will remember Everard Wykeham. (And to whom am I speaking? Hypocrite ecrivain . . .) Wrote a little for Weird Tales back in the Lovecraft days, then went to England and developed quite a reputation in the Strand and British Argosy. Much good general fiction, including Buchanesque adventure, but what one particularly recalls (and so vividly!) are his horror stories, perfect capsules of grisly suggestion, mostly dealing with the unsuspected and chilling implications, psychological and metaphysical, of man’s flight in the air. It was true: in the domain of the horror story, the air was Wykeham’s as the sea was Hodgson’s; and rarely had I flown without a twinge of grue as I recalled one or another of the Wykeham stories collected as The Arrow That Flies.
Wykeham and I had never been intimate; but we had met occasionally at conventions or at publishers’ parties and had (I think) liked and respected each other. Now he grunted a reply to my greeting and muttered, “Wish I could remember things better. I—I’m not quite all there. Nor all here either. There’s a long speech by the Ghost in Hamlet explaining just how and why the hell he got back to . . . well, call it ‘earth.’ Look it up and take it for read.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen you,” I said, “since Playboy published that beautiful chiller about—”
“I haven’t much time.” His voice was flat and toneless. “The Ghost puts it better but that’s the trouble, you have to say so much and there just isn’t time. And you don’t remember things too damn well either, for that matter.”
I paused, and then I made a speech that I have cut out of a large number of manuscripts, by myself and others. I made the half-strangled noise that is indicated by “you” followed by a dash. Like this:
“You—”
I could dimly see a nod. “Yes. Off the Queen Anne on her maiden voyage. Never recovered. Oh, they arrange fancy ends for some of us. Look at Ambrose Bierce. And wait till you see what they have cooked up for Ray Bradbury. But look: The glowworm gins to glimmer like the fretful porpentine or something. I have to make this clear.”
There was a licorice backwash of Pernod in my mouth. I tried to play it straight. “Make what clear?”
“What they’re doing. What they’re making us do. Can’t you see?”
I could see nothing but the cocooning fog and the shape in the next deck chair. In some kind of glimmer against all laws of optics I could sometimes catch a glimpse of the face, and it was not always Everard Wykeham’s. The Wilkes Booth tragic mask of Poe was there and the arrogant white mane of Bierce. And hints of other faces, living faces that I knew and loved, the gentle-satyr glint of Theodore Sturgeon, the warm japery of Robert Bloch, the ageless eagerness of Ray Bradbury . . .
“We’re all one to them,” he/they/something said. “We’re what they use. To soften the people up and make them fear. You can’t really make people fear real things. Look at Britain under bombardment. Oh, they have used killers. They had a good run of fear in London in the 1880’s and Cleveland in the 1930’s. But mostly they use us, the writers, the ones that can suggest the unspeakable, that can put the very essence of fear, like the old boy from Eton, into a bundle of dirty linen.”
“They . . .” I said slowly, and thinking of a hundred science fiction stories. “They live off of these—these sweats of fear?”
“I don’t know. Not for sure. I think it’s more like—well, an aperitif, like your Pernod. (No, I’m not mind-reading; I can smell it.) It’s something that they . . . savor. So they let us have hints and glimpses, just a touch of the way their world impinges on ours. Where time and space are—well, not quite so disciplined as we like to think. And we use these hints and build them and—”
The fog was thicker. So was his speech, almost to being unintelligible. I caught something about the glowworm and the porpentine again, and then something about impinges and the Opera and the Tower and then the deck was silent.
Then it was as if a sudden wind roared about my head and shouted god help me the damned thing is of such a color nervous very dreadfully nervous lam and have been a negotio perambulante in tenebris oh whistle and I’ll come to you peter quint the ceremony of innocence ibi cubavit lamia now we’re locked in for the night but who is that on the other side of you?
The deck was empty. The fog had thinned to admit a moon pouring its fecund gold down on the Danae sea.
I went below.
Sometimes I think I remember words from that thick unintelligibility, words that must have been answers to questions I cannot recall
