Waiting Read online

  They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.

  —H. P. Lovecraft “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926)

  PROLOGUE

  Howard’s Way

  HOWARD IS ALMOST NINE years old on his first day, and he’s made to stand at the front of the class while the teacher introduces him. Aunt Lillian—having at last won the long-running the-boy-must-go-to-school argument—dragged his mother, Sarah, away as soon as Howard’s foot was half over the threshold of the room. This marks the start of what he will ever regard as a loss of innocence.

  His aunt insisted it was time for him to learn more, that he’d surpassed what even his grandfather can teach, and that Howard should become familiar with things other than merely those that interest him and Whipple Van Buren Phillips.

  Howard knows, however, that she just wants him out from underfoot. She and Annie want to loosen the apron strings, free Sarah to visit friends and neighbors with them instead of leaning over his sick bed, worrying about his latest malady.

  They want her to stop telling him how ill he is, as if that might act as some kind of cure for him. He watches his mother’s departing back with yearning.

  Miss Whatley, the teacher, is young and pretty and kindly, and she smiles at Howard, but she isn’t Sarah; she does little to calm his nerves. The other children in the class—there are thirty, he knows, he counted them, but still they seem legion—stare at him as if they’ve never seen the like before. He wonders if there’s dirt on his forehead, his cheeks, but resists the urge to raise a hand and swipe away whatever might be there.

  He thinks of his face, how he’s seen himself reflected in windows and mirrors, the waters of the fountain when the pumps are turned off just before evening falls. He stares at the children (Grandfather whispered Show no fear! before he left the house this morning), trying to find an echo of his own features there, just one who looks like him: thin nose, protuberant eyes a little too close together behind thick glasses, wide forehead, tightly pursed lips which—did he but know it—give him the same disapproving air as Aunt Annie.

  The children, as if somehow sensing that he’s found them wanting, determine unconsciously to pay him back.

  Howard focuses on a small blonde girl in the front row; her plaits are secured with pink-and-white-checkered gingham ribbons. She stares at him, and somehow he feels like the others are waiting, waiting for her judgment. She begins, at last, to snigger.

  When he is older, Howard will recognize in the gesture the action of a pack leader, and the following of her acolytes as only natural. As a child with no experience of those his own age, however, he merely smiles uncertainly, unaware for long moments that the joke is on him.

  The giggling and guffawing rises until Howard’s ears hurt and his temples begin to pound; he will have a headache by the end of the day, he knows it. Miss Whatley frowns and shushes the class, which gradually quietens, then she directs Howard to the only empty desk, beside the blonde girl.

  The girl’s eyes sparkle in a way Howard doesn’t like—they appear cheap and mean, like glass cut to resemble gems. (Grandfather has shown him the difference, lapidary being one of the subjects they studied when Whipple undertook Howard’s schooling.) She tracks his journey like a predator watching prey, still so as not to startle the creature.

  Howard is almost terrified to take his seat; he stumbles, doesn’t quite get his backside where it should go, must purposefully haul himself onto the chair. Vaguely he wonders if this might trigger some new reaction, but it does not. There’s just a gleam and a flicker in the blue eyes, then a look of sudden satisfaction on the girl’s face as if something has been decided. Then she hisses one word: “Tadpole.”

  They chase Howard home. He’s unaccustomed to running—the air burns his lungs, esophagus, mouth; the lactic acid is quick to build in his muscles—but he’s so very aware, though he cannot say why, that if he’s caught, something terrible will happen.

  The noise of the pack spurs him on, but they don’t sound like dogs or wolves: They croak and call, ribbit and creak. They shout frog and tadpole and freak. Someone screams and he remembers the night-gaunts in Grandfather’s stories, and he stretches his stride farther just when he thought he’d reached his limit.

  At last, he trips over the raised step at the garden gate. His heart feels as if it drops like a frozen thing—he’s not reached the bastion of his front door yet—but when he rolls over, expecting to be set upon, he finds that he is safe.

  As he scrambles to get up, it becomes clear that none of the children will follow him. They stalk behind the blonde girl (Deirdre someone called her), but they will not come in, will not push in through the gate that still swings back and forth with the force of Howard’s precipitous entry.

  In the end Deirdre pauses, points at him, and hisses, “Don’t come back!”

  That night Howard does not eat his dinner. Sarah fusses, declares he has a fever. Aunt Lillian insists he have his vegetables. Howard forces them down. All are surprised when the greenery comes up again, all over the table.

  Whipple carries him to bed. Sarah sleeps in a chair by his side.

  In his dreams, Howard wanders.

  There is a castle, dark and decaying, and he knows its every corner, every crevice; he has lived here an eternity, and suffered. The loneliness of his dream-self feels like a coat of cold slime, something that grips him and will not let go. He is hungry and thirsty and has been thus forever, or so it seems to his sleeping mind. (If, indeed, he is sleeping.) When he thinks of others (others, so long ago!) he imagines them in terms of sustenance. Imagines the warmth of gore, gouts of ichor pulsing in a dying rhythm down his throat, tearing meat from bones while shrieks fill the air, resound in his ears (odd things he feels as nothing more than holes either side of his unnaturally round head).

  And there are books, so many of them lining the walls, and where they do not fit in shelves, they are stacked on chairs and tables, on beds in which no one sleeps, piled high on moldy covers and damp sheets. They are spread across floors of cracked marble, across rugs so threadbare that only the merest hint of a pattern remains. Some lie in purposeful fans, others are simply scattered like scree or animal scat, discarded. He cannot recall the last time he picked one up, opened it, read it, although there is a distant echo of having done so, once upon a time.

  They line the stairs, even, all those myriad stairs that climb up and up and up. Outside the windows are rows of high, lightless trees and he wonders sometimes, when his mind settles and focuses, if they too might be made of books. Towers, trees, constructed of paper and leather and thread.

  One night—in his dream it is always night—he is seized by the urge to ascend, to take those stairs and see where they might lead, perhaps to a place where his loneliness or hunger might be assuaged; to company or food or both. He climbs forever, it seems, past windows, past paintings of folk he cannot remember ever seeing, past tapestries, past doors open and closed, past rooms filled with naught but dust, and past the everpresent books, books, books. Because his night never shifts or changes he cannot tell how long the journey takes, but at last, miraculously, there is a door above, a trapdoor he supposes, a th
ing of wood and iron. It opens only with objecting creaks and groans, its weight making his shoulders and back ache as he heaves and pushes, at last wins.

  Here is a church. Here is a steeple. Where are all the people? It is night, still; as below so above, but there is a moon here, though he’s not sure how he recognizes it. A large silver-white object suspended in a sky that is nowhere near as dark as his own. He surveys the churchyard, the small houses that cluster around the low stone wall; not a single gleam shows. Ah, but on the hill, on the hill! So many lights, pouring from windows and doors, a halo of gold that pulses around the great edifice. There. That is where he will go.

  The journey is strangely more arduous than the one from his own ruined castle. He’s distracted, tormented by the scent on the wind of warm sleeping bodies, of unguarded flesh. Sometimes he stops in the middle of the stone-cobbled road that leads to his goal and sniffs like a dog tormented. But the locks he tries are held fast and no windows have been carelessly left unlatched, so he must continue his weary way up and up and up, toward the glowing bastion.

  He needs use no cunning to enter the castle, the doors have been thrown wide, they are unattended by servants and he wonders if they’ve sneaked off to indulge like the old cook, Keziah, sometimes does, sitting quietly in the pantry to drink her special tea that smells like Grandfather’s whiskey. He wanders though a grand foyer, looks into chambers untroubled by dust (there are, he notes, no books here and the lack disturbs him). He walks and waivers, roams until he comes to the entrance to a grand ballroom. Two men in matching livery watch as he approaches, their expressions becoming more and more concerned the closer he gets, until at last they shout and flee. The noise of their distress is lost in the crescendo of music; a waltz is being played and danced, all eyes, all ears, all feet and hands are concentrating on getting their steps correct, so he is free to enter.

  Slowly, then more quickly as they notice him, the dancing crowd parts. They bolt, and their fear gives them such speed that they escape his sweeping grasps, his clawed hands, though the talons catch the edges of pretty trailing lace and long skirts; though they tear he cannot get a grip on such fripperies. Thus it goes until he comes to the center of the ballroom, to the place where clever artisans have embedded gems and mother-of-pearl in the floor in the shape of a radiant sun.

  This is where he finds her.

  She has not heard him, for whatever reason—perhaps she is transported by the dance—alas, her partner, less chivalrous than he’d like anyone to know, has long since fled. The girl turns and turns and turns, eyes closed, lost to the music; unaware she’s easy prey. He takes a moment to observe her, finds her familiar, then realizes the features are known to him—or to his true self, to Howard who dreams and sweats, ridden by a nightmare from which he cannot wake—realizes that it is Deirdre, the pack leader, the mean girl, only grown, just a little, her face older, her hair longer, her dress from a different era. And with this realization, Howard in the dream and Howard in the bedroom in 194 Angell Street, both let loose a howl that’s inhuman; both strike out, one with a hand that has talons, the other with neatly-clipped nails. The dream-hand catches the girl’s throat and rips her red; the boy’s swats at his mother, waking her from a restless sleep.

  Sarah sits up, grabs at Howard, steadies her son, holds him immobile while he struggles, holds him until he awakens weeping and sobbing, drawing in great gasps of air.

  Howard does not tell her his dreams. He does not tell her what he did or who he was in either that darkened castle, or that castle burning with light. He does not tell her that he did not, could not wake until he’d seen himself reflected in the mirrors of the ballroom ceiling, watched himself devour his tormenter in a punishment that seemed all out of proportion with the nature of her sin.

  Howard is ill for days.

  Howard does not go back to school.

  The house at 194 Angell Street is where Howard was born and, even before his father was taken away, spent many happy hours. After Winfield’s “removal,” moving in there seemed barely much of a change at all. Indeed, his grandfather greeted him with the words “Welcome home, son.”

  The structure is handsome—one of the most handsome in all of Providence, it is generally agreed—with its wide windows, and verandas, the ivy growing over the porch providing extra shade in summer, and the broad gardens and park with winding paths, a neat picket fence and a magnificent fountain.

  The building is huge, and Howard has always indulged in explorations of corridors and rooms, chimney corners and cellars, but he is certain he never finds all the spaces; remains certain that nooks and crannies stay hidden. In the attic in particular, partitioned off into areas to store servants from a time when the house had more, there are strange angles and curvatures that seem not quite right, seem not meant to go together, and in between their junctures lie voids filled with dim and murky air that he feels might well hide something other were he to look closely enough, long enough. Sometimes he plays a game of chicken with the twilight abysses, staring for minutes on end . . . but he is always the one to look away.

  And then there is a thrum, which sometimes pulses through the floors and the walls; it seems constant but perhaps is not, yet Howard is so used to it he barely notices its presence—only its absence. It is most strong, he has noted, on those nights when the moon is full and his mother and her sisters let their hair hang loose. Those are the nights when he is sent to bed early.

  Howard’s aunts are not kind. They behave a little better when his mother is around, but not much. Lillian was given to pinching the soft flesh of his inner forearm, until Sarah found the marks. After that all he had to deal with were the snide remarks, the things forgotten: a blanket missing from his bed in winter, no fire lit in his room on icy nights, food he was allergic to appearing on his plate.

  But Grandfather gave no sign of noticing his other daughters’ inimical dislike of the boy. And he certainly never partook of it; indeed, loved the boy to distraction, and never made any comment about his father when Howard had, for a brief period, asked questions about Winfield Scott Lovecraft.

  “Your father’s not a well man,” was all Whipple had said.

  “Nervous exhaustion,” Sarah avowed with the same fervor others reserve for prayer.

  “Acute psychosis,” announced Aunt Annie firmly, with a kind of satisfaction and that little tilt of her head, a lift of the lips.

  “Neurosyphilis,” Aunt Lillian had muttered darkly when Sarah was out of earshot; Howard didn’t know what that was, but it didn’t sound nice.

  Howard has only vague memories of the day his father was taken away. Wispy visions like old flickering film of Winfield’s thin, bearded face with its veneer of sweat despite the winter’s chill; the tall man pacing with a limp in his step that had manifested as his mental state had deteriorated. That, and the twitching hand, the right one, he held to his chest and beat out a rhythm, the same one every time, eight quick beats, three slow, always in an identical pattern as if he described the main points of interest on a map. That, and the shouting, the shrieking, as two men from the Arkham Asylum came and took him; the whimpering after they’d locked him in the back of the ambulance; the spots of blood on the verandah steps where a cut on Win’s forehead bled copiously.

  After a time, Howard stopped asking and largely put the matter of his father out of his mind, taking up little more than the shape of a silhouette. Winfield’s departure, Howard decided, was intentional, an active desertion.

  The boy has a child’s sense of betrayal that undermines his mother’s assurances—regular reminders, as if she puts them in her diary on a weekly basis—that his father loves him.

  But Howard only really recalls Winfield’s existence on those rare days when he sees a letter arriving from the asylum, when he recognizes the color of the stationery and the coat-of-arms the place probably isn’t entitled to.

  Today was one of those days and, for reasons he cannot quite explain— although it might have been the rar
e absence of the humming in the walls, the floor—he has been unable to sleep, at least not for long.

  He’d dreamt that a trophy in his grandfather’s library—one of those things Whip had collected in the days when he traveled to exotic places, or so he said—had come to life. A green jade amulet, some bizarre breeding of imagination and chimerical fancy, carved in the shape of a winged dog, had fallen from its shelf. Yet before it hit the carpet to either bounce or break, it hovered in the air, the hindquarters stretching downward to the floor, its head remaining in place where its only change was an increase in size. When it took on its final form it had opened its manytoothed mouth, unleashed a bark that smelled of long-dead meat, then leapt across the space between it and Howard. Its fangs closed on his throat just as he awakened with a shriek.

  “What did you think would happen, Sari?”

  Howard is standing outside his mother’s bedroom door, hoping perhaps to be allowed to sleep in Sarah’s bed, although he knows his aunts disapprove of this too. His fingers, stretching toward the handle, are arrested at the sound of Aunt Annie’s voice. He pulls the hand back, knuckles the sleep from the corners of his eyes.

  Annie’s tone is exasperated, but her use of a childhood nickname makes Howard recall that dislike of him does not extend to his mother. There’s an unintelligible answer from Sarah, and Annie repeats, “Well? What did you think would happen?”

  “I don’t know,” sobs Sarah, louder now. “I thought we’d be happy. I thought he’d love me enough.”

  “Enough for what? To obey the rules you imposed? To respect that even after years of marriage? To not ever wonder what his wife did once a month on the full moon when she locked herself in the spare room?” Aunt Annie makes that disapproving clicking with her tongue. “If he didn’t love you enough to respect that simple request, Sarah, then he didn’t love you at all.” His aunt’s logic is always narrow. “If he couldn’t keep his own mind intact when he found out—”