Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft by Don Webb Page A

Meftmir!
    I did not Sleep but was sucked into the mind of a human, the one I had glimpsed before. A female that has not made the slime of motherhood. She was confined in a place of the mad, where the smells are terrible and the light is harsh. She is made to listen to a horrible caterwauling called hymns, and to eat dead food and be treated with metabolic poisons superstitiously thought to calm her mind. Fortunately her mind is strong, so strong that she had never been able to fit into their world. She was born in Innsmouth several orbits ago. She is one of the rogue lines, descendant from Marsh himself four generations ago. She was not brought up in our way, but as a human, and thinks that the divine would be found in her terrible form.
    I hate the way the air does not support her ugly body as she walks about. I try to Remember who I am by writing and painting. I tried once to Dance, but the other humans restrained the body. For days they kept me from moving. I cannot believe that they could be so cruel. I wished to kill the body and try again to Sleep, but the humans worship bodies and will not let me do so.
    In the past few days I have found ironic hope. I cannot send my soul far, so I know not what lies on the far side of the world. Yet I have no reason to presume that our Pacific home has fallen. Surely the strange angles of the Dreamtime have kept the Watery Abyss intact! But I found him. The one who brought the doom to Devil’s Reef. With the cruel irony of this planet, the Change came upon him the day of the depth charges. His body yearned for the sea just as our new home was pounded to flinders. I am nurturing him. As a true being I was not old enough to be a mother, but in this human body I can make the slime and feel the emotions. I enveloped him with the love of the mother.
    We have made a plan. He will come to this place and free me. He understands the human world well. He has done certain things to his appearance to hide the Change. He will spirit my body away. He tells me that this will be easy because humans do not value females and mad females are of no use. He has enough money to buy us train tickets to the West Coast. He will take me to a place with the lovely name of Land’s End, and there we will shed both human clothes and form. I feel that I can awaken the sea form of this Julia. We will swim to our home and dwell there in glory.
    Thus ends the words of Julia Phillips’s diary. The only other item in Lovecraft’s envelope was a clipping from the Brown Daily Herald describing the testing of a new depth charge on Ward’s Reef near Newburyport. The bombing went on for three days . . .
    ( For Michel Houellebecq )

Wilbur’s Song

    If they could see my ghost
    They’d see a gangly fellow
    Only now throwing off his countrified ways.
    You can learn a lot haunting Academe.
    The library is mine now,
    If I had only tongue to form the words . . .
    I know the Other one waits
    I can hear him on the stillest of nights.
    Father waits too.
    You see the spells we set in motion
    Have not been vanquished by puny men.
    Once certain Words are Uttered,
    They will remanifest in the fullness of Time.
    Certain texts cannot be erased,
    Certain sculpture survives beneath the lava.

    The human part of me is impatient
    But that from Outside waits.
    Call to me, Wilbur Whatley,
    And I’ll seed your dreams.
    Son of Earth and Starry heaven I.
    Call to me in the deep midnight
    of your despair.
    And my spirit will go to you,
    and teach you to make your
    dreams into flesh.

Pages from a Diary

    Saturday April 23
    On this brisk morning I will venture forth to forge my soul on the drumbeats of a God-awful hangover. Awoke and made coffee. Inspected coffee and poured same into sink. Sat down to make diary entry and record my profound thoughts. Profound thought—I am the only thirty-three-year-old man in the world who eats Cocoa Puffs. All right, not a great start, Mr. Ghose said no profound thoughts, use sensory stuff. The inside of my