Cthulhu 2000 by Jim Turner

Author:Jim Turner [Turner, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-51842-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

Black Man with a Horn

T.E.D KLEIN

1.

The Black [words obscured by postmark] was fascinating—I must get a snap shot of him.

—H. P. LOVECRAFT, POSTCARD TO

E. HOFFMANN PRICE, 7/23/1934

There is something inherently comforting about the first-person past tense. It conjures up visions of some deskbound narrator puffing contemplatively upon a pipe amid the safety of his study, lost in tranquil recollection, seasoned but essentially unscathed by whatever experience he’s about to relate. It’s a tense that says, “I am here to tell the tale. I lived through it.”

The description, in my own case, is perfectly accurate—as far as it goes. I am indeed seated in a kind of study: a small den, actually, but lined with bookshelves on one side, below a view of Manhattan painted many years ago, from memory, by my sister. My desk is a folding bridge table that once belonged to her. Before me the electric typewriter, though somewhat precariously supported, hums soothingly, and from the window behind me comes the familiar drone of the old air conditioner, waging its lonely battle against the tropic night. Beyond it, in the darkness outside, the small night-noises are doubtless just as reassuring: wind in the palm trees, the mindless chant of crickets, the muffled chatter of a neighbor’s TV, an occasional car bound for the highway, shifting gears as it speeds past the house.…

House, in truth, may be too grand a word; the place is a green stucco bungalow just a single story tall, third in a row of nine set several hundred yards from the highway. Its only distinguishing features are the sundial in the front yard, brought here from my sister’s former home, and the flimsy little picket fence, now rather overgrown with weeds, which she erected despite the protests of neighbors.

It’s hardly the most romantic of settings, but under normal circumstances it might make an adequate background for meditations in the past tense. “I’m still here,” the writer says, adjusting to the tone. (I’ve even stuck the requisite pipe in my mouth, stuffed with a plug of latakia.) “It’s over now,” he says. “I’ve lived through it.”

A comforting premise, perhaps. Only, in this case, it doesn’t happen to be true. Whether the experience is really “over now” no one can say; and if, as I suspect, the final chapter has yet to be enacted, then the notion of my “living through it” will seem a pathetic conceit.

Yet I can’t say I find the thought of my own death particularly disturbing. I get so tired, sometimes, of this little room, with its cheap wicker furniture, the dull outdated books, the night pressing in from outside. … And of that sundial out there in the yard, with its idiotic message. “Grow old along with me.…”

I have done so, and my life seems hardly to have mattered in the scheme of things. Surely its end cannot matter much either.

Ah, Howard, you would have understood.

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