Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales by Orrin Grey

Author:Orrin Grey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Word Horde
Published: 2018-09-04T02:05:39+00:00

Author’s Notes: Tarot imagery makes its triumphant thematic return in “The Well and the Wheel,” a story that I originally wrote for Autumn Cthulhu, edited by Mike Davis, and one that probably started with the title. Looking back, I imagine that title probably came about because of Fritz Leiber’s story “The Hill and the Hole,” though I didn’t realize it at the time.

Haruspicate or Scry

Dr. Hartledge was my faculty advisor back in college, not to mention the university’s only professor of philosophy, tucked away in a tiny office taller than it was wide in the basement of Wolfram Hall. I met him in my philosophy of religion class freshmen year, back when I was still majoring in English, and he convinced me to double-major, which was convenient enough, since Wolfram Hall also housed the English department up on the third floor. He had a quotation from Bertrand Russell taped to his windowless office door, “From a scientific point of view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes.”

As one of only four students in the entire school majoring in either philosophy or religion—the sole religion professor, Dr. Mead, occupied a much more spacious office down the hall—I got a lot of individual attention. Mostly, Dr. Hartledge tried to talk me out of majoring in English in favor of focusing exclusively on philosophy. He had an anecdote that he liked to tell, about an English class he’d taken when he was in college, where he had written a story featuring a lengthy description of a pear. While workshopping the story the next day, the professor and the other students had praised highly his imagery, drawing parallels between the pear and the womb. “I didn’t mean any of that stuff,” Dr. Hartledge told me more than once. “I was just writing about a damn pear.”

During gap periods between classes I would clear the piles of books off the narrow wooden chair beside his desk and spend my time debating philosophical points with him, or, if he wasn’t in, reading books from his teetering shelves. He gave me a hardcover copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra and a battered old paperback of Four Quartets. Over time, he gradually came to replace the figure of my father, who had died when I was young and who had, in my memory, become little more than a stern black cloud “that took the form of a demon in my view.”

When I married Gavin during my senior year, I cemented Dr. Hartledge’s place as my substitute father by asking him to walk me down the aisle, which he consented to do, even though he didn’t much approve of weddings, seeing in them, “Little more than sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

He dressed much as he did when he was lecturing, though the suit he wore was darker and his bowtie more subdued. I would have asked for nothing different, and Gavin understood my attachment to the old professor, and deflected his family’s objections.

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