The houses were empty. The windows stared. Crows—not gigantic, but mighty big—strutted through run-to-seed front gardens, picking at seeds or any leftover bright thing. There were flowers, but they looked pallid and somehow wrong. Vines like clutching fingers crawled up the sides of slumped cottages. I passed a strangely askew building with crumbling limestone peering through what remained of the plaster facing. Swinging doors hung ajar, making the entrance look like a dead mouth. On the lintel above them was a stein, so faded that the painted beer inside looked like piss. Written above the stein in faded straggling maroon letters was the word BEWARE. Next to it was what had once probably been a store of some kind. A shatter of glass lay on the road in front. Mindful of the three-wheeler’s rubber tires, I gave the broken glass a wide berth.
A bit further on—there were buildings on both sides now, standing almost shoulder to shoulder but with dark little passages between—we passed through a stink so strong and sewerish that it made me gag and hold my breath. Radar didn’t like it either. She whined uneasily and stirred, making the three-wheeler rock a little. I’d been thinking about stopping for something to eat, but that stench changed my mind. It wasn’t decaying flesh, but it was something that had spoiled in some wholly—and perhaps unholy—way.
An herbage rank and wild, I thought, and that line brought back memories of Jenny Schuster. Sitting with her under a tree, the two of us leaning against the trunk in the dappled shade, her wearing the tattered old vest that was her trademark and holding a paperback book in her lap. It was called The Best of H.P. Lovecraft, and she was reading me a poem called “Fungi from Yuggoth.” I remembered how it began: The place was dark and dusty and half-lost in tangles of old alleys near the quays, and suddenly the reason why this place was freaking me out came into focus. I was still miles from Lilimar—what that refugee boy had called the haunted city—but even here things were wrong in ways I don’t think I could have consciously understood if not for Jenny, who introduced me to Lovecraft when both of us were sixth graders, too young and impressionable for such horrors.
Jenny and I became book buddies during my father’s last year of drinking and first year of sobriety. She was a girl friend, as opposed to girlfriend, which means something entirely different.
“I’ll never understand why you want to hang with her,” Bertie said once. I think he was jealous, but I think he was also honestly perplexed. “Do you, like, make out with her? Suck face? Swap spits?”
We did not and I told him so. I said she didn’t interest me in that way. Bertie smirked and said, “What other way is there?” I could have told him, but that would have perplexed him more than ever.
It was true that Jenny didn’t have what the Bird Man would have called “the kind of bod you want to explore.” At eleven or twelve most girls are showing the first faint curves, but Jenny was as flat as a board in front and straight all the way down. She had a rawboned face, mousy brown hair that was always in a tangle, and a storky way of walking. The other girls made fun of her, of course. She was never going to be a cheerleader or Homecoming Queen or star in a class play, and if she wanted such things—or the approval of the girls who mixed and matched and wore eyeshadow—she never showed it. I’m not sure she ever felt so much as an ounce of peer pressure. She didn’t dress goth—wore jumpers with that funky vest on top and carried a Han Solo lunchbox to school—but she had a goth mentality. She worshipped a punk band called the Dead Kennedys, could quote lines from Taxi Driver, and loved the stories and poems of H.P. Lovecraft.
She and I and HPL connected toward the end of my dark period, when I was still getting up to stupid shit with Bertie Bird. One day in sixth-grade English class the discussion turned to the works of R.L. Stine. I had read one of his books—Can You Keep a Secret?, it was called—and thought it was mondo stupid. I said so, then said I’d like to read something that was really scary instead of fake scary.
Jenny caught up with me after class. “Hey, Reade. Are you afraid of big words?”
I said I was not. I said if I couldn’t figure a word out from the story, I looked it up on my phone. That seemed to please her.
“Read this,” she said, and handed me a battered paperback held together with Scotch tape. “See if it scares you. Because it scared the living shit out of me.”
That book was The Call of Cthulhu, and the stories in it scared me plenty, especially one called “The Rats in the Walls.” There were also lots of big words to look up, like tenebrous and malodorous （which was the perfect word for what I smelled near that bar）。 We bonded over horror, possibly because we were the only sixth graders who were willing to wade—and gladly—through the thickets of Lovecraft’s prose. For over a year, until Jenny’s parents broke up and she moved to Des Moines with her mother, we read the stories and poems to each other aloud. We also saw a couple of movies made out of his stories, but they sucked. None of them got how big that guy’s imagination was. And how fucking dark.