As I pedaled my way toward the walled city of Lilimar, I realized this silent outer ring was too much like one of HPL’s dark fairy tales of Arkham and Dunwich. Put in the context of that and other tales of otherworldly terror （we moved on to Clark Ashton Smith, Henry Kuttner, and August Derleth）， I was able to understand what was so frightening and strangely disheartening about the empty streets and houses. To use one of Lovecraft’s favorite words, they were eldritch.
A stone bridge took us over a dead canal. Large rats prowled through garbage so ancient there was no telling what it had been before it became garbage. The canal’s slanting stone sides were streaked with blackish-brown crap—what Lovecraft would undoubtedly have called ordure. And the stink rising from the cracked black mud? He would have called it mephitic.
Those words came back to me. This place brought them back.
On the other side of the canal, the buildings crowded even closer together, the spaces between them not alleys or passages, but mere cracks a person would have to sidle through… and who knew what might be lurking in there, waiting for the sidler? These empty edifices overhung the street, seeming to bulge toward the trike and covering all but a zig-zag of white sky. I felt watched not just from those black and glassless windows, but by them, which was even worse. Something terrible had happened here, I was sure of it. Something monstrous and, yes, eldritch. The source of the gray might still be ahead, in the city, but it was strong even out here in these deserted environs.
Besides feeling watched, there was a crepitant sensation of being followed. Several times I snapped my head around, trying to catch someone or something （some frightful fiend） slipping along in our wake. I saw nothing but crows and the occasional rat, possibly headed back to its nesting place or colony in the shadows of that mud-floored canal.
Radar felt it, too. She growled several times, and once when I looked around, I saw her sitting up with her paws on the end of the wicker basket and looking back the way we had come.
Nothing, I thought. These narrow streets and tumbledown houses are deserted. You’ve just got the heebie-jeebies. Radar, too.
We came to another bridge over another desolate canal, and on one of its pillars I saw something that cheered me up—the initials AB, not quite covered by encrustations of sickly yellow-green moss. The crowded buildings had caused me to lose sight of the city wall for an hour or two, but on the bridge I could see it clearly, smooth and gray and at least forty feet high. In the center was a titanic gate crisscrossed with thick supports of what looked like cloudy green glass. The wall and gate were visible because most of the buildings between where I stood and the city wall had been reduced to rubble by what looked like a bombing attack. Some sort of cataclysm, anyway. A few charred chimneys stood up like pointing fingers, and a few buildings had been spared. One looked like a church. Another was a long building with wooden sides and a tin roof. In front of it was a wheelless red wagon engulfed in pale weeds.
I had heard the two bells signaling midday （chow-time for Hana, I thought） less than two hours ago, which meant I’d made much better time than Claudia had expected. There was plenty of daylight left, but I had no intention of approaching the gate today. I needed to rest and get my head on straight… if that were possible.
“I think we’re here,” I told Radar. “It’s not the Holiday Inn, but it’ll do.”
I pedaled past the abandoned wagon and up to the storage shed. There was a big roll-up door, its once jolly red faded to a sickly pink, and a smaller, man-sized door beside it. Chipped into the paint were the initials AB. Seeing them made me feel good, just as the ones on the bridge pillar had, but there was something else that made me feel even better: that sense of creeping doom had lifted. Maybe it was because the buildings were gone and I could feel space around me and see the sky again, but I don’t think that was all. That sense of what Lovecraft might have called ancient evil was gone. Later, not too long after the three evening bells, I discovered why.
3
The man-sized door wouldn’t open until I really put my shoulder into it, then burst open so suddenly I almost fell inside. Radar barked from her basket. The storage shed was gloomy and smelled stale, but not mephitic or odorous. Bulking in the gloom were two more trolleys, painted red and blue. They had undoubtedly been in the shed for years, but because they were out of the elements, the paint had stayed fresh and they looked almost cheerful. Poles jutted from their roofs, so I guessed at some time or other they must have run on overhead wires that provided current. If so, those wires were long gone. I had seen none on my journey. On the front of one, in old-fashioned letters, was the word SEAFRONT. Over the other, LILIMAR. There were stacks of ironbound wheels with thick wooden spokes and boxes of rusty tools. I also saw a line of torpedo-shaped lamps on a table that stood against the far wall.