The Nickronomicon

  THE NICKRONOMICON

  NICK MAMATAS

  Copyright © 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems — except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews — without permission in writing from its author.

  Published by Innsmouth Free Press

  Vancouver, BC Canada

  http://innsmouthfreepress.com

  ISBN paperback 978-1-927990-08-7

  ISBN ebook 978-1-927990-07-0

  Interior artwork:

  GMB Chomichuk

  with special thanks to Eric Schaller for use of the postcard from “Brattleboro Days.”

  Cover artwork:

  Oliver Wetter

  For Oliver.

  This is what I did before you were born.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: The Man Who Collected Mamatas

  Brattleboro Days, Yuggoth Nights

  And Then, And Then, And Then...

  The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft

  Wuji

  Mainevermontnewhampshiremass

  And Other Horrors

  Real People Slash

  Inky, Blinky, Pinky, Nyarlathotep

  Jitterbuggin’

  Hideous Interview with Brief Man

  Dead Media

  That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable

  On the Occasion of My Retirement

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION:

  THE MAN WHO COLLECTED MAMATAS

  By Orrin Grey

  OF COURSE I was already familiar with Nick before any of this started. I ran afoul of him for the first time back when I was just starting out as a writer, when he was still nothing more to me than an acerbic presence on the HWA message boards. We were both involved in some kerfluffle about pay rates and I remember him taking me to school pretty thoroughly.

  We didn’t meet in person until years later, at the World Horror Convention in Austin, and then later yet at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, where we debated the relative merits (me) or lack thereof (him) of John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. By then, I knew him as much more than a legendary Internet contrarian. I knew him as an unyielding critic, a discriminating editor, and an inventive writer. I’d gotten scathing and insightful rejection letters from him when he was still editing Clarkesworld, and I’d bought one of his stories for Fungi. But we’d never exactly become fast friends, which is why I was so surprised to receive the letter.

  It didn’t come in a manila envelope, as it would have if I had been writing the story, but in one of those big, white, fabric jobs that they sell at the post office, the ones that are impossible to open. It looked like it had maybe been dropped in the mud a few times, or left out in the rain, and there were rust-colored stains that could have been dried blood or old take-out food. There was a return address scribbled in blue ball-point in the corner, but no name, and the postage was made with a mosaic of old stamps from before the latest price hike.

  Inside was a massive sheaf of photocopied pages, all of them crawling with the same handwriting that had addressed the envelope. The pages were wavy from water damage and none of them appeared to be in any kind of order, or helpfully demarcated with page numbers, so it took me some time to figure out what I was looking at.

  The answer, of course, dear reader, is the book that you’re holding in your hands right now. Or rather, some mad, exploded version of it. The pages photocopied from the pages of the books in which the tales originally appeared, or from printouts of websites, or, in some cases, from what appeared to be manuscript originals. All of them from Nick’s various Lovecraftian stories.

  My first thought was of some kind of viral marketing campaign, though I couldn’t figure out why I’d been the target. I knew that Silvia was putting a book like this together and so, I gave her a call, but she said, pretty convincingly, that she had no idea what it was. So, I sent Nick a Facebook message asking him about it and he said that it was probably from some crank, not to worry about it. Nick, of course, is something of an Internet celebrity in certain circles, so he’s had lots of genuine experience with weirdos over the years. This was my first and I had trouble letting it go.

  I pored over the documents into the night, reading and re-reading the stories, trying to decipher the notes that accompanied them. They ranged from underlining odd words — including a sentence in which “is” was the only word underlined — to extensive rambles about doubtful scientific and social theories. Several times, a passage had been circled and then the word, “Real?” written after it, always with a question mark, just like that.

  Much attention was given to the ways in which the stories engaged with and interrogated Lovecraft’s own tales. Next to both “Jitterbuggin’” and “Brattleboro Days, Yuggoth Nights,” the unknown notator had written, “Where did he get these letters?” in a hand so fierce that it nearly tore through the paper.

  The stories that received the greatest scrutiny were those in which Nick himself was a character and those that focused — as many of them did — on thought transference and body-swapping, whether the brain canisters of the Mi-Go or the rugose cones of the Great Race projecting their minds hither and yon through history and the future. Many of the notes accompanying these stories were written in such haste, and packed so tightly, that they became unintelligible. “Yes, but how to overcome [illegible],” “Encountered only swirling clouds of [redacted],” and so on.

  The return address on the envelope was just across the state line, into the Missouri side of the metro area. According to Google maps, it would take me less than two hours to drive there and so, when I had failed to make heads or tails of the document itself, that’s exactly what I did, taking the envelope with me, but leaving the pages behind.

  The drive took me north of the river, to some low rent apartments in a building that looked like it might once have been a motel, perched on a gravel ridge from which the Kansas City skyline was just visible. The return address had been for an apartment #30, written -30- like the end of an old newspaper story. I wish I could say I was surprised to find the door unlatched when I arrived.

  The room beyond was empty, at least of human habitation, though it looked exactly like you’d imagine the room of a conspiracy theorist in the direct-to-video serial killer movie that this was rapidly becoming. There was a computer leaking dull, bluish light and a TV old enough to still display static. Cheap particleboard shelves and a desk, all piled high with books and papers. Copies of Nick’s books and all the anthologies that he’d ever been in or edited, stacked alongside plastic freezer bags containing mundane items — bookmarks, convention souvenir programs, napkins, even a shoe — each one of them marked in careful Sharpie: “Nick Mamatas,” followed by a location and a date.

  On the desk, amidst the jumble of other stuff, was one of those big day planner calendars, every day filled with minute handwriting detailing “experiments” and “studies,” the nature of which remained impossible to intuit from the scribblings. The notes stopped on the same day that the envelope was postmarked to me, which had one sentence written on it, in thick, red permanent marker: “I have found the way inside.”

  In the upper right-hand corner of the wall that separated the bedroom from the rest of the tiny apartment, I found a miniature door, with a knob and everything, like Alice in Wonderland or Being John Malkovich. A stepladder had been set up below, to provide access to the door. It opened onto a long, tiny hallway that couldn’t have been there. It would have run right through the middle of the bedroom at about head height, over the tops of the unmade bed, empty Chinese take-out boxes with t
he little red dragons on the sides and piles of discarded black T-shirts.

  The door was just big enough that I could have crawled inside, but I opted not to. Instead, I drove back home, stuffed the documents back into the envelope, and threw the whole thing into a dumpster out behind the Target on the other side of the highway. I told Silvia about what had happened and she said it would make a good introduction for the collection, so here it is.

  I’ve been trying to keep an eye on Nick ever since and I haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. But if you spot any unusual behaviors — liking mainstream movies, letting fallacious arguments slide, not trying to get you to buy his books — well, you’ve been warned.

  BRATTLEBORO DAYS, YUGGOTH NIGHTS

  I SPENT ABOUT eighteen months in Brattleboro, Vermont in the middle of the last decade. I learned a lot of things, mostly about myself. For one thing, Brattleboro is a great small town. For another, I dislike small towns, even the ones with more bookstores than traffic lights. But I did love the bookstores, especially a used paperback house called Baskets Bookstore/Paperback Palace. Huge horror and romance sections—Sherwood, the owner, laughed when I christened the romance section “The Pink Bomb.

  Most paperbacks were cheap enough to be purchasable by the basket, which was perfect for the long winter nights, but some of the items for sale were quite a bit rarer. One day, he handed me a postcard sent between H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur H. Goodenough, an amateur press enthusiast living near Brattleboro. Goodenough isn’t talked about much today, but Brattleboro is still full of Goodenough—there’s a road named for the family (or was the family named for the road?), a trash removal firm, you name it.

  Lovecraft was acquainted with Goodenough, and Lovecraft’s visits to Goodenough in Vermont in 1927 and 1928 are the basis of his wonderful novelette “The Whisperer in Darkness.” After the story was published in Weird Tales, Goodenough sent Lovecraft a congratulatory card and also asked the author a couple of questions. Rather than responding with a card or letter of his own, Lovecraft wrote the answers in a tiny hand and then apparently gave the card to Vrest Orton—a bookman and eventual founder of The Vermont County Store—who returned the card to Goodenough personally during a trip to the Green Mountain State. Then Goodenough sent the card back to Lovecraft again, with follow-up questions written in a nearly microscopic hand. I suppose he knew the local postmaster and was able to get the card back into the mail system without a problem. Amazingly, Lovecraft managed to fit the answers to the questions on the postcard in an even smaller hand. Sherwood told me that he’d guessed that Lovecraft used a magnifying glass and a sewing needle dipped in ink. Here’s an odd thing; Sherwood had found the postcard at an estate sale. It had been protected from the elements because it had been used as a bookmark in a 1935 number of The Revelator and that number was a special issue dedicated to the “gothic tales” of Isak Dinesen.

  I bought the card and kept it with me for years—I moved to Boston and then to California. Only recently have I been able to spare the time to closely examine and transcribe the postcard. It took a few weeks. Lovecraft’s handwriting was difficult to read in the best of times, as I learned in 2007 when writer Brian Evenson took me and my friend Geoffrey Goodwin to the library at Brown University to check out some of Lovecraft’s papers. If anything, Goodenough’s penmanship is even worse, especially in the last unanswered round of questions. There are a few ink splatters on the postcard as well, but only one seems purposeful, as I make note of below. I took the card to work, and abused my photocopy and scanner privileges to blow up sections of the card, then turn them into a series of PDFs. I then zoomed in on the PDFs as much as I could, to turn the tiny letters into great abstract shapes, to better see what we would call “kerning” if the text had been typset. To decipher this postcard, I not only had to read between the lines, as it were, but I had to make sure I was properly reading between the letters.

  My friend Raphael is Google’s resident font expert and I showed him the PDFs. Raph’s PhD thesis is on imaging and halftoning over at the University of California at Berkeley. He was able to use his research to cobble together a program to “draw” my blow-ups in a way that made the letters more legible. It was still a game of refrigerator poetry for a while, as the letters, words, and sentences the computer spit out barely made sense. Only after reading S.T. Joshi’s two-volume biography of Lovecraft was I finally confident in my deciphering of the card.

  We already know a lot of Lovecraft’s life and beliefs, which is a great part of why all of the many short stories in which Lovecraft is a character and the theme of the story is “Everything Lovecraft wrote about was real! Real!” are so tedious. He was a philosophical materialist and a metaphysical skeptic, so of course there will be no secret correspondence, no occult messages, in the transcription below. But the postcard is interesting, and illuminating, and strange, in its own way. —Nick Mamatas

  HPL—

  Received latest WT number, enjoyed “Whisperer.” Questions, if you don’t mind.

  1. Who was the man in the chair? A Mi-Go in disguise or Nyarlathotep himself?

  Dear Goodenough. I suppose it would not be “good enough” simply for the waxen hands and face to be a disguise. They had to be a portent, a sign of a terror as well.

  Terror to what end? I suppose I am confused as to why the Mi-Go would allow Wilmarth to escape. Wasn’t the charade designed to lure him in to their clutches, and to bring his researches with him so that they might seize and destroy them, as well?

  Wilmarth is allowed to escape in order to better spread the terror—as a warning to humanity as to what awaits them beyond the inky black clouds of space & in the ghost-haunted woods of New England. It is important to the Mi-Go that Wilmarth actually spread the word of their coming.

  But why is that?

  [Lovecraft doesn’t respond. Presumably, the card was not sent back to him, as the third “layer” of questions goes entirely unanswered.]

  2. Fascinating depiction of the brain canisters, and the implications of same are both frightening and awesome. Genesis of same?

  It’s a laugh, but—a Dictaphone cylinder. Ol’ Grandpa Theobald was trying to find some gainful employment, though I can barely stand to type up my own fictions, much less the commercial communications of others. If a device can record sound waves and thus, a semblance of consciousness, why not a device that, when encapsulating the brain, can record brain waves and thus, actual consciousness? A few hours with the mechanism & I would have flung it to Pluto if I could have.

  Work! Is Mr. Wright not treating you “right”? Surely, you’re a “professional” now that you’ve left behind the amateur press and can draw an income from your work.

  Oh, there is next to no money in the pulps, not unless one is truly ready & able to “hack it out” and write purely commercial material for the Western pulps, the sports pulps, & even—oh, dear—the romance & confessions magazines. It’s canned beans & one loaf of bread, pre-sliced, per week for me.

  It is marvelous to live in Vermont, where the world of commerce and capital is still held at arm’s length. You remember your time here—no electrical utilities on the farm, physical work out in the verdant fields, and social life based on fellow-feeling rather than annual income. What is your attraction to city life?

  [Again, no answer. This question reads almost as a dig. Surely, Goodenough knew that Lovecraft loathed cities, with the exception of Providence, Rhode Island. Lovecraft’s 1927 visit to Vermont came on the heels of his return to New England after escaping the racially diverse and economically cratered neighborhood of Red Hook in Brooklyn NY. It is hard to imagine Lovecraft not confiding his fears and frustrations with the urban life in Goodenough. Perhaps Goodenough was more progressive than Lovecraft and wanted to needle him a bit. Incidentally, I’ve been to Red Hook many times, as my father works there as a longshoreman. By my sights, gentrification is just another form of ruination, rather than its negation, but Lovecraft would fit right in these days—he
was a cult writer who dressed funny and adopted many odd affectations, after all.]

  3. What was most interesting about the tale was the integration and interweaving of the supernatural and the superscientific. Do you see science and supernature as one and the same?

  No, there is nothing that cannot be ultimately explicated & understood via the use of scientific analysis. It is the limitations of our brains—so large-seeming in those cozy alien cannisters, but so minute swimming in this vast black universe—that all-but-require an author to explore the supernatural. It’s supremely ironic that the natural world is too enormous and too fearful for the human mind to properly correlate all its contents & so, we appeal to the supposedly inexplicable supernatural world to explicate the ultimately apprehendable natural world.

  So, is it that the Mi-Go, with their superior minds, have truly apprehended the natural world and thus appear to engage in supernatural ritual only from the mental perspective of Wilmarth? Or do you mean to say that the universe is proof against even the comprehension of the Mi-Go, so that they, too, must make an appeal to the supernatural, at least so far as is required to get Akeley’s cooperation for his interplanetary journey?

  Both are delightful possibilities & it would be a shame for me to simply record my own thoughts on the subject, as if your own were supernumerary. Also, I am surely challenging both your eyes and my own hand with my itsy-bitsy microminiature script as it stands. The Mi-Go are greater beings than we, but then again, who ain’t? But among the bestiary of Yog-Sothory, they aren’t nearly the greatest or most profound of beings. I suppose the Mi-Go are rather like us. As we might pin butterflies to a mounting board or attempt communication with a bestial tribe of [Here, the work is redacted by a blot of ink spilled onto the card and the coloring suggests that it is from Goodenough’s pen, not Lovecraft’s] from darkest Africa, they seek to learn about us through a variety of means.