The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

John Langan is the author of three collections of short fiction: Sefira and Other Betrayals, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (both from Hippocampus), and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime). He has written a novel, House of Windows (Night Shade), and with Paul Tremblay, co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (Prime). He lives in upstate New York with his wife and younger son.

For Langan, one of the key elements of Lovecraft’s stories is the forbidden text. “To be exposed to this text is to have your eyes opened to another world, one whose intersection with ours leaves your perspective forever changed, generally for the worse. I suppose ‘The Necronomicon’ is the best-known example of this, but there are other stories — ‘Pickman’s Model,’ ‘The Music of Eric Zann’ — where another means of expression is the source of revelation. We’ve all had the experience of the tune that will not leave us alone. What, I wondered, if there was more to it than that?”

Outside the House, Watching for the Crows

Dear Sam,

I know: who writes a letter, anymore?

I suppose you’re used to the mail as a conduit for care packages from your mom and Steve, or Liz and me, but if you’re anticipating any written communication from us, you’ll check your email, or your Facebook account, or even Twitter. I thought about sending this as an email. Actually, I did more than think about it. In the “Drafts” folder on my laptop, there are a couple of paragraphs I obsessed over for several hours after our last conversation, then for several more hours the following night, before I decided it would be better to sit down at my desk with a pad of legal paper, an extra-fine Precise V5 (black), and compose a letter to you. (For reasons you’ll understand later, the social media options never were.) This is the way I plan out a case, spread all my notes around me and arrange the facts they relate into a coherent structure.

I don’t have any notes, now. What I have is your question, “What’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to you — I mean, the weirdest?” which (I admit) I speculated might have been prompted by your experimentation with substances I probably don’t want to know about. Yet the answer that instantly occurred to me seems to come directly from such an experience. To be honest, I’m almost embarrassed to tell it to you. For one thing, it’s so extravagant you may suspect I’ve finally started the novel I’ve been threatening. For another, it doesn’t show me in the best light, and while I know you’ve been aware of my clay feet for a long time, I’m reluctant to call attention to them. At the same time, there’s a part of me that’s been desperate to relate this story to someone since it happened. I thought I had long since learned to control that urge, to suppress it, but your question threw open the doors and let it loose. By writing this, I suppose, I’m giving in to my need to confess; although I’m doing so in such fashion that I still have the option to delete it once I’m finished.

So: it begins with the answer to your question: at the beginning of the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, I attended a concert by a band called The Subterraneans at The Last Chance, which was a club in what I guess would have been called downtown Poughkeepsie. There weren’t many other people present. Aside from me and the friend I’d met there, maybe two dozen bodies filled the space in front of the stage. At the beginning of the show, I had positioned myself toward the rear of the open area. About halfway through the band’s set, in the midst of a keyboard solo that went on and on, I felt a breeze tickle the back of my neck. I glanced behind me, and saw the section of the club there, under the balcony, had changed. It was completely dark, except for a strip in the middle opening into a narrow alley right through what had been the club’s bar. I was not hallucinating — at least, I hadn’t ingested anything that would have allowed this to be a possibility. The breeze blew out of the alley against my face, carrying with it the smell of the ocean, brine and baked seaweed. I looked away, but the odor persisted. When I turned around, the alley was still there. I took a step toward it. Around me, the keyboard, sounding like a manic pipe organ, continued its solo. Bright moonlight picked out scraps of paper skittering across the alley’s cobblestones. At the far end of the passage, a group of tall figures stood in silhouette. I advanced another step. I didn’t like the way the moonlight slid over those tall shapes, but this didn’t stop me from continuing in their direction. I was wondering why none of the rest of the audience was noticing this when Jude, the friend I’d met here, shoved past me and walked right up to the verge of the alley, where he stopped — waiting, I realized, for me to join him.

There isn’t a great deal more — though there is something — but what I’ve related is incomplete, devoid of the context that brought me to that moment. If I’m being frank, then I have to admit, I’m not certain how much those details explain the events of that night. But it feels wrong to relate this portion of the narrative without what came before. I need to back up, to an aging manila envelope I’ve kept for twenty-five years, through moves from apartments to rental houses to my own house. It contains an audiocassette tape, a ticket stub, and a Polaroid faded almost beyond visibility. The tape has been unplayable since it unspooled in my car stereo and became so hopelessly entangled in the deck’s mechanisms that I had to snap it in several places to extract it. Although I spent I can’t tell you how many hours attempting to repair it, smoothing its creases, gluing its ends together, winding it back onto its wheels, it was too far gone. Nor could I replace it, since it was a copy of a bootleg recording of which, as far as I know, there was only one original. (I’m not even sure about that, since I never saw the tape it was copied from.) And yes, I’ve searched online for it, and no luck. When it still played, the tape contained fifty-nine minutes of the band I mentioned, The Subterraneans, performing a live show at The Last Chance. The ticket stub is for another concert by the same band at the same place on 21 June 1986.

The Polaroid is not a picture of the band. It’s of a group of people I spent Friday and Saturday nights hanging out with during the spring of my junior year of high school. Even with the damage two and half decades have done to it, I can identify everyone in the photo; though my memory supplements details that have deteriorated beyond recognition. Were you to look at it, I imagine you’d see a collection of pale ovals like a talented child’s approximation of faces, each one ornamented with a tag screaming “Eighties!” Long hair hair-sprayed into exaggerated pompadours in the case of the guys; short hair spiked and/or dyed purple in the case of the girls. Short leather and denim jackets festooned with buttons displaying the names of bands, the anarchist “A,” slogans like “Sticks and stone may break my bones, but whips and chains excite me.” Jeans and Doc Martens, or ankle-length skirts and Keds, or leather miniskirts and fishnet stockings with Docs or Keds. Clunky jewelry. It was Punk meets New Wave meets Proto-Goth.

No, I didn’t dress like that. However much I may have wanted to, I was far too self-conscious, too much of a conformist, to abandon my Polo shirt, jeans, and Converse, not to mention, my blue-and-yellow varsity jacket, an article of clothing I’d worn in all but the hottest or coldest weather since lettering in spring track my sophomore year. My clothes didn’t exactly make me fit in at school — my shirt and jeans were whatever brands were on sale at Marshalls or Kmart — but they didn’t make me stand out. They were like a kind of low-grade camouflage. The jacket drew a few startled looks from the self-identified jocks and their girlfriends; that was all. It might have made me a little less visible as a target for ridicule, which was about as much as I hoped for.

So if I was so obsessed with invisibility, why did I spend my weekend nights in the company of people whose clothes, hair, everything drew all eyes in their direction, right? To start with, there was a girl. Her name was Lorrie Carter. She was my date for the junior prom. When I asked her to go with me, it was as a friend, because she cocked her head to the right, narrowed her eyes, and said, “As boyfriend–girlfriend, or as friends?” and I said, “As friends,” the tone of my voice implying, “Of course.” Lorrie was attractive. I would have been happy to invite her as boyfriend–girlfriend, but I was reasonably sure she was seeing someone who wasn’t a student at Mount Carmel, and I was desperate for a prom date. To be honest, even had I not suspected she was dating, I would have given the same answer. Unlike you, by the ripe old age of sixteen, I had yet to have a girlfriend. I hadn’t even kissed a girl. During the games of spin-the-bottle I’d taken part in at the couple of sweet-sixteens I’d been to, the neck of the bottle never seemed to point exactly at me; instead, the guys to either side of me saw their nights improve. Too much information, I suppose. The point is, as far as girls went, my self-confidence was nil.

But Lorrie agreed to go to the prom with me, and about two weeks before the event, she invited me to join her and some of her friends for Chinese food on a Friday night after I was done with work. (I had a part-time job at a Waldenbooks, which I’m not even sure exist, anymore, in a mall that I know doesn’t exist, anymore.) Your grandparents were only too happy to give their permission. Until I turned sixteen, they strongly discouraged me from dating anyone. Once my birthday passed, however, they began to inquire and even nag about my romantic prospects. They had looked dubious at my description of my prom date as a friend. For me to be meeting her for a meal was more in keeping with their expectations.

If they’d been there for the actual meal, though, any comfort they felt would have evaporated. I met Lorrie and her friends in the main parking lot of Dutchess Community College, whose location I knew but to which I’d been only once, the time I accompanied Uncle Matt to the County Science Fair there. The parking lot is at the foot of the hill on which the campus sits. I remember being surprised at the lights still shining in the windows of the college buildings, the number of cars in the parking lot at nine forty-five on a Friday night. Lorrie and the quartet of friends with her had already picked up their order of Chinese and were passing the open white containers back and forth, some using the chopsticks the restaurant had provided, others opting for plastic forks. Lorrie had the door to her old Saab open and was perched on the edge of the driver’s seat, legs extended, ankles crossed. To her left, a tall guy whose white-blond hair rose above his head in a rooster’s comb leaned against the car, while the remaining guy and pair of girls sat in a half-circle on the blacktop in front of Lorrie.

At the sight of me, sporting the ubiquitous varsity jacket over my shirt-and-tie work clothes, a collective tense stiffened the group, until Lorrie’s face lit with recognition and she proclaimed, “This is my friend, Michael. He’s my prom date,” and everyone relaxed. One of the girls sitting on the ground held up a carton of food. I took it and the chopsticks Lorrie handed to me. I hadn’t seen chopsticks outside Sunday afternoon kung-fu movies on channel 9, but I slid them from their paper wrapper, snapped them apart, and gave it my best try. The container I’d taken was full of large slices of mushroom and green pepper floating in a spicy blue-gray sauce that numbed and stung my tongue at the same time. Mushrooms weren’t something your grandmother served on a regular basis, by which I mean ever, and I didn’t like the way these ones squirmed in my mouth. I ate enough not to be rude, then exchanged the carton with the sitting guy for one full of fried rice, whose taste I greatly preferred; although I spilled more of it than I ate. I hadn’t known to bring anything to drink with me, but no one else had a beverage, either, so I guessed it was okay.

It was a strange night — the hour and a half of it I spent with Lorrie and her friends before I had to speed home to miss my curfew by only a little. I guess it’s always a bit awkward when you meet a new group of people, but the few times this had happened to me previously, it hadn’t taken long for me to flip through my list of general high-school-related topics and find one that would allow us to pass the time pleasantly if blandly enough. Where do you go to school? How is it? Really? Or, You listening to anything good? Bryan Adams? Yeah, I love the video for his song, “Heat of the Night.” (Don’t you laugh at Bryan Adams.) These guys, though — it was like talking with people who spoke, not another language, but a dialect so profoundly removed from your daily speech, you could pick out only every third or fourth word if you were lucky. School? With the exception of Lorrie, everyone there went to a different private school I’d heard of but otherwise knew nothing about: Heartwood Academy, Most Holy Temple, Poughkeepsie Progressive School, George Rogers; although, from their conversation, it wasn’t clear how much any of them knew about their individual schools, since their days apparently consisted of skipping class, in-house suspension, and blowing off school altogether. If I tell you how shocked I was to hear people comparing notes on the best way to forge a hall pass, I realize how naïve, how sheltered that will make me sound, but I was both of those things. I might have thought about missing Calculus, but fear of being caught — and punished — by your grandfather kept the thought from becoming action. Parents, though, and any reprisals they might threaten, were of scant concern. Even Lorrie talked with cheerful disregard of calling her mother an uptight bitch for asking her why there were so many absences listed on her last report card.

As for music . . . I liked to think of my tastes as fairly eclectic, extending from Michael Jackson to Prince to Bruce Springsteen to Madonna (although I wouldn’t admit the last one), plus a few bands who were mildly off the beaten track: INXS, U₂, Talking Heads. (While I’m sure my examples will seem painfully parochial to someone of your generation, I would make the case that, say, Bad, Sign o’ the Times, Tunnel of Love, and True Blue cover a much larger musical terrain than you might grant them credit for.) In fact, when talk turned from school to records, I felt a brief flare of hope that I would be able to break what had become a long and uncomfortable silence. However, except for a nod when the guy with the rooster-comb — whose name was Jude — asked if I knew INXS’s Listen Like Thieves, I remained outside the discussion. Bauhaus, Love and Rockets, Dead Can Dance, Pixies, Throwing Muses: I had never heard of these bands, let alone anything they’d done. Other bands — Depeche Mode, The Psychedelic Furs, Siouxsie and the Banshees — I recognized as names attached to songs I’d listened to on the radio, none of which had impressed me one way or the other. You know how it is when you’re talking to your friends about a shared passion. You speak in shorthand. While perfectly intelligible to you, it leaves anyone unfamiliar with it with the sensation of listening to a radio broadcast clouded by static, so that only the occasional phrase or sentence comes clear. It’s the type of thing for which lawyers are constantly criticized, speaking “legalese,” but really, there are a multitude of examples.

Two events redeemed the night. When a check of my watch showed it was time to go, Lorrie walked me to my car. After I thanked her for inviting me, I’d had a good time, her friends were cool, she said, “I’ve been thinking about the prom.”

At those words, my stomach lurched. She was about to announce her decision not to go with me, after all. Tonight had been a test and I’d flunked it with flying colors. I wondered if I’d be able to find another date in time.

Lorrie said, “Remember when I asked you if we were going as boyfriend-girlfriend, or as friends, and you said, ‘Friends?’”

I nodded. “Sure.” She was going with her boyfriend. Was it Jude? The other guy?

“I think we should go as boyfriend-girlfriend.”

For a moment, I literally did not understand what I had heard. Then, when the meaning caught up with the words that had delivered it, I said, “Really?” I like to think my voice wasn’t too high-pitched and incredulous.

“Uh huh,” Lorrie said, and stepped forward, raised up on her tip-toes, and kissed me on the lips. It was brief, almost chaste. Before I could respond, she said, “See you Monday,” and was walking away. Fully twenty-five years, a quarter century, have passed since that night in March, and the soft give of Lorrie Carter’s lips is as vivid to me as if she had pressed them to mine this minute past.

All right, all right: once again, too much information. The other thing that saved the occasion occurred as I was nodding to everyone, saying my goodbyes. Jude stepped away from his position on Lorrie’s car, his right hand held out to me. At first, I thought he was offering to shake my hand, which wasn’t something my friends and I did, but when in the DCCC parking lot . . . until I noticed the black plastic cassette tape in his fingers. “Here,” he said as I took it, “if you like Listen Like Thieves, you might get this.”

“Thanks,” I said, and slipped it into my jacket pocket. There it stayed until the following morning, when I was searching for my car keys. Do you know, I never asked Jude why he gave the tape to me? There were several moments later on when I could have, but the question always seemed to slip my mind until it was too late. And then it was.

The fact I’d been handed the cassette in the first place had vacated my thoughts, pushed out by the memory of my first kiss from my first girlfriend. There have been a lot of happy events in my life since then: your birth, my wedding to Liz, completing law school, opening my own practice — those and plenty more, but I’m not sure any of them made me happy in exactly the same way I was after that kiss. My first impulse is to compare the emotion I experienced during the drive home that night to what I felt as a child at some unexpected pleasure, say, your grandfather surprising Uncle Matt and me with a trip to the Roosevelt to see Star Wars. But that’s not it. The smell of Lorrie’s perfume, floral (lilacs, I think) without being overpowering; the faint taste of the mushroom and pepper dish she left on my lips; the momentary press of her body against mine — obviously, none of this is anything like sitting in a darkened theater as spaceships arc across a starscape, exchanging dashes of red and green fire. What is the same is the quality of the happiness which infused each occasion, a certain . . . the word that occurs to me is “purity,” which is accurate enough for me to set it down; although further reflection suggests “uncomplicated” wouldn’t be a bad choice, either.

By the trip to work the next day, my emotion had moderated, though the early sunlight that made me squint and flip down the visor seemed more intense, more charged with raw, unprocessed beauty, than I’d noticed before. I’d brought the tape with me. There was writing on it, a single word I couldn’t decipher beyond the extravagant “S” from which it unspooled. The word was repeated on the other side, no more legibly. I slotted the cassette into the tape deck, adjusted the volume, and waited.

Considering how important the tape was to become to me, you’d think my first listen to it would have been an experience to rival Lorrie’s kiss. It wasn’t. The quality of the recoding wasn’t particularly good. A low-level hiss underlay a fuzzy collection of longish songs built around an electric guitar whose heavy reverb kept getting in its own way, keyboards whose pipe organ tones clashed with the guitar, and a singer whose nasal whine frequently disappeared into the competing noise. Neither bass nor drums were especially clear, and what was audible through the din sounded basic, uninspired. Had I been told this was a garage band playing in an actual garage, I would have accepted the description without question. I left the tape on for the twenty minutes or so of the drive to the mall, not so much because I thought the music would improve — hope springs eternal, yes, but there are some albums, just as there are some books, movies, TV shows, that you know early on will not change. They may become more of what they already are, speed further and faster down the road they’re on, but they aren’t going to veer off it. I was more curious to see if I could deduce what had prompted Jude to pass this tape to me. Yes, he’d mentioned INXS, but this was nothing like Listen Like Thieves. That record was crisp, clear, the band’s assorted instruments working with one another and Michael Hutchence’s voice to construct each song. At least on a first listen-through — which I completed during the ride home from work that night and the drive back the following morning — I couldn’t hear any obvious connections. I wondered if the cassette was meant as a corrective to the more popular album, an example of the kind of music I should be listening to. I entertained the possibility it was some kind of joke; although if this were the case, it seemed unnecessarily obscure. Unless that was the point, to demonstrate to me that I was not part of the group. As far as explanations went, it fell pretty firmly under the paranoia column, but such is adolescent psychology.

When I started the tape a second time, on the way home Sunday afternoon, it was because I was no closer to understanding what I was supposed to take away from this music at its end than I had been at its beginning. To anyone in a similar situation, then or now, my counsel would have been, “Don’t worry about it,” but this was advice I myself was (and am) unable to accept. If someone tells me a work of art’s something special, I will stick with said piece of art until I: a) decide the person who recommended it was right, b) decide the person who recommended it was wrong, or c) decide I need more time with it. If something requires more time, I’ll take as much of it as I require, to the point of years. After my first listen to Jude’s tape, I was pretty close to option b), but enough doubt colored my impression for me to conclude another listen was in order. It didn’t hurt that the guy who’d handed it to me was a friend of my newly minted girlfriend.

However, the most my repeat play accomplished was to leave the cassette in the tape deck, resulting in a third and fourth exposure on the drive into school, the drive from school down Route 9 to work, and the drive home from work. Nothing clicked. There was no magic “Ah-Ha!” moment when understanding dawned on me. But by the time I was back at the beginning of the tape for run-through number five, a vague sense of what was so significant about the music on it had started to suggest itself to me.

That music. Once you accommodated yourself to the clash of the guitar and keyboard, and could concentrate on the melody they were fighting over, you realized the band’s songs were basically the kind of music that had filled the airwaves of 1950s radio, the bluegrass-inflected R&B gathering itself into rock n’ roll through the ministrations of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and of course Elvis Presley. In an odd way, The Subterraneans — it would be another couple of weeks until I deciphered their name — were doing something comparable to what a band like the Ramones was — only, where the Ramones were trying to refine the rock song down to its simplest, purest state, these guys were trying to widen it, start with those simple chord progressions, basic melodies, and throw open all the doors and windows. Had I known anything about jazz, then, I would have identified the parallel of starting with a straightforward progression of notes, stretching them into new configurations, and returning to the original arrangement. As it was, I just thought they were addicted to long, strange solos. The more used to the music I became, the more of its lyrics I was able to decode; although large patches of every song remained opaque to me. There were references to feeling like death, and to litter on the street, and to puddles of black water, and to walking around at two am. Someone named Jo-Jo lived in an apartment that was a great place to crash at. There were several mentions of standing outside the house, sometimes a church, and the words “in-between” seemed to find their way into every set of lyrics. At least once, the singer proclaimed, “You’ve got to watch out for the crows.”

Looking over what I’ve written, I realize I’ve failed almost completely to do justice to the music I listened to constantly, every time I was in the car, and soon when I was in my room — I dug out an old cassette recorder that had a single earplug for quiet listening which practically took up residence in my left ear. I’ve made The Subterraneans sound like a concept band, an exercise in performance art, and conveyed nothing of their immediacy, of the immanence in their songs, the overriding impression they gave that there was something they were on the verge of saying, a revelation they were on the cusp of delivering. I went to sleep with their music filling my ear, and their songs followed me into sleep, into dreams where I stood on the streets of a city I did not know while the wind chased paper bags and Styrofoam cups across the pavement.

The following Friday, Lorrie invited me to join her and her friends. If she hadn’t, I would have asked to. Of course I wanted to meet her outside of school, where our respective schedules permitted us to see one another in only a few classes, but I was eager to talk to Jude, as well, about the tape whose songs were playing in my head whether I was listening to them or not, which had become the soundtrack of my life — or, I’m not sure if this will make any sense, but it was as if my day’s activities had become an extended illustration of the music, a featurelength video for it.

The principle difference between this night and the previous Friday was I spent it sitting beside Lorrie on the hood of her car, my feet resting on the front bumper, hers crossed under her legs, so she had to lean against me to keep from sliding off. I wasn’t daring enough to put my arm around her, but I placed my hand on the hood behind her and pretended to support myself with it, when its actual purpose was to allow a maximum portion of me to come into contact with a maximum portion of her as unobtrusively as possible. An hour and half with a pretty girl pressed into me was more than sufficient compensation for the remainder of the night being a virtual repeat of the week before, from another carton of vegetables in a strange-tasting and spicy sauce to further conversation to which my contribution was minimal. In addition, Jude was not in attendance. I asked Lorrie about his absence while she walked me to my car. She shrugged and said, “He’s got a lot going on.” I wasn’t exactly disappointed, especially since the kiss I received at this departure was significantly longer and — more involved, I guess you might say. But when Lorrie suggested I might like to meet with her and her friends the next night, some small measure of what prompted me to say, “Sure, yeah,” was the prospect Jude would be present.

He wasn’t, and since the weekend after was the prom, I didn’t see any of Lorrie’s friends. I saw her, and the large house where she and her parents lived, and D’Artagnan, her standard poodle, and her parents, who were younger than mine and glowed with money, and the elaborate royal blue dress she wore. Your grandfather had rented an Oldsmobile to ferry us to the prom, held in the catering hall of the Villa Alighieri, an Italian restaurant. Later, he chauffeured us to an after-prom party being held at someone’s house out in Millbrook, and still later to retrieve us from the smoldering embers of the party and return us home. Lorrie and he hit it off, and the night went as well as these things do. The meal and music were adequate, the company at our table pleasant.

What I remember most about the prom is that The Subterraneans’ music colored it, too. In fact, were it not for my subsequent experiences at The Last Chance, I likely would have identified a moment at the dance as the weirdest thing that ever happened to me. It occurred while the DJ was playing the prom theme (for the record, Madonna’s “Crazy for You”). Lorrie and I were slow dancing, her head resting on my chest. Underneath the homogenized sentimentality of Madonna’s lyrics, The Subterraneans’ singer was declaring it was always Halloween, here. The space around the dance floor dimmed, as if the lighting there had been lowered almost completely. Where the tables and chairs had been, tall forms moved from left to right in a slow procession. I had the impression of heads like those of enormous birds, with sharp, curving beaks, and dark robes draped all the way to the floor. Then the light returned, and the figures were gone. What I had seen was weird with a capital W, but it also vanished so quickly I was able to blink a couple of times and put it out of my mind. The girl leaning against me, in her stockinged feet because she’d removed her uncomfortable shoes, swaying in time to the theme, facilitated this. For the remainder of the prom, the vision did not return, nor did it during the after-party events, when I was engaged in more pleasant pursuits. The night concluded with a goodbye kiss on the front step of Lorrie’s parents’ house, after which, your grandfather took me for breakfast at McDonald’s.

One month after the prom, Lorrie broke up with me. It was less traumatic than you might suppose. Although I had continued to join her and her friends at the DCCC parking lot for takeout Chinese on Fridays and Saturdays, school, sport, and work commitments kept me from seeing any more of her. Not to mention, one of the girls on the track team, a cute sophomore, had told me she thought I resembled the lead singer of the band, ABC, and he was cute. While I had never been quickest on the uptake when it came to such things (a fact to which your stepmother will attest), even my limited powers of perception could detect this new girl’s interest in me. So when Lorrie called to say, “It isn’t working,” I found it easier to sigh and agree than I might have otherwise. I was still welcome to hang out with her and her friends, Lorrie said, which I took as a formality but appreciated nonetheless. I said I might. After I hung up the phone, I was sad, and briefly angry, at things not working out between Lorrie and me, but I was also more philosophical, more mature about it than I believe I have been about the end of any subsequent relationship, which is a strange thing to realize.

Lorrie and I remained friendly, although I returned to the college parking lot only once to eat with her and her friends. As luck would have it, Jude was there as well, for the first time since the night he had handed me the tape of The Subterraneans. I wondered if he remembered passing me the cassette, but of course he did. Since I was no longer seated next to Lorrie, it was easier for him and me to lean our heads toward one another and talk. He didn’t ask me if I’d listened to the tape. He knew. He said, “Well? What do you think?”

“I think I can’t stop listening to that tape,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if it isn’t playing: I’m still hearing it, you know?”

Jude nodded. “Anything . . . else?”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you seen anything?”

“Have I . . . ?” But I had, the robed forms moving past the dance floor at the prom.

Jude caught it in my face. “You did,” he said. “What? What did you see? The Black Ocean? The City?”

“People,” I said. “I think they were people. They were tall — I mean, seven feet plus — and wearing these costumes, bird masks and long robes. At the prom,” I added.

“The Watch,” he said. “You saw members of the Goddamned Watch.”

“Is that good?”

“As long as they didn’t see you — they didn’t, did they?”

Did they? “No,” I said.

“Then you’re fine,” he said. “Holy shit. You know you’re the first person I’ve met who actually saw something? Amazing.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I’m sorry. I mean, I get that something important has happened — to me — but I don’t know what it is.”

“It’s the music. It thins what’s around you, lets you see beyond it.”

I had read and watched enough science fiction to think I understood what Jude was talking about. “You mean to another dimension?”

“Sure,” he said. “Dimension, plane, iteration, it’s all just a way of saying someplace else. Someplace more essential than all of this.” He waved his hand to take in the cars, the parking lot, the college, us.

“How— who are these guys? The Subterraneans? How did they do this?”

“I don’t know. There are rumors, but they’re pretty ridiculous. A lot of bands have messed around with occult material, usually as an occasion for some depraved sex. Fucking Jimmy Page and his sex magic. This is different. These guys are into some crazy mathematics, stuff that goes all the way back to Pythagoras and his followers. What they tried wasn’t a complete success. Most of the people I’ve handed the tape to played it once and ignored it. A few became obsessed with it. Like I said, though, you’re the first to see anything.”

“Have you?” I said. “You have, haven’t you?”

“Twice. Both times, I saw a city. It was huge, spread out along the shore of an ocean for as far as I could see. The buildings looked Greek, or Roman. A lot of them were in ruins, which made the place seem old, ancient. But there were people walking its streets, so I knew it wasn’t abandoned. The ocean was immense. Its water was black. Its waves were half as tall as some of the buildings.”

“Where is it?” I said. “Do you know what it’s called?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I spoke to a folklorist over at SUNY Huguenot. He’d heard of the city. He said it was called the Black City — also the Spindle. He thought it was another version of Hell. He was the one who told me about the Watch, the guys in the bird masks. Said you did not want to attract their attention.”

“Why not?”

“He didn’t spell it out. I’m guessing a fate worse than death.”

“Oh.”

“They’re coming here, you know.”

For a second, I thought Jude was referring to the Watch, then I understood he meant the band. “Here? Where?”

“They’re playing a show at The Last Chance. Late June, I forget the exact date.”

“Are you going to go?”

“Are you kidding? You have to come, too.”

“Me?”

“Look at the effect a recording of their material had on you. Imagine what hearing it live could do.”

“I don’t know.” To be honest, I was as worried by the prospect of what your grandparents would say as I was any further visions. Depending on their moods, they had a way of making a request to do something new sound as if it were a personal injury to them.

“You cannot be serious,” Jude said. “You’re standing on the verge of . . .” He threw up his hands.

“Of what?”

“Does it matter?” he said. “Really? Does it? Even if this place is a district in Hell, isn’t that more than you’re ever going to find, here?”

I was religious enough for his example to give me pause, but I understood and sympathized with the underlying sentiment. It was what I responded to in The Subterraneans’ music in the first place, in so much of the music I liked to listen to, the sense that there was more, to what was outside and to what was inside me. “Let me see,” I said.

As it turned out, your grandparents raised no objection to my attending the concert. They ran through the standard questions: Where was it? When was it? Who was I going with? Who was this band? All of which I answered to their satisfaction. Their biggest concern was that I understood I would still have to wake up for church the next morning. I said I did. Having cleared this hurdle, my principle dilemma was whether to invite Adrienne — the girl from the track team, with whom I’d been going out for a couple of weeks. On the one hand, I wasn’t sure what I might be exposing her to. On the other hand, she might be angry at not being invited to a concert with me. Yes, my priorities were not what they should have been. I decided to play the tape for her and let her decide for herself. The expression she made when the first note of the first song burst from my car’s speakers told me her decision before the song was done: this was not her kind of music. I could have insisted she listen to the remainder of the cassette, but I was relieved she hadn’t liked the band and didn’t press the issue. It meant I could attend the show with her consent, and without having to worry about her.

This left Jude and myself to be concerned about. Not only did The Subterraneans’ music continue to form the soundtrack to my life, to the extent that whatever was taking place around me seemed to occur less for its own sake and more as an illustration, however obscure, of the lyrics of the moment, but I experienced a second vision. It occurred while I was lying on my bed, reading for school (Waiting for Godot). The earplug was in my right ear, the cassette nearing its mid-point. Beyond the foot of the bed, where my desk was jammed against the wall, the air darkened, wavered, as if a sheet of black water was descending from the ceiling to the floor. I put down my book and sat up. A figure stepped forward, almost through the water. It was one of the Watch. This close, it was enormous, nearer eight feet than seven, wider than my narrow bed. The beak on the bird mask shone sharp as a scimitar; the glass eyes were black and empty. The mask left uncovered the figure’s mouth and jaw, white as fungus. Its body was hidden by a heavy cape covered with overlapping metal feathers, or maybe they were scales. A long moment passed, during which my heart did not beat, before the figure and its watery aperture faded from view. Once I could see my desk again, my heart began hammering so hard I was afraid I was going to vomit. Jude’s words, “As long as they didn’t see you,” sounded in my ears, temporarily drowning out The Subterraneans. What if the Watch saw you? What if one of its members stood at the foot of your bed and leveled the glass eyes of its mask at you? What did that mean?

Nothing good, obviously, something Jude confirmed when I called him. I asked him what the SUNY professor had said about the Watch. Not much, it seemed. According to him, the Watch dealt with invaders to the City. Don’t worry, Jude said, I was probably fine. I said I didn’t feel fine. “They’re trying to scare you,” he said.

“Well, they succeeded,” I said. “I’m thinking maybe we should give the show a miss.”

“Are you kidding?” he said. “We have to go.”

“Did you not just hear the story I told you?”

“What do you think is going to happen if you stay home?” Jude said. “Do you think everything’s going to go back to normal? You are inside the music now. We both are.”

“And what do you think is going to happen if we go?” I said. “If the music has us, then how will going to its source help us?”

“Listening to the tape started something,” Jude said. “It isn’t complete. That’s why we’re catching glimpses of the other place, instead of seeing it whole. If we’re in the presence of the actual music, it might finish the process.”

As far as logic went, Jude’s argument left a lot to be desired. But so did the entire situation. In the end, I decided to attend the concert, after all.

It may have occurred to you to wonder why I didn’t share any of this with my parents. As your mom and Steve, Liz and I have done with you, throughout my childhood and adolescence, your grandparents routinely assured me that I could always come to them, there was nothing I couldn’t tell them, no matter how bad. I think they meant it, too. The times I had taken them up on their advice, though, had gone less than swimmingly. When I struggled with math or science, your grandfather, who was something of a math prodigy, couldn’t understand how what was in front of me wasn’t perfectly clear, and had trouble finding the words to explain it to me. When I brought home a failing grade, my protests that I had tried my best were dismissed, because if I had tried my best, then I wouldn’t have failed. When I complained of being teased by other kids in school, my parents asked me why I was letting it bother me. From the distance of years — not to mention, the perspective I gained raising you and your little brother — I understand and appreciate that they were doing the best they could, as do most parents. At the time, however, it meant there was no serious chance of me approaching them about what was happening to me. What would I have said? I couldn’t stop listening to this tape? I was seeing tall men dressed as birds?

So after I signed out at work on Saturday, 21 June, I drove up Route 9 to Poughkeepsie and The Last Chance. The moon hung full and yellow in a violet sky. I knew the club from the concert calendar the DJs at the local rock station read off twice a day. It had achieved notoriety as the place The Police had played on one of their early US tours — it may have been the first — to an audience of half a dozen people. (There was a snowstorm that night, or so the story goes.) I hadn’t been to it, but this was because the bands and singers I wanted to see were playing the Knickerbocker Arena in Albany, or Madison Square Garden to the south. The club reminded me of my high school auditorium, a long, rectangular space overhung by a balcony for about half its length, with a curtained stage at the far end. There was a bar along the back wall, but the fluorescent green band around my wrist restricted me to overpriced Cokes. Underneath where the balcony ended, the floor dropped six inches. A few tables and chairs were positioned around this abbreviated ledge. By the time I arrived, they were occupied by couples in various states of fascination with one another. Maybe fifteen feet in front of the bar, the sound board was illuminated by its own set of lights. A skinny guy who didn’t look much older than I was stood holding a pair of headphones to his right ear while he slid a lever steadily up a slot in the board. Cigarette smoke clouded the air at the bar, where I stopped for a Coke and to survey the club. I was wearing my work clothes; though I had removed my tie; but I didn’t stick out as much as I had feared. What audience there was appeared slightly older, college age, and were dressed in jeans and casual shirts. It was easier than I’d anticipated to find Jude, who sighted me at the bar and came over to join me. He was wearing a torn Anarchy in the UK T-shirt, camouflage pants, and Doc Martens. His hair stood up like the crest of some tropical bird. I had missed the opening act, he said, but that was no loss. Some guy with long hair whose guitar strings kept breaking; already, Jude had forgotten his name. He guessed the band would be on in another forty-five minutes, maybe an hour.

We passed what was in fact an hour and a half making small talk. Much of it concerned Lorrie and the other people I’d hung out with in the college parking lot. It was gossip, really. Apparently, Lorrie was seeing a guy who’d been a senior at our school. I recognized his name. He’d been in the drama club. I didn’t know him, but Jude considered him an asshole. “She should’ve stuck with you,” he said. I thanked him, but told him the decision to break up had been mutual. This was a surprise to him. Yes, I said, I was seeing someone new, too, so really, everything had worked out all right. Despite the music playing in my head, everything seemed normal, mundane. We were a couple of friends out to listen to some live music, discussing our mutual friends. The weirdness that had enveloped me for so many weeks seemed far away, dream-like.

The appearance of The Subterraneans, themselves, bolstered my sense of the ordinary. There were four of them, drummer, keyboardist, guitarist, and lead singer, who strapped on an acoustic guitar which spent the part of the show I saw hanging at his side like a prop. The four of them wore black jeans and plain black T-shirts. Their hair was long, but not so much they couldn’t have worked most day jobs. The curtain parted, and they emerged from backstage nonchalantly, picking their way through the cables on the stage to their respective instruments. Without introduction, they started into their first song.

The cassette had given a fair impression of the band’s sound. What it had not conveyed was the intense focus with which they performed. In my car, on my bed, listening to the guitar and keyboard clashing with one another, I had imagined a group whose members were struggling for control of whatever they were playing, and I would have predicted a certain amount of tension, if not outright animosity, amongst them. (Think Oasis.) Everything The Subterraneans did, however, was deliberate and smooth, intentional. The antagonism between the pipe-organ keyboard and the surf-rock guitar, the way the singer’s voice overrode and was overridden by them, the drums’ steady, almost monotonous beat, all were precisely as they were supposed to be. The band finished their first song, and, before the audience had started applauding, slid into the next one. This was the way they acted, as if the club were empty and they were performing for themselves. Maybe they were annoyed at the low turnout for their show; though I had the impression that had the place been filled, they would have behaved in the same manner.

When the band took the stage, my internal soundtrack was about two-thirds of the way through their tape. By the opening notes of the second song, however, my interior music had synchronized with the concert. The sensation was strange, as if I were the margin where two versions of the same song by the same band converged. I kept to the rear of the space in front of the stage. Jude stationed himself at the stage’s foot. In such a confined area, the sound was overwhelming, deafening. As The Subterraneans progressed through their set list, the stage lights went from white to a deep blue that had the effect of rendering everything on stage fuzzy at the edges, as if it had slipped out of focus. At the same time, I seemed to hear the music in a way I previously hadn’t. The keyboard and guitar weren’t fighting; instead, the keyboard’s chords were creating a vast space off whose walls the guitar’s notes echoed. The drum buttressed the enormous structure, while the singer was the point around which the great architecture arranged itself. A feeling of the sacred — sublime, terrifying — swept through me.

This was the moment the breeze tickled the hairs on my neck, and I turned to witness the alleyway that had replaced the bar. It seems incredible to me that I should have walked toward such a thing, but I couldn’t come up with any other response to it. As my feet crossed the floor, I noted the tall forms gathered at the far end of the passage: members of the Watch, there to meet any trespass. Air moved over my face, filling my nostrils with the damp smell of the sea. My body felt curiously light.

Then Jude shouldered past me and strode to the edge of the worn cobblestones. There, he stopped and glanced over his shoulder to see if I was coming. I wanted to, but it was as if his contact with me had robbed me of my ability to move. Not to mention, the Watch had shifted into the alley proper, and there was something about the way they moved, a kind of liquid quality, as if they were ink rather than flesh, that filled my stomach with dread. I hesitated. Jude did not. He turned to the passage and crossed its threshold. I took one step, two, closer. The keyboard’s solo rang off the alley’s walls. Jude must have seen the black figures drawing nearer, but he did not alter his pace. The Watch allowed him to reach the halfway point of the alley — it may have been a border they had to observe — before they took him. One second, they were ten, fifteen yards from Jude; the next, they encircled him. It was like watching a group of snakes, of eels, slither around their prey. Jude looked from side to side, his eyes wide, his mouth moving. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, nor could I read his lips. The guitar echoed up the alleyway. The members of the Watch raised their cloaks; although it looked more as if their cloaks raised themselves. Their masks rippled, the beaks lengthening, the eyes melting into them. Jude lifted his hand, begging for more time, perhaps, asking them to hear whatever else it was he had to say. The Watch fell on him. His hand kept its position amidst the black swirling around the rest of him. I could swear I heard high, hysterical laughter, worse, it was Jude’s. I ran for the alley, but it was already gone.

Instead, I collided with one of the bouncers, who was first annoyed with my clumsiness, then panicked by my shouting about what had happened to my friend. Drugs, I’m sure he thought. He ejected me from the club, and told me to get lost before he called the cops. I did, because I couldn’t think of what else to do. I’m not sure how I made the drive home. The following morning, after rising for church with my family, I claimed a bad stomach and spent the day in bed. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t fall asleep for any length of time. The image of those tall figures lifting their cloaks, their masks flowing into blades like scythes, would not leave me. When I did sleep, I dreamed of crows, hunched around some poor, pale thing, their beaks poised to strike. I was horrified, by what I’d seen and was certain had happened to Jude, and by the prospect of his parents, or worse, the police, showing up at the front door and asking me what I knew about his disappearance. Alongside my horror, guilt gnawed at me. I wasn’t responsible for Jude’s fate, not directly, but I hadn’t done anything to stop it, had I? Probably a lawyer could argue the case for my innocence, but I knew better. I was complicit in what had befallen my friend.

Secretly, I wanted the cops to ring the doorbell. I wanted to confess my role in the events at The Last Chance and be punished. For all my disagreements with the Church over the years, I have always granted it the power of the sacrament of Confession, and the penance that accompanies the rite. It’s what the law provides, or can provide, on the secular side of things. No police appeared, however. If Jude’s parents knew he’d intended to meet me at the club, they chose not to follow up on it. I actually went to Confession the next Saturday, but after listening to an abbreviated version of what I’ve written here, the priest gave me a prolonged lecture on the perils of drug use. Had I attempted the same thing with your grandparents, the result would have been approximately the same.

I considered trying to find my way back to that alley; though I’m not sure what I thought I would find. Jude’s remains? Evidence he was still alive, held captive in some alien prison? Whatever I hoped for, the other world was closed off to me. In the days after the concert, I realized that The Subterraneans’ music was no longer playing its endless loop in my mind. When I listened to the cassette, the songs refused to stay in my memory. In the weeks to come, as the summer unfolded, I continued to play the tape, hoping the air in front of me would waver, and I would once again see the alleyway opening in front of me. It appeared Jude had been right, though. Whatever had been started by the recording of the band’s music had been completed by its live performance. Eventually, the week before my senior year was to begin, the cassette unspooled in my car’s tape deck, and was so badly damaged as to be unplayable, its songs lost to me.

For years afterward, every time I was in a record store, I kept my eyes open for a copy of The Subterraneans’ tape. At the same time, I was on the lookout for information on the band, itself, who its members were, where they were located. I had no luck with either search. Last year, I spent a couple of days researching the band and its music online, but found little of any use.

As for Jude: at the start of senior year, I joined Lorrie for lunch in the senior lounge. We exchanged pleasantries about our respective summers, the classes we would be taking. I turned the conversation to Jude. How was he doing? I asked. Oh, she said, no one had seen him around for a while. Supposedly, he’d left for Boston, which he’d been talking about doing for years. Boston, I said. Yeah, she said. He wasn’t very happy here. He had a lot of stuff going on at home. Well, I said, wherever he was, I hoped he was happier. “I doubt it,” Lorrie said. “Some people just aren’t, you know?”

I said I did.

As I told you at the outset, I’ve never shared this story with anyone, not your mother, not Liz. Maybe I shouldn’t have with you. If it’s easier — if I send this letter to you — you can trash it, pretend I answered your question in some other, innocuous way. That might be better. I’m not sure what more there is to say about any of it. That is, except for the questions I still can’t answer.