originally published New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Arkham House, 1980
Our unnamed narrator (one a' those again) has taken himself of to some New England beach resort for the summer. One night in the hotel dining room he spots a hot number with two small kids and hope
s she doesn't have a husband back home. The next day he scores by meeting her at the beach. Her name is Helen Rathbourne, and she's a widow (score one for the narrator!). And as it turns out, both her and the narrator have something in common - they both like to talk in bizarre pseudo-poetic dialog that sounds like nothing that would ever come out of a sane human mouth! Example (Helen referring to her daughter):
"Susan's quite different. Most of her adventuring is done on `wings of bright imagining', as some poet must have phrased it some time in the past. Perhaps far back in the Victorian Age. I'm not good at making such lines up."
"I'm sure you're mistaken. I read a great deal of poetry, both traditional and avant-garde, and I can't recall ever having encountered that particular line."
Uh-huh.
Well anyway while they're talking Johnny (Helen's son, who's about 8), gets bored and goes running off full-tilt boogie towards the washed-up, rotted wreckage of an old breakwater, neighbored by "swirling dark water" widening into a pool with a "deep, black, extremely ominous look". He climbs up onto the dangerous pile while the unnamed narrator shouts ineffectively at him to come back down this instant. The kid ignores the stuffy froot and instead seems to be mesmerized, staring off into the sea, until the boards give way and he falls into the pool. U.N. heads in after him and fortunately finds him pretty quick.
Out on the sand Johnny recovers quite quickly and seems unharmed. Except he's acting a little strange, explaining that he went out on the breakwater because something drew him out there - something he had to find, even though he didn't want to find it. And whatever it is, he's got it clenched in his hand, so tightly that he actually can't even open his fist.
In any case, U.N. manages to get his hand open and retrieve the object, which turns out to be a pendant of some kind, an octopus with a grotesque human face. U.N. is revolted but finds now he can't open his hand to throw it away. His sense of reality starts to distort and he finds himself walking out into the sea, intoning "The Deep Ones await their followers ... the call has come (etc), and pronouncing some names familiar to all loyal Cthulhu Mythos fans.
The next thing U.N. knows, he's waking up in a hospital bed. Helen is there, talking to the attending physician, who not only share their bent for flowery speech, but is also very hip to the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. It seems a few weeks ago a bunch of freakjobs with waist-long beards were wandering around the beach area. They've since disappeared. And a man was found horribly mutilated, perhaps after an encounter with a shark (the pool is believed big enough to hold one). The pendant, which Johnny pried from U.N.'s hand just before he went under, must have belonged to those neckbeards. "Just suppose," Helen wonders, "Lovecraft didn't put everything he knew or suspected into his stories."
As U.N. drifts off into a seconal-induced sleep, he hears Helen comment on how her daughter Susan seems to love him already ... and she can understand how Susan feels. But he feels as if he is sinking into deep water, an octopoid face approaching, remembering his own strange, trane-induced words...
This was one of Long's last Cthulhu-influenced stories, and one of his last, period. He had changed a lot in the years since the Weird Tales days. Like some other stories of his published around the same time, "Dark Awakening" is a hundred times less pulpy, but a bit pretentious, yet is also evocative and has a strange, dreamy, wistful quality about it. It isn't a great story. Despite the Lovecraft-y prose, it works fine for the narrative, and the Unnamed Narrator is actually very believable. Until he opens his mouth. His (and Helen's, and Susan's, and the doctor's) dialog is ludicrous and weird. It's hard to say what to make of this slight story but it stayed with me all these years since I first read it back in the early 80's. So I think Long did something right.
No comments:
Post a Comment