Magicked by the Moon

First published in 'Not Dead But Dreaming' 1996 (edited by Lara Haynes)

At the beginning was the graveyard: a place that normally would have served better as an ending. HP Lovecraft lost his innocence in that lakeside garden of death. Yet death was not death until he created the death in death simply by his act in life ... like bait. And yes, of course, he was fully aware that a graveyard was the most appropriate venue for wooing death; but since he knew more about death’s intentions than a man had any right to know, what alternative had he other than to sneak out one night, ensuring that the garden gate’s going didn’t sound? Only a graveyard’s moonful darkness, in the end, could extend death’s possibilities.

Death was no easy target. Like a woman’s, death’s prerequisite for physical passion was love. Indeed, HPL and death had already undergone a relentless period of ‘courting’: a word he used as part of his resistance to calling a spade a spade. Given death’s passion for nothing-but-the-best, death became nothing and the best. Visibility merely subtracted from death’s existence. Death had to be worked at: worried and teased from the unsurrendering past. Only digging would suffice: through one of the loosened earths; towards a baited bite of vicarious ancestral fire.

The graveside lake was magicked by the moon. The wind tickled the trees; the same wind teased the silvery carpet of watery light. The dinghy emerged from the rippling shadows, its crew member silent with the breathlessness of expended energy. The shape raised its moon-dripping oarblades to allow the previous effort maximum play on conflicting forces ... of which a floating corpse was one. It lay just below the water’s silky sheen like an impression of a full-length oil painting. The face grinned upward, set thus by the moment of death itself. The legs wagged gently to and fro as if it were really swimming. The arms, weighted by the jewellery on the hands, acted as a couple of claw anchors snagging upon the lake’s pearl-pebbled bottom. The dress was weedy and sufficiently clinging to its shape of sex.

As the moon went under a cloud, the corpse’s body vanished in a conjuring-trick so sudden any chance audience would be momentarily stunned into utter silence. The crew member had indeed failed to identify the corpse as its own erstwhile body; so it could not yet claim it had hunted down its parent-in-death and, as the dinghy disappeared, the bank’s reedy clumps gathered the ever-present wind like sarcastic elfin laughter.

The earth was easier to dig than HPL had feared after all the ground frosts of previous nights. Now, as if a thoughtful God were keeping vigil, the weather had taken an abrupt mild turn. He was so subsumed by his task, not even a ghost floating on the lake close-by could summon his attention to its non-existence. Meanwhile, HPL’s solid silver trowel made easy inroads into the peaty soil, but even with the watchful eye of a moon to oversee progress, there was no certainty as to the delver’s depth—other than the probes of his own fingers which consequently released the handle of the trowel whilst the other hand propped the body at the optimum angle upon the bony buttocks.

It was not obvious when the trowel blade had met wood since there was no significant difference between the earthy mulch and the rotting coffin itself. But HPL’s testing fingers inadvertently threaded the empty eye sockets of his prey and such sightless crevices sucked upon what they considered to be skirmishing worms—but quickly stopped because, surely, death had no need of true hunger. Yet the thin ghoul knew how lucky it was to have been wearing gloves—even if such gloves were of the prettiest gossamer lace. And, as the baying of a hound rode the star winds, HPL headed towards the lake to await his own craft.