The Sea of Ash Read online

  The Sea of Ash

  by

  Scott Thomas

  Read The Lovecraft eZine, a free online magazine featuring

  Weird Fiction, Cosmic Horror, and the Cthulhu Mythos:

  www.LovecraftZine.com

  Copyright © 2009 Scott Thomas

  Front Cover Art by Nick Gucker

  Published by Lovecraft Ezine Press

  Formatting by Kenneth W. Cain

  Graphic Design by Leslie Harker

  All rights reserved.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal use only. No part of this ebook may be re-sold, given away, or reproduced to other parties by any means with the sole exception of reviewers, who may quote small excerpts for their purposes. If you would like to share this book with others, please consider purchasing or gifting additional copies. If you’re reading this book and did not obtain it by legal means, please consider supporting the author by purchasing a copy for yourself. The author appreciates your effort to support their endeavors.

  Table of Contents

  Editor's Preface

  1. Queen Anne

  2. The Georgian Inn

  3. A Visit from Wakefield

  4. Strange Aparatus

  5. Brinklow's Disappearance

  6. Dr. Pond and the Spirito Macchina

  7. September

  8. Books

  9. Crocker's Bite

  10. The House of 12 Whispers

  11. Gooseflesh and Coal Smoke

  12. Bullets and Blossoms

  13. The Puzzling Journal

  14. Return to Lexington

  15. The Recital

  16. A Meeting of Sorts

  17. Visitation

  18. Dusk

  Afterword

  Biography

  Editor's Preface

  Never had the universe felt so vast, and I so small within it. I had, through circumstance, been made aware of something, but of what? Something either too horrible or too beautiful for humans to know.

  --From The Sea of Ash

  In my capacity as editor of The Lovecraft eZine, many books are sent to me in the hope that I will enjoy and promote them. And many of them are wonderful, to be sure. But in the four years that I've been publishing the eZine, no book has impressed me as much as The Sea of Ash, by Scott Thomas.

  Scott gave me a copy of this novella in August 2013 at NecronomiCon (a Lovecraft convention held every two years in Providence), and I read it on the plane ride back home.

  I don't remember much about that flight. The Sea of Ash utterly and completely captured my imagination. At once disturbing and beautiful, it is a fresh take on the themes of Lovecraft and cosmic horror. I am not exaggerating when I say that it is one of the best books I have ever read.

  For the complete story on how The Sea of Ash came to be, read Jeff Thomas' Afterword. For now, suffice it to say that I soon realized that The Sea of Ash wasn't widely read, and it certainly deserves to be. After reading it, I think you will agree.

  There is a world beneath the world, and the universe is not what it seems. Turn the page, and begin a journey into wonder.

  Mike Davis

  Editor/Publisher, The Lovecraft eZine

  September, 2014

  1. QUEEN ANNE

  The photograph is a sepia thing showing Dr. Albert Pond shortly before his disappearance in 1920. He's handsome enough, clean shaven, with even features and slick dark hair parted above his high forehead. A serious fellow to be sure, looking a touch older than his forty-four years. I hold the picture closer and study his eyes. Intelligent eyes, keen eyes, their sting tempered by weariness, as if they have seen more than human eyes are meant to see.

  By contrast, the photo I took of his family home is colored and bright, snapped in the warm flush of afternoon. I HAD to start there, after all, for a sense of completeness. Originally the Whitman parsonage, the house was built in Eastborough, Massachusetts in the mid-eighteenth century. It's a fine center hall Colonial with sparrow-beckoning chimneys, and ancient clapboards infused with generations of paint from Whitmans, and the Ponds that followed.

  This is a ritual stillness, this sitting at my desk with the pictures, my gear ready and packed for the journey. I am stirring myself, inspiring myself, tuning in. I've waited years for this.

  Now I am gazing at the only surviving photograph of the baby. The thick paper is brittle and brown with age, more so for the fire that ate away the left side -- the part that showed the child's head. How unfortunate. The babe is a shadowy blur, unclothed, the rounded limbs like sausage links. It lies limp in a rumpled puddle of blankets, as described in Dr. Pond's writings.

  I have never seen a picture of the child's mother, though it is said that she, unlike her offspring, was uncommonly beautiful.

  "I find it difficult to imagine a childhood more mundane," Albert reflected in the early pages of his single published work. And... "Perhaps that was the appeal."

  The same can be said of mine. It was comfortingly unspectacular; you might even say insular. I was raised by my grandmother, just four and three-quarter miles from the house where the good Doctor grew up. That explains some of the kindredness I feel.

  Nana was a naturalist. She would likely have been a Luddite if she had been born in London. While the front lawn of our house was an insignificant little square, the back was a glorious jumble of vegetation, deep and green, flowered and ferned. It was like a library of plants, and she knew all their names, both the charming folksy ones and the exotic Latin designations that sounded to me like snippets of magical incantations.

  Whereas my siblings were imaginary, Pond had three sisters, one older, two younger. Samantha, Hope and Annie. His predilection for the healing arts manifested quite early -- he became a master doll mender to the girls. A curious aside...Annie's favorite doll (the one with long red human hair) would be found facing east whenever it rained.

  Following his quiet childhood, Albert Pond went on to study at the best colleges, earning his medical degree with honors. He drifted up the coast, settled in Salisbury on the North Shore, and opened his practice.

  In the snow of 1906 he met Bethany Miller. She was watching the Atlantic, watching the boats turn white, listening as gulls called to the snow, became snow. That silver afternoon, before dusk reared up from the sea, they walked and laughed under flakes and wings. Pond later noted that his heart was "fumbling and exhilarated." It also "felt lighter in my chest, a younger man's heart borrowed back from whom I'd been before."

  Bethany was five years younger than his thirty, full and fair, with modest blue eyes. He courted her, proposed, and the following spring they were married.

  They built the house on Powell Street then moved in during the autumn of 1911. It was a steep Queen Anne, asymmetrically Victorian, a doll's house with porch and peaks and shingles. Bethany planted frivolous annuals; Albert raised a brooding hedge of holly.

  They were never to have children. Albert more than hints at ambivalence in this regard. The long-awaited pregnancy ended in miscarriage, and Bethany was unable to conceive thereafter. The loss cast a greyness over her -- a shade that stayed with her to the end.

  Over in Bosnia, at the end of June, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, along with his wife, was shot to death in his motorcar following an inspection of troops stationed in Sarajevo. The assassin was a disgruntled Serb student, bitter over politics. A few simple bits of lead, a few coughs of smoke and the world went spinning on its way to the Great War.

  Woodrow Wilson resisted involvement until German subs took to sinking American ships. Albert enlisted and crossed the Atlantic in 1917, but it was months before he and the other Yanks saw action. He was a medic, of course, which set him in the trenches. He writes of his experiences in his book -- o
ne cannot underestimate the impact the war had on him. I think he found it especially difficult to have so many patients die, but, as he quite bluntly puts it, "the scalpel is no match for bullets."

  The worst of it occurred in the smoky, shattered woodlands of the Argonne. Pond likened the horrors there to a slaughterhouse and took home images that replayed in his sleep. One dream would deter him from rest for days on end, even when he returned to the doll's house in Salisbury.

  Here is how he describes the dream: "I could not close my eyes that I would not see a great pale face as tall and wide as a sky. It was a young soldier's face, speckled with blood, the thin lips numbly repeating, 'bleeding...bleeding...bleeding...bleeding...'”

  As the war was staggering toward its end in 1918, Albert received word of Bethany's death. She had suffered an allergic reaction to a bee sting and died alone, face down in the mums she had been weeding, her throat swollen shut.

  Dr. Pond writes: "I have seen the frailty of the human body illustrated with terrifying clarity, and yet mine has survived the dangers of war to pen these words. Despite the bombs and the gas, the cannons, bayonets and rattling Maxims, I sit here whole, while a seemingly innocuous insect, no bigger than a pistol shell, has robbed my Bethany of her life. This is the cruelest of ironies, and it torments me.”

  I am heading north. It is "day one" and the weather is promising, the mist in the hills burning away to make room for sunlight. The traffic is light this early; my speeding neighbors are mostly large trucks. For once I've made a tasty cup of coffee -- I'll take that as a good omen.

  I think of Pond's New England as I drive along Route 9, or “The Pike,” as Nana called it. I try picturing the less-congested landscape, the noble structures, the cars of that period. Glimpses of old homes bolster the illusion, but the fantasy is spoiled when I pass the inevitable golden arches and the glimmering seas of consumers' vehicles worshipfully cluttered about titanic malls.

  Crows are huddled over something small and dead by the side of the ramp that takes me onto 495. Soon there are only trees to either side and steep perilous cliffs where ledge was blasted to accommodate the road. The highway snakes up through crowded Lowell.

  There is a grey sensibility in this city...even in sunlight the bleakness permeates like the ghost of silenced industry weltering in the shadows of abandoned mills.

  Albert Pond resumed his medical practice upon returning from Europe, and though he indulged a select number of close friends, his existence was largely solitary, but for the company of a dog. Having had his taste of adventure, he was glad for the uneventful thing that his life had become, relieved to be back in the familiar Queen Anne. Peace of mind, however, remained elusive...

  His dreams of war intermingled with nightmares about Bethany's death. He would envision her sitting rigid, creaking in a rocking chair at the foot of his bed, her face a damp mask of crushed flower petals and garden soil, which largely obscured her bloated red features. He was thankful for the obstruction.

  Over time the night intrusions became less frequent, the great muttering soldier's face went silent and the compressed semblance of blooms died away like the annuals that once graced the yard.

  I can feel my excitement building as I grow closer to my first destination. To think that I will actually be seeing the house where Pond's journey began...how thrilling! I am now leaving the highway, having driven for roughly an hour; I find myself amongst houses and convenience stores, gas stations and other modern-day necessities. Before long I am turning left onto Powell Street and pulling up outside the Queen Anne that Pond built.

  I recognize it immediately, for I've seen a photograph of it taken in the mid-eighties for the obscure magazine HAUNTS AND WONDERS, which ran an article on the Pond case. Incidentally, I tried to track down and contact the author of that piece, only to find that he had died in 1993.

  The place does indeed look like a doll's house, steep and Victorian, with a front-facing gable, bay windows and a band of patterned shingles that runs above the porch-line. It has changed, of course, the present owners having painted it green with white trim. They also hung window boxes, and sometime between 1920 and now, the dark hedge of holly was removed. Still, I shiver at the sight of the house. This is where it all began.

  It was May, according to Dr. Pond's journal, though the seasons might have been misaligned, for the chill spoke more of November, and the sea was the color of ash. Not a religious man, his rituals at that time were comforting repetitions...tea in the morning, the rustling Telegram, a stroll along the shore with his retriever, Rooney.

  The beach was empty but for gulls and crows like chess pieces on the sand. The tide was coming in, as were rain clouds. It was the dog that found the naked woman lying in the wet sand. Albert heard the barks and saw the animal in the distance, dancing in agitated half-circles at water's edge. Moving closer, he too saw the body. Incoming waves draped rippling translucence over her legs and lower belly.

  She was young and fetching, the hair on her head as dark as the patch below. Her legs were closed and pointing out to the open sea, her arms flung to either side, as if to mock Christ on his cross. The doctor rushed to her side and bent down, first off thinking that she must have drowned -- her coloring suggested as much; she was as pale as the foam that nudged her limp arms. "She appeared so peaceful," Pond wrote, "as if she were merely sleeping."

  Before Albert could place a hand on her throat to feel for a pulse, he saw her flattened breasts rise and fall. The hand instead went to her cheek and rested there. "I spoke to her and her eyes opened. Never had I seen such lovely eyes, nor have I since. They were also the darkest eyes that I have ever witnessed."

  The woman regarded the stranger without alarm, or any other clearly identifiable expression, for that matter. Pond asked her if she thought that she could move, and she sat up slowly, dripping, her hair running down her throat like ink. He explained to her that he was a doctor and that he was going to take her to safety.

  He helped her to her feet and noticed the impression her body had made in the grey sand, an imprint of her graceful back. Waves tripped over each other as they rushed to swallow it.

  "I wrapped my coat about her and guided her back to my house, away from the spitting clouds and the sprawling Atlantic. Fortunately there were few other houses between the beach and my dwelling. I was generally up and about before any neighbors stirred, thus, we traveled unwitnessed."

  The heavy rain waited until they were secure inside the Queen Anne. It hummed on the roof of the porch and tinkered at the windows. Albert seated the woman on the sofa in his parlor and provided her with towels, but she simply sat there, damp and staring.

  The doctor speculated that she was dazed, or perhaps mentally defective, though he tended to doubt the latter. There was a certain something in her eyes, a quality that even he, with his gift for language, was hard pressed to describe. It made him think of the eyes of soldiers back in France, the eyes of those who had seen too much horror, but unlike them, she had made a peace with the horror.

  Albert told her his name and asked if she remembered what hers was. She gave no response. He asked if she would allow him to dry her, seeing as she had not made any effort. No response came, so he sat beside her and gently toweled her as best he could. This made him feel awkward.

  "Can you tell me anything about yourself? Anything at all? Do you recall anything about how you ended up on the beach? Did someone hurt you? Were you in a boat?"

  The visitor remained mute, inscrutable.

  "I'd like to examine you, if that would be all right?"

  Pond fetched his bag and went about his inspection. The woman was relaxed and compliant and did not even shudder when he placed the cold stethoscope to her bare chest. He did not detect any obvious injury; in fact, she seemed a healthy specimen. Only when he tried to have a look inside her mouth did she react, turning her head away and squinting her eyes. Albert apologized and withdrew.

  After the check-up Dr. Pond made tea. He had h
elped the visitor into his bathrobe and even put a pair of his socks on her feet. They fit loosely, like shedding skin.

  "Rather than refer to her exclusively as 'she' and 'the woman' (in my journal) I have decided to call her Arabella," Pond wrote. Further... "Certainly it occurred to me that I should alert the authorities, and I wondered if there were concerned loved ones out searching for this poor lost creature. Still, I made no effort to announce my find. The motivation behind my actions, or lack of action, remains a mystery to me. My intentions were by no means nefarious. I am, after all, a gentleman."

  Arabella ignored every form of nourishment offered to her, although she did open the front of her robe, dip a finger into a cup of hot tea, and trace a small circle around her navel.

  I step out of the car and take several pictures of the house. I have gone so far as to contact the present owners, explaining that I am retracing the steps of Dr. Albert Pond, but they've shown no interest in allowing me inside the structure. Very disappointing.

  It is May now, as it was then, but today the air is warm and bright, and one is tempted to believe that the world is only what we know of it... Streets and homes, jobs, schools, television programs, celebrities, sports, fashions, products, technology, politics and cultures. Familiar, numbing religions. Science. How easy it would be to be blanketed and blinded by these things, but I refuse that luxury, just as Albert Pond refused it.

  The rain had continued into the night. It blew in off the shore and wrapped wet arms around the house. Albert gently urged his guest up the stairs and put her to bed. He covered her and then sat in the rocking chair nearby, watching her sleep -- the dark eyes behind dark lashes, the pale rosebud lips compressed, the winsome face framed in mussed black hair. Perhaps her recall would be improved in the morning, he hoped.

  Albert left a candle burning; the hushed light replaced the room with exaggerated shadow. Arabella's face was slack, and her lips parted slightly, the light glimmering softly on her teeth. The doctor remained curious as to why she had averted her head when he had attempted to examine her mouth. He rose up slowly from the creaky rocker and crept closer.