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It all began last
November with my perusal of a shelf full of curiosities in a Providence bookshop
overlooking Thayer Street. Chancing to be in the city with my girlfriend, I had
stopped with her in the shop that night on the way to a film. As fate would have
it, I stumbled upon a copy of Lovecraft Studies. Instantly recognizing it
as the perfect home for an article I was then planning, I copied down the
address of editor S. T. Joshi. In the coming months, I would lose the girl, but
keep Joshi's address. There's a cruel trick of fate for you.
At any rate, I did
submit the article, "Higher Criticism and the Necronomicon",
and thus made my initial contact with my friend S. T. A few months later, I was
to meet the whole Providence/Nashua axis: S. T., Jason Eckhardt, Marc Michaud,
Ken Neily, Peter Cannon, Don Burleson, and Mollie Werba. The occasion was "NECON
81" at Roger Williams College.
My next encounter
with this loathsome and nitrous crew was scant weeks later. I drove up from New
Jersey for the occasion. So I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern
sea was upon me. It was Lovecraft's Nativity, and we had come at last to the
ancient sea town where my friends had kept festival for the last few years. Now
we were few, and shared the rituals of mysteries that none living could
understand. There beyond the hill's crest I saw Marblehead outspread frostily in
the gloaming; Marblehead with its ancient vanes and steeples, wharves and
graveyards, endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and its dizzy
church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch. We went out into the
moonless and tortuous network of that incredibly ancient town. I followed my
voiceless guides. Up, up, up, the eerie column slithered, toward the great white
church. I noticed with a shudder that the ground bore no mark of passing feet,
not even mine. But then what did I expect from a concrete sidewalk? Presently,
Don Burleson mounted the steps of the church, and drew back his hood. Reverently
and with deliberation, he intoned a passage from Alhazred's objectionable Necronomicon:
"The nethermost caverns are not for the fathoming of eyes that see. . . .
"
After these pious
duties were completed, we all retired to the Arkham House of Pizza for a hearty
repast. We munched cardboard-crust pizza, and as we were about to leave, the
teenage girl managing the place offered to trade me her virtue for my jacket.
But it was getting nippy out and I was dependent on the others for my ride.
Besides, her name was Asenath and S. T. advised me it was a poor bet.
The Fun Guys from
Yuggoth convened again recently for a party at Don and Mollie's new lair in
Nashua. The house-warming proceeded apace as we burned the place to the ground.
Now I am back in New Jersey, and if that simple fact were not horrifying enough,
I await with clammy skin and sweating palms my next meeting with that dark
brotherhood --- Hallowmas! lä Shub-Niggurath!
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"[H. P. Lovecraft] was not himself an occultist, although well read in the
literature. . . . His Cthulhu mythology is a complete and thoroughly rounded out
job of invention, actually much more convincing than [Theosophists] Leadbeater
and Besant's presumably literal account of remote things in Man, Whence, How
and Whither. "
---
Marc Edmund Jones,
Occult Philosophy, 1947 |
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