Copy Editor: Blind Willie Johnson

Contributing Editors: Matthew Cheney and Eric Schaller

Webdesigner: Luis Rodrigues

Interns: Alex, Oliver, and Z

All works © authors and artists

Cover “We Heart Lovecraft” art © 2012 Eric Schaller

Editorial © 2012 Matthew Cheney and Eric Schaller

“More Dark” © 2012 Laird Barron

“Joyride,” “Unsung,” and “Thor” © 2012 Chad Woody

 “Trying for It,” “Settling Accounts,” and “Being Providence” © 2012 Sonya Taaffe

“Oh Those Vermonters! © 2012 by the estate of Mary Francis Cogswell

 “Spaghetti Monster,” “Animal,” “The Dude,” “Deflector,” “Nostalgia,” and “Cthulhu” © 2012 Adam Blue

 “Brattleboro Days, Yuggoth Nights,” © 2012 Nick Mamatas

“The Ashland Waltz,” © 2012 Brian Francis Slattery

“Lovecraft in Brooklyn” © 2012 Meghan McCarron

Adam Blue: “You won’t start making art until you stop making art.” An older, and much wiser, artist once told me this after spending all of five seconds looking at the best painting I ever made. It really hurt my feelings. Probably because it was, and is, completely true.

Matthew Cheney: All of the songs on the Mountain Goats’ 2009 album The Life of the World to Come are titled with references to books, chapters, and verses of the Bible. (None, alas, are from Revelations.) The album as a whole is, for me, a mixed lot — the band (which was once just John Darnielle) has paradoxically become less interesting and imaginative as their musical skill and production values have increased; indeed, their latest, Transcendental Youth, is for me the least interesting album yet released under the Mountain Goats name. Until Transcendental Youth, the recent albums each have had at least a couple captivating songs, and on The Life of the World to Come the most breathtaking is “Deuteronomy 2:10″, one of the saddest songs I’ve ever encountered (and I’m a Tom Waits fan!). The music is a simple progression of piano chords that fall into a few melodic notes at the end. Darnielle sings quietly, sometimes in a whisper. Each verse of the song is told from the point of view of an animal that is the last of its kind: a tasmanian wolf, a dodo, and a golden toad. Each verse ends with the phrase “there’ll be no more after me.” If you can listen to this song without tears in your eyes, you are a monster.

Howard P. Lovecraft: The White People by Arthur Machen. A masterpiece of fantastic writing, with almost unlimited power in the intimation of potent hideousness and cosmic aberration.

Nick Mamatas: The late Project Itoh is one of the greatest SF writers I’ve had the pleasure of reading. His novels Genocidal Organ and Harmony (to be read in that order, but published in the US in reverse order) are absolutely essential. Please check him out.

Meghan McCarron: While I hesitate to be that guy recommending an app, I’m going to do it anyway: Songza is an expertly curated streaming service that has turned me on to all sorts of great stuff, from “indie R&B” like Marques Toliver to an entire station of Texas country classics. The station based on Bob Dylan’s radio show gave me “Russian Satellite” by Mighty Sparrow, a calypso protest song about Laika’s untimely death. If I like a song on Songza, I save it on Spotify, where I also waste hours clicking down the “related artists” rabbit hole. Yesterday this glorious procrastination lead me to Brigitte, a faux-60′s French girl band; today it snaked me back to Beth Orton’s “Central Reservation,” which I hadn’t heard in ten years and has gotten even better with age. On a more topical note, if you haven’t heard the Mountain Goats’ “Lovecraft in Brooklyn,” please don’t let the fact that I cribbed the title deter you: it’s a great song.

Luis Rodrigues: Earlier this year, I picked up a copy of Last Days by Brian Evenson at a friend’s place and was hooked from line one. It was clever and funny and twisted and unexpected and I placed an order for a big box of Evenson books right then and there on my smartphone. Discovering Evenson truly felt like a revelation, and there’s nothing quite like those first few seconds of elation when you realize you’re in the presence of genius.

Eric Schaller: The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer. This anthology is appropriate to The Revelator‘s theme this issue, if only because Lovecraft is one of the major influences on the literature of the weird. But where this anthology parts company with pure genre is in placing Kafka as the other major influence, Lovecraft and Kafka looming over the weird literature of the past century like a pallid two-headed Mount Rushmore. Recognizing these two strains of influence opens The Weird up to the world of fiction like no anthology before it. Covering over 100 years of fiction, and weighing in at over 750,000 words, this book is more than just a revelation, it is a feast that outdoes and outlasts any holiday celebration.

Brian Francis Slattery: The falsetto of Dona Dumitru Siminica.

Sonya Taaffe: Alan Turing.

Chad Woody: Amidst the Internet flood, I am increasingly impressed with things that go undigitized. While tinkering at a novel set in the Old West, I found Wikipedia and Google indispensable for historical information. But I also found an excellent little free newspaper called Voices of the Sandhills while driving through Nebraska a year ago. It’s full of 1800s frontier lore, photos of gunfighters and Native Americans, and odd ranching tales. None of it appears on the Internet. The entire enterprise seems based in another era of publishing. To get copies, you must drive through Nebraska, or subscribe by mail.

If the neighborhood was a dream, our new apartment was all reality. The hall steps pulled away from the wall, not far, but enough that we could see the dirty smudge above where they’d once connected. The landlord had re-fastened some with L-shaped brackets, but those had come loose, too. Gray water dripped from the ceiling; rodents scratched. But the apartment had five bedrooms and two decks. We could see Manhattan for only seven hundred dollars a month each.

The scratching in the walls bothered one roommate in particular: she heard skittering up and down every night. After weeks of denial, she discovered a mountain of rat shit hidden behind her dog’s food, emanating from a jagged, tennis-ball sized hole in the floor. The shit had no smell, but for pellets of such abnormal size to lack odor made them somehow more horrific. First, she tried sweeping the shit up, but it stuck to the broom’s bristles in stubborn clumps which she had no choice but to dislodge with her fingers. Overcome by disgust, she sprayed the entire area with 409 and scraped the melting pellets up with paper towels.

She told us the rat shit saga while we monitored new leaks during a rainstorm. The dog’s food was now safe in a plastic tub, but she wondered aloud passive-aggressively about breaking the lease. Lately during the sad ritual of leak-watching, we’d been killing time reading to each other from a tattered Best of Lovecraft, which I’d found in a box on the street. I suggested that since we had rats in the walls, we should name our foursquare check-in “Exham Priory.” I had intended it as an offhand joke, a way to distract her from any thoughts of leaving. But our roommate with the dog declared she would become mayor and started texting the roommate who spent most of his nights at his girlfriend’s about the Lovecraftian horror of our apartment. We read “The Rats in the Walls” aloud to each other three times, and a full-on mania was born.

Though we all professed to be too broke to pay the cable bill, we found money to buy Lovecraftian kitch. Presents started arriving at the door. A Miskatonic University teeshirt, a Cthulhu hat. We took turns wearing these things as we trudged through the rain to work as baristas, temps, secretaries. During one night of storms, we built an albino penguin out of papier-mâché. Lovecraft had been horrified by Brooklyn, and yet drawn by its lurid decrepitude. He became our guide to weathering the city, though we would prevail where he did not.

While the rats were no longer eating the dog food, they were still skittering in the walls. The solution came, surprisingly, from our roommate who we saw the least. He occupied the center room and paid less than us because he had no window, just an airshaft. He made video art and occasionally fucked a noisy girl whose face could not be made out beneath her bangs, like the monster in The Ring. When he came home with a cat, an adult cat with elegant white socks, we were all surprised.

“His name is Nigger-Man,” the center room roommate said.

The albino penguin sat over his shoulder in its place of honor. I was wearing the Cthulhu hat. We all knew the reference: it was the name of the cat in “Rats in the Walls.” None of us said anything.

“It’s ironic.”

“Nigger-Man did save the narrator from the rats,” the roommate with the dog said.

“The narrator was eating that captain guy alive,” our roommate who was usually at his girlfriend’s said.

“Nigger-Man tried…”

“Stop fucking saying that. We have black neighbors,” I said.

“NM. Can we call him NM?”

“Hey cat,” our roommate obsessed with his Playstation said, picking him up. “Do you believe in eugenics?”

The cat – the center roommate refused to change his name, so we refused to call him by it – was a rat expert. He brought us five in the first week. They were squirrel-sized and elegant in death, little sleeping princes in their disturbingly clean fur coats. We disposed of their bodies with wads of paper towels and washed our hands five times in hot water after. We started to wish the cat would leave us alone.

***

The rainiest winter on record, the weather report said. Water fell in wet, slushing downpours. Greasy rain slid down our walls and bled into the buckets which had become permanent features. The hole in the kitchen dripped rain or shine. The water coming out of it was rusty brown, like the wound was infected.

In April, we had a break-in. It was a lazy break-in. They took the laptops that were out in the kitchen, but not the ones hidden under comforters like hungover lovers. They scooped a handful of one roommates’ change out of the jar where he’d been saving it. Took the beloved Playstation.

We were in a tizzy, of course. A break in! Only half of us had renter’s insurance; the other half now regretted this bitterly. The police came, and we described our old-model Macbooks, our handful of quarters. They asked how the thieves might have gotten in. Our front door had been locked. We weren’t so sure about the doors out to the balcony. It was easy to just walk across the roof and enter. But we were pretty sure we had locked them.

“A window, maybe?” the police said.

We had found one small window unlocked.

A theory began forming our minds, but it was not confirmed until the Playstation-less roommate marched into the kitchen with his laptop (hidden under his smelly sheets during the break-in) and pointed at the list of wireless networks and connected devices. “There’s my Playstation,” he said. It was called The White Ship. “Someone in this building still has it.”

“The kids,” the center roommate said. “Who else would be dumb enough to turn it on?”

“And they could have fit through the window,” our roommate with the dog said.

The children who lived in our row of dockworker tenements were all black and had ambiguous parent situations. Our relationship to them up until now had been to kick their deflated soccer ball back to them as we unlocked our bikes, or to answer their strange questions about our roommates’ dog like, “Why is it spotted?” Now we watched them with new eyes. I tried to be sympathetic. My renters’ insurance had also bought me a brand-new MacBook.

“NM,” the Playstation-less roommate said. “Should we sic you on those kids?”

“He took care of the rats,” the center roommate said.

“I can’t believe you’re comparing those kids to rats,” I said. “Lovecraft isn’t about this shit. I don’t get why you think it’s funny.”

“Racism that ridiculous is always funny,” the Playstation-less roommate said.

“His work is about alienation. About feeling like the world is against you. The other stuff is just… unfortunate.”

“Where was the dog during the break-in?” the Playstation-less roommate said, ignoring my protests.

“I take her to doggie daycare once a week.”

“NM doesn’t need daycare,” the center roommate said. “NM is a killer.”

No one laughed. But no one objected, either.

***

The true threat was not the slushy winter, or the rainy spring. It was summer storms. The first crash of thunder reverberated one evening in early June. Leaks split open like sores. Over the toilet: convenient. Over the stove: less so.

As the hot summer roasted us in our beds and drowned us in its storms, I started to hate New York City. The stink of human sweat in the subway. Men staring at me on the street. The labrinthine death maze of the supermarket. The horrible, pervasive smell of garbage, luxurating in its own filth. I longed for the summers of my childhood, air-conditioned houses, backyard pools, fresh-cut lawns, even though I’d sworn never to go back to the suburbs again.

There were talks of trying to find a place all five of us could move to. But anywhere else in the city charged twice, three times the rent. Craigslist offered to exile us to the farthest reaches of the borough, or cram us into shared rooms. Exile, or living in warrens, seemed worse than a few leaks. We watched each other in case anyone should forget that we could only afford this apartment together.

***

Our death knell was not the rush of rain, but a terrible crack, like brittle bone giving way. The ceiling collapsed on top of my bed, plaster so heavy it could have killed me if I hadn’t been at work. Underneath the plaster was not wood but a furry, thick covering of black mold. It seemed to move if I stared at it too long. I imagined the scratching in the walls hadn’t been rats at all, but the spread of the fungus.

The cat kept far clear of the place.

Our absentee landlord, to our shock, actually sent someone to spray the ceiling down with “fungicide” and fix the plaster. I was willing to stay because my only other option was moving home with my parents, but our roommate with the dog moaned about mold allergies. We posted a few fake ads on Craigslist that would draw her attention and buy us some time. The only solution we could think of was a party. The strength of our apartment was its parties. We had two grills, miles of strung Christmas lights, and a makeshift bar. A party would lift everyone’s spirits. Make us appreciate our home again.

The evening air was fresh, as if the breeze were blowing in from some sweeter world. Connecticut, maybe, where we all went to school. We made burgers and margaritas, succotash and beer brats. Friends came, friends of friends, strangers too. We got drunk, we got high, we stuffed ourselves with meat.

At the height of the party, the center roommate emerged with a canvas bag. He’d found it in a hidden-away trunk while looking for a cocktail shaker. It was fireworks. Not the kind that shoot up into the sky; ground fireworks that spray colored sparks.

“We’re going to set them off on the roof,” he said.

“Our roof?” I said.

“Nah, next door. The tar won’t catch.”

“Kids live in that building.”

“Kids who took our shit.”

“So you’ll burn them down?”

His fuckbuddy-girlfriend swept aside her bangs and looked me in the eye for the first time. “It’s perfectly safe. Trust me, I’m Chinese.”

I wanted to protest more. But I was drunk and high and sunburnt. The firework was a font of light and color, holy and childish in its pleasure. The roof shook off the sparks better than it did rain.

“What are you doing? What the fuck are you doing?”

I knew the man yelling at us. He was the landlord next door, a Jamaican guy with a potbelly who, the last time I was on this roof, called me a cracker. Or, at least, I think he said cracker.

The firework was still shooting and spouting, making his face hard to see. His mouth was twisted into a rictus, his eyes tiny and hard with a primitive anger.

“It’s cool, man,” the center roommate said.

“It’s cool? Setting off a firework on my roof is cool?”

I had gone from fretting about the firework to being repulsed by his frothing – he was overreacting just like I had. “Don’t worry. We just have to wait for the firework to finish.”

“You need to put that thing out! There’s kids in this building.”

“The building is fine,” the center roommate said. “And anyway, we don’t know how.”

Green and pink light flashed across his face. I was missing something really awesome.

“I’m calling the cops.”

The firework sputtered out. We relented and shouted at everyone to get off the roof. The landlord stood there, glowering at us like an ancient idol, a vengeful god we’d long ago overthrown. Would it be terrible if I said it was a monkey god? What if I knew it was racist, but felt it was true?

Just as we got everyone off the roof, the cat leapt over the edge, running at the landlord.

“Nigger-Man!” I shouted, and then slapped a hand over my mouth.

“What did you just say?”

“The cat,” I said, my voice small.

“You called your cat that?” he said. “That’s disgusting. What is wrong with you?”

Twenty minutes later, our door shook with the authoritative thumping that only came from cops. With no more fireworks, I set the albino penguin on the hot grill; the fire swarmed up his body and set him alight. The burning penguin was an even better spectacle: not an empty show but real destruction, turning his terrible whiteness to ash. I hated everyone who had joined us on this roof, those stupid fucking hipsters. I hated the landlord. I hated the cops. My apartment was a corpse only half-embalmed, its skin about to be split by maggots. I would happily watch it burn.

I spent about eighteen months in Brattleboro, Vermont in the middle of the last decade.  I learned a lot of things, mostly about myself. For one thing: Brattleboro is a great small town. For another: I dislike small towns, even the ones with more bookstores than traffic lights. But I did love the bookstores, especially a used paperback house called Baskets Bookstore/Paperback Palace.  Huge horror and romance sections—Sherwood, the owner, laughed when I christened the romance section “The Pink Bomb.”

Most paperbacks were cheap enough to be purchasable by the basket, which was perfect for the long winter nights, but some of the items for sale were quite a bit rarer.  One day he handed me a postcard sent between H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur H. Goodenough, an amateur press enthusiast living near Brattleboro. Goodenough isn’t talked about much today, but Brattleboro is still full of Goodenough—there’s a road named for the family (or was the family named for the road?), a trash removal firm, you name it.

Lovecraft was acquainted with Goodenough, and Lovecraft’s  visits to Goodenough in Vermont in 1927 and 1928 are the basis of his wonderful novelette “The Whisperer in Darkness.” After the story was published in Weird Tales, Goodenough sent Lovecraft a congratulatory card, and also asked the author a couple of questions. Rather than responding with a card or letter of his own, Lovecraft wrote the answers in a tiny hand and then apparently gave the card to Vrest Orton—a bookman and eventual founder of The Vermont County Store—who returned the card to Goodenough personally during a trip to the Green Mountain State. Then Goodenough sent the card back to Lovecraft again, with follow-up questions written in a nearly microscopic hand. I suppose he knew the local postmaster, and was able to get the card back into the mail system without a problem. Amazingly, Lovecraft managed to fit the answers to the questions on the postcard in an even smaller hand. Sherwood told me that he’d guessed that Lovecraft used a magnifying glass and a sewing needle dipped in ink. Here’s an odd thing; Sherwood had found the postcard at an estate sale. It had been protected from the elements because it had been used as a bookmark in a 1935 number of The Revelator, and that number was a special issue dedicated to the “gothic tales” of Isak Dinesen.

I bought the card and kept it with me for years—I moved to Boston, and then to California.  Only recently have I been able to spare the time to closely examine and transcribe the postcard. It took a few weeks. Lovecraft’s handwriting was difficult to read in the best of times, as I learned in 2007 when writer Brian Evenson took me and my friend Geoffrey Goodwin to the library at Brown University to check out some of Lovecraft’s papers. If anything, Goodenough’s penmanship is even worse, especially in the last unanswered round of questions. There are a few ink splatters on the postcard as well, but only one seems purposeful, as I make note of below. I took the card to work and abused my photocopy and scanner privileges to blow up sections of the card, then turn them into a series of PDFs. I then zoomed in on the PDFs as much as I could, to turn the tiny letters into great abstract shapes, to better see what we would call “kerning” if the text had been typset. To decipher this postcard, I not only had to read between the lines, as it were, but I had to make sure I was properly reading between the letters.

My friend Raphael is Google’s resident font expert and I showed him the PDFs. Raph’s PhD thesis is on imaging and halftoning over at the University of California at Berkeley, and he was able to use his research to cobble together a program to “draw” my blow-ups in a way that made the letters more legible. It was still a game of refrigerator poetry for a while, as the letters, words, and sentences the computer spit out barely made sense. Only after reading S. T. Joshi’s two-volume biography of Lovecraft was I finally confident in my deciphering of the card.

We already know a lot of Lovecraft’s life and beliefs, which is a great part of why all of the many short stories in which Lovecraft is a character and the theme of the story is, “Everything Lovecraft wrote about was real! Real!” are so tedious. He was a philosophical materialist and a metaphysical skeptic, so of course there will be no secret correspondence, no occult messages, in the transcription below.  But the postcard is interesting, and illuminating, and strange, in its own way.

—Nick Mamatas

***

HPL—

Received latest WT number, enjoyed “Whisperer.” Questions, if you don’t mind.

1. Who was the man in the chair? A Mi-Go in disguise or Nyarlathotep himself?

Dear Goodenough. I suppose it would not be “good enough” simply for the waxen hands and face to be a disguise. They had to be a portent, a sign of a terror as well.

Terror to what end? I suppose I am confused as to why the Mi-Go would allow Wilmarth to escape? Wasn’t the charade designed to lure him in to their clutches, and to bring his researches with him so that they might seize and destroy them as well?

Wilmarth is allowed to escape in order to better spread the terror—as a warning to humanity as to what awaits them beyond the inky black clouds of space, & in the ghost-haunted woods of New England. It is important to the Mi-Go that Wilmarth actually spread the word of their coming.

But why is that?

[Lovecraft doesn’t respond. Presumably, the card was not sent back to him as the third “layer” of questions go entirely unanswered.]

2. Fascinating depiction of the brain canisters, and the implications of same are both frightening and awesome. Genesis of same?

It’s a laugh, but—a Dictaphone cylinder. Ol’ Grandpa Theobald was trying to find some gainful employment, though I can barely stand to type up my own fictions much less the commercial communications of others. If a device can record sound waves and thus a semblence of consciousness, why not a device that, when encapsulating the brain, can record brain waves and thus actual consciousness? A few hours with the mechanism & I would have flung it to Pluto if I could have.

Work! Is Mr. Wright not treating you “right”? Surely you’re a “professional” now that you’ve left beind the amateur press and can draw an income from your work.

Oh, there is next to no money in the pulps, not unless one is truly ready & able to “hack it out” and write purely commercial material for the Western pulps, the sports pulps, & even—oh dear—the romance & confessions magazines.  It’s canned beans & one loaf of bread, pre-sliced, per week for me.

It is marvelous to live in Vermont, where the world of commerce and capital is still held at arm’s length. You remember your time here—no electrical utilities on the farm, physical work out in the verdant fields, and social life based on fellow-feeling rather than annual income. What is your attraction to city life?

[Again, no answer. This question reads almost as a dig. Surely, Goodenough knew that Lovecraft loathed cities, with the exception of Providence, Rhode Island. Lovecraft’s 1927 visit to Vermont came on the heels of his return to New England after escaping the racially diverse and economically cratered neighborhood of Red Hook, in Brooklyn NY. It is hard to imagine Lovecraft not confiding his fears and frustrations with the urban life in Goodenough. Perhaps Goodenough was more progressive than Lovecraft, and wanted to needle him a bit. Incidentally, I’ve been to Red Hook many times, as my father works there as a longshoreman. By my sights gentrification is just another form of ruination, rather than its negation, but Lovecraft would fit right in these days—he was a cult writer who dressed funny and adopted many odd affectations, after all.]

3. What was most interesting about the tale was the integration and interweaving of the supernatural and the superscientific. Do you see science and supernature as one and the same?

No, there is nothing that cannot be ultimately explicated & understood via the use of scientific analysis. It is the limitations of our brains—so large-seeming in those cozy alien cannisters, but so minute swimming in this vast black universe—that all but require an author to explore the supernatural. It’s supremely ironic that the natural world is too enormous and too fearful for the human mind to properly correlate all its contents & so we appeal to the supposedly inexplicable supernatural world to explicate the ultimately apprehendable natural world.

So is it that the Mi-Go, with their superior minds, have truly apprehended the natural world and thus appear to engage in supernatural ritual only from the mental perspective of Wilmarth? Or do you mean to say that the universe is proof against even the comprehension of the Mi-Go so that they too must make an appeal to the supernatural, at least so far as is required to get Akeley’s cooperation for his interplanetary journey?

Both are delightful possibilities, & it would be a shame for me to simply record my own thoughts on the subject, as if your own were supernumerary. Also, I am surely challenging both your eyes and my own hand with my itsy-bitsy microminiature script as it stands. The Mi-Go are greater beings than we, but then again, who ain’t? But among the bestiary of Yog-Sothory they aren’t nearly the greatest or most profound of beings. I suppose the Mi-Go are rather like us. As we might pin butterflies to a mounting board or attempt communication with a bestial tribe of [here the work is redacted by a blot of ink spilled on to the card, and the coloring suggests that it is from Goodenough’s pen, not Lovecraft’s] from darkest Africa, they seek to learn about us through a variety of means.

But Akeley, a willing participant? A proud Vermonter acquiescing to having his skull sawed open and its insides scooped out in order to fill a can of beans? I never reread my own work, though I suppose that were any of my stories contracted to be reprinted in a volume of tales (Oh green and somnambulant Cthulhu, were it so!) I might, but in this case I’ll make an exception.

But why would he not be willing? I love Vermont as much as you love your home of Providence, but were strange and alien beings to materialize at my door (being stranger than yourself and Mr. Cook anyway) with hints of a secret wisdom and displays of advanced machinery, I would give my all to ingratiate myself to them. I have no interest in the United States of the twentieth century—I’d be rightly pleased to never again wait for a streetcar in the rain along with the other dour clerks and workingmen. But space? Forbidden planets that under the night sky seem so close that, if I could just find a tree tall enough, I could touch them? Yes, I would go in a moment. I would betray my fellow man for the opportunity.

In the course of our correspondence, you declared that Wilmarth was allowed to escape in order to spread word of the coming of the Mi-Go. Does that not imply that the Mi-Go are eager for more recruits? They had been recluses; now they are ready to cultivate a generation of human initiates into their alien rites. Surely, we are to be tantalized by this possibility, even as we are repulsed by the notion of having our brains removed and canned like peaches by beings who appear to be the offspring of crustaceans and fungi, to be transported to a world far from the green hills of Earth.

What is there here for men like us, Howard? Won’t you take the opportunity to go when it is presented to you? My dreary old farmhouse, your cramped apartments—there is a universe waiting for us out there, and I am in a rage for it. My mouth is hot with bile; I feel chained to this planet. Don’t you, Mr. Lovecraft? Don’t you?

[Of course, there is no answer, and not a spare millimeter left on the card for one.]

Movie trailer for The Whisperer in Darkness. Elements relevant to the miniatures make their appearance in the trailer at the following times. A Mi-Go appears at times 2:14 and 3:10. The Masterson barn appears at times 2:24 and 2:35. Round Mountain appears at time 0.55.

Mi-Go on Support Card

The Masterson Barn

Round Mountain: Granite Cliffs

Round Mountain: Standing Stones

The ghost I see walking the rust-soft wreckage
is Thomas Andrews, drowned Daedalus
in the maze of his own melted wings,
his constant notebook filled with the weight of waters,
suitcases, coal, shoe leathers, razor strops, steel.
Silence and subsidence
are mathematical certainties
like the glare of treasure seekers, flashing nonsense signals
where the chatter of Cape Race still runs in the hull,
the longing as predictable as the loss.
A shipwright leaves his name in steam and rivets,
his bones in the painted waters of Plymouth Sound,
but the man with the querying brows without his coat on
is gone down with his heart,
the last and insoluble problem of the engineer’s trade:
how to bear the memory, the tearing strain
between what we know and what it matters,
a life jacket floating in the uncalculating sea.