Today is
the birthday of cult horror icon, HP Lovecraft.
Thru his writing, he has indirectly had massive impact on the world of
fiction, so I decided to do another rewrite on one of his old works. I have done this writing exercise 3 times prior,
One,
Two, and
Three.
Standard Introduction
I am a fan
HP Lovecraft. Not his god-awful racism
of course, but the fact that he wrote in such a stilted un marketable way. I think it was Neil Gaiman (Though I can’t
find the interview) that described HP’s work as "a churning morass of
adjectives". But the ideas in the
stories, the mysterious and weird parts that lend themselves so well too modern
horror are often great.
The idea
of humanity not being important at all, that the universe is chaotic and
hostile, and that even knowing about these things leave the protagonists of the
stories insane from the knowledge, those are all cool.
What is
also cool is that all of HP Lovecraft’s writings are public domain. They can be re-printed, referenced, and even
re-written by those (like me) who are fans of the ideas but want to make the
writing cleaner, or tighter, or just less racist. (Seriously, why did you name the cat that
Howie? Did you think it was funny?)
Today’s Entry
While I
previously went with his more accessible writing, and shorter stories at that,
today I am working from a fragment that is just junk. I guess his estate or old publisher was just
binding together whatever they could at this point, because even though it was
written in 1897 when Howard was a literal child and did not know how
punctuation worked… it was published in 1959 by vultures attempting to
capitalize on Lovecraft’s cult fame.
“The Secret
Cave or John Lees Adventure” is a fragment published after Lovecraft’s death. Taken for what it is, a short adventure story
about finding a mysterious cave in one’s basement as a child... it is fine. It was written by a little kid. Howard clearly had a bigger vocabulary and
imagination than he knew how to express, but that doesn't make it good and it definitely didn't fit into what people know as "Lovecraft".
I had to hammer this thing like nobody’s business to work it into
anything approaching a complete story.
This is an
exceptionally short work, but could have easily served as the outline for a
scary children’s story in his adult life had he bothered to write it out more
and put, “inspired by a story I wrote as a child” in the introduction. You know how I KNOW it could have been
more? Because I turned it into a
multipart story, each part of which is much longer than the original story.
If you want to do this yourself, here is a link to HP Lovecraft’s complete works, or at least his work in horror. I believe he
wrote some romance stories too and I have no idea where to find those.
Anyway,
here is the story. I hope you enjoy it.
The Secret Cave or John
Lee's Adventure
“Be good
while I am away,” said Mrs. Lee “And don’t get into trouble.”
“Yes Ma’am,”
replied John.
“Bye,
Mama,” said Alice.
Mr. &
Mrs. Lee were going off for the day, and for the first time were going to leave
John, who last week had turned 10, in charge of his little sister Alice, who
was 8 but wiser than her brother. As soon
as the elder Lees were away the younger Lees went down cellar and began to
rummage among the rubbish. This
rummaging would have been frowned upon by their parents.
“John, we
aren’t supposed to be down here,” little Alice leaned against the wall watching
John. “Mom doesn’t want us breaking
things or getting hurt. Let’s just go
play pretend upstairs.”
“Mom and
Dad don’t let us play down here when they are here,” John said while making a
boat out of barrel staves. “So, we
should play around down here when they are not around.”
“They don’t
let us play down here because they don’t want us hurt,” said Alice.
“We won’t
get hurt,” said John. “And when they get
home I can show them that I built a boat down here without getting hurt and
after that they will have to let us play down here because we will have shown
them that we won’t get hurt.”
Alice gave
a piercing cry as the bricks behind her crumbled away and she fell back into a
hidden passage.
“Oh, god,” said John as he rushed up to her
and lifted her out. “Tell me you aren’t
hurt. We don’t want to get in trouble.”
As soon as
her scream subsided she said, “The wall went away.”
“Yeah, it
did, didn’t it?” said John going to the hole and looking down a long
passage. It looked cold, it looked damp,
and there was something else about it.
“Something is weird about this, let’s go down and see what this is.”
“What? No,” said Alice, moving to step back into the
cellar. “Hold on. It’s too dark to just go down there.”
Alice ran back upstairs to the kitchen and got
a box of oversized candles left over from John’s birthday, climbed up to the
high shelves for a little box of matches, and then went back to the cellar
passage.
“Here,”
Alice said, handing the candles and matches to John.
“Alice, you
are so smart,” John said. Alice blushed.
The two
once more entered the passage, lit by candles in tiny hands. They could see the walls were plastered, that
this hall had been part of the house ages ago.
They wandered deeper down the passage into what John suspected were bat
caves, or when his imagination started taking hold pirates’ cave like from
“Treasure Island”
“We could
find a mountain of treasure,” said John.
“Or we
could get bitten by rats or something and have to get shots,” said Alice.
After
walking further in, the plaster disappeared.
Lighting new candles they could see that the walls were hewn stone and
the floor was packed earth and sand, signs that this had been part of a house
disappeared. They came to a wider open
space in the earth, the light of their candles unable to show them the whole of
what must be a cavern of some kind.
“Where do
you think we are?” asked John.
“In a cave
dumb-dumb,” said Alice. “Did you
forget?”
“I mean
compared to the house,” John said rolling his eyes. “I would have thought we would reach the
beach by now.
“Let me
see,” said Alice kneeling to the sandy floor.
She drew a square, “Here is the house,” she drew a long line off to the
side, “There is the cliff over the beach,” she then turned her head, stood up
and walked around her little drawing, “Which wall was the hole in?”
John
started thinking and pointing first to his left, then his right. “Here?” he asked pointing.
Alice
nodded, “Okay,” she then drew a long line that was not quite side by side with
the line for the beach cliff, “Guess this is the tunnel then,” and she put a
wide mouth at the end of the line, “and this is the big part of the cave we are
in.”
“Listen,”
said John.
“What is
it?” said Alice tensing and reaching to hold John’s hand.
In the
candlelight they both heard a hiss noise, or maybe more like heavy breathing.
“It’s the
beach,” said Alice.
“Good,”
said John. “Hey, follow me.”
“John, we
are really deep,” said Alice. “And this
cave is too big for us to know how to find our way out. We can’t even see one wall from the other.”
“It will be
alright,” said John. “Here,” he wrote in
the sand an arrow pointing to the hall out and started shuffling his feet,
“we’ll leave a trail, and every so often we’ll make an arrow to point back the
way we came.”
Alice was
anxious, but John’s plan made sense, “Alright,” she said.
As they
shuffled along the sound of the water became clearer and nearer. Stopping every so often to draw an arrow, to
light new candles, or to shake the sand from their shoes as, “I should have
brought a stick from the basement for this” got muttered by each of them at
various points.
They
finally stopped when they found a small locked box, sitting somewhat deep in
the sand.
“I knew
this had to be a pirate cave,” said John.
“What?”
asked Alice.
“This is a
treasure chest,” said John. “These are
pirate caves. They would come in thru
the cave’s mouth on the beach, take their stuff up to whatever building was
there before our house and sell it or hide it.”
“That
sounds crazy,” said Alice.
“This must
just be something they left down here and never got the chance to come back
for,” said John.
“Why would
the leave it?” asked Alice.
John handed
his candle to Alice and pulled up on the box.
Hauling at it the thing eventually pulled free of the sand as he dropped
back on his butt, “they left it here because it is heavy,” he said. “They probably wanted to get a wagon or
something and then just put it off.”
“Okay, that makes sense,” Alice said
nodding. “How about we do that?”
“What?”
asked John.
“I think we
have gone far enough,” said Alice. “And
the box is too heavy to pull back with us.”
“No, come
on,” said John. “This is an adventure,
Mom and Dad would never let us do something like this again.”
“That is
one of the reasons we should go back,” said Alice. “The other being we are going to run out of
candles.”
“Oh, yeah,”
said John. “That would be bad. Let’s go get a lantern and tools or
something.”
“Yeah,”
said Alice, in the tone that said she would not want to come back down again, whether
they brought a lantern, tools, a team of dogs, or even with a bunch of
grownups.
John began
to sulk as they turned back and began following back the trail of disturbed
dirt and sand. Counting the arrows and
listening to the sound of the ocean start to fade. It was of course faster to go back, knowing
where you are going and not having to leave a trail is always faster, but
something about it was off. John was
starting to hear the ocean louder again.
“John,”
said Alice.
“I know,”
he said. “The ocean is getting
louder. Is the tide coming in?”
“No, look,”
Alice said, pointing to one of the
arrows drawn in the sand.
John gazed
at it. It looked wrong. The lines were too wide, and it wasn’t as
smooth as his sister’s clean lines. They
hadn’t drawn this arrow. His eyes turned
to the path.
“This isn’t
our path,” said John.
“How could
it not be?” asked Alice her voice raising and the slightest shiver in it
forming. “We made it. It’s ours.
We are down here by ourselves. We
are by ourselves. We’re by ourselves.”
Alice started shaking and the light of her candle started to flicker.
Alice
became deathly quiet and John’s ears perked as they heard the unmistakable
sound of a distant whistle. It was clear
and carried a melody that neither recognized.
The sound echoed and disappeared below the sound of the ocean.
“What do we
do?” asked Alice. “What do we do? What
do we do? What do we do?”
“Stop,”
snapped John. The sound of the ocean was
all they heard. “Don’t follow the path.”
“But--” Alice
started to retort.
“Listen,”
said John. “We started hearing the ocean
more, so we got turned around.”
“Okay,”
said Alice, her mood cooling. She took a
deep breath and let it all out.
“So, let’s
turn around,” he said, taking Alice by the hand. “And go away from the sound of the ocean. We’re going home.”
“We’re
going home,” said Alice.
______________________________
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