Tag Archives: Mack W. Mani

Essay

Yes Virginia, There Is A Cthulhu

Dear Editor,

I am 8 years old. Some of my friends say there is no Cthulhu. Papa says, ‘If you see it in The Arkham Review, it’s so.’ Please tell me the truth; is there a Cthulhu?

-Virginia Olmsted
115 W. 95th st.
Arkham, MA.

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe in anything except what they can see. They think that nothing can exist which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect compared to the boundless world about him and the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Cthulhu. He exists as certainly as the stars, the seas, and the infinite exist. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Cthulhu! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias.

Not believe in Cthulhu! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the coastlines and volcanic islands on Christmas Eve to catch Cthulhu, but even if they did not see him, what would that prove? Nobody sees Cthulhu. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the horrors there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man could tear apart. Only fear, fancy, madness, and obsession, can push aside that curtain and view the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in this world, there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Cthulhu! Thank God! He lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to destroy the heart of childhood.

Merry Christmas Virginia,

Archibald Gilman
The Arkham Review
919 NE Wilbur Dr.
Arkham, MA.

Based on the “Yes Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus” letters published in The New York Sun in 1897, by the real eight year old Virginia O’Hanlon and newspaper reporter Francis Pharcellus Church.

Artwork by Les Edwards

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A Year in The Deepwood

Deepwood: The Unicorn

When I was young,
I sought her
because of her wonder,
that was all that mattered.

When I grew older,
I hunted her
for beauty’s sake,
wanting it for myself.

As a man,
I wanted her
for what she could offer me,
a legend of my own,
immortality perhaps.

I hardly knew what to do,
when I finally caught up
with her, one day at sunset
drinking from a cool, clear pool
in the heart of The Deepwoods.

We wrestled for a time,
but eventually,
I broke her,
tying her to an ancient elm,
with silver rope,
as legend proscribed.

She told me all
the secrets of her kind.

When she was done,
I ground her horn
into my satchel
and drained her blood
into my flask,
through all of which,
she was alive
to preserve potency,
just as I had read
in the ancient texts.

When I emerged
out of The Deepwoods,
I told no one of my kill
and no one laughed
when I quit the hunt,
putting away childish things.

I prospered much from that day,
in my mixing and dealings.

But as an old man,
I see her now in my dreams,
beckoning for me
to join her in the pool,
a dark glint in her eyes.

I wonder what
she wants from me.

I see her sometimes,
even when I am awake,
a brilliant white streak
at the edge of my vision…

But I am too old to be hunted,
aren’t I?

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Poetry

Zoo Dreams (2 of 2)

I don’t remember the wild,
but my mother does.

She won’t talk about
what happened to her herd,
but her left eye,
sightless and milky white
speaks of a cruel world
beyond these walls.

Home to her now means
not having to wander,
to destroy all the time,
or worry about her children
and she says,
that is worth the space.

Though recently,
she does mutter in her sleep,
about the graveyards of Asia…

They are calling out to her,
across oceans
and across instinct,
begging her
to finally come home.

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Poetry

Beneath The Pepper Trees

We sank beneath the pepper trees,
full of lust and dustbowl sadness
he’s just a boy from town,
could have been anybody
with swagger and words.

He touches my scars
but can’t look me in the eyes
and when each breath
is shorter than the last
he whispers,
What if we get caught?

So I go faster,
past it all
and he forgets to speak,
his eyes making
lazy turns in the sky.

When we’re done
he tells me of his life,
so I nod at his words
and shake at his god,
so unlike my own,
all savage and undone.

When he tells me he loves me,
I just hold him close.

It’s dark when we close our eyes,
his marks still fresh on my body
but by morning he is gone,
off onto the freeway
and on into obscurity.

His marks are gone too,
but not his god and not the night
they follow me close all the way home,
back to the reeds and shallows
on the black water,
where the sumac grows wild.

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A Year in The Deepwood

Deepwood: J.R. Westermont

In the summer of 1882,
Jonathan Reginald Westermont
millionaire philanthropist
and big game hunter
bought several parcels of land
containing a dense forest
in the American Pacific Northwest.

The next Spring,
he hired a team of
former military men,
adventurers and survivalists
who he took into the woods
on what he called,
“a kind of training exercise”

That night,
while the team made camp,
he told them a story,
one about an endless forest,
with creatures no one
had ever seen before,
a place that defied size and nature,
with some lost civilization at its heart.
Most of the men laughed at this idea.

The next morning Westermont was gone.

Abandoned, the team tried
to find their way out of the woods,
but upon discovering their markers destroyed,
quickly became disoriented,
the forest’s natural features
seeming to have shifted overnight
or in the case of many trailheads,
simply disappeared.

The team’s journals end there.

The only survivor, Tobias Briar,
a civil war veteran and surveyor
emerged six weeks later,
emaciated and half mad,
raving about a creature
that had hunted the men down
one by one as they tried to escape.

The man had been in the woods
for less than two months,
but claimed that he’d been lost
for over a year.

The incident was pinned on Westermont,
whom no one has seen or heard from since.

The papers put a heavy emphasis
on his time spent in an asylum as a youth
and his obsession with hunting,
one Boston publication going as far as to say:

“Westermont could not be happy,
unless he was hunting the most dangerous game.”

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A Year in The Deepwood

Deepwood: The Deer & The Wolf

I spotted them from
the highest tower,
barely visible
amidst the falling snow.

First the deer,
dragging a broken
leg behind her,
her blood staining
the virgin ground.

Then the wolf,
lapping it up
as he followed.

The doe paid
me no mind,
but the wolf looked up
when he passed,
seeming to see me there…

The last man alive
in Castle Blackwold,
all alone,
locked in the highest tower,
amidst the falling snow.

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Poetry

Do You See Him Now?

Do you remember
that day in the courtyard,
just after the morning mist?

The man we met there,
with his tricky smile
and grown-up voice,
like he knew everything in the world?

I asked if you saw him there,
mumbling to himself
between the hemlock and holly,
with his grey-green cap
and stinking breath.

You said no, but you
had a smile on your face,
I was younger then by two years
and I didn’t know what to think.

You asked me to hold your hand,
I don’t remember if I did,
(it doesn’t sound like
something I would do)
but I know that I was afraid…

Of what I wanted to do,
of what I saw in the man
with the sticky hands,
fumbling with himself
there between the hemlock and holly.

Do you remember him?
That day in the courtyard,
just after the morning mist?

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A Year in The Deepwood

Deepwood: The Hunter

I will hunt you to the ends of the Earth.

And when you see me,
you will know that there is nowhere left to run.
I have hunted the animals in The Green
and I have killed them all;
what do you think am I going to do with you?

I wounded you once, in the snow,
you left a trail of blood behind you,
so that I would have your scent.
I would have caught you then,
but you lost me at the edge of
The Deepwoods.

And in that moment,
I realized that I loved you

you clever little beast…

I love you.

And I will hunt you to the ends of the earth.

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A Year in The Deepwood

Deepwood: The Stream

Turtles gently roam
its sloping banks
passing sumac
growing red and wild,
while strange colored fish
whirl and spin in clear shallows,
in and around cattails and reeds
all growing uninterrupted.

Overhead, a large falcon follows
the corridor of trees,
that grow along this stream,
his summer shadow cast upon
the bed below,
shimmering darkly there among
the centuries smoothed stones,
the occasional arrowhead,
and one or two familiar looking
bones of unknown origin,
half buried
and entirely forgotten,
in the sand

and silt

and time.

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