The Tomb by HP Lovecraft
Published March 1922
Photo by Josh Jones
Category: Macabre
When I was a teenager - 14 maybe - a few friends of mine and I spent several weeks with my best friend John at his family's cottage in Peak's Island, Maine. It was a lush island overgrown with forests and swamps, an idyllic place for scrappy nerds to have adventures. The island was also the site of several World War II military emplacements, it being on the extreme East coast of the USA. After they were decommissioned the island's kids quickly appropriated them for exploration. My memories are foggy (I've never been a good chronicler!) but I know there were several places with ominous sounding names; The Crypt, The Towers, The Bunker, The Battery - and yes, The Tomb. To get to the tomb (we seemed to lose it from day to day) you had to tramp through a thin cluster of bushes and walk down a small hill to find the overgrown concrete structure. It was a small entry way compared to the other spots, about ten feet wide by twenty feet tall. With flashlights in hand you'd walk in a bit then have to climb over a concrete wall - using broken edges and nearby logs to get over the seven or so feet. John was the typical hardcore alpha male; if you didn't want to do it or were afraid you got a quick, embarrassing and very adult dressing down before continuing on; this happened to me a lot. Once atop the thick wall it was a short drop into a pitch black tunnel that must have gone into the earth many feet but it was long ago filled in with dirt. This was only one of the mysterious structures we'd explore. It was my favorite summer.
In Lovecraft's The Tomb our narrator is a man writing to us from the confines of an insane asylum. He tells us that when he was ten he became obsessed with his discovery of a hidden tomb in the forest near his home. He cannot enter -it's locked - but he dreams about it, desires to explore its shadowy depths. One night, after a bit of dreamy insight, he finds the key hidden in the basement of his home and now has access to the sepulcher. The image of a young boy playing in an ancient crypt is disturbing but is indicative of other stories in Lovecraft's catalog of characters who are unnaturally obsessed with the dark fringes of experience. Many of his characters thrill to the shadowy dark and turn toward the rustling sound in the bushes rather than flee. They almost always regret this! But we go along with them, and it makes it all the more frightening.
Our young narrator grows up and goes to the place nightly. His obsession never falters even after the ruinous climax that sends him to the asylum.
During our time in Maine we'd explore the island and then slog home, sweaty and filthy, eat a hearty dinner cooked by John's German mother and play AD&D until the wee small hours. His dad read loads of fantasy and science fiction (I remember an immense bookshelf in their house with every classic fantasy title in it; Tolkein, Donaldson, The Shannara Books.) We'd lay in our beds, cots or couches, reading until we slept. I was deep into Stephen King at this time though I was trying to enjoy the first of the Dragonlance novels and John's Conan books. Casually one evening HP Lovecraft came up and John's dad harrumphed. We looked up to him a lot; he was really smart and charming and could converse at length about Star Wars and Blade Runner. He told us that Lovecraft was terrible because he got the science of his stories so wrong. There was one story that he half-remembered reading about aliens that came and ate people and were later defeated by - surprise! - salt water. And since humans are made up of mostly water, well...
That stuck with me, and for the next eighteen years my literary journeys avoided Lovecraft country. So when I finally dove in and devoured these stories I looked out for that story of the human-hungry aliens afraid of saltwater - I either missed it or he never wrote it. The story was likely written by one of his contemporaries working in a Mythos mold without Lovecraft's respect for science.
So glad I went to Maine, and even more glad I didn't ultimately listen to a bad Lovecraft review.
~~I read the story last night on the N train from a old collective called The Tomb and other tales; it was falling apart in my hands, brown pages crumbling to the train floor, the musty smell of a dozen booksellers wafting into my nostrils.
I took a pic to document the locale; I planned for the light up sign to read "Astoria/Ditmars" but it changed just as I snapped the photo...
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