Jitterbuggin'
by Nick Mamatas

Dear Jack -

I was intrigued with the manuscript you sent along with your last letter, especially in the rendering of the details of Lowell's old colonials & Victorian homes. You simply must come on up to Providence one of these days, I would love to shew you some of the surviving ancient architecture of this city. Unlike Lowell, which long ago gave itself over to the soot of industry, this old town has managed to hang on to a proper Yankee atmosphere and architecture. I do admire the remnants of the French Canadian footprint in Lowell & in your own writing. Did I recognize the Moody Street Bridge of the Pawtucketville neighborhood in that frightful scene concerning the Man With The Watermelon? A smart piece of writing, that was, Jackie. There is a long eternity we have been seeking, as you said, & I daresay you have actually caught a glimpse of it.

I had a frightful dream three nights ago, one that gave me a glimpse of the primal horror at the very edges of infinity! I was in New York, a city I once lived in for what were easily the two most desperate & horrific years of my life. That city is no place for a white man, & as a center of literature, I'm afraid that damned burg will simply eat young ones like you alive. Your loving Grandpa here has already been rendered by the clacking mandibles of a million slavering half-beasts, & that was just from the rejection slips! In my dream I found some small comfort from the fact that I was not blindly wandering down a filthy avenue in Manhattan proper, but was rather in Queens. I was standing outside Addisleigh Park, one of the few areas not yet gridded over & rationalized for the inhabitance of Italians & other immigrants. Right on the corner of Farmers & Linden Boulevards, within the larger community of St. Albans, I was alone. Propelled along by the weird logic that only a dreamer has, I found myself following a shadowed path cast by the creaky steel bridge of that neighborhood's elevated rail system (part of the Long Island Railroad & not the IRT if I remember correctly - even in dreams I have an unerring sense & memory for the geographical) in the hope that I would be able to find a sliver of civilization & perhaps my way home.

I came across three men in distressed modern outfits. They may not have been tramps, but they were not far from that desiccated state. They offered me a bottle, which I of course refused & then snickered among themselves with the sort of casual rudeness that would shock my old aunts (& I'm sure your poor Memere!) but that is as common as cement in New York . One of them, whose eyes were obscured by the rim of his crumpled hat, held his fingers to his lips, not to silence their rudeness but only the noise. It worked too well, & I knew eldritch forces were beginning to gather in the darkness beyond the pale amber light of the single electric lamp by the mouth of the overpass we were standing under. Not only did the fellow's comrades fall silent, so too did the wind in the trees & even the distant growl of motor traffic that can usually be heard all over the flattened landscape of this borough.

Only one sound remained, a jagged tinkling of a far-off piano. It was no parlor music but rather a deranged cacophony of scales & trills as if the pianist's hands were chasing a mad rat across the ivories. It wasn't quite the mad piping of Azathoth but it was about as close as a single pair of human hands (if it was in fact a single pair, it may have been a set of Siamese twins at the bench for all I knew) could get. Then the man who had silenced the world for the benefit of this said simply, "Party time." The other men nodded & walked off. I could not help but follow them for even the company of shambling bums struck me as better than a cold night under a bridge in Queens.

St. Albans is a delightful neighborhood, a bulwark of Old World sensibility filled with nice Victorians & some solid brick houses, though the homes were a bit overstuffed for my taste. They replicated the form of ingenious Yankee architecture without realizing that homes spread over their foundations in response to new births, expanded commerce, etc., & not simply for the sake of ostentation. Oh, & the lawns, spread like a swamp in front of the buildings. Our little quartet cut past many of these lawns; we would have looked like a band of tribesman tracing our way through the savannahs to anyone who would have been up at the ungodly dark hour of our travel. And in the distance, the sounds, spiraling & crashing ever louder, beckoning us to join them in some macabre waltz in quadruple time.

We came upon a block much like the rest of St. Albans except that it ended in a cul-de-sac & the great brick monstrosity of a house that stood at its end glowed with electric light. Shadowy figures darted & twirled in the windows, undulating almost but not quite in time with what I now realized was a form of piano music. The man with the hat rapped on the door & it was opened by a colored man. Not a servant, but a partygoer. It was a mixed-race party & of course it is the nature of the Negro to drag the white man down to his level, explaining the disheveled countenance & attitude of the other members of the little band I had found myself attached to.

The room was thick with smoke & dominated by an enormous Negro banging away at a grand piano. He rocked & rolled on his bench, preening & showing off as his hands fell over one another to punish the ivory keys of his beaten instrument. Some of the throng was trying to dance, but they could only jerk & twitch, some not even stopping for a moment to put down their drink or cigarette as they staggered across the carpeted floor. I was ready to turn & leave immediately, but one of the members of my group, a young man with slick-greased hair & an Italianate manner put his hand on my back & physically pushed me past the vestibule & into the parlor. "Don't be a flat tire," he told me, "you crashed the party with us, you're getting zozzled with us." I have no idea if he was speaking some form of pidgin, a cant known primarily to reprobate & criminals, or if the man was just insane, but it was clear that I wasn't going to be allowed to leave this bacchanal of miscegenation.

I had barely staggered into the center of the parlor when the music suddenly stopped. At once, all eyes were on me. It was silent again. Not even the ice cubes in the glasses of liqueur some of the men & women held dared to clank. And they stared at me, a mass of lowlifes brought together by some primitive libidinal pulse in the air of New York City. But what was I doing there? The pianist looked at me & smiled in a twisted leer. There was lipstick smearing his cheek from a white woman, some sort of flapper beguiled by a vicious hoodoo curse perhaps, who had perched beside him like a raven familiar balanced on an old thaumaturge's shoulder. And then he spoke.

"This ain't no rub, daddyo, what we have here is a genuine blow. So let's cut the bushwa, if you know what I mean," he said, then looked around, "and I know ya'll know what I mean, & let's get hot! Fellas, grab yourself a bearcat or a bug-eyed Betty if that's all you cake-eaters can score, & let's show this grummy drewdropper that we can put on a panic! Savoy Lindy!" With that he cackled at a soul-chilling pitch & dove into his keys again. The piano erupted with a noisome wave of madman's music & the entire party took to the floor. They danced in pairs in a hyperactive waltz, throwing their limbs into the air with no regard for rhythm, safety, or gravity. And I began to feel in the depths of my own innards, an unfamiliar parasitic twitching. That woman came up to me, the one who had pressed her lips against a black cheek not a moment before, & grabbed me by the wrist. With an arm as strong as a steel cable, she pulled me into the mass of freakish celebrants. I wouldn't dance, I could not, so she pushed & pulled, first with her left hand wrapped around my left wrist, then with her right, forcing my body to contort & twist like a band of summer taffy.

And then, gripped by a dark power beyond reason, my feet began to move to the strange avalanche of melodies pouring forth from the piano. I grabbed my partner by the waist & dipped her, then swung her between my legs with a primal strength I never had in my waking life. Yes Jack, I was dancing, dancing to Negro music! And I liked it!

With that I awoke, back in my homely old room in Providence. My heart was thumping against the cage of my chest as if seeking escape, & my throat was burning. This morning my aunt informed me with more than a modicum of displeasure that I had been having some sort of episode in my sleep, as I shrieked & thrashed so aggressively that even she was roused. If not for our current depressed state, she would have even sent for a doctor for fear that I was experiencing some form of somnambulant cataplexy.

And in a depressed state we are, personally as well as nationally, I'm afraid to report. I simply have not been able to come up with any cash in the past ten weeks. The sale of a short story is simply out of the question, as I have no manuscripts good enough to arouse me to begin the odious process of typing up. I cannot even land any editorial work from the usual suspects, thanks to the crash & subsequent nationwide penury. I have on a number of occasions been able to transcribe some horrid dream into a passable tale, but as chilling as I found last night's nocturnal misadventure with the jazzy jigs, I know that no editor of sound mind would ever pay for the right commit such a ridiculous scenario to pulp paper. Even my own mind is beginning to plot against me it seems, as my own personal night-gaunt is striking against the idea of working as a sensible muse anymore. Enjoy the dream-tale, Jack, I'm afraid that you might be the only one to ever read it.

Yrs by The Scarlet Seas,

Grandpa HPL

The End

Story copyright Nick Mamatas, published by the Fortean Bureau
http://www.forteanbureau.com