Call Me Ishmael

 

Call Me Ishmael

by H. D. Weikle

Call me Ishmael—My story is of redemption, not the redemption of sin or from error but rather my redemption from evil. I’m a son of the town of Dunwich on the sea-swept coast of New England and of an Arab merchant out of Portsmouth whom I never knew by sight, yet suffer by blood or my ancestry. I grew up in the church of England cursed by its founding father King Henry in his solemn oath to abandoned a wife and punish his God—for I am punished and dissolute in my own irreverence by suspending my faith in light of the events I have only recently experienced and which I shall now reluctantly recount.

Today I can smell the sea. As the sun rises, wind follows and the sweet, salt of Earth’s oceans fills my nostrils. I have been here many times to this place they call Myskatonic after the natives of this land for two-thousand years. A land hard by the sea once now miles distant yet still connected by a river. That sea, lowered now, locked in the steely grip of a great frozen ice cap had once flowed here, its waves crashing against Lake Aldrich shores. Here boats walked the water ways carrying the men and industry of New England to farther regions. He lived as one of these, a sailor, a whaler for many lifetimes always his own father returning as a long lost brother to this land. Now he visited once more. It was autumn two-thousand-twelve and the sea had begun to return as Earth completed half its long twenty-six thousand year circumnavigation of the galactic wheel. 

He was once Mayan, a native in this shrouded land and later stood with European strangers exploring this ancient new world, a settler bringing a new divine accord to the land. He founded Lake Aldrich before the sea began its retreat eastward. It was cold then and he hunted that great creature of the sea, its warm heart pumping scarlet billows of blood back into the icy depths as its boiled flesh rendered the oil that brought light to this land. 

Call me Ishmael.

He was of course more than that, not a man like these others but Jinn, a being hidden in darkness, summoned to Earth by Gabriel. An immortal being who will be either daemon to man or his shepherd. There are many Jinn described in the Qur’on of Mohammed, the Qurʾān of his father and his father’s father, of caliphs Abu Bakr and Uthman, many types, many faces. Some dwelt in the dark recesses of the deserts, some in the scaly heights of mountain ranges. His home was the sea. He was known as Utukku who along with ancient Pazuzu the wind Jinn sculpted the land to suit Earth’s creatures and sometimes to destroy them as Quzah the storm Jinn commanded.

Still he felt driven to protect these men and was content therefore to usher them through there short lives even adhering to the faith of their gods from time to time. That was why he was here now not to destroy but to comfort them as they sanctified a new church on Aldrich St. 

The townspeople recognized him as a fellow Christian whose father had been a Muslim merchant and whose mother a descendant of Protestant English settlers. Both parents now gone, he was thought by most in the village to be of indeterminate faith or at the very least a queer presence in this godly place and time, a loner, yet trustworthy and industrious who maintained a good reputation and vouched Catholic for the sake of brotherhood and mutual congruity.

This day he would attend inaugural services at the newly restored St. Anthonys. It was Sunday12.21.2012 a day the old gods under Hunab-Ku decreed was the end of the Mayan calendar, when a new god would appear as civilization embarked on a different road through the universe, a paradigm shift in consciousness, one even his kind could not anticipate as the Galactic plain coursed through it’s interminable cycle grinding the sola r disc to a slightly less extreme inclination, slowly warming the planet. The sea would return to claim Lake Aldrich soon enough. He reasoned better to remain visible then, one of them for a few generations longer rather than foretell the horror that was to come.

He remembered the day the old church had burned down. Its blazing spire piercing the grey sky like a beacon to heaven announcing the imminent demise of mankind and the coming of a new order among the stars. Of course the insignificant creatures that milled around trying ineffectually to douse the flames had no such epiphany, their response was simply shock and dismay, they didn’t understand the sign, what it signified any more than an ant could comprehend a spring rain as harbinger of a great transfiguring flood. They simply set about rebuilding the church to be grander that ever. It’s two story naive resilient in granite and red brick supporting a three story tower that rose one hundred-eight feet above the banks of the Myskatonic River topped with a golden spire in the form of a crucifix. Today their ant home and ant lives were once again whole. Life went on. 

The consecration of a new church was however a sacred commission. He knew at a cellular level he must obey. His race was nothing if not obedient to the laws of gods, any gods in their hierarchical disposition and subservient to their will. Gods had created his race to no less a purpose than that to which they had created these puny beings, beings with their simple faith that he was non-the-less inexorably bound. Their sacred ceremonial incantations after all were his commandments as well. He would attend today’s sacrament in the name of his own gods even as the men and women of Aldrich would obey their own daemon numen, St. Anthony of the sea who preached to the fishes in the sea, the patron saint of the sailors and fishermen who sailed upon her. Today he would be Ishmael and walk among them not hidden from sight by virtue of his natural state, the darkness he had never shewn them. He was Jinn.

Walking in the sunlight Ishmael reflected on his own origins. His father’s faith and the subtle if powerful influence his human mother had on that faith. She had never professed to adopt his elder’s hoary legacy by remaining hidden in the dark places, the places that men instinctively avoided for fear of his kind. She was a light and a path, in her own way she lit his way even now. A protestant guide illuminating his sojourn through this three dimensional existence betwixt heaven and earth, between life, death  and his own immortality. 

Yes, today he would be his mother’s keeper. Tomorrow his race would come round once more and his redemption would be realized.

The first notice of a coming storm was the absence of animal movement, no sounds, no sightings, just an unsettling quiet that dropped over the landscape one morning. It was 12. 21, 2025. Somewhere in the vastness of the Sahara Desert Pazuzu flexed his daemon wings and a dusty whorl rose from his hidden place carrying the scent of decayed African generations toward the Cabo Verde. There he waited in the depths of the Atlantic as the gale rose spinning it into a disturbed convolution of wind and sea, almost undetectable—only the animals felt it. Tropical storm Lilith was born. Her early audible birth screams noted only be her Aabaa and Om'mahat as they released their monstrous child upon her journey west.

Mornings were cold in New England, the colors of fall faded now only a memory, It had been quiet this season in Lake Aldrich. An old townsman had died with the fallen leaves, a retired seaman known well about town named Ishmael. He had been a whaler by some accounts, anyway he knew everything about the sea, never married, stuck to himself but non-the-less esteemed in the community for his piety and, as New Englanders like to say of a stranger,  he was a strapper. They buried him in St. Mary’s cemetery thinking like the ‘Dorchester Pot’ he would remain interred. 

By Sunday the following week Lilith had increased its winds to 120 MPH and advanced far north of Bermuda in the central Atlantic, approaching Georges Bank off the New England coast. There a deep channel of river water carved its way through the coastal shelf where it entered the Great South Channel to spill into the abyssal plain. Sub zero currents raised a tempest of warm water churning north with the Gulf Stream forcing water to an unnatural flow backward toward the coast. Lilith grew to a category five behemoth as it changed it’s eye-wall for a third time a mere seventy miles from the mouth of the Myskatonic basin. Lilith then became an anomaly, exceeding the Saffir–Simpson category five by a magnitude factor of ten, continuing to push westward toward shore. Of this rising tide no one in Lake Aldrich could be aware.

Utukku dwelt silently below the rim of the basin as the gaile roared above him waiting for the storm god Quzah his brother Jinn to come ashore carrying his waters inland. Lake Aldrich and every soul living and dead lay now with the sea Jinn Utukku presiding over this new realm chained by their Roxbury Pudding Stone markers to the sea floor doomed to drown for all eternity on the Scythian sands of this desert sea, only St. Anthony’s spire breaks the surface to mark what lies below.

Call me Ishmael.