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By Root 342 0

thing. My mind had been wandering for the last hour through the rooms in which my grandmother had passed her life (a year before this I’d telephoned home from some booth in the middle of nowhere, Kansas, and learned that the woman who raised me had died of pneumonia that very morning), and all at once, with the burnt-sugar flavor of bourbon in my mouth, I found myself thinking about Albert Vetch and the hundreds of forgotten stories into which he had poured all the bitterness of his cosmic insomnia. There was one story I remembered fairly well—it was one of his best—called “Sister of Darkness.” It was about an amateur archaeologist, naturally, who lived with his invalid spinster sister in a turreted old house, and who, in the course of poking around the ruins of a local Indian burial mound, stumbled upon a queer, non-Indian sarcophagus, empty, bearing the faded image of a woman with a sinister grin, which he carted home in the dead of night and with which he became obsessed. In the course of restoring the object he cut his hand on a razor blade, and at the splash of his blood upon it the sarcophagus at once grew warm and emitted an odd radiance; his hand was healed, and at the same time he felt himself suffused with a feeling of intense well-being. After a couple of tests on hapless household pets, which he injured and then restored, our man persuaded his crippled little sister to lie in the sarcophagus and thus heal her poliomyelitic legs, whereupon she was transformed, somewhat inexplicably as I recalled, into an incarnation of Yshtaxta, a succubus from a distant galaxy who forced the hero to lie with her—Van Zorn’s genre permitted a certain raciness, as long as the treatment was grotesque and euphemistic—and then, having drained the life force from the unlucky hero, set out to take on the rest of the town, or so I had always imagined, half hoping that a luminous ten-foot woman with fangs and immortal cravings might appear sometime at my own window in the most lonely hour of the Pennsylvanian night.

I set to work reassembling the story as well as I could. I toned down the occult elements by turning the whole nameless-Thing-from-beyond-Time component into a weird psychosis on the part of my first-person narrator, played up the theme of incest, and added more sex. I wrote in a fever and it took about six hours to do. When I was finished I had to run all the way to class and I walked into the room five minutes late. The teacher was already reading Crabtree’s story aloud, which was his favored way of having us “experience” a story, and it didn’t take me long to recognize that I was hearing, not a garbled and badly Faulknerized rehash of an obscure gothic horror story by an unknown writer, but the original “Sister of Darkness,” the clear, lean, unexcitable prose of August Van Zorn himself. The shock I felt at having been caught, beaten, and most of all preceded at my own game was equaled only by my surprise on learning that I wasn’t the only person in the world who’d ever read the work of poor old Albert Vetch, and in the midst of my mortification, of the dread that stole over my heart as the professor slid each page of the manuscript under the last, I felt the first glow of the flickering love I continue to bear for Terry Crabtree.

I said nothing during the discussion that followed the reading of Van Zorn’s story; nobody liked it very much—we were all far too serious-minded to enjoy such a piece of black foolery, and too young to catch the undertone of sorrow in its style—but nobody recognized it either. I was the one who was going to get busted. I handed my story to the professor, and he began to read, in his manner that was flat and dry as ranchland and as filled with empty space. I’ve never been able to decide if it was his tedious way of reading, or the turgid unpunctuated labyrinthine sentences of Mocknapatawpha prose with which he was forced to contend, or the total over-the-top incomprehensibility of my demysticized, hot-hot-sexy finale, composed in ten minutes after forty-six hours without sleep, but, in the end,