When they offered me the job, I thought it was a prank. It sounded like something Cynthia might cook up. I laughed at the caller and said something like, “Nice try. I’ve got a lot to do here, but you have a wonderful day wasting people’s time.” Luckily for me, they called back the next day.
Maybe because the second caller’s voice was so different from the first, I doubted it was a prank. The offer was legitimate. I’d be a groundskeeper tending to the lighthouse just outside Arkham. The town, more like a village, sat nestled between the rocky cliffs and restless sea on the far northern coast of Maine, located halfway between Cutler and South Trescott.
The entire compound consisted of a robust stone cottage with heavy wooden storm shutters on the southern end and an unexpectedly pudgy lighthouse on the northern. A thick stone wall that was tall enough for me to take shelter from the winds from the ocean before me or from the west behind me, connected the two structures where I would spend my days. A tiny copse of oddly shaped trees sat between the northern end of the wall and the lighthouse. Beyond the lighthouse was a small wooden shed just beyond the lighthouse, where we stored the extra lighting elements and gardening supplies.
The lighthouse was shorter and smaller than I had imagined, but my hilltop was the highest point for miles, so I wrote its diminutive size off as being unimportant. The cottage was a bit bigger than what I’d hoped for. There was a sitting room with natural light which would make a fine study and writing den, a breakfast nook, a bathroom, and one bedroom I could make as dark as I wished by shutting the heavy wooden shutters.
My duties would take no more than 2-3 hours of my day. The exceptions were on foggy days or when the lighthouse on Grand Manan Island was down for repairs. Other than that, my responsibilities amounted to no more than a part-time job. As an aspiring writer, it sounded perfect. The internet was spotty. Even with the expensive Grumman antenna, my coverage was abysmal. I learned new ways of working. Gone were the days of having continuous access to the cloud in all its glorious varieties. I learned to make do with local backups. Then once every few weeks, I drove down to Bar Harbor and spent the night at my sister’s place with her and her kids. There I could indulge all my internet habits, including picking up the bounty from Amazon that I had delivered to her home.
I’d been there several days before I really saw the place. My time up to that point had passed in romantic splendor. I would accomplish so much good writing there. I bobbed along in an uninterrupted stream of fantasies that took all my energy. By the fifth day, I decided to get serious about what I was being paid to do. I put all thoughts of writing the next great American novel far from my head and took an intentionally slow tour of my new environment.
When I finished exploring both sides of the stone wall, I came to the tiny woods between the northern end of the wall and the lighthouse, couched among some willowy ground cover was a little wooden sign that read: Fellsgrove.
That word never sat right with me. The first time I saw the brown sign with dull-yellow lettering, I grew anxious and nauseous. I finished my chores early and was in bed by 5:30 PM. I slept through the night, plagued by the worst dreams I could not awaken from.
The following day was a Wednesday and that was when I discovered the fig tree in Fellsgrove. A delivery driver who had dropped off a cache of provisions told me about the secret grove. He told me dark stories, ones I wished I could forget or, better yet, unhear.
“Don’t eat the figs,” Gus said, both raising and then dashing my hopes in one fell swoop. He went on and on about the figs, positing theories as to why the taste of the figs was vaguely wrong. I grew up in North Texas and enjoyed fresh figs from the trees in Aunt Suzie’s backyard. Nothing beat eating sun-warmed figs fresh off the bush; they were flavorful, moist, and never bland. To me, the taste of figs was the taste of home.
I was able to follow Gus’s advice for a little less than 72 hours. On my third day as groundskeeper, I broke down and entered the grove, found the tree, and dropped to my knees.
I leaned in to study the familiar fruit. They looked good. Better than good, they looked great. With a shaky hand, I plucked a round fat one from a thin gray branch. I brought the fig to my nose and sniffed.
It was odorless.
But I couldn’t remember why I thought of smelling the fruit in the first place. Or if I had ever sniffed my Auntie’s figs before. Ever. When I cast my mind back as hard as I could, the best I could do was remember an oddly subdued bready scent.
So, they’re odorless. That proves nothing.
I stared at the fruit as a hunger was reborn in me. While I had no reason to doubt Gus’s character or judgment, I convinced myself that when it came to the figs-he was misinformed.
I brought the cherished fruit from a thousand childhood memories to my face, popped it in my mouth, and bit down.
Frantically, my brain started signaling my mouth.
Spit this out.
This is wrong.
This is poison.
This might kill you; spit it out.
I spit it out. The little mouthful of mildly masticated fig meat landed with a sad splat in the soil between my knees.
For several minutes I wondered if I’d just ingested something toxic. I thought about driving to the doctor’s office halfway to Bar Harbor.
I’m overreacting.
Calm down.
I didn’t get sick, but the taste of the figs left me uneasy.
They didn’t taste bad. They were just off, somehow. It was as if an alien species came down and tried to copy our figs and produce some organic variety of their own. It looked like a fig. To the extent I could remember, it smelled not unlike a fig. But the taste? On that score, it was a wild swing and a miss.
The figs of my youth were moist and flavorful. These tasted dry, yeasty, and flavorless. It was like biting into packing materials.
I guess Gus was right.
It wasn’t until the next day that I realized how right he was. I didn’t get sick, but when I wandered past the woods again, I felt inclined for some unknowable reason to revisit the tree once more.
However, when I drew near it, my eyes began tearing up. The stench was overpowering. It smelled putrid. Rancid. Vile.
How can this be?
It didn’t smell like this yesterday.
I again considered driving myself to the doctor but dismissed the thought. If I had ingested poison, a full day had already passed. Surely it was too late to do anything about it.
I knelt to inspect the plant. It became clear that the smell wasn’t originating from the plant itself, but the mouthful I spat out the day before. The air hung heavy with an odorous miasma. My skin prickled with the wrongness of it all.
From one mouthful of foul fig.
I should mention this to Gus.
Why? Why would I do that?
The following day I arrived with a bucket of weedkiller. I’d intended to kill the godforsaken, accursed plant with the foul fruit.
As I sprinkled the yellow powdery mix upon the fig tree, the weirdest thing happened.
The plant began to hiss and smoke.
This continued for some time.
Then the stench returned. This time it came upon my entire domain, the little hilltop that was to be my home for the following year.
Then the fog arose. But it didn’t rise from the ocean below me. It seemed to emanate from the earth itself. Pouring out of the soil in which the withering tree sat.
But the weirdest part was the color of the fog. It was a yellow unlike any I’d ever seen in nature. It was wrong. An aberration. An abomination of God’s creation. As I stood in the odorous yellow cloud, I felt an impossible sadness and doom descend upon me, nudging me toward madness.
I retired to my quarters and prayed several silent prayers that the fog would not long haunt my domain. I closed the storm shutters tight, removing as much light as possible from my sleeping chamber. I fell into a series of moody yellow dreams where the fog chased me through winding backstreet alleys. I knew that if the fog caught me, awful things would happen.
The following day I woke later than usual. When I ventured forth from my cottage, the sun was busy banishing the morning fog. As I watched, the skies cleared faster than I thought possible.
I stood and studied the morning and stretched, careful not to upend my ever-present morning coffee mug. It was a weighty, white ceramic thing, a present from Cynthia. It sounds corny, but she’d ordered the mug for me when I got the job. The mug’s logo read: For Howard Phillips, my favorite lighthouse keeper! You’ve been lighting my skies for years!
My mood had lifted substantially during the night. As I came around the end of the stone wall, I was greeted by a gust of wind on my face. The dew was glistening on the grass like shattered glass. I inhaled deeply, confident that the yellow haze had abated or that it never happened, that I’d dreamt the whole thing. Then I passed the end of the stone wall, and my eyes came to rest upon the little strand of wood.
The reason I thought the fog might have left me was the breeze off the Atlantic was pushing the yellow fog off the far side of my minor mountain. But the odorous sulfur steam continued to issue forth from the ground beneath the tree. If anything, it was streaming thicker and faster.
I held my nose and approached the woods. The smell was even stronger, even through the brisk wind and my pinching fingers, I felt as if I might gag as I approached the tree. The tree had changed. My eyes were watering so hard it took me several seconds before I could say how. The previous day, the branches had been a grisly gray color. That morning they were gnarled and blackened. So black that they seemed to leech the light from the very air I breathed. I couldn’t bear to gaze upon it for long without feeling my stomach drop.
There was no residue from the yellow weed killer powder I’d poured just one day before. It was as though the earth had pulled it into itself to use for fuel in its production of the accursed yellow fog.
I started to stand up and take my leave of the tree. I never wanted to look upon it again. Ever. But something caught my eye. Earlier my attention had been focused on the blackened gnarled branches, but it was the fruit, the figs that were crying for my attention now.
I’m seeing things now.
I wiped my eyes on my flannel sleeves.
There’s no way I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing.
But I was seeing it.
I couldn’t believe what my eyes were showing me.
I left the tree and swore to never return to the grove. But of course, those are the hardest promises to keep. When one comes face to face with something truly impossible, something wildly fantastical and alien, it’s impossible to stay away for long. And so, I occasionally returned during my year of employment to behold the perverse miracle of the figs.
The fog is still there. The yellow gas continues to seep from the soil beneath the gnarled tree. The plant looks like it’s dying. It is stuck in some nether state of being neither alive nor dead. The figs hover there in the yellow gloom. No longer dormant. Some otherworldly wrongness has come to Arkham. An alien force possesses the fruit. The figs are now animate. Where they once hung limply from impossibly black branches, they now throb and pulsate. Where they once remained still, they now contract and expand, beating like shiny black hearts.
Stories by Shawn 