An herbage rank and wild, I thought, and that line brought back memories of Jenny Schuster. Sitting with her under a tree, the two of us leaning against the trunk in the dappled shade, her wearing the tattered old vest that was her trademark and holding a paperback book in her lap. It was called The Best of H. P. Lovecraft, and she was reading me a poem called “Fungi from Yuggoth.” I remembered how it began: The place was dark and dusty and half-lost in tangles of old alleys near the quays, and suddenly the reason why this place was freaking me out came into focus. I was still miles from Lilimar—what that refugee boy had called the haunted city—but even here thing were wrong in ways I don’t think I could have consciously understood if not for Jenny, who introduced me to Lovecraft when both of us were sixth graders, too young and impressionable for such horrors.
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