Finding It in the Atlas Doesn’t Help: Stephen Graham Jones’ “Xebico”

Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Stephen Graham Jones’s “Xebico,” first published in October 2012 in Weird Fiction Review and collected in Jones’s After the People Lights Have Gone Off. Spoilers ahead!

The narrator (henceforth N), Library Science degree in one hand, a beer constantly in the other, is taking a post-graduation break before “putting [his] soul on the auction block.” His girlfriend Janet, still in the thick of her Theater studies, fears his vacation may become permanent, or that he’ll end up a career barista. To help him reconnect to his library enthusiasm, she proposes that he help her research the play she’s assistant directing.

In regard to resparking his passion, her plan’s been a complete success. However, “she might have killed us all.”

Janet calls her professor “Herr Director.” For the spring production, he’s chosen a short story: H. F. Arnold’s “The Night Wire.” The premise is simple: Two men are working the night wire for a news service when something strange happens. Arnold published only two other stories. “Night Wire” was his first, appearing to unexpected éclat in Weird Tales. Henry Ferris Arnold, Jr., who died in 1963, is often cited as the author, but “H. F. Arnold” is probably a pen name.

The story is “legitimately creepy.” Night manager Jim is Arnold’s narrator. John Morgan is his uncommunicative shift-mate: a “double man” who can transcribe two Morse code transmissions into English text at once, using two different typewriters. Jim notices Morgan transcribing news from a town called Xebico. A strange fog has engulfed the place, throwing its residents into screaming panic. When Morgan stops typing, Jim realizes the man has been dead for hours. Later Jim searches for Xebico’s location, to find there’s no such town on earth.

N is tasked with writing an author bio for the program. Luckily, research is the part of librarian work he relishes. He imagines his biopic featuring close-ups of his bloodshot eyes and nervously tapping toes, climaxing in a “stern-faced” librarian shushing his hard-earned Eureka. Only the actual librarian he’s working with is his grad school friend Wendy. Before (mostly before) getting involved with Janet, he had pleasant encounters with Wendy in the fifth-floor stacks. Wendy falls under Things Janet Doesn’t Need to Know.

Not satisfied that “Night Wire’s” author was a journalist using a pen name, N speculates Arnold might’ve been a woman. Specifically Hortense Francis Winters, who married Samuel G. Arnold in 1920. He pictures her with “three stories burbling in her head… a Shirley Jackson in waiting.” Later he’ll picture her as an elderly librarian finding “Night Wire” in a pulp magazine, then shelving it with other dusty relics. Before long, he’s conflating Hortense with Wendy, with whom he has one “last” stacks-tryst.

Herr Director’s “Night Wire” adaptation is a one-act play. Though John Morgan has only two lines, he’s central to the plot. He’s cast heavy-set and pasty-faced, like he’s “stepped up from 1926.” One rehearsal, N senses someone sitting behind him. Looking back, he sees Morgan, the double man, dead. Though the apparition comes around to clasp N’s shoulder in reassurance, N doesn’t “believe him.”

N’s applied for a job managing a mall kiosk, but he’s so lost in researching Hortense that he doesn’t answer his phone. Maybe the calls aren’t job offers, but Wendy. He hopes not. He hopes Janet doesn’t suspect him of cheating, but Wendy’s really her fault, because he wouldn’t have been at the library if she hadn’t conscripted him into this project.

Opening night, N drinks 5.5 beers, not finishing the 6-pack because he promised to come sober. The auditorium’s only half-filled. Maybe the dripping horror-font he recommended for the posters has scared people away. He’ll get blamed, anyhow. Reward for his efforts, like the omission of his name from the playbill. On top of that, Wendy’s sitting a few rows back in a too-short cocktail dress.

The play goes well. Midway, smoke machines start generating “fog” that will slowly engulf stage and audience alike. Then a double of dead Morgan walks out through the fog. Finally, a pre-recorded montage at the back of the stage shows Jim’s frantic search through atlases. When he doesn’t find Xebico, more fog drifts in.

Someone in the audience screams. A woman falls in panic. Her fear triggers chaos, until Herr Director shouts for lights. The audience calms into relieved smiles. N looks back, but the woman in the cocktail dress isn’t Wendy. Her face is gray and hollow, her eyes a solid egg-white.

Morgan comes by to press his shoulder again. The not-Wendy woman stands, loses balance. Her breast slips from her tattered burial dress. He sees her as the girl in the dirt driveway, the bride, the librarian burying her work on the shelf. Then she’s Wendy, crying, coming towards him.

N joins the crowd pushing to leave the theater. He reaches the parking lot. Janet comes to the door, calling him to join the after-play party. He staggers against a car. There’s a dog inside, slit from throat to tail, as if something’s been birthed from it. Over the car roof, he sees Wendy in the ragged dress, holding an eyeless dog on a leash. The Winters girl, he hears in his head.

He turns from Janet, to step forward into Xebico.

Libronomicon: Narrator is (barely) an American Literature major. He can cite “Bartleby the Scrivener,” but don’t quiz him about Hawthorne or Woolf.

The Degenerate Dutch: He sure does remember Nurse Ratchett’s bare breast in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, though. And pride himself on questioning Arnold’s gender.

Oh, and there’s the ongoing comparison of the play’s faculty director to Hitler.

Weirdbuilding: There aren’t many stories riffing on H.F. Arnold’s “The Night Wire,” but this one is worth a couple dozen.

Anne’s Commentary

I listen to NPR on WGBH Boston, rarely missing Jim Braude and Marjorie Eagan’s live talk show. On Thursdays, they have a popular segment called “Who’s the A-hole?” The hosts present a true story of interpersonal conflict in which one (or more) participants is a total jerk. The hosts and callers-in then decide who the A-hole is. Hilarity ensues.

If Jim and Marjorie featured the story of N, Janet, and Wendy, I bet the show’s phone-lines would be overwhelmed with callers eager to pass judgment. Jim and Marjorie usually disagree on the A-hole du jour, but could they fail to unite against N? Could anyone pick Janet or Wendy instead, or even split the blame?

I don’t know—you can always spark controversy with angsty tales. Myself, I’m landing hard on N. This guy immediately employs the old Anonymous Narrator cop-out, and the first sentence out of his mouth is that he still thinks it’s Janet’s fault that everyone may be about to die. Oh, N, why do I sense your narration may not be entirely reliable?

What if you’re the author of our world’s end? Or co-author with H. F. Arnold? In the interest of fairness, let’s consider the facts, mindful that we have only your take on things to go by. Or—your take and Arnold’s supposedly fictional story.

At least N admits that Janet may not be wrong about his “vacation” becoming permanent. He also admits that his grad school laurels aren’t the shiniest. He may have lucked into a Library Science program because his undergraduate advisor urged him to complete at least one concentration. Am Lit? Why not, is N’s attitude. More worrisome, two of the professors he’s asked for recommendations are putting him off. Their lack of enthusiasm is one of the “Things Janet Doesn’t Need to Know.”

N can’t let his meal ticket lose confidence in him.

He definitely can’t let his meal ticket learn he’s been setting the outback stacks alight with a “former” flame. N asserts his involvement with Wendy ended “well before Janet.” He immediately adds, “maybe not ‘well before.’” But “they hardly overlapped.” Hardly being the critical qualifier.

Worse, they overlap anew when N “talked [Wendy] up to the fifth floor after microfiching Hortense Winters up from the past. As celebration. One last time.”

Wendy, you don’t need this Peter Pan in your life. Janet, trust your misgivings. N is never going to grow up. His one adulting talent is for library research, but his passion for digging deep, even in the lower circles of hell which are the microfiche archives, could be his salvation.

Or his damnation.

Like others before him, N doubts that Henry Ferris Arnold, Jr., often credited with authorship of “The Night Wire,” actually wrote it. Nor does he believe H. F. Arnold was simply the pen name of a journalist. From my futile searches for a Hortense Francis Arnold (born Winters), I’m assuming Jones created her for N to ferret out. N pieces together her history and conjures so intriguing a woman that he “was kind of getting a crush on her.” Developing an obsession would be a more accurate assessment of his mental state. He imagines Hortense as Dorothy from Oz, poised at the end of her dirt driveway, yearning for more. Even then she has stories in her head. In 1920 she marries Samuel G. Arnold and manages to get out three of her stories while “hiding” under the genderless “H. F. Arnold.” Did that satisfy her early aspirations?

N thinks not. He sees the elderly Hortense as a librarian who finds a pulp reprinting of “Night Wire” and holds the magazine “a moment too long” before shelving it. That reprint is real: Terror Tales, Volume 4, #6, published in October 1972 under the title “Xebico.” I felt a thrill of discovery like those N gets from exhuming deep-buried facts. I wasn’t able to download a copy of Vol. 4, #6, so I can’t verify that the reprint is graced by an illustration of a bare breast. From the general tenor of the magazine, I wouldn’t be surprised.

N revels in his research wizardry. His “last” tryst with Wendy occurs after he “microfich[es] Hortense Winters up from the past.” After this necromantic feat, he “waggled [his] fingers over [his] keyboard like they were magic, like [he] could conjure anything.”  Hold on. Wasn’t Janet responsible for the weirdness N summons? You know, like an apparition of John Morgan attending rehearsals or Hortense merging with Wendy in a sort of protracted possession. Janet pushed him into the research, which threw him back together with Wendy, so Wendy’s her fault, too. Doors are opening between realities, letting in who knows what! And didn’t Janet manipulate the Xebico bulletins projected to the onstage screen, so that letters first appeared backwards, as if representing “another language, an ancient spell”?

Still, Janet may have done N a favor involving him in the “Night Wire” production. Leaving the theater, N thinks, “It’s always like this after a good play. Like the world’s been remade, and just for you.” Certainly his prospects in the old world weren’t great. Why shouldn’t he step into Xebico with Wendy-Hortense-Dorothy and her little rebirthed dog too?

I think N has earned the A-hole prize back in our reality. Gotta love his webfu, though.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

I have a soft spot for rare riffs: stories about stories that rarely get stories written about them. There are thousands of tales of Innsmouth, a fair number of adaptations of The King in Yellow, more Frankensteins than you can shake a lightning rod at. Not so much “Night Wire” hot takes. All the better when the riff is good, as homage and as modern thematic update and as extremely weird weird fiction.

The core of “The Night Wire” is not the telegraph. It’s the slippage of horror from reality to unreality and back again, and the crossing of lines that shouldn’t be crossed. It’s the liminal dangers of death: the question of when exactly John Morgan died, and whether it was his spirit or his body that recorded one last transmission, and whether his spirit is stuck in Xebico forever. It’s the open question of exactly what really happened, that can never be resolved on this side of the wire. It’s the unsupported yet intuitive assumption that such a thing could never occur in the light of the day shift.

It’s the question of whether you see mist swirling in your own city, or whether it’s just your imagination.

The modern veil is more tattered, and a modern writer has an embarrassment of options for where to poke through. Jones’s King-in-Yellow-esque choice of student experimental theater is a good one. The kludged-together special effects of the black box can stir the imagination—it must be real, because certainly you haven’t just been terrified by a fog machine and a couple of strategically-placed speakers. I’m reminded of an excellent production of War of the Worlds that I saw in my teens, in which the protagonist reporter ultimately retreated from the outside fire escape into the theater, darkened except for rumbles and actinic orange light following him through the door. No question: there were Martians out there.

The ambiguity—the most interesting ambiguity—is exactly when Narrator starts to slip across realities, and why. He lies from the beginning, as much to himself as to Janet, which as we all know makes him vulnerable to untruths biting back. He hasn’t told Janet about his barriers to getting a post-MLS library job (his personal ones, separate from the terrible market). He hasn’t entirely admitted to himself that his reference problem isn’t going away. His affair with Wendy only kinda overlaps with his relationship with Janet, except when it continues, unless Wendy is a figment of his imagination. He’s not drunk on opening night, because he didn’t drink an entire sixpack.

So: does he actually find material about Hortense Arnold at all? Or is she another lie, created to placate Janet and reinforce Narrator’s self-esteem (and perhaps self-image as a feminist)? If he does find her records, do they come from our world or Xebico’s? In our world, H.F. Arnold is still tentatively identified as Henry Ferris Arnold, but I had to double-check my memory because Hortense was persuasive. Narrator certainly stretches connections where he can: “the irrelevant bare breast on this pulp cover is totally a reference to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is… shall we say, not persuasive.

So maybe his Yellow Sign moment is in the library, finding a biography man wasn’t meant to know. But it could also be in the theater, drunk and imagining Janet aware of his possibly-real affair, seeing dead John Morgan and Wendy/Hortense in the audience—it’s interesting that the incursions start among the spectators, only moving on stage when the fog machine panics the audience (again, a la the legend of War of the Worlds).

Or perhaps he is John Morgan, dead in his chair, as he imagines at the play’s end. Dead in reality, or dead metaphorically as a “really committed” boyfriend with a plan and a future. Sending one last transmission to Janet before falling into the mist-shrouded chasm between reality and delusion, like a character from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Much to ponder. But, perhaps, not too hard, and only in daylight.

Next week, join us for the conclusion of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary!