Black Wings of Cthulhu (Volume Six)

by S. T. Joshi

“Yeah, sorry about that,” I said. “Very lucky.” Then I rubbed my palms against my overalls, trying to rub away that oily sensation, just as I was trying not to think about the black hole I’d thought I saw when I opened the box.

  We can safely, I think, return now to the day in bed, the rainy day, some forty-eight hours (give or take, mostly take) after the books were brought to my apartment on Dexter Street. I stared out at the rain, through the rain at the sodden part and the green trees and grass and the cloudy sky.

  “I’ll take them with me when I go,” Maggie said.

  “I’m not trying to be a prick,” I told her.

  “I know,” she replied.

  And I changed the subject. “I think it’s going to rain all damn week,” I said. She neither agreed nor disagreed. She crushed out her cigarette in the ashtray on the nightstand, got out of bed, and dressed. She pulled on the cable-knit sweater I bought her when we were in Ireland last autumn. It’s a sort of oatmeal color, with surprisingly tasteful green shamrocks. The morning was almost gone, and she had to get to work.

  “We’ll get dinner out tonight,” she said, before she left. “Decide what you’d like before I get back, okay?”

  “Sure. Maybe that Abyssinian place on Wickenden.”

  “I could live with that,” she said, then leaned across the bed and kissed me.

  I stayed in bed maybe half an hour after Maggie left. I didn’t want to work, didn’t want to have to spend another day pretending to work on the painting that seemed to have no interest in my ever finishing it and so was determined not to cooperate.

  But when I finally did get up, I realized she’d forgotten the box of books. They were still right there on the floor beside my stool.

  2

  IN THE WEEKS TO COME, I WOULD BEGIN TO understand those books, as they would begin to understand me, and this same arrangement would apply to Maggie, though in a different and, ultimately, more malign sense. I hope I do not seem especially calm or especially rational as I write this all down; I’ll never again be either. Regardless, the books were never removed from my place. I asked her a few more times to take them home with her. She lived over on the east side of town, at the foot of College Hill. From her front room, you could look out across the Old North Burial Ground. I’d ask her to remove the books, and she’d promise she would, but then she’d leave without them. I could never decide if it was something passive-aggressive or if she didn’t want them around any more than I did. I know it wasn’t forgetfulness, as she never was the absentminded sort.

  As I began to understand those books, and they began to understand me, they . . . how do I say this? They told me stories. Or I learned stories from them. I don’t mean this in the usual sense that one learns stories from books, by reading them. I mean something else, which I’m still (and I suspect always will be) at a loss to explain. I was drawn back to them repeatedly, never mind my loathing for the sight, smell, and feel of the things. Even the noises they made, the crackling of ancient pages and binding. Sometimes I would handle them with mittens or gloves.

  I began to understand the books, and they began to understand me. See Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146 [1886]), “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.” One of those quotes that’s repeated with such frequency it becomes tiresome, but few others could be, in this instance, more germane. Each of those books is an abyss, or a monster, or an abyss in which dwell monsters beyond counting—take your pick. Only, I don’t think I fought very hard. Curiosity, our species’ old friend of questionable intent (I’d prefer not to speak in such a teleological manner, but to do otherwise would only obscure).

  I began to understand the books.

  They told me stories.

  Count among them a tale I gleaned from the Latin volume, De Vermis Mysteriis. One of the volumes best described, from what I could tell, as a grimoire. Though I do not speak Latin, I was able to gather that this particular book was supposedly authored by an alchemist named Ludvig Prinn during the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The copy from the box wasn’t that old, but seems to be an 1888 French reprint.

  De Vermis Mysteriis.

  Mysteries of the Worm.

  Oh, I should mention that someone had scrawled a few scraps of translation in the margins. These notes appeared to be quite old, in a spidery hand that suggested they’d been made with a fountain pen or perhaps even a quill. In each case, the translated lines were underlined, with a neatly drawn arrow pointing to the gloss. An example: A tenebris inter diem noctemque observant et semper vigilant, with a sepia arrow leading me to “From darkness between day and night they watch, and are ever vigilant.” ~ S. T. 1912 (only a very few of the translations were initialed and dated).

  But I did not say that I read stories from the awful books Mags had found in Newport. I said they told me stories, and they did so voicelessly. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that they showed me stories, like movies of the mind.

  For example:

  I learned of an Englishwoman who, on January 4, 1853, tried to summon something using De Vermis Mysteriis. Possibly this very copy, or possibly some other. Her name must have been irrelevant, because I never did learn that; I only know the date because of a curious and intricate sort of clock on her wall that noted the time, day, month, phases of the moon, and various sorts of zodiacal information. The woman stands naked on a chair that sat within a sort of double, interwoven circle. I can’t be sure what the circle has been traced from. My imagination usually assumes salt and blood, no matter how cliché that assumption might be. The woman’s hair is auburn, and very long, reaching almost to her lower back. I know her name is Harriett, and that she was once a schoolmistress somewhere in Surrey. The room isn’t dark, but lit by flickering gas jet behind glass fixtures on the walls. Her skin glistens with oil or grease. Her arms hang at her sides, and in her left hand is a dagger with an oddly wavy, asymmetrical blade, while her right hand holds a dried bundle of lavender, rosemary, and rue. From a ceiling beam hangs a noose of jute rope, just slightly behind her. For a long time she stands very still, as still as I would have thought only a statue could stand. I have noticed the book lying open on the floor in front of her, in front of the chair. It appears to be a much newer copy than the one from the cardboard box, but obviously can’t be from the 1888 printing.

  Harriett drops the herbs, then raises the dagger, which I have since learned is referred to as a kris. She mutters Latin (at least it sounds to me like Latin), and then she’s speaking English. All at once, it seems as though the gas jets have been shut off. The room beyond her circle has been swallowed by a darkness, but only the room beyond her circle. She calls to a being named Mynarthitep, and the darkness begins to swirl, to writhe, and now it’s shot through with iridescent threads that put me in mind of a sheen of motor oil on water. Without knowing how I know, I do know that this Mynarthitep is an angry god— possessed of a propensity to put Jehovah to shame—and that merely speaking its name can call down a terrible wrath. I know it has entered the room, and is now wrapped tightly as the coils of a constricting serpent about that circle, which is beginning to give way as Mynarthitep squeezes tighter and tighter.

  “Fair enough,” Harriett says, almost whispering. “I wished only to look upon your face, as so few ever have, and now I’ve done that, haven’t I?” And she slices a long gash between her breasts. Blood oozes down her belly and drips to the floor. There’s a sound, then, that makes me think of those old black-and-white submarine movies set during World War II, when a sub has to dive deeper than it should, and the water pressure threatens to crumple it. Harriett has gone more deeply than her protective circle was designed to go, and now it is on the verge of implosion. But, still, she dutifully offers this dark god her own blood. The circle breaks, as she slips the noose about her neck and kicks the chair out from under her. It screams, Mynarthitep, and I know that Harriett, who once was
a mere schoolmistress in Surrey, has somehow cheated a god.

  This is only one among the hundreds of stories given to me by the eleven books Mags brought into my apartment that day in May. I see little point in writing any of the others down, though I still may. Keeping them to myself is almost unbearable, and even the release of just that one has made the load lighter. So we’ll see. By “we,” I suppose I mean “I” and nothing more.

  I’ll see.

  3

  WHAT FOLLOWS IS A SERIES OF EPISODES, RELATING, to varying degrees, to Mags’ cardboard box of books. I did warn of the fractured, episodic nature of this narrative. The dollops by which this “story” would be delivered, did I not, way back at the beginning? And yes, I do assume this is a “story” that will be read, as I have discovered an extremely small esoteric journal with an even smaller readership which, I think, will be glad to have this strange document. One whose editors and subscribers will, readily and eagerly, not view it as merely fictional, but as fact almost concealed by the conspiracy that hides the genuine face of the world from ignorant eyes. Myself, I believe in no such organized or purposeful conspiracy. It may only be the nature of the mind of women and men, that we have evolved down the hazardous course of our genus’ two(+)-million-year history to perceive our environment in such a way that is most advantageous to humankind’s consciousness, so that evolution is the sole conspirator here. Mind is merely the function of brain, and there is no reason to suspect that psychology is any less at the mercy of natural selection than is the structure of the brain; indeed, to believe so would be entirely absurd.

  And I have already faced too many absurd things in too short a time.

  I

  IDID MAKE AN INQUIRY CONCERNING THOSE ELEVEN books. Not to a librarian at the Providence Athenaeum or the library of the Rhode Island School of Design. This was a week or so after Maggie had brought the books to my home (and then refused to remove them). Instead, I called a shop in Marblehead, Massachusetts, a shop that purported to specialize in texts concerned with the “occult, magick, witchcraft, and demonology.” I admit that the shop’s proximity to Salem, with its unfortunate history and the grotesque tourist trade that thrives upon that history, made me wary. But it was the first such shop I encountered online, and I really wasn’t in the mood to look for any others. I asked about four of the titles by name. A nervous man (at least, he sounded nervous) cut me off after the fourth and wanted to know if this were a joke. I assured him it wasn’t, that the books were very real, that I was on the up-and-up, that all eleven were stacked on the table in front of me, and I could read from one if he wished. He hung up on me. I stared at the receiver for a long time before returning it to the phone’s cradle. And I thought, She’s going to have a lot more trouble unloading these things than she suspects. She, of course, being Mags.

  II

  TEN DAYS AFTER MAGGIE BROUGHT THE BOX HOME from Newport (which happened, by the way, to be the fifteenth, a Wednesday), I had cause to drive along Atwells Avenue, skirting Federal Hill on some errand or another. It’s a bad part of town—Federal Hill, I mean— and not a part I make a habit of lingering in. I cannot even recall what the errand was, but I needed to reach the turnoff onto the highway, southbound (I think)—that much I do remember. And at the corner of Atwells and Sutton, I passed an abandoned and decaying church. A sign outside identified it as St. John’s Roman Catholic Church. It was built all of redbrick and marble, and the blocky steeple faced Atwells. I’m not even sure I’d call it a steeple, as it was topped not by a traditional spire, but a peculiar variation of mansard roof, capped with a modest cross. Near the top, there was a single lancet window on each of the tower’s four sides. From a purely architectural standpoint, I cannot say there was anything especially imposing about the building. I was not raised Christian, and they’ve never inspired in me any sort of default reverence. The beauty and grandeur of truly spectacular examples, or those with great historical significance, are not lost on me—such as the First Baptist Meetinghouse on Benefit Street, which happens to be the first Baptist church built in America (1774– 1775). But this derelict building on Atwells Avenue, it had about it both a pronounced plainness and a very discernible sinister atmosphere. Somehow, it managed to appear ordinary and unspeakably unwholesome at the same time, as if sporting some unsuccessful camouflage. A mask through which its eyes were all too visible, and don’t they say that the eyes are the windows to the soul?

  I didn’t pull over for a better look, though some fraction of me very much wanted to do just that. A much larger fraction of me had no thought but to keep driving and not look back, and also to wish I’d never set eyes on the place. I wondered, vaguely, how I’d come this same route so many times before and never once before noticed the place.

  I went on about that Wednesday’s errands, whatever they may have been, and it must have been an unremarkable Wednesday in every other respect.

  It wasn’t until early June that I happened to remember the church. Mags and I were having dinner at a Mediterranean place on Atwells, and I mentioned that place. I described it, all the details I could recall. Maggie furrowed her brow and picked at her salad a moment, and then she said, “That’s very strange.”

  “Why? Why is that very strange?” I stopped eating and stared across the booth at her. She stopped picking at her salad and stared back at me. I’m not sure if the expression on her face was more confusion or concern.

  “St. John’s was torn down back in the nineties. Ninety-two, I think. There wasn’t much left, because it had burned, but what was left was demolished. There’s nothing there now but an ugly little park. Are you sure . . . ?”

  The question seemed to trail off unfinished, or maybe it didn’t. Either way, it hung there between us for a minute or so, and then I got up and almost ran to the restroom. She followed me and held my hair back from my face while I vomited into the toilet. When I was done, she wiped my lips clean with a wad of tissue.

  III

  EARLY THAT JULY I WAS READING, FOR THE FIRST time, Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951). He devotes most of Chapter 13 to an encounter he, marine biologist Ed Ricketts, and the crew of the Western Flyer had with a tiny island south of Isla San José. Steinbeck writes:

  A small dark islet had caught our attention as we came in [to Amortajada Bay]. For though the day was bright this islet, called Cayo on the map, looked black and mysterious. We had the feeling something strange and dark had happened there or that it was the ruined work of men’s hands. Cayo is only a quarter of a mile long and a hundred yards wide. Its northern end is a spur and its southern end is a flat plateau about forty feet high. Even in the distance it had a quality which we called “burned.” One knows there will be few animals on a “burned” coast; that animals will not like it . . . Whether this is the result of a deadly chemistry we cannot say. . . .

  There is so much strange about this islet we will not set much of it down. It is nearly all questions . . . There is no landing place; all approaches are strewn with large sea-rounded boulders which even in fairly still water would beat the bottom out of a boat. On its easterly side, as we approach, a cliff rises in back of a rocky beach and there are a number of shallow caves in the cliffside. Set in the great boulders in the intertidal there are large iron rings and lengths of big chain, but so rusted they came off in our hands. Also, set into the cliff six to eight feet above the beach, are other iron rings with loops eight inches in diameter. They look very old . . . In the shallow caves in the cliffs there were evidences of many fires having been built . . .

  The crew encountered only a single animal on all Cayo, “one large black crow that shrieked at us with dislike, and when we approached flew off.” Upon revisiting the shallow caves, before returning to the sanctuary of the Western Flyer, they noticed the bones and shells of sea turtles, a great quantity of clam shells, “and scrawled in what appeared to be charcoal and pigments, many unnerving pictographs or hieroglyphics. Rational men do not speak of blasphemy or of wit
chcraft, but I think we all felt we’d come upon the source of the island’s ‘burning.’”

  Ed Ricketts was struck by a train on May 11, 1948, near his home and lab in Monterey, and among his papers and notebooks was found a series of sketches reproducing the images from the walls of Cayo. I have found three symbols identical to these in one of the books from Mags’ box. They can be found midway through François-Honoré Balfour’s Cultes des Goules (Paris, 1702). I don’t read French and have no wish to know what the accompanying text might reveal to me.

  IV

  FOUR YEARS AGO, A FEW MONTHS AFTER I MET Maggie Ellen Morse, we visited the National Museum of Illustration. I’d never been, but Mags had, and she wanted me to see it. And (the exorbitant admission fee aside) it was, for the most part, a wonder. The museum is contained by Vernon Court, an estate designed by John Merven Carrère and Thomas Hastings of Carrère & Hastings, and the interior was conceived by the firm of Jules Allard et ses fils of Paris. A beautiful and ghostly dream of that lost and secretly venomous “Gilded Age.” Vernon Court was completed in 1898, so it was one hundred and thirteen years old upon the occasion of our visit.

  The collection, though, concerned me far more than that cold and ostentatious tomb of a mansion. I saw pieces by N. C. Wyeth, Elizabeth S. Green, Maxfield Parrish, Howard Pyle, Coles Phillips, and . . . too many to name. I did my best to avoid the kitschy Norman Rockwells. But there was this one canvas, created by a painter of whom I’d never even heard, and whose name I’ll not set down here. I will briefly describe the painting.

  Three young women, all nude, kneeling and heads bowed, so that it is difficult to see anything more of them but their backs, shoulders, buttocks, the soles of their feet. Each has blond hair so long it reaches along to the black stone floor. Before them floats an emaciated figure (it is impossible to say if it is male or female) who seems clothed in nothing but a long yellow robe; its face is hidden by the robe’s hood. The figure is pointing towards a wall behind it (which seems to be built of the same black stone as the floor on which the three girls kneel). Upon the wall a single symbol has been painted, something almost (but not quite) akin to the Greek triskelion (τρισκέλιον), and the figure is clearly motioning towards it with one gray and almost skeletal hand, though, with their heads bowed, none of the three women can possibly be looking at the floating entity in yellow. Perhaps they have already seen it, and this is why their heads are lowered.