by S. T. Joshi
I didn’t call out to her. I never did during those nights when I’d find her reading from one of the eleven books. My love said to me, before her white teeth drew my blood, “Light is dark, and dark is light.” Yet reducing that to the simplicity of 01001100 01101001 01100111 01101000 01110100 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100100 01100001 01110010 01101011 00101100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01100100 01100001 01110010 01101011 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101100 01101001 01100111 01101000 01110100 would be worse than fallacious.
I stood a moment in the bedroom doorway, staring down the hallway. Then I went to the kitchen for a glass of water. After the kitchen, I paused before an unfinished canvas, wondering how many months would pass before (assuming “if”) I were able to finish it. Thankfully, I was having much better luck with commissions, so I wasn’t worrying about the rent, utilities, and so on and so forth. I set the half-empty glass of water on the little table beside my easel to share space with metal tubes of paint, a bottle of linseed oil, a scatter of brushes.
I found her on the scuffed hardwood floor next to the ratty chaise I’d inherited from my mother. These details seem, to me, infinitely more important than I believe they would to anyone else: ratty, scuffed, inherited, et al. On the chaise itself one of the books lay open. Von unaussprechlichen Kulten. Those calf-bound covers, signatures of vellum pages held together with sewing thread. What was left of Maggie—no, what Maggie had become—lay at my feet. It is critical to recall that this is not a process of reduction, but one of transformation. An invited transformation, dictated by the reproductive facilities of Burroughs’ linguistic virus once it made the leap from gray matter to all the other cells of her body. I don’t know exactly what I felt in that moment, and likely I never will. Maybe the virus has not yet (and never will) bestow upon the human brain that one perfect word that would describe the transformation of Maggie Ellen Morse. Maybe that’s a mercy it granted us, if I dare ascribe to it the capacity for mercy.
Her trapezohedron didn’t shine, but glinted wetly. Perhaps other eyes than mine were required to see the shine, or it may be the shine of her new form was contained within the tetragonal trapezohedron of her, the geometric boundaries of her square antiprism, that semiregular polyhedron. She measured no more than six inches across. Eight red-blue pulsing kite faces constructed of fibrous, connective tissue—muscle, epithelial tissue, fine networks of veins. If there were nerves, they were not visible to my naked eyes. The edges joining vertices were constructed all of living white bone. I didn’t wonder if this were some other organism, possibly summoned from the book when Mags spoke an incantation aloud. I knew what I was seeing. I knew perfectly goddamn well what I was seeing there on the floor. I sat down a foot or so from it, and watched. At some point, I went to the bathroom to piss and find the bottle of Vicodin. I went to a cabinet in the kitchen for the bottle of rye. It is difficult for me to communicate the calm that had settled over me. There was no horror, no terror, no panic, and hardly even any sorrow. How can one mourn inevitabilities? Wait. Dumb question, as we’ve built too many religions around our inability to not grieve (and fear) the inevitability of death, yes?
I returned to her with the pills and liquor. If I spoke any words at all, I’ve forgotten them, each and every one. She’d passed over to other existence, though I will never know if she did so from desire or mishap or the lure of words contained in irresistible books (id est, viruses). Hardly matters, but I found it unlikely she would be able to hear me. It may be one may fall so deeply into language that one loses the aptitude to comprehend the speech of those Outside you. You have become, to use Charles Fort’s phrase, “a damned thing,” and you have done so through the aegis of “damned things.” By the damned, I mean the excluded. Excluded from the rational minds of rational women.
Dawn came, then a clear summer morning, and Mags seemed, I was certain, to draw in upon herself by the slightest of degrees. To flinch, I’d say . . . described this “Shining Trapezohedron” thing as a sort of portal for summoning an ancient, evil god which could only be banished by bright light. I went back to the bedroom, and in the top of the closet I found another thing I’d inherited from my dead mother—a cedar box large enough to contain the trapezohedron of once-human flesh. I did not like the feel of her, my skin against hers when I lifted her into the box, and I plan never to touch her again. It wasn’t so different from the greasiness I felt that first day, lifting one of the books from that Campbell’s Tomato Soup carton. I returned to the closet and placed the box on a high shelf. I have no intention of ever again opening that closet door, so long as I remain in this apartment.
I said something earlier about how I am writing something I mean to be read. I said something about an esoteric journal, but fuck all that. I’ll hide these pages as I have hidden her. But those eleven books . . .
I locked them in a small home safe I purchased at a gun shop in North Kingstown. Also, it wasn’t hard to discover the deepest point of Narragansett Bay (a few words typed into Google)—184 feet, 56 meters, in the East Passage, and this must be very close to where the enigmatic Dr. Dexter sunk the artifact worshipped by the congregation of the Starry Wisdom. I considered taking the Block Island Ferry, to consign the books to deeper waters than can be found in the bay. And I still can’t say why I did not. Maybe the virus had more of a hold on me than I thought, and they wished to be near the relic Prof. Bowen brought back with him from Egypt. I can’t know if that was the case. I did, I admit, consider burying Maggie in the same depths, but I couldn’t bring myself to do so.
And now I am making an end to this, my disjointed narrative.
Or, at least, I have come to a point where I can indulge in another illusion so precious to our minds, the illusion of endings. The sight of her transformation, the slick feel of her, what I saw and read within those drowned books. The fact that what she is now is kept safe in my bedroom. I can never find a vaccine for the virus. I will not even try.
I receive letters, sometimes, all postmarked from the same address in Yorkshire, England. I don’t open them.
You Shadows That in Darkness Dwell
MARK HOWARD JONES
Mark Howard Jones was born in South Wales on the twenty-sixth anniversary of H. P. Lovecraft’s death. He is the editor of the anthologies Cthulhu Cymraeg: Lovecraftian Tales from Wales (SD Publications, 2013) and Cthulhu Cymraeg 2 (Fugitive Fiction, 2017). His latest Lovecraftian fiction appears in the anthologies Black Wings 3, The Madness of Cthulhu, Volume 2 (Titan Books, 2015), Black Wings 5, and Gothic Lovecraft (Cycatrix Press, 2016). He lives in Cardiff, the capital of Wales.
HE’D WANTED TO GET LOST, CERTAINLY, BUT NOT this lost. The map he’d procured when he hired the boat was now useless.
After the strain of the last year, five days away, all alone, seemed like a good idea. A chance to clear his head. And God knows nobody would miss him. Certainly not his insolent daughter or her uninterested younger sister. Only his distant wife had raised any concerns, and those were mainly financial; she was in the midst of divorcing him, after all.
A hiking holiday would get him away from all that. It was intended to help him focus on what was important in his life. The trip down river had been almost spur-of-the-moment.
He’d come upon the small boatyard by accident after getting lost. Despite some initial language problems, the old man who ran it had been very helpful and told him where he’d taken the wrong path. But before he could begin retracing his steps, he’d been drawn to a small boat with a motor.
A keen canoeist in his youth, he was sure he could handle the small boat. And it wasn’t the boat that was the problem. He had now sailed off the edge of the map—literally and metaphorically.
Simply turning the boat around was not an option; he’d hit some white water earlier in the day. He’d never be able to make his way upstream past that . . . and the banks were too steep simply to haul even his small boat onto dry land and go around.
At the first likely-look
ing spot, he’d heaved to and dragged the boat up onto the shallow bank. Making sure he’d tied it to a sturdy-looking tree stump, he’d set off to find someone who could tell him where he was . . . and where he should be going.
* * *
He panted as he laboured up the rise. There was no sun, but the air was filled with a clinging heat that seemed intent on persecuting him.
All around him grew black-petalled flowers. Although he’d never seen anything quite like them before, he felt sure they were a member of the poppy family.
He stopped for a moment, hands leaning on his knees. Once he got to the top of this rise he’d be able to see what lay ahead. A town, he hoped. His thirst was growing with every step, and he was so tired.
He looked down at the flowers. They weren’t even nodding their heads. As there was not even a faint breath of wind, the only thing to disturb them was him. They were all around him, stretching to the horizon on all sides. Maybe this was their only home, this hollow in which he found himself.
Their petals were a lustrous black that he didn’t think was possible in plants. He imagined that somehow he was the first to discover them. And maybe he’d be given the honour of naming them. Papaver noctis sounded right. The night poppy.
He pushed himself back up straight and forced his legs to take him onwards. As he was approaching the top of the rise, he saw several spires of a huge building rising before him. The building was unlike any architectural style he’d ever seen, the spires so unnaturally tall that they disappeared into the light grey clouds above.
As he got to the top of the rise he came across a huge, dark plain as far as the eye could see. Covered in black poppies.
In the centre stood an enormous cathedral or abbey. Even though the cloudbase was low, the spires must still be many miles high. Impossibly high.
Whatever its architectural peculiarities, it was the only building in sight. And the only place where he might find help.
He’d been walking for just a few minutes when he saw someone else crossing the plain. They must have been over half a mile away and coming from the opposite direction, but it heartened him to see another person.
There was a kind of heat haze over the flowers, and he had to stand very still and concentrate to see what the figure was. Squinting and straining his eyes, he could make out the shape of a young woman. She evidently had more energy than he, as she was hurrying towards the huge structure. Then she stumbled and disappeared into the mass of black blooms.
He stood still, watching for nearly a minute, but she didn’t get up. Maybe she’d collapsed from exhaustion and was unable to get to her feet again. Even if he’d wanted to help, even if he had the strength, he’d lose his bearings in this black wilderness as soon as he began to move. He’d never find her.
He decided the best thing to do was reach the building and report the woman’s accident to whoever was in charge. Meanwhile, he continued to scan the plain of poppies, in the hope that she’d reappear.
The giant building still seemed miles away, even though he’d been walking for over thirty minutes. He stopped for a second and looked around him. The ocean of black petals barely moved, as if they were all part of some enormous piece of sculpture instead of living plants. To reassure himself, he bent and plucked a single poppy, grinding its petals between his fingers. Thin, black juice was smeared on his fingertips.
Wiping his fingers on his trousers, he resumed his trek. As he went on, he felt sure the poppies were growing darker. A colour darker than black? He knew it was impossible, but—
He peered down and realised it was the space between the stalks that was darkening, not the flowers themselves. Its colour was completely opaque, impenetrable. At first he thought the darkness was rising from the earth. It was only when he looked at his hand that he realised it was falling like rain from the grey sky. Two or three black marks appeared on the back of his left hand, to roll slowly and sluggishly off.
He rubbed the back of his hand with his fingers. The “rain” had a peculiar silky feel to it. And it was certainly not a liquid. Nor was it a dust. Or a gas. He searched his fuddled mind for a description but came up blank. He stooped and dipped his fingers into the layer that had settled on the ground. It clung to his fingers for a fraction of a second before sliding off.
The heads of the poppies were only barely above the level of the black stuff now. Suddenly he realised that, if it kept raining, he’d be unable to see where he was walking within an hour. He daren’t risk that. If he stumbled over or into something—or simply into the “fog” . . .
He hadn’t been scared of the dark since he was a child, but he didn’t relish being swallowed by it, blinded in the blackness. He began to pump his legs in panic. He had to get to that building, no matter what appalling things he might find there. It was his only possible haven.
Maybe the black stuff was fallout from some nearby industry, he thought. Pollution might also explain why the clouds hung so low in the sky. He didn’t want to take the chance that it was toxic; he tried to push himself harder to reach the huge dark building, pulling his jacket over his head as he went.
As the building gradually drew closer, its strangeness impressed itself upon him. Although its design suggested a religious use, aside from the enormous spires there were very few attributes of the sort he was used to in a place of worship. There were no windows visible, which was almost unheard of in such a huge building. And there was an uncanny smoothness about it: an old building was usually covered in statuary or decoration of some sort, often depicting religious figures . . . but not this one.
Finally he felt he was within a reasonable distance of the building. Panting heavily, he crossed the final few hundred feet to reach its vast bulk. He stretched out one arm, symbolically splaying his fingers against the icy stonework. This soon turned into genuine support as he leaned against the wall to regain his breath. One beneficial aspect of the strange architecture meant that he could shelter under an overhang, safe from the dark rain for a while.
The architecture had seemed unusual, even odd, from a distance. But close up it had a disturbing aspect to it. Arches seemed to flow one into the other, while buttresses tried to loop inside one another, as if someone had plucked the designs from the nightmares of some half-insane architect and rendered them solid.
In fact, from a certain angle the whole building seemed to be lurching forward, as if getting ready to break loose of its foundations and hurl itself headlong across the flower-filled plain.
He’d seen lots of old buildings over the past decades— usually at his wife’s insistence—and their surfaces wore their age openly. They were weathered, pitted, scarred. Yet the curious black stone of this structure looked as if it had been quarried only yesterday. But surely nobody built on such a grand scale any longer?
He had no idea the architecture in this part of the world was so distinctive. He didn’t remember any of the guidebooks mentioning it. He fished in his jacket for the pocket guide that had been so helpful in the past weeks. It was gone.
Slipping off his jacket, he checked all the pockets twice. Then he looked about him, as if it would be possible to spot the book if it had fallen out on his walk here—as if the black flowers would relinquish any prize. He realised that he must look like some over-enthusiastic mime artist to any spectator. Self-consciously he glanced about him; there was no one.
Standing in this strange place, he suddenly felt cut off from his own world. The guide had been his link to home, in a sense. Without it and surrounded by these odd blooms, he felt truly like a stranger. Lost and friendless.
He decided the only thing to do was to find a door into the huge building. There might be a tour guide or a caretaker who could tell him exactly where he was . . . if he could make himself understood to them, of course. He imagined English was a rarity in this district.
His missing guidebook had also contained a selection of useful phrases, but he didn’t trust his memory to recall them correctly. He might even
accidentally conjure up an insult by mispronouncing something. Glumly, he realised he’d probably have to fall back on his previously unrehearsed skill for mime once more.
Pulling his jacket over his head again, he began to make his way round to the front of the building. When he’d started his journey towards the building he’d hoped to head straight for the entrance, but the bizarre design had defeated him. However, after several minutes of following the curves and angles of the wall, he found himself at his destination.
The front of the building had an enormous doorway set within an oddly angled porch. The overhang was more than enough to provide him with shelter. He walked up the four broad steps leading to it.
In the archway he noticed a detail that filled him with admiration for the craftsmen who created it. The top half of a human cranium had been carved into the curious black stone, to act as a macabre doorstop. A memento mori also, he guessed. Indeed, the top of the skull had delicate cracks lining it, as if the heavy door had begun to fracture it, like a spoon when it first hits a fragile eggshell at breakfast time. He half chuckled to himself at the playfulness of its creator.
The thought of breakfast made him aware that he was hungry. Once more his hand plunged into his pocket, retrieving the remnants of a chocolate bar. He pushed the last few pieces into his mouth, turning his head to gaze out across the dark field that surrounded him.
The field had disappeared. In place of the black blooms that had stretched from horizon to horizon, there now stood a broad dark lake. It had drowned everything except the architectural monstrosity on which he was standing. He had become trapped on an island.