by S. T. Joshi
Erin did not want to find out.
She left her car at the curb as she pulled up in front of her condo. When she flicked on the desk lamp in the living room to illuminate the Object, the bulbous orb that peered out at her reminded Erin of the fisheye lens of a closed-circuit security camera. Were they watching her right now, in real time, from unimaginable worlds at inconceivable distances?
She would fix that.
Erin went and yanked the comforter off her bed and rolled the Object up in it so the eye could no longer look at her. She lugged the bundle out to her car and threw it in the back seat, then went back inside to grab the claw hammer she’d used to hang the Monet prints in her office.
Without giving herself time to regret the half-million dollars she was about to throw away, Erin got back in her car and sped out of town. She would do what Aram should have done, what Thaddeus Bennington should have done, what all her predecessors should have done. She’d bury it where no one would ever find it. She didn’t own a shovel, but she could break up the soil with the hammer’s claw and dig out a hole with her hands.
Night had descended, and traffic on the freeways had begun to lighten as Erin drove away from the suburbs and into the hills. With no definite destination in mind, she didn’t care where she ended up as long as it was unpopulated and remote. She hadn’t had any food or coffee all day, and her head buzzed with a droning, fuzzy mosquito whine. But eating could wait.
Choosing a turnoff almost at random, she ascended a curving, two-lane highway until she could no longer see the glaring lines of traffic on the freeway or the glowing enclaves of strip malls and tract homes. At the first turnout she came to, Erin pulled over.
Nothing about the spot struck her as unusual when she first got out of the car. Often invisible due to the permanent haze of smog and the overpowering ambient electric light of Los Angeles, a speckling of stars shone in the moonless night sky. Other than the road itself, the only nearby sign of civilization was a cell phone tower atop a low rise on the right.
As she glanced around at the shaggy silhouettes of the shrub-covered landscape around her, a creeping sense of déjà vu set in. Despite how different the place looked in the dark, she finally recognized it as the road she’d found herself driving along when she’d awakened that afternoon.
The fact that some subconscious impulse had brought her back here made her flesh crawl. Had she been sleepwalking again without realizing it?
Erin shook off the dread. It hardly mattered which patch of dirt she shoved the damned thing in as long as she was rid of it.
The dome light came on when she opened the rear door of her car, and a black oval, quick as a cockroach, scuttled out of the bundle on the backseat and leapt into the brush at her feet.
Erin’s face went cold as the blood drained from it. She snatched up the rumpled bedspread and shook it. Three chunks of the meteorite’s fractured husk tumbled onto the leather upholstery. The figurine inside was gone.
Erin heard a rustling among the shrubs that bordered the road, and she stumbled into the undergrowth to follow it. With the tiny LED flashlight attached to her key ring, she managed to spotlight a scrabbling, ridge-backed arthropod that resembled a giant trilobite or horseshoe crab, but its many legs propelled it back under cover of the vegetation.
Erin saw the leaves and grass ahead of her quiver, leading in a beeline to the cell phone tower. Only then did she comprehend that the thing had used her to bring it here, just as surely as it had used Thaddeus Bennington to drag it out of the polar wastes. Just as it had maneuvered all its human pawns to move and protect it until the moment was right. And, really, for a species that had existed since the dawn of time, what was a delay of another century or so?
Long enough for a primitive Earth species to develop a telecommunications network capable of broadcasting a signal around the planet.
Erin reached the base of the triangular tower too late to stop the crab-thing from scurrying up one of the long spars of the structure’s lattice frame. The thing’s pincers ticked against the metal as it climbed until it attained the pinnacle, where rows of white rectangular, vertical antennae relayed cell phone transmissions from tower to tower. The crab-thing clamped onto the array with the parasitic tenacity of a tick.
In the hills around Erin, coyotes howled as if in agony. She dropped to her knees, clawing at her head as the stars screamed at her.
And as the call came from across inexpressible gulfs of time and space, the Aldon-Bennington Object provided the final proof of its indisputable authenticity.
The Well
D. L. MYERS
D. L. Myers is a weird poet in the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. His work has appeared in Spectral Realms, Halloween Howlings, and K. A. Opperman’s The Crimson Tome. He dwells among the mist-shrouded hills and farms of the Skagit valley in the Pacific Northwest.
1
APRIL 14, 1921
A long and grueling search of many weeks
Had I endured before the house was mine,
The thing that captured me at first a fine
Old well that stood before its gable peaks.
Of basalt bricks and ebon wood, it stood
Between the house and dark and silent trees
That strangely swayed and shook before the breeze
As if they yearned to stroke its dusky wood.
I also felt a yearning stir my soul;
A whisper faint and cryptic called to me
Across the endless, shadowed sea of years,
And I may never of its voice be free.
An air of vast and ancient things sublime
About it hung—this thing untouched by time.
2
APRIL 21, 1921
Today, down in the cellar, footing stones
Of countless other structures were revealed,
Each stacked upon the other all concealed,
Beneath a coat of clay inlaid with bones
Of birds and beasts, arranged into strange signs.
How many there may be, I do not know,
Or how far under earthen floor they go
Into what lightless depths or hidden mines.
I feel that I am like those stones a part
Of something old and hidden in the earth.
It frightens me and yet allures me too,
This thing unknown that feels about to birth.
What strange, sweet spell sings to me in my sleep?
I fear it calls from someplace dark and deep.
3
MAY 30, 1921
My sleep is filled with nightmares foul and black,
Of things half seen or heard in echoes lost,
And I begin to wonder at what cost
To body, soul, and mind these terrors track.
And always I look down into the well
To see a sable, swirling void instead
Of blue and cloudless sky above my head.
Dark dreams of grim foreboding I can’t quell.
So, robbed of peaceful sleep, I pass my days
In silent dread of what the night may bring,
What visions strange and vile the wind may sing
In whispers through the trees all lost in haze.
This place begins to feel as if it’s cursed;
I fear the dam of doom has yet to burst.
4
JUNE 19, 1921
This morning in the glowing light of dawn
I found that I had sleepwalked in the night;
I stood before the well aghast and chilled.
A dim-remembered dream filled me with fright—
I saw my face reflected in the well,
A pale and haggard mask of deathly white,
Afloat upon a sea of blinking eyes
That moiled and glimmered in my reeling sight!
Has madness reached into my fevered mind
And left these strange impressions and dark signs—
Or are these t
hings like wind among the pines,
Unseen but sensed in motions all aligned?
I fear that I am lost to savage fate;
For me it is already much too late.
5
JULY 27, 1921
The voices came in the oppressive heat
Of midnight’s gloom, and then I shrank within,
My skin too terrorstruck by the dire din
To even tremble. Darkness swelled and beat
Its blackness round me like a winding sheet
In which I could not breathe nor move nor think.
They were a thousand mortal sounds in sync
That swarmed in waves like frenzied bats and beat
Upon my mind a summons fierce and bleak,
Commanding me to climb into the well!
My mind was ever fixed on its black maw;
The voices said there I was meant to dwell.
As dwellers of the past, I would go far
Into the haunted, darkling voids bizarre.
6
AUGUST 1, 1921
The former tenants of this place still live
Below the well’s serene, black liquid skin,
Beyond our bright demesne in tracts akin
To ebon gulfs where shapeless things outlive
All life upon this crowded, frantic plane.
Their voices called for me throughout the night,
With darkling words that seared my soul with fright,
To follow them to shadow-worlds arcane.
Today I go to sable spheres unknown,
To realms of being vast and violet-stained,
That lie beyond our meager minds constrained
By life within this puny sentient zone.
The well’s a door to realms sensed but unseen;
I journey now to where black wings careen.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
S. T. Joshi is the author of The Weird Tale (University of Texas Press, 1990), The Modern Weird Tale (McFarland, 2001), Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (PS Publishing, 2012), and other critical and biographical studies. His award-winning biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (Necronomicon Press, 1996), has been expanded and updated as I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (Hippocampus Press, 2010). He has edited Lovecraft’s stories, essays, letters, and revisions, as well as works by Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, and other writers.
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
BLACK WINGS OF CTHULHU
TWENTY-ONE TALES OF LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR
EDITED BY S. T. JOSHI
S. T. Joshi—the twenty-first century’s preeminent expert on all things Lovecraftian—gathers twenty-one of the master’s greatest modern acolytes, including Caitlín R. Kiernan, Ramsey Campbell, Michael Shea, Brian Stableford, Nicholas Royle, Darrell Schweitzer and W. H. Pugmire, each of whom serves up a new masterpiece of cosmic terror that delves deep into the human psyche to horrify and disturb.
“[An] exceptional set of original horror tales… [Black Wings] will delight even horror fans completely unfamiliar with Lovecraft.” Booklist
“Cumulatively creepy studies of Lovecraft-style locales where inexplicable supernatural phenomena suggest an otherworldly dimension intersecting our own.” Publishers Weekly
“Joshi’s tribute proves there’s still plenty of life in the Elder Gods yet—and plenty of highly talented writers penning dark fiction these days.” Fantasy Magazine
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