Fading Light: An Anthology of the Monstrous: Tim Marquitz

by Tim Marquitz

  As my face showed my incredulity, Kiska patiently went on.

  “The reason I asked about the birds was that it was believed the whippoorwills were the servants of these gods and would collect the souls of the living as their mortal husks died. Just as your grandfather’s lark brought new life into the world, the whippoorwills stole life to be devoured by these creatures. It is an amazing belief, if you ask me, but one shared by many cultures. From Buddhism to Hinduism to even the abandoned religions of Egypt and Mesopotamia, this belief in the spirit world and demons persists, as does the belief in spirits and gods. They say where there is smoke there is fire. I tend to agree.”

  The sun was rising as we turned the last bend and entered the town of Dunwich one final time. Far to the north a large cloud gathered over the lumber mill.

  “That is where we need to go.” Kiska pointed at the far distant mill.

  “How do you know?”

  “That’s not a cloud,” he replied. “Those are birds.”

  As we approached the mill, a smell permeated the air. It was pungent, similar to rotting meat. The sight that greeted our eyes was one of absolute horror. Within the buildings were mounds of bodies strewn about, while local workers were placing them on hooks suspended from a conveyer pulley system bringing them through to the next room. Above, the sound of thousands of birds could be heard swirling in the early morn.

  “Well, well, well, look at what we have here,” came a booming voice filling the room. Chifford was looking down from his perch high above.

  “If it isn’t our lost sheep come back to the fold. How nice of you to bring her back with you, Paul.”

  Before we could react, hands grabbed us from behind and we were bound. Immediately, I heard Professor Kiska chanting something in a language I could not understand, but all that it did was elicit a peal of laughter from the man above.

  “Oh Paul, Paul, Paul. Trying to use that old spell of Armitage’s? That would only work if I was from the other side. Unlike my great Uncle, I am quite human.”

  Doctor Kiska let out a sigh of resignation.

  “It was the only weapon I had,” he whispered in my direction. “Sorry, Diana.”

  At that point we were gagged and brought into the next room. What I saw amazed me. In this large room was what looked like the top of an ancient pyramid, but blood covered every point of it.

  “I am glad you are here to see this, Diana. You get to see what happens to those who oppose me. It seems Jeremiah, the last of the Undecayed Bishops, decided to ignore my orders and refused to kill you the other night. That was unfortunate for him.”

  At the top of the pyramid I saw Mr. Bishop kneeling beside an altar of stone.

  “I tried to warn you about these degenerates,” he gasped. “Why did you return?”

  “Because she is the heroine,” replied Thomas Whateley. “Because she couldn’t leave her students to die.”

  With that, Whateley took his right hand, which I noticed was encased in a steel glove, tipped with claws and dripping with blood, and shoved it into Bishop’s chest and pulled out the still beating heart while mumbling the name Yog-Sothoth while the din of whippoorwills crescendoed above.

  “Really,” he continued as Bishop’s corpse was dragged to the side to be carried into the other room for processing. “I was hoping you would have lasted longer. I was hoping to marry you one day. You are really the first one to actually look into the disappearing students. Everyone else just didn’t care.”

  He reached out again and ripped out the heart of professor Kiska just as if picking a cherry from a bowl. Once again the name of Yog-Sothoth and a crescendo.

  It was now my turn. They led me to the altar, and he stared down at me.

  “You know, we’ve been doing this for so very long. Pickings were very slim after the Underground Railroad shut down. We even had to sacrifice our own for a while. I still can’t believe how easily people are fooled. Nobody asks where the meat comes from even though we haven’t had cows here for fifteen years. You know, I listened in on your lesson about Hitler and how they operated. He was a fool. We have killed millions but nobody notices. Everyone notices the fat tick sucking too much, too fast, but not the small tick that takes it low and slow feeding off the weakened calf nobody cares about.”

  He glared down with his hand poised to strike.

  “They say mankind is the ultimate predator, but the hunt is always best when the predator doesn’t know he is the prey. They never see it coming.”

  All it took was a flash of the hand, I heard the name called, then heard the shrill cries of the birds, and then saw their flapping rush of wings. It was time to struggle against their clawing grasp, and all I could see was a fading light.

  I was born on September 27, 1969. I have always felt I was born to be a teacher. I grew up admiring teachers and I knew there was something about teaching youth that always called to me. I also felt that there was something else just out of reach. It is like a song whose tune you know, but you can’t remember the lyrics.

  I regained that memory last month, and have frantically been trying to write it down on paper. It only took one word to recall it in pure crystal clarity. All it took was the name of a town in an article published in the El Paso Times, an article about the new opportunities to be had in a town called Dunwich.

  I recall one thing Whateley taught me. The best hunt is when the predator doesn’t know he is the prey, and they won’t see me coming.

  Dust

  Wayne Ligon

  Gran never did accept the explanation we heard on the news that a dust cloud had come between us and the Sun, blocking almost all of its light and heat from reaching us. She taught astronomy at UCLA a lifetime ago, so I had reason to listen to her.

  “It’s just foolishness. We’d—I’d—have seen it decades ago. People are acting like it just snuck up on us.”

  By now, six weeks after the Sun went out, it was an old argument, and I just tried to keep a neutral face while I counted out her meds. Her body was failing, but her mind was still sharp.

  “Dust clouds are dark, Gran, unless something lights them from behind. They could have missed it,” I’d say, and she’d act like she wanted to throw something at me. Honestly, I said it to get a rise out of her.

  “They’re also big, light years across. The probability we’d drift into something so small and so dense?” she’d sputter. “It just beggars the imagination.”

  She was right about that, though I’d never tell her so. A dust cloud dense enough to block all but the dimmest flicker of light from just 1 AU away? It would be denser than anything observed or imagined. But, of course, there it was.

  Week Six. Most of the succulent plants were already dead by this point. They were getting snow flurries on the Florida coast. Even if the cloud passed away right now, it was too late for us, for all life on Earth. The plankton was dead by now, the food chain severed at its base.

  I watched thick, wet flakes blow past the window as I plopped the last of the pills into their dated plastic trays. Beyond, the Pacific stretched, black and silent. The Moon was black, too, of course. Only whispering starlight was left to us now, barely enough to make out the play of shadow and reflection on the sea.

  Gran had done very well for herself in her academic days: authored several books, done the lecture circuit, even had a couple of television shows. They’d called her the First Lady of Science. She retired at the height of her fame and spent most of her money on this, a private cove on the Oregon coast. She still wrote a book every decade or so, but they were light, popular reading at best, nothing like the flights of imagination and fact she’d woven in her early days. “They keep me in pizza money,” she claimed.

  Her retreat was silent and still, the rooms built way back into the earth and rock with only a thin line of windows to show it even existed. Water was from an artesian well and most of the power was, ironically, solar. Thankfully, she’d included a large fireplace in the great room. I’d rolled her bed
into the great room, and I slept on the couch in case she needed anything. Neither of us had any illusions we’d ever leave this place.

  I counted her pills again and compared them to the little chart I’d made up, checking it twice to make certain I wasn’t about to poison her ahead of time. We’d talked about what we’d do that morning, breath pluming softly in the shadowed great room, each of us wrapped against the increasing cold.

  “I want it to be quick and painless,” I said into the darkness.

  “I hear freezing to death is supposed to be both,” came Gran’s soft voice.

  “True. Making naked snow angels or something has its appeal.”

  Gran laughed. “The angels should be here for both of us, soon enough.”

  I cut my eyes over to her, but could only see her outline in the dim, battery-powered nightlight. She’d been an atheist as long as I’d known her, but she’d never mocked my faith before. I decided she wasn’t doing so, now of all times.

  “You’re certain about that, hmm?”

  “Reasonably. It would fit, I think.”

  “Fit what?”

  “Things I’ve read,” came the soft reply, almost drowsy.

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then eased my way out from under the covers and into jeans and jacket. My cat Barnaby had disappeared into the woods the day we got here, or he’d have been warming my feet as he’d always done. He’d gone to make his own peace with what was happening, I suppose.

  “So we’re decided, then? There are more than enough medicines to do the trick,” I said as I fetched the kettle for tea.

  Gran carefully eased herself into a sitting position in her bed, her cheeks sunken but her eyes still bright. “I think so, but your decision surprises me. I thought suicide was a sin.”

  Her tone was earnest, and I concentrated on setting the kettle correctly and then waking the fire, adding wood and using the poker. “It is,” I answered, at last, “but I can’t leave you alone, and I don’t want to be alone when it happens. I could linger, and go mad, eventually freezing to death months later, anyway. I’ve thought it over, and I’m thinking God will understand.”

  Gran said nothing, only nodding her head as she rose and dressed.

  Now, later, I clicked pill trays closed and looked out the kitchen window.

  The Pacific shuddered under the winds. Months or years from now, it would freeze over entirely. I blinked back tears, seeing a large humpback whale breech and fall back into the black water. The poor thing would be starving by now. The bottom feeders would be growing fat and happy until slowly the food trickling down from the surface slowed and stopped. Eventually, only the tiny things around the deep-sea vents would be left.

  I turned and almost dropped the tray. Gran was right behind me, staring at the swirling water where the whale had been. Her face was drawn, her lips quivering.

  I put down the medicine and embraced her, drawing her slight form to me, feeling her tremble.

  “Have you heard anything, in the wood?” she said into my ear.

  I shook my head and stepped back, reached to arrange her hair. “No, Gran. Most of the birds are gone. The bugs, too.” It had been the height of summer in North America when the darkness came and threw the entire ecosystem into a tailspin. I’d seen some very bizarre animal behavior on the drive up to the cove.

  “Of course. Be careful going out for wood. I suspect there might be feral dogs.”

  “There are cougars and bears in the region, too,” I said.

  “Not for long. They’ll be leaving for warmer pastures, or so they think. Their instincts might save them, for a time.” She smiled suddenly. “You be careful, though,” she said, and kissed my cheek.

  I busied myself making sure that the various systems of the habitat were still working, then I went for a walk on the deck outside.

  The wind was only a breath right now. I suspected the climate was slowly stabilizing towards an endless calm, with no sunlight to drive the massive atmospheric heat engine. Before the last TV stations went off the air in the wake of the fires and riots, I’d heard that we were still getting about one percent of our former light and heat. Enough, perhaps, to keep something multi-cellular alive. Someday in the distant future, the cloud would pass and life would begin its long climb up the ladder again. It had done so before and would do so again. There was some cold comfort in that.

  The cove was almost closed in, and the drop-off to the gray beach below was a good fifty feet. The deck very slightly overhung, giving me a spectacular view. Gran owned everything in sight, and I knew the land was surrounded by a high fence so I was less worried about animals than I was of people. The cities had surely been emptying for weeks, now. We’d seen not a single sign of human life, though. No airplanes, no boats, nothing.

  I saw more whales at play, out in the far gray reaches of the sea, and I leaned against the railing to watch them until I saw one suddenly pulled under.

  I wiped my eyes and felt my hand shake. I ran inside for binoculars and returned, focused on the distant pod.

  Gray-black shapes broke, spouted, and slid back into the water. It could be an orca pack. The predators, they would be the last to go. Then a smooth matte-black shape heaved itself out of the water and I felt my knees go weak. It dwarfed the whales around it by an order of magnitude, and my eyes wanted to slide off that infinite blackness, wanted not to focus on it. A part of the … the not-whale split off and slid into one of the humpbacks, like a slow spear. It thrashed and was pulled out of sight. It was hard to see exactly what happened; the hide of the predator was so black it killed all detail. It was like watching a silhouette.

  The whales hadn’t been playing. They’d been running.

  I stumbled back until I hit the thick plate glass doors. The binoculars dropped. They probably broke. A part of my mind told me Gran would be mad. She’d told me to be careful with the binoculars. They were grown-up things, delicate and expensive.

  I wiped at my eyes and stumbled inside. Gran was sitting up in her bed, watching me.

  “I guess it’s happening sooner than I thought,” she said, her face in shadow.

  “What is?” I managed to croak. I clenched my hands to stop them from shaking. What I’d seen was impossible. Nothing that big could exist. Maybe it was the pills. I’d handled them with bare skin. There could be a reaction, hallucinations, something.

  I felt Gran’s touch on my shoulders. She turned me around to face the ocean again, even though I tried not to. Her fingers were achingly tight.

  “Shhh, shhh,” Gran said, like she was calming a pet. “I’ve known something would come along for decades now. I didn’t know the shape or nature of it, though.”

  “This whole thing, the house, the land … ”

  “As safe and secure as I could make it,” she laughed softly. “I was prepared for an economic or political collapse. A new Crusade, an ethnic cleansing, a pandemic, a food blight, zombie apocalypse; something like that.” Her fingers tightened. “Something that would eventually end.”

  “Is this why you retired?”

  “It’s part of it, yes. I was tired of the uphill battle against the politicians, the people holding the purse strings. I forced myself to become more commercial, so that I could amass enough money to ride things out when those same people eventually destroyed us. I fancied I would become a new Johnny Appleseed of learning, walking the land after the collapse, restoring peace and reason.” Her laugh was brittle, a breath of madness in the undercurrent.

  I watched the churning sea. My bladder threatened to empty when I realized the same creature was still passing us by, after all this time. It would have to be miles long.

  “I grew old and feeble, waiting for what I thought was inevitable. It seems I don’t get to play post-apocalyptic savior after all,” Gran said, leaning against my back, supporting herself on my rigid frame.

  I finally tore my eyes away from the sight outside.

  “What was the other part?” I said, drea
ding her answer.

  Gran sighed. “I was an astronomer, one of the oldest sciences there is. There are certain texts, old things, that we generally consider it best that no-one else see. Mostly, they’re just curiosities from all over. A fragment from a Mayan temple, parchments found in Iraqi ruins, things like that. Old, old star-charts that show a sky different from ours. We used to think it was the equivalent of prehistoric science fiction. Until I started finding correlations.

  “I thought I was slipping, so I started the process to retire. The last thing I wanted was to be remembered as a once-great scientist reduced to appearing at crackpot conventions. A graduate student of mine found my observations and replicated them. He sent them to several of my colleagues, and they found the same things.”

  I felt a cold weight settle in my chest. Beyond the thick glass, the snow started to fall in earnest.

  “The stars were moving. I mean, quickly. Light-years in a day, that sort of thing. Shifting. It meant a fundamental change in the constants of space-time; space itself would have to warp and buckle to make the shifts we were seeing.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “No, what’s crazy is that we know so little! We can’t even leave our little playground here, to see what’s happening in the here and now. We’re dealing with fossilized light. Any warnings we might get would come far, far too late. That’s exactly what happened! If we’d somehow known things were changing on such a fundamental level maybe we could have … ”

  She sighed and her fingers left my shoulders as she stepped around to my side, to press her nose to the frigid black glass.

  “I’m sorry, no, nothing could have been done. We waited too long, stayed in our basket until it was far too late. We waited until the stars were right, again, until they could return.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said feebly. Beyond, in the black sea, there was no sign of the impossible thing I’d seen earlier.