Black Wings of Cthulhu

by S. T. Joshi

  I made my way up to Sentinel Hill where the final confrontation would take place. I had walked this route before with Lovecraft/Armitage but this time felt different. I could feel the wind on my face. My body had form and substance where before it was only dust and mist. Sometimes I was Rice. Sometimes I was Morgan. And once, just once, there was a brief time when I could have sworn I was Armitage and I was spraying the spawn of Azathoth with the powder.

  Above me there was the usual half-face squirming in torment except, this time, it stopped. It looked straight at me, ignoring the other two. “And what do you think you’re looking at?” it said before it went back to its part and obligingly disappeared. I almost expected it to say “I’m gonna keep my eye on you” before it left, but it didn’t. Afterwards we went back to the circle of terrified townsfolk and Armitage went into his speech. “Watch the skies!” I mouthed behind him. “Watch the skies!” The townspeople looked at me as if perhaps the wrong thing had been sprayed with the powder on the hill.

  I regretted not seeing Old Wizard Whateley this trip. He was always a lot of fun to talk to, particularly if you got a few drinks into him.

  WHEN I AWOKE, I WAS IN A HOSPITAL BED.

  I’d been in them before, of course, so this was no real strange thing to me, but it still wasn’t a good sign. There was a strong coppery taste in my mouth. I knew that wasn’t a good sign either. My finger was hooked into one of those machines and I could hear the heartbeat monitor behind me, happily beeping away. (I’ve always wondered why they put those things just out of your sight. As if watching your heartbeat might make it stop.) I felt weak and worn out. My clothes were gone and I was in the hospital gown. Lovecraft was sitting in the chair nearby.

  “Can you believe what they’ve done to my city?” he asked when he saw I was finally awake. “They tore up the bridge. Tore up that historic bridge to make room for more traffic and make the downtown more scenic.” He pronounced scenic with an extra flourish of sarcasm.

  “Where am I?” My bed was encircled by one of those curtains but, because of the lack of noise, I could tell I wasn’t in an emergency ward. It was still somewhat light out, so I knew it was daytime but I didn’t know what day.

  “You’re in Rhode Island Hospital. It’s attached to Jane Brown, you know. I went and looked in at the room where I died. There’s a nurses’ station there now. Everything changes.”

  I pulled the cord and buzzed for the nurse.

  A large woman in a white uniform came a few minutes later. She explained that I had been unconscious for the last few days after I’d come into the emergency room by ambulance. “You’ve had an attack,” she said and Dr. Lyons had me admitted. She’d alert him that I was awake and left the room after giving me some more medication. “Painkillers,” she said, but she didn’t bother to tell me what kind.

  Inspector Legrasse walked by my door and waved at Lovecraft. He was dragging along some half-crazed swamp dweller behind him.

  A little while later, Dr. Lyons came in but he looked an awful lot like Jeffrey Coombs from Re-Animator.

  “Mike,” he said.

  “Dr. Lyons,” I replied in my best Jack Webb voice. “Where’s Bill Gannon? I heard he got arrested for wife beating.”

  He looked at me as if I was some sort of test bug. “What?”

  “Nothing. Just a bad TV reference. What am I doing here?”

  Dr. Lyons pulled up a chair. “You had an attack.”

  “What kind of an attack?”

  He sat there for a moment, searching for the right words. “You were at work. Do you remember that?”

  I nodded yes.

  “You were waiting on a customer. He was a black gentleman. In the middle of the transaction you began screaming and yelling for him to leave you alone. In fact, I’m told that you actually said that the man should ‘take his old witch away and stop haunting you.’ Sound familiar?”

  “No. Not at all. I really did that?”

  “I’m afraid so. A few of your co-workers tried to get you to calm down, but you went into a spasm and blacked out. You’ve been here for two days.”

  I tried to concentrate on what he was saying, but all I could see were those weird dimensional things from From Beyond circling his head.

  “What happened?”

  “The tumor is growing. It’s pressing on the part of your brain that covers motor functions and memory. I don’t know what’s happening to it. It almost seems as if something is making it grow faster.” He paused for a moment. “Michael, you’re experiencing hallucinations.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s not unusual, given the tumor’s location. But I admit that I didn’t think this would happen so quickly.”

  Dr. Lyons/Herbert West stood up so he would appear more impressive.

  “Michael, you need to have the operation.”

  “We’ve gone over that before.”

  “I know. You don’t have the money or insurance. But we’ll find a way, Michael. You’ve got to do this.”

  I looked at him. It was easier to just go along.

  “Okay. Sure.”

  “Good. I’ve got you set up for the operation in two days. We’ll keep you here and keep an eye on you until then. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  “All right. Just rest easy. I’ll be back later.”

  After he left, I lay there for about ten minutes. Then I got up, got dressed, and left. Lovecraft followed me out. No one stopped me. It seemed that no one took any notice of me, and I wondered if they saw me at all or if it was just the way things are in Rhode Island.

  I took the bus home.

  There was only one message on my machine. It was from my boss. “Michael...um, I’m sorry to have to say this but we’re going to have to let you go. I hope you understand. We just can’t have any more scenes like today. I know you have problems but, legally, we can’t afford the risk. Sorry. We’ll mail you your last paycheck. Um...so you don’t really need to come back. Okay? Hope everything works out for you. Bye.”

  I took an extra dose of the herb/vitamin potion and laid down in bed.

  “So now what are you going to do?” asked Lovecraft.

  I didn’t say anything.

  Lovecraft was standing near the window. There wasn’t much of a view to see. He had on one of his father’s old suits. It fitted him pretty well but was still a little loose in the shoulders. I wasn’t sure if it was one of the suits that got stolen while he was in New York.

  “You know,” I finally said, “I’ve read both of the biographies. Joshi’s and de Camp’s.”

  He grimaced.

  “At least Joshi took the time to try and understand the era,” he responded. “De Camp lived through some of it and he still couldn’t understand how it affected me.”

  “They never said much about your death. About how you felt as you lay there in that bed at Jane Brown.”

  He turned to look at me. For some reason, his lantern jaw looked more solid. I could almost swear that his chin was reflecting the light.

  “Go to sleep, Michael.” It was the first time I had heard him refer to me by name.

  I went to sleep.

  Professor Wilmarth/Lovecraft was talking about the black stone. Akeley had sent it through the mail and it had disappeared. I took out the stone from Machen’s “Novel of the Black Seal” and showed it to him. He was interested but disappointed. “Yes, but it’s not quite what we’re looking for.” He played the record for me and I listened to that strange otherworldly voice.

  “To Nyarlathotep, Mighty Messenger, must all things be told. And He shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides, and come down from the world of Seven Suns to mock...”

  It was not surprising that it was my voice speaking on the record.

  Wilmarth/Lovecraft took no notice.

  Suddenly, we jumped forward and I was in Akeley’s cabin. Wilmarth/Lovecraft was talking to Akeley, who was sitting in the opposite chair and covered in his huge robe. Akeley
was describing Yuggoth with its great cities of black stone. After awhile, Wilmarth/Lovecraft went to bed and I took his place.

  “So,” Akeley said in that queer, disjointed voice, “what are you looking for?”

  “Not much,” I answered. “It’s just that I’ve always wondered—a lot of us have wondered—who are you really? Under that mask. Who are you? Are you one of the Fungi? Are you Nyarlathotep?”

  “Why don’t you see for yourself?”

  I reached over and took off the mask. It was Lovecraft. “Of course,” he said, “who else would it be?”

  I NEVER DEVELOPED A TASTE FOR CLARK ASHTON Smith. I knew he was a good writer, but just something about his work never clicked with me. Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith were touted as Weird Tales’ “three musketeers.” And yet it was often said that Seabury Quinn was more popular with the readers than any of them. Lovecraft never got a cover. Guess Margaret Brundage just couldn’t bring herself to paint Cthulhu and, after all, there were no half-naked damsels in distress in Lovecraft. Maybe he would have been more successful if there had been.

  THE NEXT FEW DAYS PASSED STRANGELY.

  I don’t need to say that I didn’t show up for the operation. Dr. Lyons called once, demanding to know where I was and why I didn’t come in. He didn’t call again. In fact, nobody called after a while. I got to the point where I had to pick up the phone and check it regularly to make sure it was still working.

  I stopped doing that when a thick, guttural voice came on the empty line and said, “YOU FOOL, WARREN IS DEAD!”

  The dreams went back and forth then. Sometimes I’d have them when I was sleeping. Sometimes I’d have them when I was awake. I’d be walking down Thayer Street and suddenly I’d be walking down a street in Arkham, heading for the Witch House.

  Were they real? Was anything real at this point? I remember all those stories where everyone knows that the dreams are real except for the dreamer. In Pet Sematary, the main character (whose name escapes me but he was played by Dale Midkiff in the movie, which wasn’t a bad adaptation—King had suffered far worse) goes for a midnight walk with the spirit of the dead student. The student leads him down the path to the Pet Sematary and then tells him not to go beyond the wall. He might as well have put a big neon sign saying, “This way to the Wendigo’s Zombie grounds.” When he wakes up, he’s stunned to find his feet covered with mud and sticks. When I read that, I wasn’t overcome with fear. Of course the dream was real. Aren’t they always? My first thought was, “Damn, that’s gonna be hard to clean up.”

  The dreams. Eventually the dreams are the only things that are real. In the dreams there’s no cancer, only monsters, gods, demons, ghouls, and things you can grab and hold with your hands. Something you can fight and batter into submission. Ever try to grab a cancer?

  I STOPPED EATING AFTER A WHILE. DIDN’T KNOW WHY I was bothering anyway. Everything tasted the same and had that metallic, coppery taste to it. Lovecraft approved of that. We talked a long time about things and only occasionally would something creep through the woods or the walls. I kept taking the herb/vitamin potion along with Dr. Lyons’s medication until it ran out. The Hounds of Tindalos ran through every once in a while but stopped coming when I ran out of food to give them. The cats of Ulthar never bothered to come at all, preferring to stay on the moon until everything was over.

  “Am I dying?” I asked Lovecraft.

  “Maybe. Who knows? What is death? Don’t ask me.”

  “But you’re dead.”

  “Am I?”

  I FINALLY FOUND THE SECTION IN THE GHOST PIRATES that Lovecraft was talking about.

  The good ship had been plagued by the appearance of ghost pirates who are making away with the sailors. There were ghost ships following them through the mist. The narrator tries to explain what’s happening:

  “Well, if we were in what I might call a healthy atmosphere, they would be quite beyond our power to see or feel, or anything. And the same with them; but the more we’re like this, the more real and actual they could grow to us. See? That is, the more we should become able to appreciate their form of materialness. That’s all. I can’t make it any clearer.”

  I was spending more time away. I couldn’t remember what day it was or what month. The cable was shut off eventually, which was okay because the electricity followed shortly after. I lay in bed, fumbling through my mind. Things and places wandered through me until, eventually, I found myself spending less and less time in that small room in Rhode Island. When I was there, my head was one large hurt. I had begun to think of my brain as a big black stain. If I could lift my head and look in the mirror, I felt sure that my eyes would be completely black.

  Lovecraft accompanied me most of the time, but sometimes I was alone walking through the worlds. I was solid, with form and substance. Here, I was thin and ghostly. The people there welcomed me. They grabbed my hand, slapped me on the back, and brought me along. Here, only Lovecraft stayed at my side and, eventually, I woke up and even he wasn’t there anymore. He had moved beyond and to see him, I’d have to let myself drift away.

  I didn’t float off like you hear in those near-death shows. I fell away from myself, sinking through the earth. I was going beyond and following old Joe Slater to that strange place that was a star far away that shone upon Olathoë aeons ago.

  The ground below me became a solid deck of a ship. I felt it move through the water as we raced forward into the strange and forbidding water where an island had suddenly appeared.

  Asenath looked at me through Edward Derby’s eyes. I sent six bullets into his brain.

  I reached for the smooth surface of polished glass.

  I thrilled to the sound of Erich Zann’s music as the dead, mute man called to something outside the window.

  I tore through Capt. Norrys’s body while the sounds of the rats ran off in the distance.

  I unfurled the photo at the corner of Pickman’s painting.

  I cringed in Nahum Gardner’s farmhouse as the colour sprang free.

  I...had become...fiction.

  The Broadsword

  LAIRD BARRON

  Laird Barron is the author of the acclaimed short story collection The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (Night Shade, 2007). His stories have appeared in Sci Fiction and Fantasy & Science Fiction and have been reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Year’s Best Fantasy, and Best New Fantasy 2005. He is now at work on his first novel.

  LATELY, PERSHING DREAMED OF HIS LONG LOST FRIEND Terry Walker. Terry himself was seldom actually present; the dreams were soundless and gray as surveillance videos, and devoid of actors. There were trees and fog, and moving shapes like shadow puppets against a wall. On several occasions he’d surfaced from these fitful dreams to muted whispering—he momentarily formed the odd notion a figure stood in the shadows of the doorway. And in that moment his addled brain gave the form substance: his father, his brother, his dead wife, but none of them, of course, for as the fog cleared from his mind, the shadows were erased by morning light, and the whispers receded into the rush and hum of the laboring fan. He wondered if these visions were a sign of impending heat stroke, or worse.

  September had proved killingly hot. The air conditioning went offline and would remain so for God knew how long. This was announced by Superintendent Frame after a small mob of irate tenants finally cornered him sneaking from his office, hat in hand. He claimed ignorance of the root cause of their misery. “I’ve men working on it!” he said as he made his escape; for that day, at least. By the more sour observers’ best estimates, “men working on it” meant Hopkins the sole custodian. Hopkins was even better than Superintendent Frame at finding a dark hole and pulling it in after himself. Nobody had seen him in days.

  Pershing Dennard did what all veteran tenants of the Broadsword Hotel had done over the years to survive these too-frequent travails: he effected emergency adaptations to his habitat. Out came the made-in-China box fan across which he draped damp wash cloths. He shuttere
d the windows and snugged heavy drapes to keep his apartment dim. Of course he maintained a ready supply of vodka in the freezer. The sweltering hours of daylight were for hibernation; dozing on the sofa, a chilled pitcher of lemonade and booze at his elbow. These maneuvers rendered the insufferable slightly bearable, but only by inches.

  He wilted in his recliner and stared at the blades of the ceiling fan cutting through the blue-streaked shadows while television static beamed between the toes of his propped-up feet. He listened. Mice scratched behind plaster. Water knocked through the pipes with deep-sea groans and soundings. Vents whistled, transferring dim clangs and screeches from the lower floors, the basement, and lower still, the subterranean depths beneath the building itself.

  The hissing ducts occasionally lulled him into a state of semi-hypnosis. He imagined lost caverns and inverted forests of roosting bats, a primordial river that tumbled through midnight grottos until it plunged so deep the stygian black acquired a red nimbus, a vast throbbing heart of brimstone and magma. Beyond the falls, abyssal winds howled and shrieked and called his name. Such images inevitably gave him more of a chill than he preferred and he shook them off, concentrated on baseball scores, the creak and grind of his joints. He’d shoveled plenty of dirt and jogged over many a hill in his career as a state surveyor. Every swing of the spade, every machete chop through temperate jungle had left its mark on muscle and bone.

  Mostly, and with an intensity of grief he’d not felt in thirty-six years, more than half his lifetime, he thought about Terry Walker. It probably wasn’t healthy to brood. That’s what the grief counselor had said. The books said that, too. Yet how could a man not gnaw on that bone sometimes?

  Anyone who’s lived beyond the walls of a cloister has had at least one bad moment, an experience that becomes the proverbial dark secret. In this Pershing was the same as everyone. His own dark moment had occurred many years prior; a tragic event he’d dwelled upon for weeks and months with manic obsession, until he learned to let go, to acknowledge his survivor’s guilt and move on with his life. He’d done well to box the memory, to shove it in a dusty corner of his subconscious. He distanced himself from the event until it seemed like a cautionary tale based on a stranger’s experiences.