by S. T. Joshi
I wonder if we even left footprints in the snow. I am certain only that we came to a high, dark place beneath brilliant stars and perched at the edge of a precarious precipice, so that with the slightest tumble, not to mention an intentional leap, we could have hurled ourselves off into the black sea of infinity forever.
The presences gathered all around us. I could feel their wings brushing against my bare back and shoulders like the wind.
That was when the man who had waited for me all this time, who had brought me here to this place, first taught me how to speak the speech of the dark spaces. Maybe he began with a series of syllables that went something like whao-ao-ao—but it was a howl, high and shrill like nothing I had ever imagined a human throat could produce, a screaming beacon that could reach across interstellar spaces, beyond the universe itself, into the great, black whirlpool at the core of Being. It was so loud. It filled everything, obliterated everything. Did my eardrums burst? Was there blood oozing out of my ears? The body is to be discarded, and for a moment it seemed it was, as in a kind of vision my companion bore me up, surrounded by howling, dark angels, and we hurled through infinities without number until we came at last to a flat and frozen plain, beneath two black suns, and we knelt down and abased ourselves, and shrieked that impossible shriek before a miles-high eidolon that might have had the form of a man, but never was a man. And this thing opened its stone jaws to join us in our song. It spoke, without words, the secret name of the primal chaos that turns in the heart of the black whirlpool, that unnameable name which no human tongue can ever form, nor can any human ear—with or without broken eardrums—ever hear.
That was almost thirty years ago, I say, uselessly. A lot of water under the bridge since then.
There no time, the stone man says.
Indeed, he has not changed at all. If he is truly alive, he does not age.
You are ready, then?
Yes. I have done a terrible thing.
Somehow I found my way back home. I must have arrived a while after my father came home from work, because I discovered him sitting amid the ruins of our trashed living room, staring at the heavy-caliber pistol on the floor and at the brains and blood splattered all over the furniture and walls. My sister was sprawled head-first down the front stairs. My mother lay right in front of Dad, curled up as if she were asleep.
He was weeping uncontrollably.
He never noticed that I was naked and wet and half frozen, or that I was burned where either the stone man or any of the winged ones had touched me. I stank of sweat the way you do when you’ve shivered really hard. When I tried to say something it came out as a weird, trailing howl. Lights glared and whirled all around the house, blinding me, and the sounds were all strange and distorted, people talking to me at the wrong speed, all growling and distorted, like the voices of broken machinery. Maybe there was blood running down my cheeks. One of my eardrums had burst. I’ve been partially deaf in that ear ever since. The house was spinning, shifting, and nothing made a great deal of sense. My feet hurt intensely from where they had touched the stars, as if I had been wading ankle-deep in the burning sky.
In the end, guess what? Somebody really did wrap me up in a blanket like a little baby and hand me a cup of hot chocolate.
Yes, I did time in institutions after that, in high, red-brick prisons where you have to wear pajamas all day and night in the company of crazy people who think you are one of them, where the bright lights are always on and there is no darkness, except what you can carefully, secretly nurse within yourself, despite the best efforts of so many cooing and clucking Professionals to gently probe you with words and drugs and Get To The Root Of Your Problem. They want you to confess, confess, confess, as relentless as any Inquisition, their pretend-gentleness as insidious as the rack and the thumbscrew.
Confess.
Yet I held out. I hoarded my secrets. Eventually, for lack of evidence or lack of guilt or lack of interest, or maybe something as mundane as lack of continuing funds, after many stern lectures about how I was apparently devoid of all normal human emotions, I was cast up at eighteen, an orphan, shipwrecked and alone, onto the shore of the Real World to make my way in it.
The rest is fraud. Imposture. With darkness in my heart, with my secret cunningly concealed, I gained, at first, marginal jobs and marginal acquaintances, and learned to impersonate a human being, going through all the motions of “normal” life, becoming so convincing in my falsehood that I even managed to marry Marguerite, a much more accomplished person than myself, and to father a daughter by her, whom we called Anastasia, whose name means “resurrection,” as in the resurrection of hope.
But it was all just one more part of my plan. Another part was that we had to leave our native Pennsylvania, and by cunning degrees I eased us into the necessity of moving the entire family to Arizona.
It spooked them. No doubt about it. A place of vast emptiness, where there are immensities that no one from the East can really comprehend, and you can easily go hundred miles at night between the last gas station and a truck stop, seeing absolutely nothing in between. A little town like Page perched on a hilltop with its stores and green lawns seems like a whimsical speck of paint on an otherwise completely empty canvas. Ten miles down the road can be as barren as the moon. I took Marguerite to see the Grand Canyon by starlight, and she was terrified of its vastness even as I wanted to leap out and swim into its abyss, in which there was no up or down and no distance, where infinity is very close, and at its heart swirls the black chaos whose name may never be spoken.
You came to me.
I knew the way.
An awakening, into darkness.
Yes. Because I have done a terrible thing.
Then listen.
And we both listen. It makes no difference that I am partially deaf in the real world, because this is a sound from out of the immensity of the darkness. We gaze down from atop a remote mesa over a desert landscape that stretches off into black nothingness, without the light of a house or a highway or any glow on the horizon to suggest that mankind has ever set foot on this planet—from out of that distance and that darkness, from beyond the squat, round hills that are visible only because they block out the starlight, comes a howling which I have indeed heard before and have never stopped hearing all the days of my life, a sound no human throat ought ever to be able to utter.
You hear it? my companion asks.
Yes, of course.
In such places, in the darkness, we are closer to the outer spheres. Dimensions, gateways, whatever you want to call them, touch.
Do other people hear this?
The Christians say it is the howling of a damned soul. The Native peoples, who have been here longer, have other, older ideas.
We stand in the darkness, gazing into the farthest distance, and for an instant the stars seem to be rippling, as if they’re a reflection in a mirror-smooth pond and something has just gone skittering over the surface.
My companion takes my hand, as he did that first time, in the dark. It is a surprisingly human, tender gesture.
The howling sound is all. It fills the universe. I cannot hear anything else. I cannot speak or hear, and we two reply, joining an impossible chorus even as the presences close in around us, and I feel their wings beating against me like the wind. Their claws or hands or whatever it is they have tear at my to-be-sloughed-off flesh as they seize hold of us and lift us into the air, off the top of the mesa, sweeping over the landscape, into the stars and the darkness beyond.
I am still able to touch the thoughts of my companion and converse with him after a fashion that is not speech, except perhaps the speech of dreams. His words form inside my mind, as if they are my own.
This is my tragedy, I come to understand.
I have done a terrible thing, but not terrible enough.
For a while, during the years of my imposture, I didn’t feel like a damned soul at all. It was very beguiling. Marguerite awakened with
in me emotions I did not know I even had. We were happy. When our daughter was born, it was a joy. She taught me how to laugh, something I had not done in a very long time.
That must be sloughed off.
I had a life.
And I lost it.
Again.
I have done a terrible thing.
It is of no matter. Such things do not exist in the dark.
But what if I can’t slough it all off? What if the condition of nihil is only incompletely achieved? What if, in the end, my sin is a very petty and human one, a routine mixture of cowardice and prideful despair?
Now the stars swirl around us in a vast whirlpool, and then there are more dark dust clouds whirling, obscuring the light, and we pass through, borne by our captors, for I believe that is what they are, the ones to whom we have surrendered ourselves. Once again the ice-plain stretches below us, beneath the black suns, and the enormous stone visage looms before us, and the stone jaws grind and the stone throat howls, speaking the names of the lords of primal chaos, and of the chaos itself which cannot be named at all.
I have done a terrible thing.
History, family history, has a way of repeating itself, and the sins of the fathers are visited, etc., etc., but not precisely and not the way you think, because the terrible thing was simply this, that at the end of many long and happy years together with Marguerite, she began to leave me, not because she was unfaithful or wanted a divorce, much less because I blew her brains out with a heavy-caliber pistol or induced her to do the same to herself. More simply, she developed brain cancer, and after the seizures and delirium and withdrawals into hospital wards, where I last saw her hooked up to monitors and tubes like a thing, not the person I loved, who had taught me, quite unexpectedly, how to be human—after I no longer had the courage to visit her or whisper her name, I looked into the darkness once more and remembered all those strange things from my youth, and my companion, my mentor, my friend with the many funny names I’d made up for him and no name at all, was waiting for me as if no time had passed.
COWARDICE AND DESPAIR. HOW TERRIBLY, disappointingly human at the last.
Falling down from out of the black sky toward the immense thing that is more of a god than anything imagined in human mythologies, I realize that my only crime is that I am a liar, that I claimed to be ready for this journey when I am not, that I have not managed to slough off my humanity at all; that if anything I have suddenly regained it.
I call out to my companion. I speak strange words, like an apostle babbling in tongues. I ask him if he is my friend, if he has been my friend all my life. I tell him that I have a name, which is Joseph. I ask him his own name, and somehow I am able to press into his mind. I catch glimpses of his life and learn that he was an astronomer who worked in Arizona about 1910, named Ezra Watkins, and he too has some deeply buried core of sorrow, a secret pain that he is terrified I might uncover and force him to confront before the darkness can swallow him up utterly and forever.
He draws away from me in something very much like panic, shouting that these things must be gotten rid of, discarded, sloughed off—the phrase he uses over and over again, chanting it like a mantra—and I can feel his immeasurable, helpless, despair as memories of his discarded humanity begin to awaken within him.
He begins to scream, to make that unbelievable, indescribable howling noise, and for once I cannot join him in his song. From out of my mouth issue only words, like a little boy’s voice, not loud enough to be heard, breaking, shrill.
Consternation among our winged bearers.
This one is too heavy. He is not pure.
They let go of me. I am falling from them, through space, burning among the stars, blinded by light, away from the stone god, away from the black suns and the swirling dark.
I call out to Ezra Watkins. I reach for his hand.
But he is not there, and I can feel my ears bleeding.
Maybe my daughter Anastasia inherited my alleged total lack of human emotions, because she disappeared about the time her mother became ill, and I never heard from her again; but I am, alas, a very poor liar, which is my single crime, of which prideful despair, cowardice, and self-delusion are mere subsets, what I have failed to slough off.
I alone have escaped to tell thee.
My eyes do not glow. That is an illusion. In the dark, there is no light.
I wait. I have walked too far in the dark spaces. I have waded barefoot among the fiery stars and the black stars and burned myself. I cannot walk upon the Earth again, but only wander in the darkness, howling.
The Christians say it is the howling of a damned soul. The Native peoples, who have been here longer, have other, older ideas.
They’re both right.
Nobody is going to make this better with a blanket and a cup of hot chocolate.
Now that you have come to me, you must tell the story.
The Truth About Pickman
BRIAN STABLEFORD
Brian Stableford is an acclaimed British author of science fiction and horror novels, including The Empire of Fear (Simon & Schuster UK, 1988), Young Blood (Simon & Schuster UK, 1992), The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires (Mark V. Ziesing, 1996), The Werewolves of London (Simon & Schuster UK, 1990), The Angel of Pain (Simon & Schuster UK, 1991), and The Carnival of Destruction (Simon & Schuster UK, 1994). He has also edited The Dedalus Book of Decadence (Dedalus, 1990–92; 2 vols.) and is the author of such critical studies as Scientific Romance in Britain 1890–1950 (Fourth Estate, 1985) and The Sociology of Science Fiction (Borgo Press, 1987).
THE DOORBELL DIDN’T RING UNTIL FIFTEEN MINUTES after the time we’d agreed on the telephone, but I hadn’t even begun to get impatient. Visitors to the island—even those who’ve only come over the Solent from Hampshire, let alone across the Atlantic from Boston—are always taken by surprise by the slower pace of life here. It’s not so much that the buses never run on time as the fact that you can’t judge the time of a walk by looking at the map. The map is flat, but the terrain is anything but, especially here on the south coast, where all the chines are.
“Do come in, Professor Thurber,” I said, when I opened the door. “This is quite a privilege. I don’t get many visitors.”
His face was a trifle blanched, and he had to make an effort to unclench his jaw. “I’m not surprised,” he muttered, in an accent that was distinctly American but by no means a drawl. “Who ever thought of building a house here, and how on earth did they get the materials down that narrow track?”
I took his coat. There were scuff-marks on the right sleeve because of the way he’d hugged the wall on the way down rather than trust the hand-rail on the left. The cast-iron struts supporting it were rusted, of course, and the wood had grown a fine crop of fungus because we’d had such a wet August, but the rail was actually quite sound, so he could have used it if he’d had the nerve.
“It is a trifle inconvenient nowadays,” I admitted. “The path was wider when the house was built, and I shudder to think what the next significant landslip might do to it, but the rock face behind the house is vertical, and it’s not too difficult to rig a block-and-tackle up on top. The biggest thing I’ve had to bring down recently is a fridge, though, and I managed that on the path with the aid of one of those two-wheeled trolleys. It’s not so bad when you get used to it.”
He’d pulled himself together by then and stuck out his hand. “Alastair Thurber,” he said. “I’m truly glad to meet you, Mr. Eliot. My grandfather knew your...grandfather.” The hesitation was perceptible, as he tried to guess my age and estimate whether I might conceivably be Silas Eliot’s son rather than his grandson, but it wasn’t so blatant as to seem impolite. Even so, to cover up his confusion, he added: “And they were both friends of the man I wrote to you about: Richard Upton Pickman.”
“I don’t have a proper sitting-room, I’m afraid,” I told him. “The TV room’s rather cluttered, but I expect you’d rather take tea in the library in any case.”
He assured me, quite sincerely, that he didn’t mind. As an academic, he was presumably a bibliophile as well as an art-lover and a molecular biologist: a man of many parts, who was probably still trying to fit them together neatly. He was, of course, younger than me—no more than forty-five, to judge by appearances.
I sat him down and immediately went into the kitchen to make the tea. I used the filtered water and put two bags of Sainsbury’s Brown Label and one of Earl Grey in the pot. I put the milk in a jug and the sugar in a bowl; it was a long time since I’d had to do that. On the way back to the library I had a private bet with myself as to which of the two salient objects he would comment on first, and won.
“You have one of my books,” he said, before I’d even closed the door behind me. He’d taken the copy of The Syphilis Transfer off the shelf and opened it, as if to check that the words on the page really were his and that the book’s spine hadn’t been lying.
“I bought it after you sent the first letter,” I admitted.
“I’m surprised you could find a copy in England, let alone the Isle of Wight,” he said.
“I didn’t,” I told him. “The public library at Ventnor has Internet connections. I go in twice a week to do the shopping and often pop in there. I ordered it from the U.S. via Amazon. I may be tucked away in a chine, but I’m not entirely cut off from civilization.” He seemed skeptical—but he had just walked the half a mile that separated the house from the bus stop on the so-called coast road, and knew that it wasn’t exactly a stroll along Shanklin sea-front. His eyes flickered to the electric light bulb hanging from the roof, presumably wondering at the fact that it was there at all rather than the fact that it was one of the new curly energy-saving bulbs. “Yes, I said, “I even have mains electricity. No gas, though, and no mains water. I don’t need it—I actually have a spring in my cellar. How many people can say that?”