Black Wings of Cthulhu

by S. T. Joshi

  Mr. Worklan knocked on our door one night that summer. Grandfather let him in, and from my room I could hear their agitated voices. Worklan spoke in low, worried tones, his voice rising in fearful expressions, then subsiding into barely audible whispers. Grandfather spoke calmly; then I heard something like “...happened so fast” when the door of my room was closed, blacking out the secure crack of light from the hall. For several minutes I lay awake in the dark. I fell asleep listening to muffled voices.

  Again, I dreamed of the big white worms tunneling up from under the ground. Their thick, blind, segmented bodies, unused to light, smelled like water in a limestone cave. Nothing in my humble experience prepared me for their existence, and my repeated nightmare became more terrifying and vivid with each occurrence. To ease my mind, Grandfather described the Orson Welles radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds in 1938, and how everyone thought Martians had landed in New Jersey. “We may be frightened by strange ideas, but sometimes we have to ignore them.”

  The creatures in my dreams were only as real as those Martians, I told myself, and they couldn’t find their way into my room.

  The next week, Grandmother, in her brown plaid overcoat, walked with me to Caroline’s Bakery on 15th Avenue, where I stared into the long glass cases that contained fresh-baked birthday cakes. The baker often decorated these cakes with small plastic cowboys and Indians. We came for the homemade cinnamon rolls, however, and left quickly, passing Fire Station No. 7 on the way home. The back of our apartment house bordered an alley directly behind the fire station, and the gridded metal fire escape, whose uppermost platform was outside our kitchen window, could be seen winding downward to the alley where the garbage cans were grouped like big aluminum mushrooms near a brick wall. A fireman named John often threw a tennis ball back and forth to me in the alley. He had become a father figure, encouraging me to catch the ball and throw straight.

  “He’s learning to be a real ball player,” John had told my grandmother.

  At the front of the apartment building, I opened the tall, wood-framed glass door to the entry hall. Grandmother took a key out of her purse to check the mailbox.

  That day, as we reached the second floor, Mrs. Schulte came running down the hall. She held my grandmother not so gently by the arm.

  “Mr. Worklan in 8 is moving out!” Her face, not as aged as my grandmother’s, nevertheless looked older right then. She might well have been announcing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

  “Oh?” said Grandmother, looking significantly down at me for a brief moment.

  “Yes...he...told us this morning. I thought you’d like to know.” She backed away. “It’s too bad when people want to leave,” she said emphatically, and walked back down the hallway.

  The next day, movers began to take furniture out of Mr. Worklan’s apartment. Some of the tenants, including my grandfather, gathered on the hot summer sidewalk near the moving van to talk to him. I sneaked into the alley to listen to them from around the corner of the building.

  “No, I won’t stay. I won’t stay now,” said Mr. Worklan angrily.

  “They couldn’t have found us so soon,” said Mr. Sorensen, an older tenant on the second floor.

  “We’ve got to do something this time,” said Mrs. Schulte in a violent whisper, and I could hear an edge of hysteria in her voice.

  “Look, I know we’ve kept from meeting each other—since we aren’t the only people in this building—but we sure as hell can’t meet on the sidewalk,” said Sorensen. He stared at Worklan. “The movers are coming out again. Why not go inside and talk? Why couldn’t you wait, Worklan?”

  Worklan stood there, stiff and straight, eyeing the apartments, his lips quivering slightly, his gaze scanning the courtyard and the windows as if trying to recall some lost or forgotten memory. He shook his head.

  “Come on, Worklan,” said Sorensen. “We should stay together.”

  “You’re making a mistake,” said Worklan. “We’ve been safe. But all of us should move now.”

  The movers came out carrying a mirrored bureau that brilliantly reflected the windows and brick of the apartment house. They brought it down the steps and across the courtyard toward the sidewalk while the small group of tenants made room. A determined Worklan shook hands with Grandfather, then nodded to the others. “Goodbye.”

  By sundown, the movers had gone, and Mr. Worklan’s apartment at the end of the second-floor hall was empty.

  “He’s left, and we might not hear from him again,” said Grandfather that night.

  “We won’t really know...” said Aunt Evelyn.

  “Keep your voices down,” said Grandmother. “David might hear.”

  “He’s asleep,” said Aunt Evelyn.

  But instead, I lay awake listening, thinking, wondering anxiously. Was there an essential fact about our lives I didn’t know, that no one talked about? Would everyone leave? Where would I go?

  “If we just stick together...” said Aunt Evelyn. “We should never have left Billings.”

  “You don’t mean it, Evelyn,” said Grandmother. “We got away.”

  “What about Worklan?” said Aunt Evelyn. “There aren’t as many of us now. It’s not fair.”

  “Is it supposed to be fair?” said Grandfather. “For Chrissake!”

  “Please keep it down,” said Grandmother. For a moment there was silence, and I thought someone would come to check on whether I was still asleep, but no one did.

  “Worklan could turn up missing like Lars Johnson,” said my aunt. “Remember Johnson, the boss on the East River side?”

  “I remember them all,” said Grandfather.

  “They run away,” said Aunt Evelyn nervously. “Why don’t they stay? They run away and eventually they disappear. What happens if...”

  “I don’t blame them,” said Grandfather.

  “Oh, why can’t we just get someone to help us?” said Aunt Evelyn. She was crying. Her fretful, harsh sobs drifted through the hall into my room, where this time the door had been accidentally left ajar.

  “We’ve been through that, too,” said Grandmother resignedly.

  “We should find David’s father,” said my Aunt. “We should get David to his father.”

  “He thought we were insane.”

  “Please keep it down,” said Grandmother.

  “Sorry,” said Grandfather in a barely audible voice. “But Evelyn’s right. It was fine as long as David was living with his mother and father, but now he’s not safe with us, and we’re getting too old to move again. We have to make a stand.”

  “God,” said Aunt Evelyn, “I don’t know.”

  “This time we’ll have to wait,” said Grandfather.

  “What will we tell David?” said Aunt Evelyn. There was a long silence, and during the silence I struggled to keep from yelling in terror, rushing into the living room and pleading with them to tell me what was happening to us. Eventually, I fell asleep exhausted. And in my dreams they came again from below in their tunnels—slick, pasty horrors without eyes...

  In the morning I watched Grandfather sitting in his chair, smoking his pipe, occasionally looking toward me where I played grimly with toy horses. His gray features were a cruel poker face. I fought with the determination of a chess player to stay calm. I was afraid to speak.

  When the sun was low one day and the light glared through the front-door glass into the building’s entry hall, I sat on the lower step of the staircase. Mrs. Turnbull was cleaning her apartment and had made one or two trips out the back door behind the main staircase, now carrying a grocery bag of garbage that smelled of used coffee grounds. I heard the garbage can lid rattle onto the can in the alley, and from Mrs. Turnbull’s open apartment door I could hear the soap-opera voices of Stella Dallas coming from her radio. I heard the back door close, watched Mrs. Turnbull start back down the long hallway, then turn.

  She suddenly walked back toward me, a hurricane of thick makeup and bright red lipstick. Her face was like a shrunken
plaster cast, her pale eyes like marbles of blue and white fire. “Your grandmother hasn’t told you anything,” she said hastily. “They spoil you.” Her left eye twitched slightly in its cavity of dry flesh. “You shouldn’t be here. Do you think we’re all going to pack up and move again? Tell your grandpa and grandma what I said.” She bent down, a frightened caricature. “It doesn’t matter because I’m not going to live much longer, you know what I mean? What dying is? Or,” she smiled, “haven’t they mentioned that little item to you either?” She started to say more, but saw tears in my eyes. She quickly turned, as if from the scene of a crime, and retreated toward her apartment with the soap-opera voices.

  Late that evening, I believe some kind of a meeting was held. After I heard my grandmother, grandfather, and aunt go out and shut the front door, I put on my robe, came out of my room, and went into the outside hall. There was the sound of people treading through the lower hallways and down the stairs to the first floor. There was that feeling, barely comprehensible to me then: I am inside a tomb, here are the dead people moving around. I went back into the living room and sat in Grandfather’s overstuffed chair.

  I didn’t know how long I slept, but when I awoke, I pictured the downstairs hall in my mind, thought about the first-floor tenants and the front-door glass, which must have been a tall dark rectangle at that time of night.

  Aunt Evelyn had said, “How could they come from under the ground if we’re on the fourth floor?” I realized how misleading that comment had been, and I remembered Mrs. Turnbull taking out her garbage along the short passage that went past a door that led to the basement. Down there, our storeroom locker was packed with old furniture, boxes of bedding, tools, and other things. The basement room with its rows of wooden foundation posts extended under the entire length of the building and included a big boiler. I had been down there once or twice with Grandfather, but never alone.

  I went out into the hall. It was dark because of a burned-out light bulb, but a flood of light came up the stairwell. I went downstairs to the short hall that led to the alley. Midway along it was the cellar door. Ten feet away was the alley exit door, and through its window I could see a dim illumination of streetlight on the bricks of the old fire station.

  I turned the cold brass of the cellar doorknob. A light was on in the basement; the old stairs descended into dimly lit space. Frightened but curious, I stepped down one at a time.

  The underground room extended into the dark shadows among the row of foundation posts.

  In this bizarre place, under a dim light bulb near the center of the bare floor, sat my grandmother. She was rocking slowly back and forth in a high-backed rocking chair. Her hands worked a pair of knitting needles, nervously starting and stopping while the chair creaked. I recognized the chair as one that had recently been put in our storage locker next to a pair of old snow tires. She had rocked me in that chair many times.

  I stepped quietly down to the bottom of the stairs. Grandmother wore the brown plaid overcoat she’d used while walking with me. It was cold down here.

  “Grandmother?” I whispered.

  Her hands stopped knitting.

  “Grandmother?”

  The chair stopped, she looked up in surprise and stared in my direction.

  “David?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Why are you down here?” she said in a dry voice. She started to get up. The knitting fell from her lap onto the concrete floor. She stood up. “Oh...you have to go back upstairs. How did you find your way down here?”

  “I didn’t know where anyone was.”

  “Well, you’re supposed to be in bed.” Her voice fluttered in an unnatural way. “You’d better go now, right away.”

  I turned.

  “Wait,” she said. She motioned me to come to her. I walked across the cold floor, and when she sat back down I eased myself onto her lap.

  “It is a long night,” she said. “You know, David, I love you. Sit with me for a while, like we used to do.”

  We sat there rocking for some time, until I could hear the floorboards creaking slightly overhead with the movement of footsteps while Grandmother looked up in silence.

  “Why are you down here, Grandma?”

  “Well, because it’s cool down here after such a hot day. You know how hot it was today, don’t you? Well, down here it’s cool.”

  “Are you coming upstairs now, Grandma?”

  “Not yet, dear. I can’t come back upstairs right away. I’m really supposed to be down here for a while. Will you do me a favor, David?”

  “Yes,” I said with tearful eyes, knowing that something was wrong.

  “Will you tell your grandfather that I’m all right, and that you were here?”

  “Yes.”

  “And remember that we love you.”

  I kissed her on the cheek, and she let me off of her lap.

  I went back to our apartment on the fourth floor. A pale yellow light came from the kitchen. Grandfather sat alone at the kitchen table, his elbow on the table, eyes downcast. He looked up at me when I came in and brought a handkerchief out of his deep pants pocket.

  “Grandma says to tell you she’s all right,” I said.

  Grandfather looked at me with wide eyes. He hadn’t expected me to come in by the front door and didn’t know I’d been gone.

  He lifted me up and held me tightly on his lap. He spoke calmly and treated me as if by some remote chance, after his words changed the world forever, I would be able to cope. He proceeded slowly at first.

  “You are becoming aware of certain things, David, so it’s time you knew that the world isn’t exactly what it appears.” He shifted me on his lap, trying to get more comfortable.

  “You remember I came on the boat to New York in 1906? Well, about a year later I got a job working on the New York subway system, which was being built then. I had a friend who’d come with me from Norway—Nels Hanson. We worked in the tunnels because, well, we needed the money to pay rent and buy food; so we stayed. We had to work, Hanson and I and the rodmen—Worklan, Turnbull, and Murphy. A fellow named Benson was an engineer—and there was some odd slumping of the ground he didn’t expect. A few of the men were afraid because they didn’t know how safe we were down there. I was afraid, too, but we were there to do a job—the sand hoggers, drillers, and the bosses, bless their black hearts.”

  “Sand hoggers?”

  “That’s what they were called.” He paused. “Building a tunnel is a big job, David. Things happen, people die, people leave, people go through a lot of trouble. Working underground is like working in a city with no sky—a big, dark, dreary place. It was down near the Hudson Terminal, in one of the two lower tubes, that the bad thing happened.

  “Benson, the engineer, was ahead down the line, checking out the ground problem. This was before the concrete had been poured. There was a lot of water down there, freezing cold, so we all had our heavy clothes and rubber boots on... We heard this terrible scream coming from down the line, but we couldn’t get there very fast. Something had happened to Benson... You know, when some people are frightened really bad, they just aren’t themselves anymore. That’s what happened to Benson. He kind of fell asleep in his mind.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “We didn’t know. But later, when he recovered from shock, he said there were strange things in the deepest parts of the tunnel. He said they had been crawling down there and affecting his mind.

  “A month later we were down there again, in the lower tunnel, just a few of us: Lars Johnson, our boss—Murphy, McShay, and Sorensen, the man who’d taken over for Benson—and some others, some of the people who live right here in our apartments, David, and who’ve stuck together for over forty years. I guess there were a half-dozen of us down there on that day.

  “It was like a bad dream, David, like the dream you’ve been having. McShay and Bailey came running back from below. They said that huge white things were in the ground—worms, they said—and Farley,
he was a non-union man but tough-minded; he had a pick ax, McShay said, and he tried to kill one of them but couldn’t, and they took hold of Farley with big sucking jaws and dragged him down under the ground. It was horrible. No one could help Farley, and we ran back through the tunnel—and in the days following we had horrible thoughts—thoughts we were told by Benson came from underground, thoughts we couldn’t understand because the underground things were blind, yet they lived in a world of sound and vibration, and they could hear us.

  “For days, no one would go back down there, and construction was held up until a new crew could be found. There were some transfers to other parts of the project. There were rumors that a large hole had been filled in, but there were no more strange stories. The men I worked with scattered from job to job until the subway was finished. But none of them who were in the tunnel that day have ever been able to live in one place for long—because of the dreams. Dreams that may not be dreams at all. Or memories either. Some said McShay and Bailey killed Farley themselves because he was a non-union man. But Mr. Worklan, he thinks maybe those blind creatures under the ground permanently locked into our minds because they can’t see or talk, and they got to know where we are. We’ve come up with all kinds of ideas, but the one that sticks is that those things under the ground are trying to find us again. We don’t know why.

  “But that’s sometimes the way the world is, David. Our idea is that they share our planet but don’t know what we are, and maybe no one but us knows about them. So we’ve been moving around the country, because after each move the dreams stop. We think the dreams mean they are getting close to finding us again, and we don’t know what will happen if they do. Most of us decided to band together. We began to study books about a hollow earth, UFOs, and things like that, and we formed a kind of club to delve into these matters. None of it was the truth. I set up the lumber business, first in Minnesota, so we could work and stay together.”