Black Wings of Cthulhu

by S. T. Joshi

  And this makes sense. Difference is difference, whether it be big or small, and it may even be that the smaller differences feel the most enticing. Most people do not want (and would not even be able) to throw aside a lifetime of preference and predilection and taste. You are who you are, and you like what you like. Short of being able to have their partner manifest a different body once in a while (which is clearly impossible), many seem to opt for a very similar body that just happens to have a slightly different person inside. A person of the same class and general type, but just different enough to trigger feelings of newness, to enable the sensation of experiencing something novel—to wake up, for a spell, the slumbering person inside.

  Difference fades quickly, however, whereas love and the warmth of long association do not, which is why so many end up sloping right back to where they started out. Most people don’t end up in liaisons with barmaids or other exotics. They get busy with friends and co-workers, people living in the same tree. They don’t actually want difference from the outside world. They want it within themselves.

  I realised, after mulling it over in the quiet, tidy kitchen for nearly an hour, that I wanted to be someone different too, however briefly. So I went upstairs, told my son that I was popping out to post a letter, and went out into the night.

  IT WAS AFTER NINE BY THEN, AND DARK. AUTUMNAL, too, which I’ve always found the most invigorating time of year. I suppose it’s distant memories of changes in the school or university year, falling leaves as an augur of moving to new levels and states of being within one’s life.

  I didn’t walk the most direct route to the house, instead taking a long way round, strolling as casually as I could along the deserted mid-evening pavements, between lamps shedding yellow light.

  I was feeling...something. Feeling silly, yes, but engaged, too. This wasn’t editing. This wasn’t ferrying Oscar to and from school. This wasn’t listening to Helen talk about her work. The only person involved in this was me.

  Eventually I found myself approaching the street in question, via another that met it at right angles. When I emerged from this I glanced up and down the road, scoping it out from a different perspective to it merely being part of the route to my morning latté purveyor.

  The road ended—or was interrupted—by one of the traffic-calming gates, and so was extremely quiet. There’d be very little reason for anyone to choose it unless they lived in one of the houses I could see.

  I stood on the opposite side of the street and looked at the house where the woman lived, about twenty yards away. A single light shone in the upper storey, doubtless a bedroom. A wider glow from the level beneath the street, however, suggested life going on down there.

  My heart was beating rapidly now, and far more heavily than usual. My body as well as my mind seemed aware of this break in usual patterns of behaviour, that its owner was jumping the tracks, doing something new.

  I crossed the street. When I reached the other side I kept going, slowly, walking right past the house. As I did so I glanced down and to my right.

  A single window was visible in the wall of the basement level, an open blind partially obscuring the top half. In the four seconds or so that it took me to walk past the house, I saw a large green rug on dark floorboards and caught a glimpse of a painting on one wall. No people, and most specifically, not her.

  I continued walking, right the way up to the gate across the road. Waited there a few moments, and then walked back the same way.

  This time—emboldened by the continued lack of human occupancy—I got a better look at the painting. It showed a small fishing village, or something of the sort, on a rocky coast. The style was rough, even from that distance, and I got the sense that the artist had not been trying to evoke the joys of waterfront living. The village did not look like somewhere you’d deliberately go on holiday, that’s for sure.

  Then I was past the house again.

  I couldn’t just keep doing this, I realised. Sooner or later someone in one of the other houses would spot a man pacing up and down this short section of street and decide to be neighbourly—which in this day and age means calling the police.

  I had an idea, and took my mobile out of my trouser pocket. I flipped it open, put it to my ear, and wandered a little way further down the street.

  If anyone saw me, I believed, I’d just be one of those other people you notice once in a while—some man engaged in some other, different life, talking to someone whose identity they’d never know, about matters which would remain similarly oblique. It would be enough cover for a few minutes, I thought.

  I arranged it so that my meandering path—I even stepped off into the empty road for a spell, just to accentuate how little my surroundings meant to me, so engaged was I with my telephone call—gradually took me back toward the house. After about five minutes of this I stepped back up onto the curb, about level with the house’s front path.

  I stopped then, taken aback.

  Someone had been in the lower room I could see through the window. She’d only been visible for a second—and I knew it was her, because I’d glimpsed the same long, brown hair from that morning—starting out in the middle of the room, and then walking out the door.

  Was she going to come back? Why would she have come into what was presumably a living room, then left again? Was she fetching something from the room—a book or magazine—and now settling down in a kitchen I couldn’t see? Or was she intending to spend the evening in the living room instead, and returning to the kitchen for something she’d forgotten, to bring back with her?

  I kept the phone to my ear, and turned in a slow circle. Walked a few yards up the street, with a slow, casual, leg-swinging gait, and then back again.

  I’d gone past the point of feeling stupid now. I just wanted to see. When I got back to the pavement, I caught my breath.

  The woman was back.

  More than that, she was sitting down. Not on the sofa—one corner of which I could just make out in the corner of the window—but right in the middle of the rug. She had her back to me. Her hair was thick, and hung to the middle of her back. It was very different in more than colour to Helen’s, who’d switched to a shorter and more-convenient-for-the-mornings style a few years back.

  The woman seemed to be bent over slightly, as if reading something laid out on the floor in front of her. I really, really wanted to know what it was. Was it perhaps The Guardian, choice of all right-thinking people (and knee-jerk liberals) in this part of North London? Or might it be something else, some periodical I’d never read, or even heard of? A book I might come to love?

  I took another cautious set forward, barely remembering to keep up the pretence with the mobile phone still in my hand.

  With my slightly changed angle I could now see her elbows, one poking out from either side of her chest. They seemed in a rather high position for someone managing reading matter, but it was hard to tell.

  My scalp and the back of my neck were itching with nervousness by now. I cast a quick glance either way up the street, just to check no one was coming. The pavements on both sides remained empty, distanced pools of lamplight falling on silence and emptiness.

  When I looked back, the woman had altered her position slightly, and I saw something new. I thought at first it must be whatever she was reading, but then realised first that it couldn’t be, and soon after, what I was actually seeing. A plastic bag.

  A red plastic bag.

  Who unpacks their shopping in the living room? Other people do, I guess—and perhaps it was this link with the very first inkling I’d had of this woman’s existence (the temporary arrival of her food in the kitchen of my own house, in the very same kind of bag) that caused me to walk forward another step.

  I should have looked where I was going, but I did not. My foot collided with an empty Coke can lying near the low wall at the front of the woman’s property. It careered across the remaining space with a harsh scraping noise, before clattering into the wall with
a smack.

  I froze, staring down at her window.

  The woman wrenched around, turning about the waist to glare up through her window.

  I saw the red plastic bag lying on the rug in front of her, its contents spread in a semicircle. She was not holding a newspaper or magazine or book. In one hand she held half of a thick, red steak. The other hand was up to her mouth and had evidently been engaged in pushing raw minced beef into it when she turned. The lower half of her face was smeared with blood. Her eyes were wide, and either her pupils were unusually large, or her irises were also pitch black. Her hair started perhaps an inch or two further back than anyone’s I had ever seen, and there was something about her temples that was wrong, misshapen, excessive.

  We stared at each other for perhaps two seconds. A gobbet of partially chewed meat fell out of her mouth, down onto her dress. I heard her say something, or snarl it. I have no idea what it might have been, and this was not merely because of the distance or muting caused by the glass of the window. It simply did not sound like any language I’ve ever heard. Her mouth opened far too wide in the process, too, further accentuating the strange, bulged shape of her temples.

  I took a couple of huge, jerky steps backward, nearly falling over in the process. I caught one last glimpse of her face, howling something at me.

  There were too many vowels in what she said, and they were in an unkind order.

  I heard another sound, from up the street, and turning jerkily I saw two people approaching, from the next corner, perhaps fifty yards away. They were passing underneath one of the lamps. One was taller than the other. The shorter of the two seemed to be wearing a long dress, almost Edwardian in style. The man—assuming that’s what he was—had a pronounced stoop.

  In silhouette against the lamp light, both their heads were clearly too wide across the top.

  I ran.

  I ran away home.

  I HAVE NOT SEEN THAT SUPERMARKET MAN AGAIN. I’m sure I will eventually, but he’ll doubtless have forgotten the corned beef incident by then. Out there in the real world, it was hardly that big a deal.

  Otherwise, everything is the same. Helen and I continue to enjoy a friendly, affectionate relationship, sharing our lives with a son who shows no sign yet of turning into an adolescent monster. I work in my study, taking the collections of words that people send me and making small adjustments to them, changing something here and there, checking everything is in order and putting a part of myself into the text by introducing just a little bit of difference.

  The only real alteration in my patterns is that I no longer walk down a certain street to get my habitual morning latté. Instead I head in the other direction and buy one from the mini-market instead. It’s nowhere near as good, and I guess soon I’ll go back to the deli, though I shall take a different route from the one which had previously been my custom.

  A couple of weeks ago I was unpacking the bags from our weekly shop and discovered a large variety pack of sliced meats. I let out a strangled sound, dropping the package to the floor. Helen happened to be in the kitchen at the time and took this to be a joke—me expressing mock surprise at her having (on a whim) clicked a button online and thus causing all these naughty meats to arrive as a treat for the husband who, in her own and many ways, she loves.

  I found a smile for her, and the next day when she was at work I wrapped the package in a plastic bag and disposed of it in a bin half a mile from our house. There’s a lot you can do with chicken, and even more with vegetables.

  Meanwhile, we seem to be making love a little more often. I’m not really sure why.

  Susie

  JASON VAN HOLLANDER

  Jason Van Hollander’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Weird Tales, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other publications. His macabre artwork adorns books published by Arkham House, Golden Gryphon Press, Subterranean Press, PS Publishing, Tor Books, Night Shade Books, and Ash-Tree Press. He has illustrated books and stories by Thomas Ligotti, Fritz Leiber, Ramsey Campbell, William Hope Hodgson, and Clark Ashton Smith. He has won an International Horror Guild Award and two World Fantasy Awards.

  SUSIE, ANGUISHED WITH THE BURDEN OF A THOUSAND Unborn, curses the frailty of human life as Doctor Farnell clamps cool fingers around her chin. “Sip slowly,” urges the physician in a voice devoid of emotion. “We can add sugar to the next dose.” He lowers the fluted glass. “Your sister has been asking about you,” he adds.

  Alkaloid bitterness spirals down her gullet. Sitting up is difficult. The single pillow, which is too thin, slips down the headboard of the hospital bed. As the nurse fluffs the pillow Susie licks her lips, sifts through unfamiliar memories. Sister? Her thoughts are mazy. The little one under the earth? “Emeline?” she wonders aloud. “Didn’t she die when she was six?”

  Her query floats away unanswered. Doctor Farnell taps her wrists, which she notices are bound with surgical gauze. Even through the miasmas of delirium and the lingering effects of anesthesia the doctor’s expression is troubling. Unmanageable anxieties banished her to this Gothic Revival Palace of Moan, whose inmates roam the halls, shuffling in slippers, lost in the folds of ill-fitting stained frocks.

  Eventually the nurse explains, “Tomorrow your sister wants to visit.”

  “Lillie Delora? Annie?”

  “One of your sisters.”

  Susie’s bewildered response: “Which one am I?”

  Her unanswerable question drifts beyond the curtains drawn around the bed. A late May breeze, sea-scented, mixes with the acrid scent of carbolic acid that wafts down the women’s infirmary of Butler Sanatorium. Other than Susie and the doctor and the portly nurse, the ward is unoccupied. Shivering, the dying woman squirms. Her bedclothes and sheets are damp with sweat. Doctor Farnell leans closer, manipulates her eyelids, gawks as if peering deeply into unfathomable pools.

  “What about your son—didn’t you say he’s some sort of astronomer?” asks the physician. “Surely a star-gazer would want to gaze upon his mother during her convalescence. Surely he intends to visit.”

  “He is a poet of the highest order,” Susie hears herself say. “But he is too frail to visit, too sickly. His appearance...he really doesn’t like to walk upon the streets.”

  “Is there some sort of infirmity?” inquires the doctor.

  “He must avoid places where people could stare at him. Illness...and the constellations...accentuate the deformity. The hideous face”—she pauses to catch her breath—“when the host-form sickens the displaced identity surfaces. And the host form dissolves. This is why I’m here, this is what is happening to me.”

  A flicker of understanding passes between nurse and physician. Exhausted, Susie closes her eyes.

  “The fever will break,” F. J. Farnell avers in a medical man’s voice that is heartless and reassuring at the same time. “Depend on it: the surgery was completely successful, the obstruction removed, the biliary colic resolved. Get some rest. Get some sleep. Palliatives will be provided.”

  Susie opens her eyes. Her vision is blurred. The nurse seems to be proffering an empty glass; the edges shimmer. An unconvincing simulation of a smile mars the physician’s face as he intones: “The tincture is efficacious but it clouds the mind. Nurse Grady will try to remember to sugar the next dose.”

  “My head aches.” Susie—the unusurped portion—tries to gather her thoughts. “Everything is collapsing. Years ago my husband collapsed. My child will collapse. How will we manage, how will we fare? Our situation is dire...”

  “It’s the fever. When it breaks you’ll feel better.”

  “I will live only to suffer,” Susie whispers as the doctor swirls through the curtains. Her statement is objective, not a contradiction. Human ingenuity is insufficient. The doctor and his medicaments are primitive, the nurse is impertinent, traipsing in and out of the curtained partition with her sour Sapphic glower.

  The dying creature shuts human-seeming eyelids, tests the failing sensorium. Listens to the click-
clack of cleats of high-button shoes on floors of tile and marble. Inhales institutional odors: green soap, floor-wax, ammonia. Disinfectant.

  Nurse Grady returns, brandishing the fluted glass. It glistens with opium and water and spiraling granules of sugar that are magically descriptive, nebular, galactic in implication. Flushed, the nurse fidgets, sputters, “Don’t think I’ll be forgetting the terrible things you said to me, what you accused me of yesterday!”

  “You are the heavyset nurse. The one who bathes me.”

  “Accusing me of...improprieties. When all I did is what I’m paid to do: a sponge bath for patients that sweat through their gown and dirty themselves.”

  “You touched me. Your hands lingered,” Susie reminds the porcine woman.

  “All I did was to perform my duty as a nurse.”

  “You kept staring at my nakedness.”

  “Your belly-skin had tattoos, symbols in strange colors, scurrying around like beetles. Especially near the sutures. And someone put furry boots on your legs. They looked like goat-feet.”

  Susie stared at the ceiling, warding off realizations. “Is my body changing?” she wonders.

  “By the time the ether wore off...by the time you stopped vomiting, the tattoos vanished. I don’t know how you got rid of the boots. Maybe it was some sort of trick. Anyhow,” huffs the nurse, “I was just performing my duty as a nurse.”

  As evidence the porcine woman points at her uniform, which is starched, unnaturally white, overbright in the sunlight slicing through the bars of the sanatorium windows. Silicated, decides the efficiency that is fused with Susie. “When you washed the host-body, your hands lingered,” avers the pluralized Susie. “You caressed the host-body.”