Black Wings of Cthulhu
Page 43
“Lookie, Missus. I don’t never touch the Host except when the priest places it on my tongue.”
“You touched this flesh.” Susie, unable to move, gestures with her chin. “The flesh of this body.”
Abruptly the nurse throws open the curtains, muttering, “Godless and raving sick in a madhouse, and I’m justifying myself to her.”
Shanty-Irish sow. The human insult, a regional construction, flits through Susie’s overmind. Communication is futile, a distraction. As the dying body lurches there is a sense of gauze tightening on wrists. This is because hands and ankles are bound to the hospital bed. Two thrashes confirm constraint. Her slender fingers clench the sheets. Suddenly she comprehends that the host-body is wracked with pain from the surgery. Just for a second the steely intention in front of Susie’s mind unclamps. “This husk is in agony,” she gasps. “Help me!”
THE HOSPITAL BED IS EQUIPPED WITH A RUBBER PAD to protect the mattress. Nonporous, the pad repels moisture, spew, discharges, fluids. By preventing evaporation the unyielding rubber pad promotes perspiration. This is why Susie’s sheets are sweat-damp, her gown sweat-sodden. Her temperature climbs. Delirium convinces her that the pad and length of her body form a human-skinned flying carpet. Over Providence she soars, lying on a mesh of discontinued selves. Surcease is a formula etched on the aethers, magically descriptive, nebular, galactic in implication. Her many-selved mind aches with pluralized yearnings. How many selves crouch and hide in the swirling formulae?
Ideations, viscid geometries, larval letterforms.
Strands of her consort are woven into this carpet of dreams. Winfield, animalistic whiskers sprouting from his upper lip. His illness was the illness of this accursed planet, which crawls with absurd cavalcades, husk armies, ritualized and valueless spawnings...while her Thousand Unborn swirl in the aethers like the spindrift of Eternity.
In the midnight hospital room the dying entity jolts awake. The plight of her Unborn Brood knifes into her. Her helplessness is unbearable. To open time she summons a tangible ideation of her consort and bleats Iä! Iä! Iä! without uttering its truest name.
Proceeding into the room is a crowd-sized tangle, mostly Winfield, partly the Butler Hospital room in which he died, partly the unnamable efficiency. Fully aroused, the avatar mounts her, thrusts, groans, boasts, its mind maggoty with spirochetes. Iä!
Between her thighs Susie feels the potent fecundating seed of death.
IN BED, SUSIE JACK-KNIFES AWAKE. THE PLIGHT OF HER only child jolts into her. Scant minutes away from the asylum lives her only child—no longer larval—languishing, dreaming, cadaverously slim and pale. She envisions him costumed in the antique clothes of his dead father. Hideous by any standard, earthly or otherwise.
In a midnight hospital room Susie forms a tangible ideation of her child (“a poet of the highest order”). Because she’s fatally depleted the phantasm is runt-sized. It drifts near the ceiling fan. Sliced into wisps by the slow rotation of blades, it recombines but loses volume, substance, lacks luminosity. Willed to do so, it alights onto a wall calendar, budging a leaf (May 24, 1921). Then it alights on her wrist. By any earthly standard its expression is hideous, the choreatic tic pronounced. Tiny as it is, the lantern-jaws manage to chew through the gauze, freeing one hand. Susie unknots the other wrist, but not before an avalanche of pain engulfs the right upper quadrant of her torso. There, the phantasm suckles, drawing nutrient ooze from the partially unstitched wound. Then and there she expects discontinuation, as the brown rat-like minikin cleaves and burrows into her flesh. Pain is everything. Yet everything is nothing compared to the plight of the Thousand Unborn, whose fate must devolve on her beloved, sublimely gifted, weakling invalid useless child.
HIS INVOLVEMENT IS ESSENTIAL: BELATEDLY, SUSIE realizes this. Suddenly the undermind bursts through. What do you expect from my child? demands Sarah Susan.
“He must tend to his mission,” answers the usurper in a goatish bleat. “He must...he must devote his energies to the Thousand Unborn. And usher in the Dawn of the Thousand Young.”
He is too frail, he will collapse.
Susie feels the ideation of her son brush against her cheek, licking teardrops. It is odorless, breath-textured. Inexplicably, it smiles as it slithers through the bars of the window, a slow silvery comet staining the air with a trail of luminous symbols, viscid geometries, larval letterforms.
Breathing is no longer necessary: Susie realizes this belatedly. When her body is discovered her mouth is open. In repose she appears to be glancing out the window. At midnight the sky of Providence is tinctured with hues of the morgue and the stars. To the eyes of the dead this is a scroll of endless night...with symbols and the language of Time etched on the aethers, magically descriptive, cosmic in implication.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
S. T. Joshi is a leading authority on H. P. Lovecraft and the author of The Weird Tale (1990), The Modern Weird Tale (2001), The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos (2008), and other critical and biographical studies. His biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996), won the British Fantasy Award and the Horror Writers Association award; it has now been published in an unabridged edition as I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010). Joshi has prepared corrected editions of Lovecraft’s fiction, poetry, and essays, and is working on a long-range project to publish Lovecraft’s collected letters. He has also done work on Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken, Lord Dunsany, and other writers. He has received the World Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. He lives in Seattle, Washington, with his wife, Leslie, and numerous cats.
COMING SOON FROM TITAN BOOKS
Black Wings of Cthulhu
VOLUME TWO
EDITED BY S. T. JOSHI
The modern masters of Lovecraftian horror offer up more brand-new and utterly horrifying tales, taking their inspiration from stories by Lovecraft himself. Well-known writers such as Caitlín R. Kiernan, Steve Rasnic Tem, Chet Williamson, Jason V Brock, Nick Mamatas, John Shirley and Darrell Schweitzer delve deep into the psyche to terrify and entertain. S. T. Joshi, the world’s leading expert on Lovecraft, has assembled another star-studded line-up essential for every horror library.
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The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s timeless creation returns in a series of handsomely designed detective stories.
The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes encapsulates the most varied and thrilling cases of the world’s greatest detective.
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by Daniel Stashower
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
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THE SCROLL OF THE DEAD
by David Stuart Davies
THE STALWART COMPANIONS
by H. Paul Jeffers
THE VEILED DETECTIVE
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THE MAN FROM HELL
by Barrie Roberts
SÉANCE FOR A VAMPIRE
by Fred Saberhagen
THE SEVENTH BULLET
by Daniel D. Victor
THE WHITECHAPEL HORRORS
by Edward B. Hanna
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HOLMES
by Loren D. Estleman
THE ANGEL OF THE OPERA
By Sam Siciliano
THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA
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PROFESSOR MORIARTY
The Hound of the d’Urbervilles
KIM NEWMAN
Imagine the twisted evil twins of Holmes and Watson and you have the dangerous duo of Professor James Moriart
y—wily, snake-like, fiercely intelligent, terrifyingly unpredictable—and Colonel Sebastian ‘Basher’ Moran—violent, politically incorrect, debauched. Together they run London crime, owning police and criminals alike.
A one-stop shop for all things illegal, from murder to high-class heists, Moriarty and Moran have a stream of nefarious visitors to their Conduit Street rooms, from the Christian zealots of the American West, to the bloodthirsty Si Fan and Les Vampires of Paris, as well as a certain Miss Irene Adler...
“It’s witty, often hilarious stuff. The author portrays the scurrilous flipside of Holmes’s civil ordered world... and ventures into more outré territory than Conan Doyle even dared.”
Financial Times
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