Black Wings of Cthulhu, Volume 4

by S. T. Joshi

  The horizon was continually aglow, orange-colored with a brilliant white central streak. Yet there was no sound of thunder. Like the crazed advance of the rats, this phenomenon too took place in unnerving silence.

  “The house is not far from here,” I said.

  Olsen strained his torso forward over the steering wheel, as if to impart a greater speed to his nondescript Ford. “Plagues of dysentery and fever,” he said. “A great drought and then drenching downpours month after month. Floods that carried off the children of Goray and the sheep and goats. Continual strokes of lightning against every edifice. Rats. Rats and adders. Insanity.”

  “The people went mad?”

  “They behaved as if they were. That was probably for the best.”

  “How—?”

  He peered through the windshield at the darkness that wrapped us round like a pall. “Suppose a transcontinental jetliner took off from O’Hare in Chicago and landed on a plain in ancient Mesopotamia. Suppose you were a citizen of ancient Erech and you witnessed the arrival. You would see it as a monster more frightening than any you had been told of in the mythologies, frightening beyond comprehension. A huge, silver, flying creature, as long as the main thoroughfare of your village. It roars like the wildest of sandstorms and is clouded with unbreathable dust. Its flat, stiff wings tremble and spurt flame. Flame leaps out from beneath its tail feathers. Along its belly are holes through which you can see the forms and faces of the people it has swallowed. It shudders and roars like a dozen tempests bound with lightning together.”

  “It would be frightening, but I could still reason.”

  “You could reason only in your customary terms—which would no longer apply. The existence of the jet plane in your world changes that world. You could not perceive it as it is. You would see it in terms of nightmare and demonic presence. That is how you would try to reason about it.”

  “I would have had no forewarning. The Babylonian would have no background knowledge. But you and I are forewarned. We know the history of Lilith and how the goddess came to be connected with our locality. We can still act rationally, you and I.”

  He smiled a tight, painful smile. “The airplane would exist very briefly in that place. The physics would be too alien.”

  “Physics?”

  “The atmospheric chemistry is different. The continuum itself has a different gravitic center from ours; it is held together from a different locus. The magnetic polarities are reversed. Subatomic reactions would be almost instantaneous.”

  We had reached the border of the estate, and the turnoff led us alongside a white rail fence toward the grounds of the big house. The landscape was bathed in the orange-white glow that pulsed like the heart of some invisible beast.

  Then the car stopped. The motor shut down and the headlights failed. We sat inside a furnace of heatless light.

  Olsen spoke with great difficulty. “The Pasterbys are no more. You see Lilith where their great house stood. Do not look upon her face.”

  Her face was covered. We were still almost a quarter of a mile away, but she was visible in the electric glow, as large as a mountain crag. Her wings were folded about her, the pennons burning iridescent. Black, yellow, scarlet. Black fire and white fire. Then she began to unfurl her wings, slowly at first, and then in an instant they covered all that part of the sky and the scorched land below.

  I looked away so that I would not see her face.

  Then I closed my eyes to shut out the gigantic incandescence of her appearance and disappearance. I have seen many photographs of the detonation at Los Alamos. But those explosions were of matter in its particle states. The explosion here was one of time-states. There are no time-particles. This detonation would be without radioactive residue. Its causes must disappear utterly.

  Still there was no sound, only the unbearable silence.

  “Physics,” I whispered.

  “Did you see her face?” Olsen said.

  “I saw her feet with the mansion in her talons, all crushed to pieces.”

  “It is good you did not see. I looked away. I did not see her claws.”

  The glow that had lit the world was extinguished. The darkness was palpable, but it no longer breathed.

  The motor started now when Olsen tried it and our headlights came on and he brought us along the gravel road at a very slow pace. His face was wet with sweat. I found that I was weeping, making no sound.

  “We will discover some remains here,” he said. “The reciprocity must be maintained, the balance between the energies of the continua.”

  He stopped and we got out and walked unsteadily across the lawn. Figures lay upon the ashen grass, disposed haphazardly.

  Life-size figures of black stone lay here, too many to count. Each was maimed in some fashion, mutilated by the joining of two different states of nature. Feet were sheared in half, arms broken at shoulders, elbows, and wrists. Torsos were shattered. The facial features were twisted in agony, but most of the faces were obliterated. The figures were naked or dressed in hooded robes and I thought these must be the presences that the grandfather had sensed in the mountain-peak cavern in his dream, at the moment he reached for the object in the stone vessel and never knew if he had taken hold of it.

  “They have gained their satisfactions, Rast and Leetha and Lilith. When the grandfather broke his agreement, whatever it was, he broke the laws of physics. Lilith has gathered the Choneys to her world in Babylon. These stones on the ground are in exchange, all the Pasterbys that ever lived in the direct lineage. There must be fifteen generations here, at least.”

  “It makes no sense,” I said. I touched one stone with the toe of my shoe. It was real.

  “Not to us.”

  Olsen looked westward toward Queen City, turning his head away from the end of the world. “We must prevent ourselves from trying to understand.”

  “To forget?”

  He gazed at me with a piteous expression. “We will not forget, but we will come to believe that we have forgotten.”

  “That is madness.’

  “For us, the only possible sanity,” he said.

  Half Lost in Shadow

  W. H. PUGMIRE

  Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire has been an obsessed Lovecraftian since reading E’ch-Pi-El’s tales and letters in the early 1970s. His many books include Bohemians of Sesqua Valley (Arcane Wisdom, 2013), Uncommon Places (Hippocampus Press, 2012), Some Unknown Gulf of Night (Arcane Wisdom, 2011), The Tangled Muse (Centipede Press, 2011), and Monstrous Aftermath (Hippocampus Press, 2015). He dreams in Seattle.

  “I am half sick of shadows,” said

  The lady of Shalott.

  —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  IT WAS MY FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY, AND I RESOLVED TO get drunk. So I left the cozy porch that was my refuge and strolled that afternoon to the liquor store, where I spent a fortune on a bottle of rum that had been distilled in 1952, in Martinique. Clutching the paper bag in which I carried my bottle of golden nectar, I strolled along the shoreline where most of the ancient wharves had been broken apart or fallen in rot into the water. On one dilapidated pier, however, a phantom danced. Her theatrical gown of black swayed about her and conjoined with the dark veils that hung about her figure. I was too far from her to make out her face, most of which was covered by her length of raven hair; but I thought that perhaps she wore a pall over her countenance. We had many zanies in Kingsport, among our poets and painters mostly; but their crazy antics rarely disturbed me in any real way, as this creature did. I watched for a few minutes, until she stopped moving as she faced my direction; and the way that she was bent over, heaving and juddering, so reminded me of a bird of prey preparing for a kill that, nonplussed, I continued on my way to Water Street and the ancient cottage whose porch I called my home.

  It was going on late afternoon by the time I reached the high iron gate that opened onto my place of residence, and I was happy to walk past the gnarled trees in the front yard, among which strange large stones had been od
dly grouped and painted so that they resembled the queer alien idols of some obscure Asian or African temple. Those stones had been effective in keeping people away from the former occupant of the cottage, a tall lean centenarian known to most as the Terrible Old Man, a non-social fellow who paid for groceries and household items with antique coins of minted silver and gold.

  It was my habit to camp out on the front porch of the centuried cottage, an area that held warmth no matter the time of year; but I didn’t want to spend my birthday alone, and so I pushed open the narrow oak door of the dwelling and entered into a dusky room that was crowded with the bizarre items that its former-sea-captain occupant had collected during his decades of travel and plunder. Near one small-paned window I had set a table, which I had found in an otherwise empty room and on which a collection of peculiar bottles had been placed, in each of which a small piece of lead or stone was suspended pendulum-wise from a string attached to the cork stopper. When the Terrible Old Man lived, he would sit at the table in the small room, drink his booze, and talk to these bottles, and after the old captain’s disappearance I continued this practice. But I hadn’t liked the lonesomeness of the little room, and so I had moved the table and its bottles to the more spacious main room, next to a window that overlooked the yard and its suggestively painted stones.

  I took the bottle of Rhum Clément Tres Vieux X. O. from its paper bag and set it on the table, pulled up a high stool and sat. “I drink to you, my hearties!” I saluted the dusty containers before me, touched the bottle’s mouth to my lips, and sipped. The liquor was dry, woody, with a hint of spice and fruit in its body. “Shall I drink to another fifty years? Am I doomed to exist here as did the captain, a lonely loon aged one hundred years, lingering on because extinction is of little import? Ah, but where are my manners?” Leaning toward the dusty old bottles, I poured a little of the precious liquid onto the stopper of each one, smiling as minute streams of rum trickled down the streaked sides of murky glass. “Imbibe, mates.”

  I drank until the light of day was extinguished outside the small-paned window; and then I lit three stout candles near the table and drank some more. As flickering shadows danced about the cluttered room, I made up pirate ditties and serenaded the pendulums inside the bottles, those pendulums on which small indistinct faces had been chiseled. In a voice that grew slurred, I spoke to those pendulums of my easy life, of the poetry I had written, of the poems I may yet compose; and as they harkened to my words, those pendulums seemed to vibrate in sympathy at the mutterings of a drunken fool. I laughed as eyesight blurred and the dusty old bottles took on new shapes, and I gibbered at the shadow that pressed against the window from outside, the shadow that seemed to regard me and to which I raised my nearly empty bottle of nectar. “Come in, come in. Rest among our other shadows and dream the misty dreams of Kingsport. Come, out of the cold wind and chilly moonlight. Have a sip as I celebrate this disease called ‘Life.’ Come on, no need to flitter beneath the gnarled trees, among the scheming stones. Enter!”

  I laughed as I was answered by the wind that danced among the branches of the nearby trees, those branches that tapped against the antediluvian dwelling. A momentary movement of tempest rushed about me as the cottage door was opened, and I nodded at the shadow that spilled into the room. As my blurred eyesight took in the phantom, I thought I recognized it; and as I scrutinized the being it began to spin, so that its black dress and dark veils lifted to the room’s low ceiling. I watched its danse, and my sodden head began to spin with it, until the wormy walls appeared to bend. The creature stopped to contemplate me, but how it could do so I could not comprehend, for it wore no face. Lifting my bottle to it, I proposed a toast, but then I noticed that my rum had been entirely consumed. However, I had a half-bottle of white wine among my stash on the porch where I slept, and so I struggled to my feet to fetch it; but before I could take more than a half-step, I fell and felt my face crash against the floorboard.

  “A pale thing floating in a blur of fleecy jet, with eyes that watched as it twisted to and fro. It sways like the small humming things inside the Terrible Old Man’s bottles, those petite pendulums on which faces of a sort had been carved. Ancient eyes in a youthful face—penetrating gaze. Strings of lifeless hair, dull brown in hue, and the thin hungry mouth. Oh, the sad sad smile.”

  Soft laughter sighed from her as the phantom listened to my talk, my words that I had meant to be thought alone as I emerged from the shadow of my drunken blackout. The figure had removed the veil with which her thin and pretty face had been covered. Bending to me, she smoothed one hand against my forehead, where I felt a tender pain. I detected a scent of lilacs in her tangled hair, probably an ointment. Suddenly, she floating upward and perched onto the edge of the chair at the table, and I watched as she examined the dusty bottles. “I had a pirate ancestor who was engaged by an old sea-captain.” Turning her head, she looked on me with an expression I could not read. “Philippa Angelica Ellis, of Toronto.” She returned her attention to the bottles and began to hum an eccentric tune, and I sensed the hanging pendulums begin to vibrate in response. Crawling to the table, I elevated my hand to her mouth and stopped her noise. I could feel the delicate bones beneath her mask of flesh.

  “When was your last meal?” She shrugged, but I caught a tinge of woe that darkened her eyes. Holding on to the table, I lifted myself to a standing position and stalked to a shelf that held a number of antique metal boxes. Opening one, I took some gold doubloons from it, returned to her, and pressed the coins to her palm.

  She wiggled her fingers so that the coins danced in her hand. “Pirate’s booty? How quaint.”

  “What brings you to New England?”

  She hesitated before answering, and then sighed heavily. “I was performing in an acting troupe, and we played in nearby Arkham.”

  “You speak in past tense. Are you no longer with the company?”

  “I have grown sick of shadows,” she recited, and then cocked her head in a curious way. “That’s from Oscar Wilde. I saw that you have the novel on that small shelf of books outside.”

  I nodded. “What brings you to Kingsport, my lady?”

  “The car I hitched a ride with is from here, so I pretended this was my destination. Once I saw the town I felt a kind of glow, a warmth within me. I think I’ve visited this place once, in a dream of mist and moonlight.” She rose out of the chair and raised one hand to my breast, as if to take hold of my heart, and I saw that she was little more than a child. Some tragic element in her being filled me with sudden sorrow, and I wanted to protest when, suddenly and silently, she glided from the cottage, into outer darkness.

  Becoming aware of a subtle pulse of pain on my forehead, I sat in the chair, placed my elbows on the table, and buried my head in my hands. This main room inside the cottage had always worn an uncanny air, but there was a new element of strangeness now, and the lingering fragrance of lilacs. I reached out to smooth a finger against the cool glass of the tallest bottle, the one that the Terrible Old Man had called “Long Tom.” I smiled at the memory of my early years in Kingsport, when I had dropped out of the world and first began to camp on the comfortable porch of the obsolete cottage. The sea-captain seemed to welcome my presence, and soon he began to invite me inside his cluttered home and spin yarns about his journeys around the globe. My memory of him was crystal clear: the blue eyes that sparkled in a deeply lined face, the long white hair and beard, his olden way of talk and queer vocabulary. We would sit together at the table in the otherwise vacant room, and he would include his bottles in our conversation, calling them by name—“Jack” and “Peters” and “Spanish Joe.” I regarded those antique bottles and realized that the smallest, the one called “Mate Ellis,” was missing. A kind of panic swept over me. After the old man’s disappearance, I had felt a sense of duty, of watching over his habitation and keeping invaders at bay. Groaning, I stood and walked out onto the porch, grabbed my jacket, and stepped briskly out of the yard. A bright moon illumin
ated my way to the wharves, and on one dilapidated pier a phantom danced.

  The horn of some invisible boat moaned in the distance. It was low tide, yet I could see that the water was quickly creeping toward shore. The water’s rhythm oddly matched the movement of my blood, and I could discern its relentless motion in my ears. The young creature’s ditty, too, seeped to my ears, the faint song of lunacy that blended with the baleful hooting of the distant horn. Reaching the wharf, I stepped onto its antique timber and felt as the entire thing swayed, coaxed by the movement of her dancing. Her scent of lilacs wafted to me. “Miss Ellis,” I whispered.

  She stopped spinning and studied me from behind the dark veil that concealed her countenance once more. Her hands were wrapped around the small bottle, which she pressed against her bosom. “He called to me in dream, but I could never locate him. I was too young, too sane. Not yet claimed by our heritage of wanton madness. Yet the dreams always tugged, especially beneath the shifting stars of Arkham, and I finally found my way.” Holding the bottle up to lunar light, she studied its moving pendulum. “I’ve lost all my family, but I’m happy to have found him. He’s danced with me in dream, and kissed my eyes. What kind of wizardry was woven, I wonder, that spliced his soul to that small pendulum inside this bottle?” Looking upward to the moon, she sniffed. “Can you smell it, the rising mist over the water that washes toward us? Do you taste the water’s antique memories, of sunken ships and drowned souls? How wonderful to feel such kinship with others who have lost their way.” Her eyes regarded mine. “But maybe you cannot. Your mind isn’t wayward enough, I think. You haven’t dreamed deeply enough. Something inside you resists the marvelous things. And yet you insist on lingering here, in this realm of dark enchantment and spectral trance.”

  “I sense it keenly enough. I choose not to partake. My wizardry is language, the spinning of poetry.”