Black Wings of Cthulhu, Volume 4

by S. T. Joshi

  Cassandra nodded. “Once we find a place to store Viewer #28, you’ll be good to go.”

  * * *

  An hour later, Carl Muirhead was lying on the gray waterbed listening to the buzzing pink noise fill his brain. He had once been based at the US Amundsen-Scott Research Station in Antarctica, and its harsh serenity appealed to his military mind. He mentally re-created its geodesic dome as his Sanctuary.

  While his brain and body cycled down into a receptive brainwave posture, Muirhead mentally paced the cool austere interior, creating an imaginary strongbox into which he cast his fears and concerns. Also, all the frontloading he’d received thus far. In this case, frontloading came with the territory. He’d have to work through it.

  In the center of the dome’s floor lay a great well. A gray vortex churned in the well. The coordinates were chiseled into the rim. He has set them there as he visualized this space.

  When he felt ready, Muirhead would plunge in. But not before. He had to be free of all earthly thoughts.

  Even for a seasoned viewer, the line between the imaginal and the operational is a treacherous blur. So when his strongbox started to rattle, Carl Muirhead ignored it as an artifact of an active rather than receptive imagination.

  It refused to settle down. Mentally, he unlocked it. Out popped something black and rubbery, sporting an eggplant-blank ovoid instead of a featured head. It flung a long-handled spear at him.

  Muirhead went to White Light. The spear vaporized upon contact with his expanded aura.

  With an angry whipping of its snaky black tail, the ebony entity retreated down the churning well.

  Boosting his auric field, Muirhead stepped to the rim and plunged in.

  The sensation of falling was long and pleasant. When he hit the membrane, it was a surprise. He bounced back. Taking another run at it, he struck hard and rebounded.

  The third time, it passed him through with no more sensation than a finger going through a soap bubble.

  Rolling upon impact, he found his metaphysical feet. That was RV Rule #1.

  Rule #2 was to keep moving. It was the only way to perceptually turn undifferentiated waves into recognizable particles. His recon was spiral. Nothing was manifested, so Muirhead expanded his scope.

  A face flashed briefly. An ovoid head, sharp bat ears, and absolutely no features. It was lost almost as quickly as perceived.

  The area seemed cavernous. Drums, or something that reverberated like drums, crept into his conscious awareness, pulling him toward their maddening cacophony.

  Muirhead resisted. The thrumming tug persisted. He pulled back. The tugging tones grew tormented, insistent.

  Although he had left his physical body back in the gray room, Carl Muirhead could feel his heart-rate accelerate. A creeping panic was setting in. The tug turned into tendrils of terror.

  He gave himself the mental command: Return to Sanctuary.

  For a panicky beat, nothing happened. A cold blackness seemed to be creeping over him. The drums swelled. A weird piping started up, wilder than Pan at his most manic.

  Then, abruptly, he was back in Sanctuary.

  And something infinitely black and manlike was rising out of the well….

  He seemed to be dreaming. Strangely, he knew he was dreaming. Carl Muirhead lay in the womblike gray chamber, but something was wrong—horribly wrong. The geometry. It was impossible. He was enclosed in a sealed place. Although he could remember coming to this room, suddenly it made no sense that he could be enclosed. It was against the very laws he knew—or thought he knew.

  There were no corners or angles in this round sealed space. Yet somehow, something was extruding out of a high round spot that was akin to a corner.

  It was small and black—intensely black. A cloud. It possessed no face, yet it looked at him with such malevolence he could imagine a visage of incalculably unutterable evil.

  A harsh voice spoke:

  “Death is all around you! Your eyes! Your eyes!”

  He could not move. He could not breathe. He lay paralyzed, a helpless morsel for the nasty black cloud that stealthily slipped toward him like a formless spider descending a web.

  Remembering his training, he shot it with White Light.

  Shocked, the dark thing retreated from view. It was that easy.

  Abruptly, Muirhead was awake. He sat up, heart racing. There was no cloud. Nothing. The geometry of the room seemed perfectly normal now.

  Yet he remembered clearly how it had been. For a frightening moment, his mind attempted to reconcile two utterly opposed views of reality. Then it all faded like a dream….

  * * *

  “What the hell happened?” Cassadra asked anxiously.

  Muirhead sat up. He was drenched in a strange sweat. “I must have Deltaed out. I returned to Sanctuary, and suddenly I was dreaming. A black cloud zeroed in on me—”

  “You’ve been hagged.”

  “What?”

  “Hagged. Newfoundland folk term for sleep paralysis-style demon assault. The fear will pass very quickly. Breathe normally.”

  “Fear? That was sheer terror.” Muirhead lay back down. “There’s something else. I can’t seem to recall what….”

  “It will come back if you relax. Please compose your session report while the data is still fresh in your mind.”

  She departed hastily.

  * * *

  “Your session report clearly describes a night-gaunt,” Cassandra was saying thirty minutes later.

  “I’m unfamiliar with the term,” Muirhead admitted.

  “An even lower order of entity than Target N.” She frowned. “Do you recall what you had forgotten?”

  “No. It’s at the periphery of my consciousness, but still eluding me.”

  Cassandra frowned. “I think the next session should be monitored.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Carl, are you familiar with the soul retrieval concept? I think what happened to Manton calls for such a procedure.”

  Muirhead frowned. “I’ve done a lot of non-local operations, but I’ve never done that.”

  “Have you ever had a spiritual experience during RV?”

  “Once. Never forgot it, either.”

  “Good. Then you’ll understand what I’m driving at. A human being at our level of vibration is capable of making contact with a disembodied consciousness. That will be your tasking. To locate viewer Manton Marrs. Are you okay with that?”

  “No guarantees,” he reminded.

  “Not even that you’ll come back,” Cassandra said flatly.

  Muirhead stood up. “I want to bulletproof the next session before I jump back in.”

  “How?”

  “Don’t know. But there’s got to be a way.”

  “Fine. This time tomorrow.”

  “Done. See you then.”

  “On your way out,” Cassandra called after him, “you might want to get a reading. On the house. Forewarned is forearmed.”

  “It’s a thought,” said Muirhead.

  “I recommend Kim.”

  Kim was blonde and almost no help. Her eyes skipped over the Tarot card spread. “There’s something you’ve forgotten.”

  “I know. Can you tell me what it is?”

  Kim couldn’t. “I can’t seem to grab an image. I feel blocked.”

  Muirhead sighed. “I know exactly how you feel….”

  3.

  PRESENT AND UNACCOUNTED FOR

  LYING IN BED THAT NIGHT, CARL MUIRHEAD FELT blocked too. His mind kept jumping to those last few minutes in Sanctuary, just before he fell into that surreal space where Euclidean geometry ceased to be relevant. There was a missing memory there, but he still couldn’t access it.

  He didn’t remember drifting off, but knew he was dreaming. He did not know how he knew, nor how it was possible to know that he was dreaming. But he knew.

  A black faceless figure stood at the foot of his bed. Tall, lean, radiating incalculable power, it gazed down at him with a weird comb
ination of malevolence and contempt, even though it possessed no discernible orbs.

  —I am come again, it communicated. The words rang in Muirhead’s mind, not his ears. For the tall black entity possessed no mouth either.

  Muirhead’s question was non-vocal. A thoughtball. —What?

  —All knowledge you desire I possess, it returned.

  —What are you?

  —Am I not magnificent?

  —Huh?

  —Do you fail to behold me?

  A sucking sensation took Carl Muirhead by the feet and his consciousness spun crazily and without direction.

  He did not know where he was in time or space, but something like a black organic egg swallowed him. Flaps closed over his head and he felt as if he were in a womb. Not his mother’s womb, but something both familiar and alien. It seemed as if he were suspended in a warm jellylike substance.

  A soothing disembodied voice pulsed. —You are safe here.

  —What are you? returned Muirhead.

  —God.

  —God!

  —The god of this sector. I am named Nyarlathotep by him who created me.

  —Who created you?

  —He whose name is Love.

  —God Almighty created you! Muirhead thought back, stunned. —For what insane purpose?

  —To fulfill my destiny, as will all creation.

  —What is—

  —You have opened the door for me, the mighty mind of Nyarlathotep interrupted. —Therefore, I will permit you to enter Ultimate Chaos to retrieve the entity you seek. I offer no other guarantees.

  Carl Muirhead abruptly woke up. Terror was high in his throat. His heart pounded. Jerking awake and up, he expected to behold Nyarlathotep, but there was nothing there but a dark emptiness that reverberated like a lingering presence….

  * * *

  Cassandra picked up on the second ring. “Yes?”

  “I made contact,” Muirhead reported. “Target N. They’ve been wrong about him since day one. He’s not a low-level entity, but a sector god. Probably has dominion over this solar system. Maybe the whole damn Milky Way.”

  “That’s useful Intel.”

  “But here’s the bad news. I remember what I couldn’t before. He followed me back through the wormhole. He’s on Earth now.”

  The silence on the line was electric. “Are you … certain?”

  Muirhead hesitated. Feeling a suffocating constriction at his throat, he clawed at the collar of his sweat-soaked pajama top, only to discover that he had it on backwards. He had not gone to sleep that way.

  “Dead certain,” he said thickly.

  Neither one spoke for a long time. Finally Carl Muirhead said, “I’ll see you at the agreed-upon time,” and hung up.

  Sleep eluded him till dawn. Instead, he danced in the Theta state, getting physical rest but no mental peace. He was trained to do that.

  * * *

  The morning was spent going over every CEES datafile on Nyarlathotep.

  “Interesting that this H. P. Lovecraft should have dreamed or channeled such a name,” Cassandra was saying. “It means ‘Nyarlat comes in peace,’ or possibly ‘is satisfied.’ Doubtful he would know that.”

  “Listen to the first paragraph,” Muirhead put in, “the one he wrote before he fully woke up: ‘Nyarlathotep … the crawling chaos … I am the last … I will tell the audient void….”

  “Audient means listening. That’s a pretty advanced concept for a pulp horror writer.”

  “He channeled this, unwitting,” Muirhead decided. “Records of his dream-life show the usual indicators of an emergent psychic. Lucid dreaming. Astral encounters. Nature spirit visions. Hypersensitivities to assorted stimuli. The works.”

  “I’ll buy that,” Cassandra said. “But what does this story tell us?”

  “That Target N is a sector god, and a harbinger for the end of the world, if not the galaxy. His advent on Earth will mark a kind of metacosmic Ragnarok.”

  “Or trigger it.”

  “Let’s not go there….” Muirhead wrinkled his brow. “Suppose that all these reports of sleep paralysis are in fact artifacts of Target N attempting to enter our plane. These black clouds. There’s nothing like them in mythology or literature. They’re not Jungian in nature. If they’re part of the collective unconscious, they don’t pop up except in SP experiences. They invariably induce profound terror. Ancestral memories of thunderstorms would not evoke a cold cosmic fear.”

  “Lovecraft used that exact term,” Cassandra murmured. “Cosmic fear. He reported multiple REM sleep nightmares of profound terror. Even pre-prepubescent night-gaunt attacks. It’s starting to sound as if he suffered from SP before it was a documented medical condition.”

  Muirhead leaned back in his chair and stared off into thoughtful space. “Nyarlathotep has been trying to invade Earth since this crypto-sensitive Lovecraft first summoned him out of the void. These clouds may be what Lovecraft called the crawling chaos. If he’s loose, we’ve got to find a way to put this big black genie back into its bottle.”

  “How?”

  “Maybe Manton Marrs can tell us,” Muirhead mused softly.

  Cassandra’s violet eyes deepened in hue. “Are you ready to go in, Carl?”

  “Yeah,” Muirhead said, loosening his shirt collar absently. “And I think I know how I’m getting back if I run into trouble out there.”

  “Care to share?”

  “No. The Ether has ears.”

  * * *

  The pink noise buzzed insistently in his headphones as Carl Muirhead sank from Beta to Alpha to Theta. It was a drowsy feeling, yet his heart pounded high in his chest and his palms perspired profusely as if his pores had let go completely.

  The coordinates were etched in the rim of the Vortex well once he reached Sanctuary. Methodically, he went through the standard protocols, then jumped into the swirling gray Vortex.

  The membrane passed him through, and Carl Muirhead began tracking through a superblack realm in which drums pounded at some near distance. He had the sensation of things in engaged random motion—wild, unseeable, yet perceptible on a sensory level divorced from the organ-based human senses. It brought to mind a swirling blackness, if an unrelieved blackness could be perceived to swirl.

  He recalled the frenetic final lines of Lovecraft’s story:

  And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.

  Somewhere back in Earth reality, his body shuddered in sympathy with his dislocated mind.

  Mentally, Muirhead sent out the name Manton Marrs. If this was a typical thought-responsive other-dimensional environment, his focused intention would take him directly to his objective.

  It did. Instantaneously. Manton Marrs was a disembodied energy signature, but one that was recognizable. And responsive.

  —Manton? he probed.

  —Yes. The energy coming back felt dismal and depleted. Muirhead moved toward it. He was confronted by a wall—a medium resembling a mass of gray gelatin. The essence of Manton Marrs was fixed in this like a wasp in amber. Muirhead sensed others as well, arrayed dimly behind him.

  —Come back, he signaled. —I’ve been sent to bring you back. Come back with me.

  The return signal was weak. —Cannot…. Unable.

  —Connect with my energy. I know a way to return.

  —No point…. Nothing to return to … anymore.

  —What do you mean, Manton?

  —Nyarlathotep … Dark Redeemer … Crawling Chaos … approaching … Sothis Radiant … Rapture … Ragnarok … All are One …

  —What? Muirhead pressed.

  —No hope…. It’s all … scheduled for demo—

  —For what? Muirhead presse
d. —I don’t understand.

  A picture came to mind. A big black ball swinging on the end of an iron chain. A wrecking ball. It came toward him, causing him to flinch instinctively.

  —I understand, Carl Muirhead thought back. He felt cold. The background drumming seemed to swell. A thin piping noise joined it, and he knew his time was short.

  —One last question, Manton. What do you know about Nyarlathotep that will help me change the future?

  —Created by … Love …

  —You mean God?

  —God is Love …

  —That makes no sense.

  —Nothing makes sense when you correlate the All….

  The dread piping drew nearer, and Carl Muirhead gave himself the command to return to Sanctuary. Nothing happened. He was not surprised. The drums boomed more loudly, and the flutes grew eager. He tuned them out and began chanting a desperate numerical sequence.

  * * *

  Muirhead came out of it, drenched in a chilly second skin of perspiration. The room felt warm in a claustrophobic way. The reassuring hum of the air conditioner was absent. Another power failure. They were a daily occurrence these days….

  He rolled off the gray waterbed, saying thickly, “Better euthanize the remains. Manton Marrs isn’t coming back.”

  Cassandra asked, “You found him?”

  Muirhead shook his head. He could still feel that damnable drumming in his bones. “Wish I hadn’t. He told me there would be nothing to come back to.”

  “I don’t want to hear that!” Cassandra snapped. “I have children.”

  Muirhead found his legs. They were unsteady under him. “I almost didn’t make it back myself.”

  “But you did. That means hope. We have hope.” She handed him a tall glass of icewater. “Tell me we have hope.”

  Muirhead sipped slowly before replying. “The coordinates always take you to the target. I learned that early on. Before I went out, I gave myself a second set of coords, 0001/0001.”

  “Meaning?”

  Muirhead took another slow sip. “Ground zero. The place from where I started. Not Sanctuary, which is no longer inviolate, but my own body. Reverse coordinates. They carried me back.”

  “Brilliant! No one’s ever thought of that before.”