Black Wings of Cthulhu, Volume 4

by S. T. Joshi

  The honeymoon period of my parents’ affair did not last long. Soon after they started spending time together my mother was subjected to a string of intense nightmares. She didn’t elaborate, hinting only rarely about what they entailed. What was more concerning were the headaches and nosebleeds they caused. Her suffering was genuine, and the only balm was to start recording those terrifying visions. I recognized a lot of the exorcised images in the poems Wanda had found. As the frequency and intensity of my mother’s nightmares grew, the sleepless nights and terrible thoughts ate away at her waking life.

  Whatever their cause, my aunt took her seriously. She too had noticed peculiarities about the man, things that were not quite right. Like the way he seemed to forget how to use his hands, or stuttered when he spoke as though warming up an unused instrument. He did not recognize simple things such as streetlights, but his memory for what he encountered was eidetic. And yet he was only interested or aware of his surroundings when he stared into the night sky.

  My aunt did not understand my mother’s infatuation with him, and for the first time we agreed. My father sounded wholly undeserving of my mother’s affection, and yet he remained in her life, despite how poor its quality had become. My mother fell ill and remained so for a very long time, the constant morass of nightmares destroying her sleep, preventing her from doing anything but shambling through the new house she and my father had bought together. Then, without incitement, without reason, my mother admitted she’d become suspicious of who my father was. I skipped forward and back, trying to understand what she meant, but she did not mention it again. “He is not who he says,” was the entirety of what she wrote, and even that she tried to scribble out.

  With the next entry, her journal became consumed with poetry, foregoing the recording and documentation of her life. The poems were as strange and confusing as anything I’d read, made more bizarre by their inchoate nature. They were prototypical pieces without sense of timeframe or inspiration. They simply existed in that no man’s land of the past, the churning blood of her unconscious. But even jumbled and fragmented, when I read closer I was struck with a kind of terrified confusion. My mother clearly didn’t realize what she was doing as she wrote those poems, but I knew. I knew because they were the same images I saw every time I sat in front of my keyboard. I was dreaming my mother’s horrors, sharing her mindscape. And instinctively I knew we were not the only ones. Someone else haunted our mutual dreams. Someone else for whom they were not dreams at all.

  * * *

  I found nothing more in my mother’s diary. As abruptly as her poetry began, it stopped, and in its wake all she entered were the most perfunctory details of her life. My father became a ghost in the pages, never mentioned, though his presence was felt among the accounts of my mother’s activities. His illness was fleetingly suggested during an account of my mother being at the hospital, no doubt near the time her pregnancy was discovered. Shortly thereafter an oblique apology was made about my aunt, but what had caused the falling out was unclear. Whatever it was, words were not needed to communicate its seriousness. Yet it didn’t stop my aunt from visiting, as a short entry about going to tea soon followed. Even the date of my father’s death was unclear. No mention of it was made before I reached the unexpected end of the diary, and on reviewing the preceding entries to see what I’d missed, I found only more questions. With my mother gone and her diary unresolved, there remained only one person who knew my father at all, one person who might answer those questions my mother did not want me to ask. As loath as I was to see my Aunt Renée, I knew I had no other choice.

  Sometime in the midst of my breakdown I’d received word from a distant cousin that my aunt was ill. She was confined to a bed in a hospital a few minutes from her house in Maple. After what happened at the funeral, I understood why she never reached out to let me know she was sick—no doubt she expected me to be glad, as though there were some divine justice to it all. She would have been right, but part of me understood that it was a horrible thing to feel. I telephoned Wanda with the news, but regretted it as soon as I heard the distance in her voice. Still, she urged me to go see my aunt.

  “Dan, you have to. You’ll regret it if you don’t. She’s family.”

  “Is she? I don’t even know anymore.”

  “She related enough. You need to put everything behind you and go. Maybe it’s the fresh start you need.”

  I knew she was right. I needed to see my Aunt Renée because she was not long for the world, and when she went the truth about my heritage, about the strange revelations in my mother’s diary, would go with her. But I was also terrified about what she might say. I wasn’t certain I could bear to hear it. But what choice was there? Wanda was right: I would never be able to move on until I spoke to her, and time was running out. I sobered up enough to drive to the hospital and park on the fifth floor of the garage. Then I stayed in the car for thirty minutes, preparing myself.

  The hospital had been built within the last decade, and unlike where my mother had suffered through her final days, it was clean and full of sunlight. My aunt’s room was private, and flowers filled the windowsill—as did crucifixes of various sizes, and a single image of Jesus in a golden frame. My aunt was asleep, snoring gently, her glasses askew on her head. On the tray table beside her sat a covered lunch, waiting for her to wake and eat. I pushed it aside then gently called her name.

  “Aunt Renée. It’s me. It’s Daniel.”

  One eye creaked open, then the other. There was the wheeze of oxygen pumped into her nose. She carefully licked her lips.

  “What are you doing here? You stink.”

  Her voice was little more than a slurred croak. I tried not to be reminded of my mother.

  “I need to talk to you. I need you to tell me about my father.”

  She closed her eyes and laughed—one hitch of her shoulders, her breath rattling. Immediately, she winced, but the smile didn’t completely fade.

  “You can’t be saved. Get out. Go away.”

  “Aunt Renée, I read my mother’s diary. I read all of it.”

  To this, her rheumy eyes opened wider.

  “What did you learn? Nothing. You didn’t learn a thing.”

  “I need you to tell me who he was. What happened to him? Why were my mother’s dreams so strange?”

  I was desperate for answers, growing more desperate when I heard how difficult it was for her to breathe. I did not know how much longer she had.

  “Give me some water. That nurse, she’s trying to kill me. What’s the opposite of drowning? She’s trying to dry me out. She wants my jewelry.”

  I was confused for a moment—my aunt was wearing no jewelry—but when I saw her crippled hands adjusting a clasp that wasn’t there, I realized her medication was causing her to hallucinate.

  “Do you know where you are right now?” I asked. She gave me a sidelong glance as though that didn’t deserve an answer. “Do you know who I am, Aunt Renée?”

  She shook her head. She didn’t want to say.

  “Aunt Renée, who am I?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who am I, Aunt Renée? Tell me who I am.”

  Suddenly her hatred exploded, filling her with vigor. Her eyes bore into me.

  “You’re a blasphemy. You’re a thing. You’re like him. Like your father.”

  “I’m—what?”

  “Your mother told me what he was, what he said he was, so we took care of it. But I never believed. I knew he was lying. Satan’s kind always lies. He was a foul-blooded thing sent to test and torment us.”

  “What did she say?” I pleaded. “What did my mother say?”

  “It wasn’t in your precious diary?” she spat. I shook my head, and she laughed, then slumped, and I watched the energy dissipate from her like spewing air. She closed her eyes to rest.

  “What did she say, Aunt Renée? Please tell me.”

  My aunt spoke, but it was a mumbled whisper. Her last reserves were depleted. On
e of the machines she was hooked up to buzzed every few seconds. The sound was deafening.

  “What did she say?” I repeated, leaning close, my ear to her mouth. Outside in the hall there was some commotion.

  “She said he was lost. She said he didn’t belong then, that he wanted to go back. She said he hated the meat most of all, that it wasn’t big enough to contain him. She said in his sleep he would make sounds like he was talking, but the words were so old they made her cry. She said he was not who he said he was, and when she found out he wouldn’t let her go. He was a monster.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Do?” she asked, her eyelids cracking apart, revealing a sliver of white. “He made you. Wasn’t that enough?”

  My aunt fell asleep then, and try as I might I could not revive her. When I left, the nurses were making her as comfortable as they could.

  * * *

  I’m left with more questions than answers.

  My Aunt Renée never regained consciousness, and it wasn’t long before she was buried, too, in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, not far from my mother. I never found out what she was talking about, and little of what I did know made any sense. I tried going through my mother’s diary again more than once, traveling back in time to look for hints about what my father was, about what my aunt discovered that was so vile she turned into a religious zealot, about what my mother had done that caused her to hide from the world. But there was nothing, no stone left to turn. All I had were impressions and my mother’s frightening poetry. And my unbearable dreams.

  I find it impossible to write now. Every image that appears to me is suspect—I wonder if they are of my own conjuring or strange visions from my father, trying to communicate with me from wherever he is. I’m sure he is somewhere, alive, as out of my reach as I am of his. He still communicates to me through my dreams, and they continue to degrade and become unbearable, as though my inability to lance them by way of writing is only building up the pressure. If that’s true, I wonder how long it will be until I explode, and what might happen then. But I can’t—I just can’t bring myself to write another word, so instead I drink and sit in the dark and wait for whatever truth is coming to reveal itself at last. Wanda has not given up on me yet, but it’s only a matter of time. I have nothing left inside that she would want—it has been carved away by death and unearthed secrets. What remains is a shell, a living, breathing shell of meat and blood, existing in the present. The sort of thing an ancient alien being might want to inhabit, should it somehow be skipping through time and space in search of a vessel. That’s the sort of crazy idea that occurs to me now, the sort I can no longer exorcise through writing. It is like something that might occur to one trapped deep in the horror of a nightmare. Trapped without any hope for escape.

  Revival

  STEPHEN WOODWORTH

  A graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, Stephen Woodworth is the author of the New York Times best-selling Violet series of paranormal thrillers, including Through Violet Eyes, With Red Hands, In Golden Blood, and From Black Rooms (Random House, 2004–06). His short fiction has appeared in such publications as Weird Tales, Realms of Fantasy, Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Year’s Best Fantasy, and The Dead That Walk, and he has other tales forthcoming in Nameless and Midian Unmade, an anthology of stories inspired by the works of Clive Barker. He is currently at work on a new novel.

  BRICE HUGGED THE LAPELS OF HIS FILTHY DOWN jacket closer around himself as he squinted down the brick chasm of the alley. Darkened doorways sulked in the walls on either side, offering neither entrance nor exit. The only sign of movement was an empty plastic bag, tumbling hollowly in the gusting draft like a shed skin.

  Everything about the place felt wrong. The location was too deserted, too deep into the shunned heart of the city. Most missions stationed their soup kitchens and makeshift chapels on the fringes of the urban blight—close enough to draw the shambling needy, yet removed enough for their staff members to leave safely at night. If Brice had not been so cold and so hungry, even he, a native of the streets, could not have been lured into this district.

  He consulted the crumpled flyer in his hand to check the address, but could not read the small typescript. No streetlamps illuminated the surrounding grime of metal-shuttered shops and sewage-scented asphalt. All he could make out was the large heading that first captured his attention:

  REVIVAL TONIGHT.

  He’d come by the advertisement not more than an hour ago as he trudged up Main Street toward the nearest shelter that would take him in. A four-mile walk, and he wouldn’t get there till well after midnight. He had no money, no food, no liquor, and the few passersby at that hour bowed their heads and quickened their steps if he so much as looked at them. In summer, he could have curled up on a vacant doorstep and slept till the cops came to shoo him away, but tonight’s bitter winter wind cut right through his stocking cap and frayed jeans, and sleep would be impossible.

  Without alcohol to squelch them, unwelcome memories bobbed into his consciousness like the flotsam of a wrecked ship. A job, a wife, a son whom he was no longer permitted to see. Lashed by regret for a life squandered and exhausted by the prospect of the dreary hours ahead, Brice had slumped against an adjacent lamppost, ready to collapse and die of exposure rather than take another step.

  As if in commiseration, a hand grasped his upper arm and squeezed, constricting to the point of painfulness.

  Brice straightened to look at the slouching figure that had accosted him. “Leon?”

  The man before him wore a gray flannel sweatshirt, the face cowled completely by a pullover hood. Yet in the static world of the homeless, clothing served as much a marker of identity as a face for street people to recognize one another. That hoodie certainly looked like the one Leon always wore, though mottled by new and darker stains. He stank in a way peculiar for a vagrant—a salty putrescence, like the rot of beached kelp. The smell repulsed Brice more than the fetor of sweat and urine he’d expected, and he recoiled, wrinkling his nose.

  Whether or not he was Leon, the man didn’t say. He simply peeled a sheet from a sheaf of papers he carried and thrust it at Brice. The latter winced with disgust as he accepted the page—its margins were sticky where the hooded man had touched it.

  In the dun glow of the sodium vapor streetlight, Brice saw that most of the sheet was covered with a radiating, serpentine pattern of intertwined lines, as if a map to a labyrinth with no egress. In the ring’s center, calligraphic letters promised “REVIVAL TONIGHT,” with details of the event in smaller print below. Brice noted that both time and location were near.

  “They got food?” Brice asked the man he assumed was Leon, but the hooded figure shuffled away without speaking. Brice rubbed his bicep, which was still sore from where the man had clenched it, and cursed when he found finger-shaped smudges where a gummy residue had clung to the sleeve of his jacket.

  Leon was not the sort to have got religion. Most likely, Brice thought, someone had paid him a few bucks to distribute the flyers. Brice himself had little hope of salvation, but he’d often turned to the missionaries for a hot meal and a roof over his head. On this night, he’d settle for a cup of coffee and a chance to doze during the sermon.

  * * *

  And so he’d wended through the litter-strewn avenues of this abandoned quarter of the metropolis, advancing in the shadows to avoid being rolled by thrill-seeking gang members. Now that he was here, though, it seemed as if he’d fallen victim to some cruel practical joke. He could find no brightly lit prayer meeting, no hallelujahs and hosannas, no comfort or consolation.

  As he scrutinized the flyer, a glimpse of motion in the alley caught his attention. A dim phantom drifted about halfway down the narrow lane—a shuffling figure whose gray, hooded sweatshirt appeared to float amidst the engulfing blackness. It turned through an open portal on the right and vanished from view.

  Brice followed the way Leon—if it was indeed Leon—had gone. He found that the double doors
there, though shut, were unlocked. They opened onto a steep stairwell that sloped into what must have been the building’s basement.

  Brice hesitated, for there seemed to be no light below, and he wondered if he had selected the correct entrance. As he crossed the threshold, however, he realized that a faint, bluish luminescence clearly delineated the downward steps, though its source was uncertain.

  He descended to a low-ceilinged hallway and was heartened to hear music of a sort emanating from the opposite end of the passage—a solemn, sonorous hymn distorted by the odd acoustics of the structure’s cinderblock foundation. The azure phosphorescence grew brighter as he advanced, until it hung like a haze in the air, although it still had no definite origin. This must be the right place after all, Brice decided.

  The hallway led to a room that was much larger and higher than he anticipated. Now there could be no question but that Brice had found the correct gathering, for the flyer’s spiraling design of interlaced lines had been reproduced on the vast far wall, radiating blue light as if it were an enormous stained-glass window illumined from behind by a great nocturnal sun. Cerulean hues shimmered on a sea of Brice’s fellow derelicts, making them appear submerged. The entire congregation stood swaying in time to the dirge-tempo psalm he’d heard.

  Brice grimaced at the lack of benches or folding chairs. No chance to nap here. To avoid attracting attention, he mingled with the crowd at the rear. Slightly out of sync with those around him, he mouthed along with the chorus, whose words he couldn’t quite make out, and made random vocalizations in an attempt to mimic the increasingly atonal canticle. Not like any gospel song Brice had heard before. Maybe this was one of those New Age religious orders. He only hoped they would reward him for enduring their ceremony.