by Anthology
Later, I met Melanie, who worked in banking, and was even more normal than I. I took her once to my parents’ place in Brattleboro, but she hated Vermont, the country air and the possibility that there might actually be things (insects) flying in it, which she had never experienced growing up in Jersey City; so we were an obvious match and married soon thereafter.
And, yeah, we made lots of money, bought a big house in Queens, raised the statistically normal 2.5 children (I exaggerate but slightly), and together we kept statistics, became statistics, and brought into the world more little statistics, and, in short, had a life.
It wasn’t a great life. But it was a life. It was ours. Melanie was a good woman. I think I even loved her.
And then you came back, returned to Earth, came out of hiding, or whatever.
I remember that I first heard of you in what was doubtless intended as a comedy spot on a late-night “fact” show of the sleazier variety: THAT’S INCREDIBLE. VERMONT GURU SAYS HE HAS BEEN ON ANOTHER PLANET FOR YEARS AND NOW HAS A MESSAGE FOR ALL OF US.
You had commanded me, once, to keep these things a secret, because the world was not ready. But now? Talk shows, tabloids, a best-selling book which was the biggest thing since that last one about the guy who was abducted and buggered by aliens disguised as giant peanuts or some damn such.
You started a religion. You gathered hundreds of followers, then thousands to your old estate in the Vermont hills, until the place was dotted with tents and swarming with reporters and cops and unhappy locals. Was this going to be another Waco, Jonestown, what? The story went that you were waiting for the world to end in 2000 and everybody was going to be carried to Heaven in a flying saucer, or at least that’s how the newspapers told it.
And then you started writing to me. I don’t know how you got my address, but you got it, and the letters started coming. I burned the first as soon as I realized who it was from. I intercepted several more before Melanie found them, but of course she did find them in the end, and so we sat up one night at the kitchen table over coffee and I told her the deep dark secret of how I had known this real weirdo in college and maybe even associated with him for a while.
But I was better now, I assured her. I was normal.
A great revelation is at hand, you wrote. Come and join us. Be a part of the glory of transformation.
“Sounds like he thinks he’s Christ,” Melanie said.
“Something like that.”
“And you hung out with this guy?”
“He wasn’t quite as wacky then.”
But you wouldn’t leave me alone. You got on my e-mail and sent me vaguely threatening letters, all of which boiled down to Join me now before it is too late.
Frankly I was glad when that raid happened, when your “compound” got flattened by the Feds looking for guns, drugs, wild sex orgies, abused children, or human sacrifices, none of which would have interested you—or your Masters—in the slightest. I was glad, not because I ever wished you any ill, but because I wanted to be rid of you, and I thought I was. Never mind that three prosecutors in a row died of heart attacks, and none of the witnesses would talk, and your followers just dispersed and went back to their lives as if they had awakened from some long dream, the victims of collective amnesia.
Never mind that. You dropped off radar. Good riddance. Gone. I went on with my normal life.
And it was only a year ago that I got your postcard, postmarked Vermont (of course), which made me so very afraid.
Opie, you wrote, I know I have made mistakes, and there are misunderstandings, but I know too that you will come back to me and join me on the Great Journey, because They who have directed and shaped our lives all this time have ordained it so. Don’t resist. Obey your dreams and all will still be well. But do not stray from the path, for the dangers of the dark spaces are very real.
* * * *
What the hell was that supposed to mean to a normal guy like me? I think you knew. I think you, the Outer Ones, somebody made it mean something, as I strayed from the ordained path, into the darkness.
I don’t have to tell you then any of the details about how, as he approached school age, my son Matthew had motor problems and speech problems and was declared autistic by the time he was six. Nor do I have to tell you about Matthew’s big sister Carol, who had been such a sweet child, but now went with a very different crowd in highschool and came home with her nose pierced, then with metal things dangling from her lips. When I said something she just stuck out her tongue and there was what I can only describe as a penis-shaped cufflink screwed right through the middle of it. Tatoos followed, chains, leather, spikes, drugs, the foul language, and the enormous boyfriends who looked like killer androids out of some trash movie, who threatened to break my fucking back fucking in half if I ever laid a fucking hand on fucking Spike (which was what Carol called herself now) like, fuck, you know?
Her mother and I wept for her and at the same time were afraid of her and almost wished her dead, just so it would be over.
But it wasn’t over, was it, Justin? Just one more turn of the fucking screw, like, you know, when business failed, even in these prosperous times, and we had to sell the house, and daughter Carol flipped us the bird one last time and vanished on the back of a motorcycle. And then there was the small matter of Melanie coming down with lymph cancer at a statistically unlikely, early age; which metastasized; and on the night when she died, when I sat for hours by her bedside in the hospital and held her hand and whispered little stupid nothings that she couldn’t hear anyway; on that night of all nights I fell asleep, finally, out of sheer exhaustion, and dreamed for the first time in a very long time of deep spaces and dark planets.
I dreamed that I was hanging naked, like a trapped insect amid the frozen spiderwebworks of the Gardens of Ynath, beneath the brilliant stars in a black sky. And I heard the whispers of many voices, of those hanging there with me, frozen forever, suspended against time until the ultimate ending of the universe, and I conversed long and profoundly with a pharaoh of ancient Egypt, who had found his way hence four thousand years ago, and with an artisan and scientist of medieval Italy who had delved into forbidden mysteries and contrived to be carried off one step ahead of the Inquisition; and I spoke too, with a member of the beetle race which will succeed mankind on the Earth two million years hence, and with minds which had never known or imagined our species at all.
For in the Gardens of Ynath there is no time, and the future is as negligible as the past.
I dreamed of all those minds and voices, and it seemed, in my dream, that all of them were glorious and transfigured and greatly expectant; and also, I think, in part, afraid, of the one who is to come at the end of time, who was described to me in a manner I couldn’t quite understand as the Darkness (or Chaos) that walks like a man, before whose feet we shall all, in the end, fall down in abject worship.
Such was my dream, and when I awoke alarms were going off and all the TV monitors around Melanie’s bed had flatlined and the nurse hauled me aside to make room for frantic doctors and their useless ministrations.
I almost felt that you were with me in the room, Justin, and I cannot believe it was a coincidence that I reached into my pocket and took out your postcard, and read the address: a rural route, familiar zip code, the old Akeley place. I think you were there. I think you guided me as I walked out of the hospital unchallenged, as if I were invisible, and looked up into the bright New York sky and saw, hovering above the parking lot, one of the Outer Ones, like a crab or a jellyfish with mebranous wings, waiting, visible for just a short time before it faded into the glare of the city lights.
* * * *
We sat by candlelight at the table inside the old farmhouse, and you said to me, “It’s all lies, Opie. Crap.”
You wept then, and I looked at you with terror and amazement.
“No,” I said. “You can’t mean that.”
“I mean all this messianic garbage, the idea that They were watching over
us and guiding us and would take the faithful few off to the Gardens of Ynath to dwell in glory and wisdom forever—”
“I know,” I said. “I read your book.”
“All crap.”
“Well what is the truth then?”
“This.”
And you showed it to me. You reached under the table and lifted up something heavy, then thumped it down in front of me, the black stone, square, about the size and weight of a bowling ball, covered on all its surfaces with very worn, hieroglyphic writing. When I saw it, when I ran my hands over it, I knew that it had not been manufactured on this planet, and I knew, too, what it was; for I had seen such things in my dreams.
In the Gardens of Ynath there is a great altar of pale, powdery stone, with many niches in it, where such objects are placed, and some of those niches are empty.
“It’s all too absurd,” you said. There were tears on your face, gleaming in the candlelight. You looked very old then, exhausted, defeated. “The purpose of this entire exercise, the reason for the manipulation and ruin of generations of human lives, was not to uplift the human race with any goddamn cosmic message or to reward any faithful believers, but simply to recover this stone. It is one of five brought to Earth millions of years ago. One was recovered in Wales in the late 19th Century. All of the others have storied histories. This one was found, and lost again, in the 1920’s. I can’t give you all the details. I don’t know them. There was a lot of intrigue, subterfuge, something about a fake being sent away by rail freight, intercepted as it was supposed to be, a decoy… I don’t even know why they want it. For reasons they’ve never bothered to tell us. Shit.… They went through such trouble for decades at a time, when all this while, the fucking thing was buried under the floorboards of this farmhouse. Old Man Akeley fooled them, recovered it, or never lost it, and stashed it.… Somehow they never figured it out. That was his last victory over them, before…whatever happened to him. Well, the only thing that makes any sense, when you think about it, is that the Outer Ones are just as stupid as we are.”
“No,” I said quietly. “For once I must tell you that you’ve got it all wrong. For once, at last, I am the master and you are the acolyte.”
You merely turned to me in a daze and said, “What?” or maybe it was “Huh?” before I hefted the black stone and brained you with it.
I did so because I understood what you could not, that it isn’t a matter of messiahs or movements or even of serving them in some semi-intelligent way. It’s about joining the flea circus. They carried you off, because you promised them the black stone. But you did not have it, so they brought you back, to complete your trick. Now you have. That stone is a ticket to the Beyond. Not out of gratitude will they take the bearer of the stone off with them, but for reasons of their own. It is not the faithful who shall be transported, but whoever holds the ticket, that’s all.
Me. You brought me to this point. It is only logical that I should go.
After I struck you, I stood over you, and though you lay in a puddle of your own blood, I was not convinced that I had killed you.
I say that you will rise again, awaken out of your long dream and find me gone. But, being as I am such a normal fellow, a paragon of business-like efficiency, I conveniently have in my pocket a palmtop computer, into which I type this account, this imagining, for your benefit. I leave it here on the tabletop, for you to read when you’ve sufficiently recovered.
Because we were friends once. Because I want you to understand.
* * * *
Now an absurd image comes: the stars are swirling like the water down a bathtub drain; no, like a vast cyclone stretching over lightyears of space and aeons of time, and the great numbers of the winged ones are like gnats, like mayflies, swarming into that brilliant abyss, into the mouth of eternity, which shall swallow up the bearer and the stone together; and I shall dwell without pain in the Gardens of Ynath amid my companions, until the ending of time, when the Crawling Chaos takes shape and walks like a man. Then shall I fall down at his feet and worship, and, like an animal, reach up to lick his outstretched hands.
That’s what you wanted in the end, isn’t it?
DRAWN FROM LIFE, by John Glasby
Never had I thought I should have to write of the hideous affair of Antonio Valliecchi and the terrible happenings in the house in Mewson Street, for there are shocking events which occur on the very rim of human consciousness which are best kept hidden and unmentioned. The horrendous truth behind his death is something no one will believe. I am only writing this record now because I have heard vague rumours the authorities are considering pulling down those old houses and I dread what they might find in the one at the very end, standing alone on the hill.
This is the one where Valliecchi lived when he came to London in the autumn of 1975. It is an early-Georgian building standing in its own grounds. Very few outsiders know this area of London, right on the outskirts, well off the beaten track. I must confess I had no idea it existed until that night. Yet it was there I discovered that there are shadows in this world of which few are aware; and yet of which all should be afraid.
I lived in a little Mews off Chelsea at the time and was busy with my book dealing with the lesser-known contemporary artists and had taken to frequenting the older and lesser-known bookshops and art studios searching for material during the mornings, writing up whatever I had gathered in the afternoons and evenings.
I had only vaguely heard of Valliecchi apart from the fact that he gave a violin concert at the Albert Hall and there were billboards all over the place and rave notices in the papers the following day.
One morning, I came across a little shop in one of the narrow streets that form a maze in the middle of Chelsea. I do not even recall seeing the name of the street. There was a decaying church at the corner of a tiny square and innumerable alleys leading off the place in all directions. It was a backwater that not even the summer tourists ever visit.
The shop was so small I almost passed it by without noticing it. In the window was the usual layout of painting on small wooden easels. There was certainly nothing inspiring and no items of any interest to me. In retrospect it seems certain that the sequence of fearful events that were to follow, culminating in that final cataclysm of horror, would never have occurred had not some imp of perversity prompted me to go inside and browse around.
It was dark and dingy inside and I had never been able to get the proper feel of a painting unless I could examine it under the correct lighting conditions. There were a few more paintings hanging around the walls but these I dismissed at once. I was on the point of leaving when I noticed a stack of canvasses in one corner, standing on edge, one against the other. It was as if the owner had discarded them, considering them to be of little value.
I suppose it must have been perverse curiosity more than anything that made me go through them for I wasn’t expecting to find anything exciting. There were a few abstracts, a couple of mediocre still-life pictures; not much to stir any kind of emotion in me.
Then I came across it, tucked away at the back as if it had been there, forgotten, for a very long time.
Merciful God in Heaven, would that I had tossed it back into the pile and walked out without unrolling it and looking at that hellish painting! My first thought was that I had stumbled across an unknown Goya. But when I took it across to the window for a better look I knew that not even Goya could have painted anything like that. It was sheer, undiluted horror!
It takes more than mere imagination and inspired brushwork to turn out paintings like Valliecchi, for that was the name at the bottom of the canvas. Any dauber can churn out covers for horror magazines, which are intended to convey fear and scare the reader into buying the book. Pictures like that just make me want to smile at the naivety of those who buy such magazines. But it takes a rare kind of genius to depict real horror; the kind that makes one shiver just to look at it. The kind that makes you believe that not only can such things exist; but th
at they do exist!
In general terms, the picture was a landscape; but it was like none I had ever seen, even in my wildest nightmares. It is difficult even to begin to describe it. There was a rocky plateau piled high with drifts of green sand. Normally that would have put me off completely. Yet in that painting, it looked right. I got the impression that, taking the landscape as a whole, any other color would have been utterly out of place.
There was a sheer cliff on one side dotted with cave openings in which there were glimpses of eldritch things. Mere words cannot describe them in any other way for they did not even remotely resemble anything in real life as I know it. Valliecchi had given only vague suggestions of outline; but that was more than enough. They looked positively frightening.
It was a little while before the peculiarity about the name on the painting struck me. Antonio Valliecchi. It seemed highly unlikely that he and the concert violinist were the same man. And yet, I thought, why not? It was unlikely that two men of the same name were undoubted geniuses in similar creative fields of art.
I knew I had to have the painting. Curiously, I did not have to haggle with the owner over the price. He let me have it for a ridiculously low sum. Possibly it had lain there for so long, gathering dust, he was glad to rid of it. It was, he said, the only one by Valliecchi he had and as to whether the painter and violinist were one and the same man, he did not know. To my inquiry as to whether he had come across any other work by Valliecchi, he replied that he had never seen any himself but had heard that there were one or two others in circulation. He affirmed that there was not much call for such bizarre work.