Black Horse and Other Strange Stories

by Wyckoff, Jason A.

  Suddenly all activity stopped, all sound disappeared save the endless, diminishing echoes of the insects’ song . . . and the low drone, still throbbing, still building. Joe’s gaze was drawn again forward. Of course: There, at the head of the nave, was an altar. A haze of blue light glowed there behind swirling veils of the vermilion mist. Joe’s terror grew with the swell of the drone even as the beauty of the coalescing light enthralled him with the promise of unutterable bliss—

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Frieda from accounting stood at the opening of Joe’s cubicle. Joe quickly surmised his situation: He was leaning over his countertop and holding an x-acto knife, apparently (to her eyes) cutting away at the fabric.

  ‘Nothing,’ Joe replied. ‘Moving some of the frames around. I got one of the pins caught.’ Joe felt he came over suspiciously, like a bad liar. He sat down and tried to lean back nonchalantly. ‘Can I help you with something?’

  ‘Expense cheque.’ Frieda extended her arm with the cheque in her hand.

  Joe lunged forward and snatched it from her hand too hastily.

  ‘Oh, uh. I’ve been waiting for this. Thanks,’ he said. Joe saw Frieda’s eyes move towards the tear in the fabric. ‘I’d better get this deposited right away. Thanks again.’

  Joe looked at Frieda expectantly for a few seconds before she took the hint and left. He opened a file drawer and threw the cheque in dismissively. Joe let his head drop into his hands, his elbows planted on his knees. He was shaking. What had he just experienced? There was no answering that question to himself, no explaining it, certainly no hope of rationalising it. And who else would believe him? Who else could possibly understand?

  Joe sat bolt upright as inspiration hit him. He covered the hole with the Disneyland picture before leaving his cubicle.

  Joe walked through the office briskly to the location of his old cubicle. There, just as Seth had said, were several archive boxes stacked on his old chairmat: Everything that Jerry Samples left behind. If there was anyone else who might understand, it was Jerry—after all, hadn’t he left inexplicably and without notice? Maybe Jerry had had a similar experience—and perhaps he’d left something in the paperwork that could shed some light on . . . well, whatever the hell it was Joe had just seen. Joe started digging through the boxes hurriedly. He tore through the drawings and the reference manuals and the project binders, looking for anything extraordinary. Joe didn’t kid himself: He was looking for anything that might indicate a loosening of the reins on Jerry’s sanity. Joe threw another box aside carelessly, dislodging its contents. On the bottom of the stack was a spiral-bound notebook with bent cover and curling corners. Joe picked it up. Field notes and calculations, neat and tidy, filled the first two-thirds of the notebook. But then—he didn’t have time to read it now, but the import of the content was clearly communicated to Joe in the heavy penstroke, the snatches of exclamation-marked phrase, the crude and hasty sketches of unthinkable shapes.

  ‘Hey, Joe.’ Kevin Hardy, Joe’s old neighbour, looked over the cubicle wall. Joe promptly and acutely noted how little he’d missed the cloying scent of Kevin’s ubiquitous lemon drops.

  Joe snapped the notebook shut.

  ‘Did you pick up one of Jerry’s projects?’

  ‘No.’ Joe reconsidered. ‘Yes.’ Well, that was brilliant, Joe congratulated himself.

  ‘Which one?’

  Joe set the notebook aside and shovelled the spilled papers back into the box. He let the question drift. ‘Hey, Kev—where did Jerry go?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Joe stood up. ‘What firm did he go to? I know you worked with him some—did he tell you goodbye when he left?’

  Kevin shrugged. ‘I never actually heard where he went. I don’t think he even came in on the day he quit. It was like he was just gone.’

  Dinner was difficult for Joe; he was anxious to examine the notebook he’d brought home from work. Of course, he didn’t tell Pauline what was distracting him, so she, in turn, was upset by Joe’s dismissive and evasive answers to her questions. The girls were not conscious of the tension between their parents, but responded poorly to the lack of attention paid them and argued amongst themselves. Pauline eventually believed Joe’s explanation that ‘work stuff’ was the cause of his anxiety (‘What else could it be with Joe?’ she reasoned) and began to try to get a definitive response as to whether Joe was worried about keeping his job. It may well have gone on interminably if Kathy hadn’t spilled her milk and blamed Ashley for it; Joe used the diversion to excuse himself, stealing away to his study.

  Joe shut the door and sat down at his desk, banging his knee on the crooked metal leg in his haste. He snapped on the gooseneck lamp and pushed a small stack of bills out of the way. He set the spiral wire spine on the worn deskmat and slapped the covers down so that the notebook fell open half-way through.

  Jerry’s writing had the straight up-and-down, levelled and boxy quality that was a holdover from when they still taught architects penmanship. Even in this informal notebook, the prose was set conservatively within the margins and rough thumbnail sketches were clearly diagrammed. Joe recognised the job Jerry was working on, an office addition to a rural tri-county hospital campus. Joe flipped though the pages toward the back, until the change in lettering style made him stop. On the first few pages where there appeared a marked breaking from original, restrained handwriting, the subject matter failed to deviate at all. Joe surmised that here is where Jerry had begun to experience some fantastic diversion in that cubicle, just like Joe, but had attempted to carry on without acknowledging the disturbance. Then there appeared odd marks, oblong asterisks, to the side, in the margins. Their origin quickly became clear to Joe: Jerry was drawing the insects. One was labelled: ‘Not right’. The text began to break up; job-related observations petered out mid-sentence, to be replaced by fragments of limited clarity: ‘Is there space between spaces?’, ‘Every image a word in their anthem’, ‘So many hues of darkness’. Two pages following, any work-related text disappeared completely and the drawings that began to dominate the pages had nothing to do with a hospital addition. The first was a rough approximation of the cathedral, just as Joe had seen it. Other detailed sketches followed, some delicate in their rumination, others scratched with intensity sufficient to tear the page. Joe took these drawings to be observations of the bas-relief symbols and pictures he’d seen carved into the great cathedral’s pillars and on her walls. Some were abstract or recoiled upon themselves with the dimensional impossibilities of an M.C. Escher print, others depicted creatures horrible and bizarre; their appearances made Joe shudder; their perverse and merciless activities repulsed and hypnotised him. And on every page there appeared an image of one of the insects, always a little larger, always a little more distinct. The clear, light area around the head began to take shape, even as the text on each page became both less cogent and less frightened; the hysterics in Jerry’s thought began to tend toward the adulation of something. ‘She is of the light and all of it.’ ‘How is Hell horrid if it is the root of temptation?’ ‘The black is me, the wave in the swarm of her legion.’ Still, breaks of defiance to Jerry’s dark seduction found form in a desperate ‘nonononononono’ and an anguished, full-page ‘God, what will I be?’ Joe turned the last page over.

  There was Jerry’s last drawing: the insect, up close, revealed as a machine of diabolical origin, a vessel whose driver stared out from the clear viewport at the base of the head. Jerry had depicted the face inside as his own.

  Joe’s head swam and the room about him spun. Terrible connections in his head were trying to come together while his sanity strove to keep them apart. That was what was wrong, Joe thought. The scope of the thing was all wrong. I thought they were tiny; even though I knew the cathedral was vast, even though I knew their number was a multitude, still I couldn’t grasp its grandeur. Because I was seeing it without the proper sense of scale! Every one of those things, those—ha!—insects, was a manned machine in se
rvice to a queen whose arrival was being celebrated even as I watched! What—or, dear God, who—did I crush against the cubicle wall?!

  Joe closed the notebook violently and pushed himself away from the desk. Surging dizziness slammed him into a four-drawer cabinet. He steadied himself and tried to breathe normally. His eyes burned with blood behind them.

  ‘Honey?’ called his wife from behind the door and down the hall.

  After a few seconds he gasped, ‘I’m fine.’

  Joe managed some easy banter during the late local news that dispelled the tension from dinner. Pauline leaned her head on his shoulder during the weather report. Before bed, Joe made sure to take a lingering look at each of the girls; he thought about what they would be, and he smiled with deep satisfaction. He was going to quit his job tomorrow. Pauline would be upset, but Joe knew that his experience would land him at a new firm with little downtime in the interim. And everyone back at DKT&T would excuse his recent behaviour, wish him well upon his way, and sigh in relief that he was gone. He lay down next to his wife, already asleep. Tomorrow he’d burn Jerry’s notebook and rid himself of any connection to the unknowable expanses of that dark dimension and the thrall of whatever alien deity claimed dominion therein. Of one thing, Joe was decidedly sure: he wasn’t going anywhere.

  Panorama

  The police had held the point of view that if Vince couldn’t get hold of his client by phone it didn’t mean Geoff Schloesser was a missing person, it only meant he wasn’t answering his phone. Nevertheless, they agreed to have a cruiser go by the house and have a look. They reported back to Vince that there were no signs of foul play—or any other activity, for that matter—which, to them, meant only that the artist wasn’t answering his door. As Geoff wasn’t exactly expected anywhere, and as Vince was not family and only Schloesser’s agent, the police had felt disinclined to pursue Vince’s suggestion that they forcibly enter the man’s home to investigate further.

  As he drove down the two-lane county road that curved gently around fallow fields and between unassuming hills, Vince thought he should have pointed out that Schloesser would be unlikely to smash a window pane prior to committing suicide. Vince was alarmed at his own suggestion; had it really come to this—that he would believe Schloesser capable of killing himself? Geoff’s behaviour certainly had been disturbing the last few months—disconsolate after Keri left him, he had gone from extrovert to hermit.

  Vince frowned with chagrin at his neglect of his client. He felt he should never have left Geoff alone at the studio for so long. It had been more than four months since Keri broke things off and Geoff withdrew to the sanctuary of his ‘seasonal’ studio out in the country. It was unthinkable to imagine Geoff out of the metropolitan social scene for four months. Unlike so many of the temperamental recluses (both genuine and affected) known to litter the artistic community, Geoff had always enjoyed the company of others unabashedly. The joy he felt from socialising was without agenda; he didn’t care if whomever he talked to could help his career or not. Though the artist interacted without consideration to position or privilege, Vince knew that Geoff thrived on the recognition; Geoff needed validation and appreciation, even if he didn’t care if it was expressed monetarily. Geoff believed that his talent would drive his career, obviating the need to ply for patronage. He was occasionally gracious enough to thank Vince for his contribution, though Vince knew full well that Geoff’s agreeable personality and good business sense coupled with the popularity of his work made Vince’s efforts negligible.

  Geoff Schloesser had gravitated towards Magical Realism in college and continued working exclusively in that style during the quarter-century since graduation. He demonstrated unusual restraint as a youth, observing the stringent principles of the early movement, including its celebration of the mundane. But his talent flourished when he began integrating aspects of the later practitioners, adding forays into (mild) surrealism and including fantastical elements within the otherwise quotidian framework, fusing the disparate realities with equitable hyper-realist depiction. His works were engaging—pictures that might be initially dismissed as frivolous became hypnotic as the viewer succumbed to the depth of realisation and Schloesser’s absolute command of light. He painted as much from imagination as from observation; he said of his process, ‘I am supposed to be creating, after all.’

  Geoff’s recent work had transcended even his earlier virtuoso accomplishments, even as the outré elements became more familiar. He had decided to explore a very literal iteration of ‘magical realism’, incorporating creatures of classical myth and fable as ‘the dark players lightening up an otherwise dim world’, as he put it. Sprites peeked out from the shadows of a wine rack and hid with chameleon skin on a workbench; satyrs glowered maliciously from a copse, watching the unwary maidens among the sober parishioners on their way to church; one masterwork depicted a man with his back turned, facing his elaborate collection of first editions, with a second, phantom presence showing only in the reflections on the gold-leaf lettering of the spines.

  In one particularly memorable conversation, Geoff had confessed to Vince that he’d seen impossible beings frequently in his youth, and that that inspired some of the subject matter he explored. ‘I’m hardly the first to propose that the ability is often present in children, and then it fades or is ‘taught’ away, but my experience was different: I got so scared that I decided to stop. I made the conscious decision, not that they weren’t real, but rather that I wouldn’t see them anymore. I sometimes wonder if I could reverse that decision. I don’t think so, though,’ he had laughed, ‘I’m still afraid!’ Vince remembered that Geoff had squeezed Keri’s hand as he finished the thought.

  Vince slapped the sun visor down against the glare as the road curved right, heading west. He thought of Keri and sighed; he thought of what the loss of her meant to Geoff’s life, and he winced.

  To be in a relationship—or to fall out of one—was nothing new to his friend. Geoff was always with a woman. He communicated with an effortless confidence many found attractive, and the transition to intimacy often followed just as effortlessly (though he would have flinched in horror at the suggestion of a ‘sexual conquest’). If a romance disintegrated, he would resolve to focus on his work and forswear companionship, go out to toast his newfound purposefulness, and wake up in a new relationship. Vince suspected Geoff’s inability to be alone was indicative of abandonment issues resulting from his father’s departure at an impressionable age and his mother’s death at a formative one. Vince was often surprised at Geoff’s ability to endure his heartaches with such resiliency considering his psychological make-up, but ascribed it to Geoff’s romanticism of womanhood in general above any specific individual. But with Keri, the relationship—and the end of it—had been different.

  They had met at an opening, of course. Vince noticed her as soon as she entered. Keri’s straight black hair lay smooth and undisturbed on her cream-coloured shoulders, stopping just short of her plum satin dress. She looked not as if she were unaware of her beauty but unafraid of it. Vince became distracted; he found himself trying to explain to an investment broker exactly how to appreciate Geoff’s art when he saw the artist approach Keri. He couldn’t help smiling: Too late, bud, he told himself, and seeing the way the two seemed casually enraptured by each other, he hadn’t minded at all.

  Vince rejected the idea that Keri was the first woman Geoff had treated as an equal; on the contrary, Geoff always welcomed the sense of acceptance that intimacy gave him with honesty; he never separated himself by feeling contempt for anyone who admired him. And though Keri may have been the first woman he elevated above himself, Geoff didn’t objectify her with idolatry. Instead, his very personal love for her seemed like a break from the idealisation of generalised romantic love.

  Keri had maintained an empty apartment for a while, but eventually gave up the pretence that she was ever apart from Geoff sufficiently long enough to justify the expense, and sublet it to a friend. Afte
r that, they were always together. They often hosted joyous gatherings of friends who delighted in their company and the ‘vibes’ of their union. Keri would float through Geoff’s loft studio while he worked. Her presence was never an intrusion; indeed, he couldn’t concentrate well when they were apart and preferred that she ‘hang around as much as she could stand to’. She was never bored with him and could immerse herself in her own intellectual and creative pursuits undistracted. When Vince would visit Geoff, Keri would join the conversation, or not, according to her preference, and it was never rude when she didn’t, and always enchanting when she did. As they spent so much time together, and considering Keri’s undeniable beauty as well as her muse-like inspiration her presence evoked for Geoff, it had seemed only natural when she began modelling for him.