Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft

by Don Webb

  Midsummer Night—Opened a Rift without the use of mirrors. Blood of the Moon and a crack’s there anyway. Had a few white and black flashes, then the LEAP where black is white and white black. Didn’t succumb to screaming heebie-jeebies this time. Others came and talked to us—teaching our bodies. But communication so deep that we can’t remember it as yet. Thibaut de Castries says the mutation is physical, not mental. Still very dizzy—walls would spin and shift if I let them. When I finish this entry I’ll go and take a cold shower. Apartment full of junk. Eyeglasses, false teeth (2 sets!), ticket stubs, ten silver dollars (go to coin store tomorrow), and some junk jewelry. Looks like a Mardi Gras parade went through the front room.

  Sothis Rising. Praise be to Sothis’ Silver Star Note: we perceive space in three dimensions because only for n = 3 is the metric unique. In n > 3 the metric is not unique. In everyday life we observe non-unique metric as time, 4D change in a 3D window. The Feast enables the Adept to pull out into Daath. Daath has a non-unique metric—symbolized as Magick = Energy tending to change. The negation/annihilation of the adept is important: empty space = pure energy. Talked with shades unborn tonight, got concrete plans for transformation. Equipment will be big cost, but you can’t take it with you. After dismissing Them, Charles gave (pointlessly) a talk about secrecy in our workings, ending it with some crude jokes about stakes and garlic. May need to get ID to get surgical equip—

  Blick was interrupted by a noise downstairs. 17:15—someone home from work. He would have to drive downtown to check out. He completed the catalog to turn in and installed a special access lock on the door. On an impulse, he erased “diary” and slipped it into his pocket. The case was closed and this would make an interesting souvenir.

  Blick’s sleep over the next week was filled with horrors. Mostly, he dreamed of the Tenniels lying naked and hairless while the many-armed surgical equipment crawled like a carnivorous spider over their bodies. The Tenniels would smile at him, greet him by name. “We love you, Bill. We loved you before you were born.”

  Sometimes he would dream of being a stalker. Hunting through a vast haunted Los Angeles. Everything was reversed, distorted, half unreal, as though the entire city lay reflected in Aunt Sadie’s bay windows. Black was white; white was black, angular curved, curved angular.

  After three agonizing nights, Blick looked like hell. He asked for and received light duty. No questions. Most of the squad had read his report on the Tenniels and were sympathetic. He was investigating a railway salvage fraud case when news of the second killing came in.

  The graveled drive writhed in convection waves. It would have been an excellent day for hang gliding, except that hang gliding is prohibited by local statute, protecting the pools and privacy of the residents of Beverly Hills. It is difficult to say where the meat fell from, since no one was in the airspace.

  It was not difficult to identify the meat as human. It fell upon the drive with enough force to imbed the hot pebbles. Mr. Victor’s driver nearly ran over it while returning from a shopping expedition in town. The remains were never identified.

  Blick returned to his own flat with twilight. Going home had been hard since Laura left. The small apartment expanded to a big empty space. Since the nightmares started, the dark rooms seemed malignant as well as lonely.

  The television’s red and blue lights made Blick’s face a tribal mask. When the news of the Beverly Hills Butcher came in, Blick left for the neighborhood bar. A few cold beers, exchanging a few lies, ought to quell the nausea.

  Blick stopped outside Eddie’s. The night was cool. Best place to get a hold on his mounting disquiet. The front window was full of regulars, the blond kid who hustled Tempest for drinks, the fat grocer and his pink polyester wife, the sports cluster around the TV. A young couple was watching Blick intensely, reflected in the glass. They must be standing behind him. Blick turned. No one. Turn again. Only himself reflected. Into the bar. His scared face.

  The next morning with a hangover that would kill small cattle, Blick called in sick. Afraid to use the bathroom mirror, he shaved by feel, cutting his chin nicely.

  He dressed for inconspicuousness. Brown shirt, camel cords, tan socks. Packed his .357 Magnum in a shoulder holster. He was almost out the door when he went back to get the Seal of Solomon keychain his Aunt Sadie had given him and a St. Christopher’s medal from Lynn. Couldn’t hurt.

  The bus took him near the UCLA library. His hangover and accompanying nausea had vanished during the fifteen-minute bus ride. His stomach rumbled and his head sought the magic elixir of coffee.

  The air was surprisingly clean, although already in the mid-nineties. In his student days, there had been a little cafe—there it was, just six blocks from campus. It had been the Silver Grill but now was the Mecca with cut-out onion domes painted in orange and black.

  The inside still featured naugahyde-covered benches and ersatz formica table tops embossed with broken paper clip designs. Blick ordered two glazed doughnuts and coffee.

  The counter, its stools and old men, were reflected in a full-length mirror. Blick froze when he saw the mirror, wondering if daylight and urbanity were significant shields against the Tenniels. There might be more than just Charles and his wife. How many missing person reports did the office receive daily? Seventeen? Twenty-three? Thirty thousand disappear in the US every year without trace. Who knows how many in India or China.

  The coffee was strong and the doughnuts stale. As he dunked the doughnut, he felt a fly brush his neck. He started. In the mirror, two black-robed figures were leaning toward him.

  Blick spun, trying to stand and free himself from the chair. A taloned hand swished its way to his neck. Fingernails passing into his neck, lifting up and away from the direction of spin. A bright black flash. Violent nausea as the floor dropped from under him. Hieroglyphic silence. Vertigo. Reaching for his gun in a cubist freeze-frame painting. Falling.

  Suddenly (at least he thought it was suddenly) Blick focused. He hung suspended in a vast purple light. Alone. A cicada music in his ears. His neck wrenched and bleeding.

  Movement was impossible. Nothing to purchase against. After flailing his legs in the cold static void, Blick felt their love. “WE love you, Bill! We loved you before you were born!” Two ideas kept re-entering his mind. He spent hours fighting them. First: he was weightless. Which immediately brought about thoughts of outer space. Second: he wasn’t breathing. Which suggested the hereafter.

  After deciding on Descartes’s maxim of existence, he calmed down. Panic here was unbounded; without beating heart, sweaty palms, or other visceral governors, panic could totally fill you up.

  Perhaps other feelings would be as absolute. That was why the Tenniels came here. Taking Heaven by storm. “That’s right, Bill, we love you, inside out. We talked with you before you were born.”

  Obviously the Tenniels had some method of movement, of interacting with the real world. As well as some need to do so, unless the stalking of himself had only been for fun. “Fun is all there is, Bill. Nothing is true, everything is permitted. We love you, Bill. Don’t make the mistake of rejecting us!”

  Blick closed his eyes to shut out the humming purple void. Very carefully he imagined riding the elevator. He ran the memory, film-like, over and over. He trimmed each temporal edge until the upward sensation was all that remained. Simplistic thoughts would intervene: “I’ve really got it now” or “I wonder if they see inside me?” and he would have to begin the process again.

  After an eternity of trying, he was able to hold the sensation of ascent. Slowly he began to rise.

  Gradually the light changed from purple to silver-gray. Blick floated above a purple hemisphere of light in a silver-gray void. The noise was different, more of a tea whistle than a cicada song.

  Stretching to the horizon were other purple hemispheres, some quiescent, some seething like cauldrons. All glowing.

  After a few minutes of observation, Blick noticed a salmon-pink lightning that played over the
hemispheres. Very fine, it guided the purple light back into rigidly geometrical shapes whenever it began to expand, dimple, or sag.

  The lightning was a webwork emanating from the top of the hemispheres and enveloping their domed bottoms. The origin of each web was a squiggle of light in the center of the purple disk.

  Blick’s own hemisphere had a stylized “B.” With branches so pretty. The birthday cake with three yellow hyacinths in the bowl or Alice’s hospital where Momma died and buried in chilly October bobbing for apples in raining buckets canceled Mardi Gras communion wafer after the ash roasting marshmallows—“You little Oreo piece of shit!” in the playground. High School graduation. “Billy Jean” by Michael Jackson, “Twilight Zone” by Golden Earring, the first time he saw the Inverted Fountain at UCLA, Royce Hall, “Ain’t your daddy a fucking Jew?”, the Hollywood Sign, taking Laura to the Magic Castle, the Disneyland Haunted Mansion, getting a blowjob from the tranny hooker . . .

  Blick looked away. Somehow his whole life was netted in its glowing web. Holding cells. The thought popped in: He was drifting back into the hemisphere.

  The memory flashes had left him drained. He tried to hoard the elevator rising image. Inches above the hemisphere he stopped and began drifting upward, this time much more slowly. Memory is ballast.

  He rose about seven feet from his cell when he saw the gargoyles. Black wings. Gray scaly features, dog heads, goat horns. Three of them. Their great black wings beat against the glowing silver atmosphere. They flew with eagle grace.

  Blick fumbled for his gun, realized that he had been clutching it tightly since the coffee shop. The gargoyles sliced through the sky twenty yards above Blick. The humming background became a sharp keening as they passed. “Let them consume your flesh, Bill, they are our love. They are the great Night of Be With Us!”

  They wheeled about, descending in a rapine arc toward one of the hemispheres close to Blick.

  The first swept above it, gathering a glowing sigil in an outstretched talon. It tore from the light as a scab from a wound, bursting into sparks a few wingbeats away. The other two plunged into the now softer-seeming light, snatching a victim, a tall bald man dressed as a fisherman. His shouts were silent. Caught firmly between the two gargoyles. The three gargoyles and their bloodied prey flew away.

  Far below the hemispheres two dark figures were rising. Blick darted into the recently vacated hemisphere. He sank into eye level—the light in this one was wet and slimy, its noise much more metallic.

  The figures rose. Dark, hooded. Long before they reached the hemisphere level, Blick recognized them for the Tenniels.

  They rose, floated over Blick’s hemisphere. Charles gestured and the sigil glowed brightly.

  Blick shot. Twice.

  The first shot caught Charles just above the chest. His body began drifting downward. The second shot caught Anna in her stomach. She clutched her belly, crying as if betrayed.

  Blick told them what he had told all humans for over forty years: “I reject your love!”

  Before Blick fired again Anna wiped the sigil away with her foot and pointed.

  Detective Sergeant Blick materialized almost a thousand feet above L.A.

  (For Fritz Lieber)

  To Mars and Providence

  Exactly twenty-nine days after his father had died of general paresis—that is to say, syphilis—in the local asylum, the boy observed the cylinder land upon Federal Hill. On some level this extramundane intrusion confirmed certain hypotheses that he had begun to form concerning the prognosticative nature of dreams. He had been dreaming of the night-gaunts for three years. They had—the horrible conclusion now obtruded upon his reluctant mind as an awful certainty—come for him. As befit a gentleman of pure Yankee stock and the true chalk-white Nordic type, he had but one option: he must venture forth to meet and if possible defeat these eldritch beings.

  He was eight years old.

  The initial and certainly most daunting difficulty would be getting past his mother and aunts. His grandfather Whipple Phillips might be an ally in this quest, since he had often kept Howard entertained with tales of black voodoo, unfathomed caves, winged horrors, and old witches with sinister cauldrons. But Grandfather Whipple was in Idaho, and his mother, though normally indulgent of such whims, would not allow his questing into the night air. Howard therefore adopted extreme stealth in the acquisition of his bicycle. He actually carried it several yards from the house before mounting it in quest of adventure.

  Down College Hill across the river and then hard work up toward St. John’s Catholic Church on Federal Hill, which is where he judged the cylinder had fallen. The neighborhood, alive with nameless sounds that vied with morbid shriekings, seemed to have taken notice of the cylinder’s fall. There was a general lighting of candles, lanterns, torches, and the like. By the time he reached St. John’s a rugged ring of light surrounded the shiny cylinder. He could not stand to force his way through the crowd, so he entered the church proper and climbed up to the bell tower. Opening a small window in the bell tower, he watched the scene below with growing horror and fascination.

  A portion of the cylinder had begun to turn. No doubt the entity or entities therein sought the relieving air of the night as a counter to the searing heat of their bulkhead. The crowd grew fervent with their prayers— prayers to an entity Howard knew to be no more real than the Santa Claus he had abandoned at age five. The lid fell free, and a great fungoid stench assailed Howard’s nostrils.

  The great leathery wet glistening squamous head of the cylinder’s occupant lunged out, pulsing and twitching obscenely. Its vast liquid eyes, whose terrible three-lobed pupils spoke of the being’s non-Terran evolution, gazed with glittering contempt upon the sea of humanity surrounding the smoking crater. Some brave soul, perhaps hoping to get a better look at the horror, shined a bull’s horn lantern at its eyes. It recoiled from this unwanted stimulus, making a great hooting cry that would be difficult to render phonetically. Ulla! Or perhaps Kuulla! The creature ducked back into the cylinder, only to re-emerge with a weapon of some sort. Suddenly a flash of blue lightning so intense that it made all the other light a darkness flashed from the weapon. Amidst the screams, Howard fainted.

  When Howard returned to consciousness, it was a return from a dream of being medically examined by panting, wheezing, fumbling, drooling Martians. He was—to his intense surprise—in his bed at 454 Angell Street. Susan Lovecraft, his mother, was standing above him.

  “I see that my little Abdul has wakened. I trust your materialism will be thoroughly shaken by the miracle which saved you from the Martians.”

  “Martians?”

  “One edition of the Gleaner made it out before the error disrupted the city. Everyone has fled. We, however, will remain until Grandfather Whipple comes for us.”

  Howard could begin to smell the burning city. His mother couldn’t be this calm, if what she was saying was true. This must be some sort of game, like when she fixed an Oriental corner in his room when he took the name Abdul Alhazred when he was five. He would play along; after all, there was the fact that he had arrived back at his home.

  “You said something about a miracle?”

  “The Martians killed everybody near the cylinder. Some men at the university watched it all with binoculars. One of the Martians climbed up the side of the church, to the bell tower’s open window, and pulled you out. It carried you down inside the cylinder. I suppose it thought it was one of their own. You are a very ugly child, Howard, people cannot bear to look upon your awful face. When the second cylinder fell, the Martians hurried out of the first to aid in the other’s arrival. One of the brave men of the Brown Library, Armitage I believe his name was, ventured all the way there to find you. He knew you because you had pestered him with questions on Cicero. You were there in the cylinder ‘sleeping peacefully,’ he said.”

  “How long?”

  “You’ve been asleep three days.”

  There was something in his mother’s eyes
that wasn’t right. Perhaps the “Martian” invasion had unhinged her highly strung nervous system. He must obtain nourishment and newspaper quickly, and then scout out the city.

  “Could you bring the copy of the Gleaner, Mother?”

  “Certainly, Howard.”

  The paper had huge headlines. EARTH INVADED BY MARS. The cylinders had fallen in London and Texas.

  How ironic, thought Howard, that the Martians would have chosen to land in the Italian section of the city, since it was Giovanni Schiaparelli who had discovered Mars’ canal system.

  Mother brought him a sandwich for breakfast. The bread was stale and the house quiet.

  He asked after his aunts.

  Mother’s face went blank and dreamy. “They’ve gone west to speak with your grandfather concerning the invasion. I believe they took the train.”

  Howard knew that one of the first things the Martians would have done would be to destroy trains, telegraphs, and roads. Mankind would panic if it lost its ability to reassert its pathetic reality by its continuous idiot-god mutterings. What happy cows they would become in a few days, happy to be herd animals. He could feel the contempt he had seen in the three-lobed eyes of the Martian, a burning contempt that an older and more perfect civilization must feel against the ape-like humans.