Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2011

by Mike Davis (Editor)

  Darius Roy’s eyes lit up and he laughed harder, breaking the weak quivering barrier his lips had created. His hysteria begun to dig deeper into Dr. Johansson’s conscious.

  He sat down again in the folding chair. He removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. Finally Darius Roy’s laughter had subsided to a quiet giggle, but Dr. Johansson needed a moment to collect his thoughts. He owed it to Darius Roy to focus. The distractions were unfair to the man’s treatment.

  When Dr. Johansson finally replaced his glasses, the room was noticeably darker. The waning sunlight was all but gone now and the small light bulb was fighting a losing battle with the ever-encroaching shadows. All Dr. Johansson could see of Darius Roy’s face was his shark-like grin. He cleared his throat and decided to move forward in order to salvage what he could of the botched therapy session.

  “Mr. Roy-”

  “Why do you call me that?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Why do you insist on calling me, ‘Mr. Roy’?”

  “I apologize. What would you like to be called?”

  Darius Roy chuckled. “It doesn’t really matter. Call me what you’d like.” The shark grin returned. “Soon enough, we’ll all be dust anyway.”

  “Mr., er uh, Darius, we never discussed how you became acquainted with the, uh-”

  “I didn’t become acquainted. They came to me. They needed me and I agreed to help them. They need transactions. Blood for blood. Flesh for flesh. You know…”

  “Is that why you murdered your family?”

  “Oh come now, they were only the beginning. There will be more. Before long, we will all be gone.”

  “Yes, well, are they, uh, your friends, the reason you murdered your family?”

  “Why does everyone insist that I had any part in their murder?”

  “You were tried and convicted.”

  Darius Roy sighed. “Yes, of course I was.”

  “The police reports also stated that there was no blood. Can you explain that?”

  “Well of course. They took it. They needed it. Now they are almost tangible. You might be able smell their acrid scent. Can you hear their whale songs? Can you feel them in your bones, doctor?” Darius Roy chuckled.

  Dr. Johansson decided to ignore the last question. He continued his notes, only half aware of what he was writing. “So what now? Are they are supposed to come for you?”

  “No. No, they aren’t coming for me.” Darius Roy’s grin widened. “I’m merely the catalyst. I’m the flame and they’re the moths. You on the other hand…” Darius Roy chuckled.

  Dr. Johansson narrowed his eyes, slightly annoyed with all the cryptic comments. “What is that supposed to mean, Mr. Roy?”

  Darius Roy didn’t answer. He leaned forward, revealing his manic eyes again. The moonlight glinted from his teeth. “Tell me, what do you have there? What have you written about me?”

  Dr. Johansson’s palms felt grimy. He cleared his throat so not to sound nervous. A distant roll of thunder seemed to Dr. Johansson to be appropriate. A chill ran down his arm. “Well, I scribbled a few notes. It’s just to help me-”

  He paused. His notes looked completely foreign to him. After the first line, where he wrote about Darius Roy not being frightened, was a page full of bizarre shorthand. However the scribbles seemed to have purpose. It almost appeared as if the sheet was filled up with a foreign language.

  “Looks like they found you, doctor.” Darius Roy’s teeth glimmered before he sat back against the wall, allowing his face to be consumed by the shadows.

  “What?”

  The bulb overhead flickered as another roll of thunder seemingly rocked the tiny cell. A tight pinch in his chest sent Dr. Johansson into his coat pocket. He fumbled with an aspirin bottle, popping its top and sending dozens of pills to the floor. Sweat streaked down his face as he wheezed for air. He dropped to his knees in a desperate attempt to find a pill. He needed to stop the pain. It was becoming unbearable. He glanced up to the exit buzzer, but couldn’t move.

  Fiery pain roared through his arms. His flesh rippled as if a legion of snakes writhed under his skin. He heard his flesh tear like canvas as hundreds of gleaming tentacles spilled out from his forearms. A flash of lightning illuminated them. Black, green and glistening, they whipped through the air.

  After Dr. Johansson fell to the floor, his last moments were agony. His flesh was slowly dissolved and consumed. But just before slipping into oblivion, Dr. Johansson noted the manic grin on Darius Roy’s face.

  -

  -

  Brian Barnett has published over 60 works over the past two years both online and in print, including a half dozen anthologies. He is the co-editor of The New Flesh ezine.

  Story art by mimulux.

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  NOTE: Images contained in this Lovecraft eZine are Copyright ¬©2006-2012 art-by-mimulux. All rights reserved. All the images contained in this Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without my express written permission. These images do not belong to the public domain. All stories in Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without the express written permission of the editor.

  Ushered On the Wind

  by Jeffrey J. Taylor & W.H. Pugmire

  They came on the wind. That is my warning and my final testament to the world, a world I fear that I am not long for. So many good men gone, and I, the last of them, could do nothing to save them. I am headed south to find a man that my younger brother whispered of, someone that I think may help me. I thought of him as a nut when I first heard of him – but that was before my world was pulled out from under my feet. I’m not sure how many days I’ve been moving. It hasn’t been easy, any of this. My name is Randy Wood, kind of amusing when you consider that I’m a logger by trade. Now I’m probably wanted by the authorities – or worse.

  That thing – the shadow behind the sky!

  I had never done well when I was young. School wasn’t my thing and I dropped out when I was in grade ten. My old man was disappointed and angry and gave me the boot from home. Maybe I deserved it. I got a job in the city but it depressed me. I hated the noise and the lights and soon shut myself off from everyone. I wouldn’t answer the phone or meet with friends, just holed up in my cramped apartment and going out only when I had to work – until I lost my job. I drifted from one dismal situation to another until I answered an ad for Phillips Forestry. My first tour out was amazing. Being in the woods and up in the mountains made me a new man. I worked hard and sweat out the new guy hazing. My body hurt, but I knew this was the building of new strengths, physical and mental, and I persevered. I had never felt so gloriously alive, so real, so a part of something. I loved the brotherhood of belonging to a group. This was my real calling in life, and I gave it my all. I worked myself up for almost six years until I was made a foreman and charged with my own crew. We went up every season and pulled trees for Phillips with another team planting behind us. I gave respect and was given respect; my old man even shook my hand when I returned home. I was liked and admired, and it made me feel like a new man.

  It felt good, strapping logs to helicopter leads, pulling stumps and traveling up muddy back roads. I gave the new boys the gears and made a few of them realize that they were really men too. Who knew it would fall to shit so fast?

  We were well into the season and were actually ahead of our daily quotas. There hadn’t been much rain so we had been going pretty much non-stop. The helicopters were dropping down the mountain without problems and the trucks were moving down the coast to the barges and mills. Everything was running smoothly and the men were actually quite happy. Old Sherman had the boys fed and the money was piling up in our accounts. Sherman was quite a guy. He was over six feet and had to weigh 350 pounds – a monster
, but a gentle one. He had gone to some famous culinary school in Vancouver and could have cooked for royalty, or so he said. I’d sometimes ask him why he was cooking in a work camp and not for some fancy royal highness. He’d always answer back that he wanted to make meals for people who appreciated what they were given. I never did hear anyone complain about his food and I never did eat as well as I did when we were up on the mountain together. He was one of the last to go, God rest his soul.

  Sherman was only one of the good men I had up there. There were eight other veterans and three new guys among us, all strong and hard-working. Reilly was my right-hand man, a lean Irishman that I came to depend on over the last two years. He was with Phillips before me but would never take a promotion to run his own crew. “Not for me,” he’d say, “God made better men than me to follow.” But he was the only one I trusted, the one man who could really pull the others up when things went bad. He was with me to the last and his screams wake me every time I attempt to sleep these days.

  With everything running so smoothly we should have noticed the little things that were happening – but we were too consumed with pushing our quotas and making more cash. We never really noticed, when we entered that last area, that all of the forest sounds were gone. None of us had seen a deer or black bear in a couple of weeks, and there had been no birds calling from the trees. It was just an eerie quiet lonesome kind of place, except for the wind that would pick up now and again. Even the stars seemed to dim at night when that wind blew its cold breath down onto the mountain. Then we came upon that strange pale tree with its weird yellow moss and carvings. Who could have made those carvings was what we couldn’t understand, the place was so far from any community. Weaselhead, the one Native American guy on the crew, said that the tree reminded him of legends he had heard as a kid, and he was the one who pointed out the prints in the ground surrounding the large pale trunk, prints that were unlike anything we could comprehend. The carvings on the trunk may have been aboriginal – but there was something peculiar about them and I hated looking at them, they bothered me. I was relieved when Wilson and Burton, two veterans, brought down the tree, however much they were freaking out about the texture of the thing’s bark, its softness and its smell.

  It was Wilson and Burton who were the first to go missing. They were accounted for at dinner and had been seen smoking outside before we went lights out. Morning comes early for a lumberjack so it was strange that they were already gone when we all arrived at the mess for breakfast. Sherman had beaten us all there by half an hour and hadn’t seen them leave. We came to the conclusion that they had gone down the lone road and pulled in to the base camp to quit. It wasn’t unheard of but was odd in that we were making such good time and money. The road was mud because of the melt coming off the mountain’s cap. Why would they leave like that? I dropped it for then but I was going to question the helicopter pilots when they checked in with us before they made their way up. They didn’t.

  We weren’t able to raise anyone at the transfer station on the radio after that either. We called down over the entire morning with no response other than the occasional static. My men were already restless when a greenie, Parker, found Burton’s utility belt and hard hat about ten meters back from the main building. There was blood running up a nearby tree and his small chainsaw was gone off of its clip. We began to fear the worst and started a search for Wilson – was he responsible for what we had just found? We searched until we found his boots that afternoon. It appeared that he had been torn from them and dragged a couple of meters before disappearing.

  The wind picked up again that afternoon, and that’s when we started taking notice of the queer little things. At first we thought that they were star-shaped leaves that skirted along the ground pushed by the cold wind. They weren’t unlike a maple’s leaf but we were far too high up the mountain for that, these were an odd blue colour and they looked to stop every so often as if to wait for something. They had come and gone by day’s end. Weaselhead had taken to muttering some aboriginal song to himself, and I asked him what it was all about.

  “This place reminds me of a legend in our tribe, of something that falls out of the sky and snatches men. The song tells of this thing and its totems. That freaking tree we fell, with its symbols…” But then he just shrugged and shook his head.

  I ignored him as we tried to raise the transfer base into the evening hours, but we were answered by nothing. Sherman began to make complaints that our supplies would run low in a couple of days, and that’s when I really began to worry. I had never lost contact with the station down below and for this long, and with two men missing my remaining crew were spooked. Damn Weaselhead wouldn’t stop muttering that crazy song in his native tongue – although some of the words he sang sounded so strange I didn’t think they were a part of his heritage, words like ‘Ithakkha’ that he pronounced in a guttural way without moving his tongue. At one point he began to etch some of the symbols that we saw on that pale tree into the earth with his knife, until I stopped him. I left him alone, though, after we discovered that he had carved a likeness of some of those symbols into his arm!

  The wind was colder than ever that night, and it sounded like a strange beast as it moaned around us. Everyone was acting spooked, and then we found that two more men were missing before lights outs. That’s when my panic turned to fear, and that fear was contagious. Three more men decided to leave camp in the morning. We couldn’t say anything to sway them, and so Sherman and Reilly, Weaselhead and I watched in silence as they left. Part of me wanted to go with them, I’ll admit; but I was in charge and I tried to be an example to the remaining fellows. I didn’t want to answer to the company when this turned out to be just some downed lines and stupid workers in a panic. This was the first time that I had made good in my lifetime and I was going to see it through. No one would be able to accuse me of giving in to fear of the unknown.

  That last night there is a nightmare I can never forget. Reilly and I heard that damn savage singing his cursed song from somewhere outside, and found Weaselhead dancing inside some kind of circle he had built with bits of wood on which he had chiseled symbols and totem-like images that were unlike anything I had ever seen in Native art. Then, from some distant place, we heard Sherman screaming; but when we rushed to his aid there was no sign of him, just long gouges in the dirt where it looked as if he had been dragged for about two meters before vanishing. Reilly and I searched for the next hour before he suggested that the culprit might have been a bear; and that was possible except for the fact that we found no bear tracks. It was then that the chill wind brushed against us, and the distant chanting of Weaselhead suddenly ceased. When we went to return him to camp, we found his circle of wood vacant, but we seemed to notice some of those weird leaf-like things circling upward into the air, as if caught in a current of whirling air. We went to his circle of wood and found the blood-smeared knife in its center. I felt a sudden surge of violence and frustration, and I began to kick away the chiseled wood of the circle like some crazy man. Reilly bear-hugged me and told me to stop acting like a fool. He was the one man I completely trusted and regarded as a brother, and I needed to stay calm and see him out safe and back to his family.

  We slept with our utility belts that night and I had the lone rifle with me. It didn’t provide much comfort but, regardless, having the small chainsaw clipped to my belt made me feel a little better. We had them to cut off small branches or remove undergrowth that impeded our logging lines. You could start the thing with one hand if you had to, which gave us a small sense of security. It was a powerful tool that we could use in case we needed to defend ourselves, which seemed more like than not. It was the one thing that had come to save my life despite it also being the reason that I no longer have my left hand.

  We woke up the next morning to the sound of the wind coming up through the trees, making it much colder than was usual for August. Reilly and I were apprehensive about leaving and set about making breakfast and som
e sandwiches for the four or five hour hike ahead of us. We glanced out of the windows as we passed them, not speaking to each other, as though we were afraid to make any unintentional sound for fear of some thing breaking the treeline and attacking our building. I tried to think back and assess everything that had happened. How hadn’t I noticed that the birds were gone or that the insects and larger animals had vanished? Nothing stirred except for that damn soft whipping of the wind in the trees – and the scuttling of those blue leaf-like things.

  I want you to understand that those things were completely unnatural and utterly terrifying. The too deep of blue on their veined tops that led down to thin serrated pink edges. They seemed to pulse as they moved along the ground. They would lift up and the tips of the five edges left scratches in the dirt, and the grass and foliage they touched would cinder. Watching them reminded me of that man my brother had mentioned, who now seemed less an oddball and someone I should seek out. My brother was into some strange spiritual stuff and this fellow, Wilhelm Meier, had impressed him as a man of importance. I would go to Seattle if I got out of this and find this mystic who is clued-up concerning the stranger things of reality, acquainted with the secret mysteries our world has wrought.

  Reilly and I had been on the service road for about an hour when I was shaken to my mortal core by his screaming. I was encased with a shaft of piercing cold air such as I had never experienced, and I felt my brain would freeze. Yet still I whirled around to help my friend – but he was gone, gone with nothing but drag marks in the dirt and those hellish leaf things whirling in the air and dancing on the ground. Something in me snapped then, and I screamed with rage as I approached a cluster of the things with an intent to stomp them into bits. What stopped me was the sudden eerie silence all around, an unnatural quiet in which I imagined I could hear my blood course through my veins. One of those things was near my foot, and I shook off my haunted feeling and kicked it a couple of feet from me, surprised at how heavy it seemed as my foot collided with its substance. There was another one near me, and so I bent low and picked it up. It looked dry but was in fact wet and pulpy, heavy in my hand onto which its moisture leaked. That cold liquid felt as if it would burn the tissue of my flesh, and so I tried to drop it to the ground. It was then, god help me, that the leaf-thing flipped over and clutched my hand, which was shot with pain. I tried to shake the thing from me as I was suddenly dragged along the road by something I could not see. My brain became more numb with bitter chill and my eyes seemed to ice over; and then those eyes took on new elements, and I watched as my surroundings began to fade, replaced by an alien vista. A sea of stars in some dark heaven moved slowly above me as I was rooted to an expanse of yellowed grey stone. And then I beheld the monstrosity that made me moan for death.