Black Wings IV

by Edited by S. T. Joshi

  That word, hole, is entirely inadequate to describe what she’s slowly, slowly, slowly fashioning. Just as all the names and epithets worn by the Black Pharaoh are entirely inadequate. In her mind, she can see what she’s making, piecemeal, on the ceiling, because He showed her.

  Hole.

  Breach.

  Tear.

  Whatever.

  When she left the wall, she and Elmwood boy going their separate ways until next week, she went to her hiding place below the Biograph. She sits on the loveseat, trying to ignore her itching, infected hip, and listens to the ticking of the alarm clock, which she also keeps on the wobbly table, perched atop a crooked stack of books capped off with Quantum Mechanics and Experience. She’s always careful to wind the clock whenever she leaves the room below the stage, checking it against the wristwatch supplied by the Guard. She listens and waits impatiently. In the darkness, it’s easy to lose track of time. The tick, tick, ticking of the clock seems to do more to blur moments than to delineate, and so she sometimes wonders why it’s so important to her to keep it wound. But eventually she hears heavy, shuffling footsteps coming down the corridor. They stop just outside the room, and then there’s a protracted moment of silence before the faint, dry sound of an envelope being slipped beneath the door. Sweating, her heart pounding, almost too anxious to breathe, she waits until the footsteps have retreated back the way they came before she lights the candle.

  It’s an envelope sealed with a few drops of yellow wax stamped with the same mark scratched at the bottom left-hand corner of her door. Susannah crouches over the envelope, almost reluctant to touch it, even now, when she can no longer recall how many times this ritual has been repeated. It isn’t necessary to hold a thing in one’s hands in order to recognize the significance with which is has been imbued. She reaches down, her fingers no more than an inch or two above the paper, but she hesitates. Susannah suspects that they all hesitate, the ones who have seen the Black Pharaoh and been chosen to receive these significant messages sealed with yellow wax.

  “Do you mean to wait all night?” a voice whispers from a corner of the room, an inky spot where the unsteady flame of the candle isn’t reaching. But Susannah knows that the candlelight wouldn’t brighten that corner even if she walked over and stood there. Something in the corner is immune to light. She isn’t sure if that something was there when she found the room, or if it followed her. She isn’t sure if all the disciples have black corners and voices that speak to them from black corners.

  Still crouching, Susannah looks over her shoulder, peering at the corner even though she knows there’s absolutely no chance of seeing who or what is there.

  “When I was seven,” she says, “we took a vacation to Yosemite, a camping trip. It was summer, and I lay on the hood of the car. Just me and my father, staring up at the stars. He would point to one and tell me its name. What astronomers called it.”

  “Astronomers were always arrogant fools,” the voice tells her, “thinking they could name a star.”

  “I’d never seen anything like it. The whole sky seemed bathed in white fire. The Milky Way stretched from one horizon to the other.”

  And, she thinks, the sight of them absolutely fucking terrified you, though you never told Dad that. You wanted to crawl beneath the car and hide there until sunrise when there would only be that one familiar star, close and warm.

  She says, “He pointed out the specks that were Mars and Venus and Jupiter.”

  Susannah can hear whatever speaks to her from the corner smile. It smiles in a way that can be heard. “Be grateful to his memory, then. He paved your way to glory. He set the stage that night.”

  “He taught me about the speed of light,” she replies, even if it isn’t a proper reply. “He told me a lot of those stars had died billions of years before we looked up and saw them.”

  That was the first night she understood how small she was, how her only perfection would ever lie in her perfect insignificance in the face of all that universe stretched out above her.

  “You should open the envelope,” the voice says.

  I wanted to crawl beneath the car and lie with my face pressed to the ground. That sky was hungry, and I expected that any moment I would fall up, up, up—forever falling into its jaws.

  “You’d not even be a crumb,” says the corner. It knows the way into her head, so when it hears her thoughts and answers them she isn’t ever surprised. “Doesn’t mean the sky would spare you, but you wouldn’t make a decent morsel. Heaven eats entire galaxies and is still ravenous.”

  Which reminds her of one of the last newscasts before there were no more newscasts and never would be. One of those foolish astronomers described the discovery of an apparent black hole between Saturn and Neptune. He talked about X-ray emissions, the event horizon, and accretion disk. He talked about the death of planets.

  “There are no paths that lead away from the black hole.”

  The scientist might have said that, or it may only be a false memory.

  The sky is eating us alive.

  “The clock is ticking,” says the voice, not meaning, specifically, the clock on the table. Meaning, of course, a clock so vast as to be inconceivable.

  Her hip itches like hell, but she doesn’t scratch it. She picks up the envelope and carries it to the table. She uses a thumbnail to peel back the sticky yellow wax, which smells very faintly of honey. There is an expensive-looking piece of stationery inside, folded over once. As always, the message has been composed in sepia, writing that looks old-fashioned, and Susannah always has imagined that the messages are each written out with an antique fountain pen.

  Each man and woman who receives these envelopes has also received a key to a cryptographic code. No two of these ciphers are identical. She spent a week memorizing hers, then destroyed the ruled index card on which it had been written. Just for her. The Black Pharaoh speaks joyfully in an endless parade of languages learned from his father, and so he has one to spare for each of his chosen.

  “You are a special snowflake,” sneers the voice, and she tries to ignore it, but that works about as well as trying to ignore the prickling irritation where the fungus has taken root in her flesh. “You are a unique butterfly,” laughs the voice.

  Susannah reads the message over several times, and then several times more to be certain that she’s worked it out precisely right. She isn’t permitted to copy it down as she decodes the encrypted equations and stellar coordinates; she has to hold it all in her mind. Copies are much too dangerous when there are so many out there trying their damnedest to ferret out the servants of the tall, thin man who waits in doorways for lost sheep. And as soon as she’s certain she’s got it right, before she climbs atop the ice chest with blue Sharpie in hand, she has to burn it. Not after, which is why she has to be more sure than sure can be that she’s made not even the most minute mistake. She touches one corner of the stationery to the candle’s flame, and the paper catches and burns. She drops it onto the floor and waits until nothing remains but ashes. The whole floor of the room is carpeted in a fine grey layer of ash, smeared beneath her bare feet. She’ll leave wearing ash. She always does.

  “Your own moveable feast,” the voice in the corner whispers. “Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.”

  Star dust.

  “In the end,” the voice reminds her, “not even that much will remain.”

  Susannah needs only fifteen minutes to copy the message onto the concrete ceiling. The Guard can hide inside their pillboxes and lob mortars at the demons who/that come too near the city. The jets and helicopters can fire their air-to-air missiles at the drift-gliders and the polyp clouds. The infantry can spray all the napalm it wishes. Let them. Because this is where the real offensive strikes of the war are being executed and carried out, in this dark, musty room and countless others like it all around the globe.

  The tip of the marker squeaks as she draws lines to connect the dots between stars that only fo
olish men would try to name. She is laying a minefield. She is building a siege engine.

  Susannah only hardly ever sleeps. If her insomnia were complete, that would be a mercy. Because even a woman touched by the hand of that tall, dark man to hasten The End, even such a woman as that, as Susannah, is not immune to fear. To terror. To dread. To be a whirlwind’s concubine is not to be immune from the wind. And, long after midnight, when she has finished with the instructions delivered to her cramped room below the Biograph Theater, she extinguishes the candle and sits down to rest in the loveseat. She only means to get her breath, to clear her head, for the translation, transcription, then the act of laying down those new pieces of his stratagem has left her as drained as it always does.

  But, there in the comforting arms of the darkness, thinking of the wall and No Man’s Land, of the forest and the Elmwood kid, she slips.

  She sleeps.

  She dreams.

  No one is spared in dreams.

  There is no protective ward against the revelations riding on the double-helix of REM and NREM, spat up and out by the amygdala and limbic system to come crawling up from the recesses buried deep in the convolutions of grey matter. In her dreams, Susannah has never been aware that she’s dreaming, never in all her life; that would be another sort of mercy. The worlds of her dreams—before and after the return of New Horizons and the sundering of reality—have always, always, always been as authentic as her waking world.

  She walks along a boulevard that seems to have no beginning and no end. The shells of dead buildings rise up tall on either side of the street, and every empty window frame is another eye. Above Susannah, the sky seethes red with unopposed squadrons of driftgliders. The asphalt beneath her bare feet is sticky, as if it has either never cooled or is melting again. She’s going somewhere, even if she could never say where that might be. She can hear distant artillery, the impotent booming of howitzers. But there is no one here to make a stand. This place, she knows, has fallen to chaos.

  The itch from her infection is maddening, and has spread from her hip all the way down to her leg and across her belly. But she doesn’t scratch, because that only spreads it faster, and she still has so much work to do before she joins the others in the forest.

  “Is this the very last day?” she asks, uncertain whom she intends the question for and not expecting an answer.

  “No,” says a voice very close behind her. It sounds like her mother’s voice, but she doesn’t turn or even look over her shoulder to see. “No, Susannah. It’s not quite as far along as that. On that day, the stars will wink out, one by one. Isn’t that what you’re doing when you draw on the ceiling? Erasing the stars?”

  “Then there are still stars up there, behind the monsters?”

  “Watch where you put your feet,” says the woman who may or may not be her dead mother. “Watch your step. There are no maps here.”

  “No one repairs the roads anymore,” Susannah replies.

  And then she’s come to a crucifix welded together from rusted steel girders, and hung there with coils of baling wire and with railroad spikes is the Elwood kid. He isn’t dead yet. Like Christ at Calvary, he stares Heavenward, as though he might yet be delivered.

  “No one’s coming for us,” she tells him.

  There’s a happy ring of ebony beetles dancing about the base of the cross, singing ebony beetle songs of sacrifice. She thinks about crushing them beneath her heel, all of them, so at least the boy could suffer in peace.

  “We’ll see,” the Elmwood kid whispers through blood and a mouthful of broken teeth. “Nothing is certain. Ain’t that the New Rule?”

  “Nothing is new about uncertainty,” she tells him.

  His blood is the same color as the bellies, throats, and the under-sides of the wings of the driftgliders.

  The Elmwood kid says, “I’ll go for all of them, because there must be someone who will go for all of them.”

  “Who said that?” she asks the Hanged Man.

  “I did. Just now.”

  “No. Someone said it before you.”

  And this is when she sees that there are dozens and dozens of other crucifixes—hundreds, possibly—stretching away along the boulevard before her. This is, she thinks, the Road of Needles. The Road of Infidels.

  “Go away, witch,” he says. “I’m dying. I don’t want you to be here when I die.”

  She walks along the shore of the risen island on the very afternoon that it emerged, when it still dripped with the silt and slime of the seafloor. Heaps of hagfish, ratfish, brittle stars, and sea cucumbers squirm around her ankles, but she feels no revulsion whatsoever. Her back is to R’lyeh, with its warped spacetime and tortured geometry, that utterly alien architecture where the sleeper was imprisoned three hundred million years before the rise of mankind, as the continents slammed one against another in the birth throes of Pangaea and the first tiny reptiles scurried beneath the boughs of steaming Carboniferous jungles.

  Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.

  No, sing that song no more. He is awakened.

  A sanguine sea laps at the basalt shore.

  The second angel poured out his bowl into the sea, and it became like the blood of a corpse, and every living thing died that was in the sea.

  There are fleets of destroyers and aircraft carriers out there, the ships of war, bobbing like toys in a bathtub. Soon enough, the sleeper, no longer sleeping, will wipe them all away, send them straight down to the bottom of the ocean. The bombs begin to the fall, shat out of submarines and silos in China, Nebraska, Russia, India. The clock on a crooked stack of books in a concrete room below Chicago ticks, and then all the world is made of light and fire.

  The fire is a path into cool shade.

  Holocaust to blessed, perpetual gloom.

  This is the day when gates open for Susannah, when the plague fungus has eaten enough that there’s more of it than her. Now she only ever dreams of the gulfs out beyond Pluto and Charon. What’s left of her brain is soothed by narcotic effects of the spores coursing through the sludgy remnants of her bloodstream. So there’s no more pain. There will never again be pain. She goes to the forest with a dozen staggering others. She walks the shadowed lanes between stalks that would put redwoods to shame (if any redwoods still grew). And she finds her place among those who have come before her, a gaping wet vulvic nook in one of the stalks, and she allows that honeyed cleft to receive her. If this is Dante’s Wood of the Suicides, William Blake’s Forest of Self-Murderers, at least there are no harpies to tear at the bodies of the damned.

  And there is peace in unity.

  All wars end, even this last war. Even this wholesale massacre, as it can never truly be said to have been a war. As Mr. Wells wrote, “bows and arrows against the lightning.” And many weeks later, many wax-sealed envelopes later, many nightmares later, many turns at the wall later, on a Sighday the end of this war does finally arrive.

  Susannah watches from the ramparts as the wave rolls across the land, crushing, obliterating, consuming everything in its path. The wave is as high and wide as the sky. It isn’t a wave of water. It moves so slowly that there was time for news of it to reach the city days before it became visible, rolling in from the southwest. From, she supposes, the direction of R’lyeh. Of Hell. Some have fled the city, bound for the deserts that once were Wisconsin. But those refugees are few, a scattered parade of the last enclaves of Hope and Determination. They are the doomed unwilling to accept an impending fate, and so Susannah can only think of them as cowards. Better to stand here and bear witness at the conclusion of human history. The wave is a theater curtain drawing shut after the actors have taken their final bows and retreated to the wings. If asked, she would have to admit that the sight of it is not unwelcomed. After more than five years, almost a quarter of her life, Susannah is ready, and she has done her part to usher in this moment.

  “It can’t be real,” the Elmwood kid whispers in a whisper that is more awe
than terror. “Sue, It can’t be real.”

  “It’s real,” she assures him. “Few things have ever been more real than that.”

  He raises his left arm and points towards the place where the horizon used to be.

  “Nothing can be that…” But then he trails off.

  “In its way,” she says, “it’s beautiful.” She stands, moving in an effort not to scratch at the welts and boils and spongy tissue that has spread from her hip across her belly, between her legs, up her entire back. In the old days, no one with such an advanced stage of the plague would ever have been permitted to remain on the wall.

  But beggars can’t be choosers.

  The wave oozes forward, rolling inch by inch by inch.

  Her final envelope simply called it Shuggoth.

  Despair, for by your hand comes the annihilator even of time, and those once rebels who were legion have been made whole and imbued with inconceivable intent, and the name placed upon it is Shuggoth.

  The Black Pharaoh has allowed her to play a role in this extinction. The lines, angles, and remaining interstices marked off on so many secret walls within the city, they are all, in their way, midwives and heralds of the wave. As a reward, those who crafted them will pass from the cosmos, or, more accurately, into the post-cosmic void, with some small part of their dignity intact. Of course, this gift is a subjective perception and nothing more; the star-born harbingers of oblivion—conceived outside the quantum-foam cradle of this universe—offer no gifts, no favors to the faithful.

  No one mans the howitzers. No jets are scrambled for a closing show of defiance. There is not even panic in the streets. The people who have remained in the city have accepted what is coming, and now there is only the waiting. They have a few more hours at the most.

  The Elmwood kid points at the sky now. When Susannah looks up, she can see that the stars are winking out, one by one.