Black Wings IV

by Edited by S. T. Joshi

  “Changed…how?” Glenn wanted to know, his professional interest now as aroused as his personal investment in Lily; in truth, he often wondered whether these were one and the same thing.

  She refused to look at him, just continued striding over rocks. “There’s something I’ve never told you. It’s something I’ve never told anyone. Only Mum and I know. But now you should, too.”

  “Go on. I’m listening.”

  She laughed again, the noise harsh and mocking in such a motionless atmosphere. “Oh, I like your objective distance,” she said, clinging to a chain around her neck, one of the weird amulets she’d once bought in a New Age shop. “You pretend it’s for our benefit—you all do, everyone in the therapy game. But actually, I sometimes think it’s for yours.”

  “You mean, to stop us from getting involved with clients?”

  “If you like.”

  Now it was Glenn’s turn to be audacious. He said at once, “Well, that’s already happened in this case, hasn’t it?”

  He’d suspected the comment would knock her off-guard, and so it proved. Lily grew silent for a moment, as if addressing the vast sky. But then, her voice motivated again by a need for confession, she said, “My dad used to beat us up, both Mum and me. And very, very often.”

  Glenn was certainly shocked, he could admit that much, but he somehow kept his response calm and neutral. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  Her laugh on this occasion sounded more like a scoff. “Hell, what’s to tell? It’s the usual male deal. In his case, a projection of unfulfilled desire. Seeking excuses to grow angry over a lack of opportunity to perform antisocial acts, whatever sad, common, and dull things these may be. Jesus, Glenn, you’ve read all the books. It ain’t rocket science.”

  Something about her phrase caused Glenn to look up again at the moon, hanging in the sky like an indifferent face. Its eyes were craters, its mouth some tranquil sea. Then he glanced back at his girlfriend, but his only thought at this stage was to wonder whether her mother’s apologetic nature, the way she’d disparage her cooking before guests had even tasted it, had a direct causal link to her husband’s earlier behaviour. And if that was true, what on earth had this done to the child, to poor young Lily?

  “We’re here,” his girlfriend announced, halting yards ahead of Glenn, her tone undeniably excited. And before Glenn could properly examine what appeared to be the dark mouth of a broad tunnel beyond her, she went rapidly on. “I’ve come here almost every year since I was about twelve. You see, what happened back then happened on September the fourteenth, my birthday. I’ve read all about the myth online, and it’s only tonight when it works. While standing inside in a tiny dip in the ground, you have to look up and see the moon passing over that hole in the cave’s ceiling. And when it’s absolutely aligned, like a cap, the cave is sealed…sealed by the moon. And that,” she finished, with little uncertainty in her voice any more, “that is when you see him.”

  A god of desire, a master of rage, a spiritual advocate of every furtive taboo you or anyone else has ever considered … Hell, had Lily been suggesting earlier that her father had once wanted to sexually abuse her? Or was she trying to tell Glenn, whom she surely trusted now, that the older man had gone that far? In reference to male behaviour, Lily had used the words “sad, common, and dull things”—and Glenn considered the implication here all too transparent.

  But none of this squared with what he knew about his girlfriend’s father. It was true that the other tall man was reserved, given to non-communication and periods of detachment. But that was the point: he seemed harmless, as if there was no hurt in him. He certainly hadn’t seemed the type—and Glenn, in his professional role, had witnessed many of the kind—to commit domestic violence…let alone anything even more sordid.

  As Glenn wondered whether he was being naïve and still had much to learn, Lily went on.

  “I grew bigger in my teens, but never big enough. I don’t why you have to be so tall to see the moon cross the path of that hole on this particular night. The past is weird, full of stupid nonsense…but in this case, the myth seemed to work. My dad went into the cave alone and observed the cave being sealed by the moon. And when he came back out, he was a different man. He never hit either of us again. It was as if…as if…oh, I don’t know… ” Now her voice sounded desperate and frustrated, but eventually she added, “… as if he’d seen something in there that had changed everything.”

  At that moment, as Glenn continued processing left-field thoughts about an ancient god of the darker realms of human experience, Lily paced away from the snaking entrance to what was obviously Mooncap Cave and started goading him again.

  “I want you to go inside,” she said, her manipulative persona reappearing, teasing and taunting. With one hand, she pinched her small breasts and then placed the other in her groin, clutching and rubbing it. “I want to know what my dad saw that day fifteen years ago, Glenn. Only you are tall enough.”

  Two aspects of this latest information troubled him. The first was the age at which his girlfriend’s dad had become less violent and possibly even more than that. Lily was now twenty-one, and fifteen years ago she’d have been just six. Six. If she’d experienced unnatural episodes at such an age, it was hardly surprising that she now behaved so provocatively, so moodily, so unpredictably.

  But it was the other issue that unsettled Glenn the most. She’d said, “Only you are tall enough.” And did that imply that she’d agreed to be his lover for only one reason—his height? This wasn’t as comical as it sounded; Glenn had read many cases about relationships in which relative physical stature was a crucial component. Some women refused to date short men, and this couldn’t be ascribed to either social mores or evolutionary imperatives. It was a psychological preference, plunging deep into Freudian territory. Women with short fathers might be drawn to taller men as a way of defusing incestuous tensions, for instance. And those with tall fathers…

  Glenn refused to think about that. After all, his girlfriend had said nothing more about her dad than alluding to his violence before he’d entered the cave and his passivity after emerging. Maybe only that was involved, and Glenn was inventing the rest the way people in his profession often did, a clichéd occupational hazard, seeing smoke without fire.

  Now Lily had placed one hand on his groin, which stirred with irrepressible need. “Go in there for me,” she said in a low voice, like a coquettish temptress in full force. “And when you come back out, tell me what you saw.”

  His penis stiffening under her imperious grasp—rational objectivity had little impact on the autonomous body; Glenn knew this from his studies, too—he pulled away slightly, but not so far that he was unable to relish these impromptu furtive developments. He imagined him and Lily walking back to the campsite later, after he’d got this foolishly symbolic act out of the way, and enjoying fiery sex in their tent. This was surely a watershed test, he thought, stepping away from his girlfriend and towards the shadowy mouth of the cave. By re-enacting a key episode from her disturbed youth, he could gain her trust and even help her become a normal person. That was what they wanted, after all: himself, Lily, her mother…and even her culpable father. Normal. Prosaic. Like the humdrum world with all its delusional mythologies, its ancient, innocuous charms.

  Without further hesitation, turning briefly to observe his giddy girlfriend with dope-narrowed eyes, Glenn stepped inside a tunnel darkened by the mysterious moon.

  Fortunately, the tunnel, about twenty yards long and chinking from side to side, wasn’t too cramped. Glenn suffered mildly from claustrophobia, a psychological condition that had a no more insidious cause than being a big guy in a world carpentered for smaller people. But this was no manmade place, no tailored refuge from wild nature. This was the world itself, in all its cold, murky reality.

  He strode across standing pools, residue from a recent downpour, before he and Lily had arrived at the campsite. Water also dripped from the top of the tunnel, more t
han once tapping him on his neck, like an insect falling to deliver its sting. But the sharp sensation was just coldness, sending shivers along his spine. He felt fearful, he could admit, but this was simply an atavistic response to his subterranean location and nothing to do with his girlfriend’s words when she’d bullied him into coming down here. He wondered again what this foolish game betokened. He was happy to do all he could to help her, especially after learning about such dark secrets from her past. But surely this went beyond the call of his occupational duties. Rounding a final bend in the dim, dank-smelling tunnel, he observed light up ahead, etching all the stone around him with crawling life. Then, entering a circular cave with a hole as big as his head in its ceiling, he realised where the illumination was coming from: the moon beyond that gap above, just visible from this angle.

  Despite his mounting unease, Glenn tried telling himself that he’d consented to his girlfriend’s eccentric request as a personal favour and not a professional obligation. He was here as her lover, and must now experience some nebulous part of her girlhood, when she’d been too young—only six years old—to remember anything accurately. The truth probably involved her father experiencing a paradigm shift in how he related to his family; maybe his wife had stood up to him, delivering an unambiguous ultimatum: No more violence or we’ll both leave, your daughter and I. And the girl would have first noticed this while holidaying in the area, her childish mind, with all its innate capacity for animism, attributing the change to such a rich environment. Later, while researching the experience with credulous need, she’d learnt about the age-old myth associated with this small cave, the way the moon passed its hole, and the thing that allegedly dwelled here…It was all nonsense, of course, as Glenn was about to prove.

  Just then, noticing a slight dip at the heart of the shadow-filled cave and heading quickly towards it, he considered his own youth and all the commonplace events he might have similarly misinterpreted, imbuing them with magic and other primitive modes of thought. He’d been an anxious child, given to violent tantrums. But in hindsight, Glenn thought these had been more to do with fear. He recalled being unable to sleep as a boy, even as late as his teenage years. That shadow beyond his bedroom curtains hadn’t been a tree in his home’s front garden, but a murderer come to bear him inexorably away. These episodes, which some might attribute to unaddressed psychological issues, but which Glenn ascribed to common vicissitudes of uncertain youth, had lasted until he was an adult and had taken charge of his life with a career, a home, and now a partner. Lately he found himself afraid of hardly anything…until today, of course, standing in this spooky cave with only a perverted fairy story to make sense of it.

  At that moment, from his new position, standing in a small dip that seemed designed for a human’s bipedal posture, he spotted the moon gliding across the neat disc of the ceiling’s hole. Only its right edge was presently visible, but Glenn was astonished how quickly it moved, as if accelerated by his queasy perception, which arose from either denied fear or the drug he’d imbibed earlier. But in truth, he knew this had to do with context, the stone framework reducing the satellite’s cosmic capacity, turning it into a small cap over the cave. Now he realised why Lily had insisted that he observe this phenomenon: anyone shorter or even taller would struggle to watch the moon describe this autumnal trajectory, moving over the gap so that its edges neatly aligned with those of the hole. He also understood why he’d had to stand in this dip in the cave’s cold floor; it wasn’t just about the angle at which he looked, but also his distance from the ceiling: his height and spatial location were perfectly combined to observe this ancient, mystical event.

  And now it was about to happen.

  As the bloated, bony moon nearly filled the hole in the ceiling, Glenn thought back to everything Lily had said, about how it had irrevocably changed her father, transforming him from a monster to some docile recluse. Assuming for a moment this had really happened, what impact might it have on Glenn, who was already quietly respectful? Would his reptilian self, the Freudian beast that allegedly existed inside all people, be roused from its depths? But that was stupid, stupid. Glenn glanced away from the moon now filling the hole in the cave’s ceiling.

  That was when he saw it.

  Sitting against one wall directly ahead, the figure was as large as himself, but considerably fleshier, great folds hanging off a combination of bones that seemed too slipshod to sustain any movement. It was as pale as the cosmic satellite Glenn had just been observing. Its face, insofar as this could be described, was a hybrid travesty of knotted skin and squashed features: eyes fought for supremacy amid a twisted nose and a razor-sharp mouth. Its ears were mere nubs, and what little hair existed on its flaky scalp looked like wire ripped from some faulty power socket. The whole of it appeared to thrum with incipient motion, even though it remained remarkably stationary; its elongated limbs, little more than sockets held together by stretches of sinew, hung laxly beside a corrugated torso, like wax dripping from a misshapen candle. It smelled like a zoo, foul and intense. Then it made a strange sound, like a trillion bees trapped in a locked room, and when it finally exhaled a bronchial breath, words soon followed, the aged utterances of something beyond such petty concerns as life and death.

  If this was a human language, it was like none Glenn had ever heard. The syllables the thing spoke bounced around the cramped cave, as if they were beasts crashing against a cage’s interior, powerfully seeking an exit. Glenn felt his psyche flinch from the sound and wondered whether his girlfriend outside might think a minor earthquake was occurring. But then he recalled how much she knew about this event; she’d been here before, after all, and would surely expect a violent trauma in this tiny, isolated part of the planet. Indeed, everything she’d told him was true: a god of desire, a master of rage, a spiritual advocate of every furtive taboo you or anyone else has ever considered … This figure now sat in front of him, booming some message Glenn was unable to comprehend.

  He flicked his glance from the creature, from its unreal face and stirring limbs. Then he found himself looking once more at the moon capping that hole in the cave’s ceiling…but now it had begun moving away, sliding further across the gap, its left edge parting from the makeshift lip. Seconds later, sensing a shriek of terror building inside him like the presence of something infinitely more dangerous than mere sound, he fled from the spot he’d occupied, in full view of that horribly bony entity, which had thundered out incomprehensible words, its flesh beginning to tremble and writhe.

  While heading again for the exit—that damp, snaking tunnel—he thought he noticed in his peripheral vision the figure depart with the moon that had brought it, but he lacked sufficient confidence to conduct a proper assessment. He simply wanted to get back outside, safe in the arms of Lily, someone who’d once experienced by proxy the horror he’d just endured. The creature’s manifestation—its long-lasting effects—had altered her life forever, and this had surely been to the good.

  As Glenn re-emerged from the underground layer and took hold of his waiting girlfriend, who simply smiled that knowing smile, he couldn’t help wondering how it would all go for him.

  “So come on, Glenn, tell me what you saw in there.”

  He’d already decided that he’d suffered some kind of pot-induced hallucination in the cave; that was a rational interpretation, the only explanation that made sense now that his emotional engagement in the event had diminished.

  But Lily didn’t want to hear such a humdrum account. Laid beside him in their tent, her eyes sparkled and her lips trembled. Her whole body, dressed only in knickers and a feminine vest, seemed to shake with imminent revelations.

  When they’d arrived back in the campsite, it had been raining heavily, and this had provided Glenn with a perfect excuse not to stop and talk until he’d got his recollections into some kind of order. At the tent, he’d stooped and pushed aside all their goods inside—including that heavy mallet—before encouraging his girlfriend to enter,
with him quickly bringing up the rear. Then, after stripping off their wet clothing, they’d sat and ate sandwiches until Lily, with scarcely suppressed eagerness, had refused to tolerate the silence by asking her plaintive question.

  Glenn looked at her, still struggling to reconcile what he’d witnessed inside that cave with the uncomplicated way he’d always lived his life. He’d rarely done drugs, at least not hard ones, and the last time he’d suffered a bad dream was maybe five years ago, while studying for exams to qualify in his profession. But…was there something deeper in his existence, something of which the thing he’d seen less than an hour earlier had been a subconscious symbol? Yes, this was surely now about him; the entity lurking in that shadowy place, a vision conjured from inaccessible memories and sustained by perverse captivation, had tried telling him something, the way it had communicated a life-transforming message to his girlfriend’s father, fifteen years ago. The creature was certainly delusional, but no less true in its meaning.

  Lily was growing increasingly impatient. “Come on, tell me,” she said, and immediately scrabbled off the floor like an insect, swung one leg over his body, and then straddled him like a deadweight. She pressed her groin against his exposed boxer-shorts and lifted his hands to cup her pert breasts beneath her vest. Then, her voice no less insistent, she said slowly and surely, “I…want …to…know.”

  “What…what do you want to know?” Glenn replied, becoming aroused despite the bullish way she always tried getting what she wanted from him.

  “Everything,” she said, her tongue darting in her mouth like some forked appendage. “Describe it to me. Include every detail. Make me feel as if I was there.”