Black Wings IV

by Edited by S. T. Joshi

  He struggled to make himself heard, to make his words into sound. “I don’t want to know this—”

  “You already know it. They have their pet theories, but they can’t face the truth. They’re the ones who cut us off from the Dream. Movies and TV and everything we consume, all that energy wasted to make all those false realities more real than our own. They’ve already made waking life a dream and the dreamers into a mushy mass-mind where everyone shares the same dream of being the only one who matters.

  “That’s why, whenever they catch someone who grew up without media saturation—Islamic terrorists, home-schooled fringers, feral kids, or chronic wards of the state like yourself—they wreck their sleep schedule and test them to destruction trying to find out how to repair what’s gone wrong with the rest of us.”

  His frustration swelled into a bubble that enclosed them both. Eyes oozed all around them, bathing them in vacant scrutiny. “Who are you, really? Where are you? You’re not in jail. You don’t have a dog in this fight. I just want to go home. I want to wake up…”

  She shook her head and shed sparks. The knives sang like wind chimes. Burning wind threw him down so he found himself staring up into her eyeless face. “Forget about waking up. They can’t even wake you up now. The lucid dreaming program runs in ninety-day cycles. If you’re this deep, you’re probably a brain in a bucket with some jumper cables on it by now. They use any excuse to cut you open, sell your organs. The Dream is the only real afterlife, the only real state where human minds have survived the death of their bodies. You have to go through to the other side. Find the one who stands between humanity and the Gate of Deeper Slumber. Find it and kill it.”

  “Why should I?”

  She tilted her head and now she had eyes like opals, and a smile like molten diamonds. “I belong to the man who can lead us to the true Dream.”

  He inhaled the bubble, pulling her toward him. “I’ll put your ass to sleep, don’t worry. But what’s in it for me?”

  Her sly diamond smile turned to coal. “Everything mortal will fail you.”

  “I won’t fail you.” He breathed in the blood and wine heat of her, and became a man.

  “You will,” she said. “And I’m not mortal.”

  She kissed him. A spark passed from her lips and bored into his brain, burning synapses to slag, creating strange new paths and echoing voices in his mind. His head exploded and he woke up.

  He floated above a desolate wasteland of ashen dunes. Glowering over the horizon, a sickly white mountain with a huge, hideous monument carved into it. Eroded limestone features slowly emerged from the gray void, until he realized that the face of the mountain was his own.

  Tubes ran up his nose and down his throat, and an IV dripped glucose into his arm. Nobody had ever put so much effort into keeping him alive. His body jerked as regulated high-voltage pulses raced through it. A rubber plug in his mouth kept him from biting through his tongue.

  From somewhere out in the murky void beyond the bed, a ghastly panorama of distorted faces leered down, dire constellations that blurred and warped and spun off flaming comets of words that tumbled to detonate upon the twisted wreckage of Andre Kellogg’s body.

  “Mr. Kellogg…Is he, can he…He is? OK….Tre, your mother says you like to be called Tre … . You’re in a secure ward at MU Hospital. You’ve been an inmate at a private juvenile correctional institution, and you’ve been under sedation for most of the last fourteen months…. We’re very sorry for your discomfort, but the parent company was in no way legally responsible for what happened. This affadavit releases us of liability….”

  Big pregnant pause, filled with the sound of breathing machines.

  “Now, all the records were destroyed….What we’re trying to ascertain is the objective of the experiment that was performed on you….Anything you could volunteer would be invaluable….Can he even hear me?”

  He tried, but could not get any closer to his body. A soft but irresistible wind, the repulsion of like magnetic charges, pushed him back. He could only watch as his hand reached out for the pen and mechanically signed the form.

  He drifted off and they left his body alone and when he woke up, he was still months of agony away from walking without assistance, but he would survive…and more, he would get something he never could have hoped for—a second chance. He could recover and start over with a clean slate and the knowledge that the broken, insane system had failed to swallow him whole—

  He woke up on another table—a cold steel one, and the lights in his face hid the masked canine faces of the ghouls who cut him open and played inside him.

  “Jesus, look at these lungs. What are these kids smoking these days?”

  “Dibs on the liver…”

  He turned away and flew, burning through the restraints and the red curtains of the operating theater, and then he was racing through the trees of a forest. He ran like a flayed rabbit, hunched over to hold his slit belly together. The surgeons chased him through the misty forest on all fours, baying his secret name. He threw scraps of himself over his shoulder and escaped when they stopped to eat them. Through the mist and great cathedral groves, he stalked until he came to the edge of a chain of purple, snow-crowned mountains.

  A vast ruined city of giants melted into inky pools and indigo rivers of shadow in the faltering glow of a bloated purple sun. The road passed among towering mausoleums and orgies of shattered statuary. He heard a brittle clap of falling brickwork and whirled in time to see her vanish behind a rock.

  “I see you!” he shouted, then turned his back. He needed nothing from her now.

  “You shouldn’t have come here!” she cried out. “You’ll just deliver it to them—”

  He threw a rock at her, but it seemed to pass right through her, confirming his fear. “Get lost, you’re not real! You took over my body and sold me out—”

  “You’re still confused, poor dear. Are you really so sure that you’re real?”

  He threw another rock, but it turned to smoke as it left his hand. The street subsided beneath him, like a great beast letting out a long, last breath.

  A pulsating flood of pus boiled up out of the earth, the distilled infection of a mortal wound. Before Tre could make her understand, the sea of sickness had drawn itself up into a suppurating tidal wave.

  Domed temples collapsed under its lurching, liquid weight. It stretched upwards and curled overhead, countless human bodies suspended within its gelatinous mass.

  “Kill it!” she screamed. “That’s the thing that stands in the way of the Dream! You can be the one who saved the sanity of the whole human race, Tre! You can be the one to slay the dragon—”

  It didn’t look like a dragon. A wall of liquid flesh crashed down on the causeway, flinging bricks larger than cars aside like grains of sand.

  He ran so fast he flew over the buckling plaza, dodging falling columns until he came to the end of the abandoned city. The road led to the head of a staircase that wound down the sheer mountain face into shoals of dimly glowing clouds far, far below.

  She stood behind him. She looked younger than he was, but he knew better than to trust anything he saw. “It’ll crush you if you take another step. It’ll eat you up so you die inside it forever.”

  —Fight that, I can’t—

  At his back now, she pushed him toward it. “You only have to face it to drive it back. Then we’ll escape—together…”

  He didn’t know what to believe. He embraced her, pivoted, and threw her over his shoulder into the gathering protoplastic storm. The monstrosity recoiled, shivering with joy as it digested her. Seemingly forgotten, he escaped, sobbing with terror and relief.

  The treads of the staircase were too tall to scale alone, but he lowered himself over each of seventy cliff-like risers and dropped from the last step just as the terminal rays of daylight failed. Somewhere along the way, the stairs had grown smaller, or he had grown larger, until he stumbled over them and had to stoop to proceed down the tu
nnel at the foot of the stairs. Satisfied with his offering, the abomination did not follow.

  The tunnel abruptly grew into a grotto lit by a pillar of white fire. The walls were riddled with holes, doors, and gates. Some were rusted shut or blocked by sheets of cobweb or clumps of fungi, while others were lit by torches and hung with faded bill-boards and flashing video screens.

  He did not mean to bow to the two ancient men who stood between him and the maze of doorways. They stood taller than the tallest he could make himself, and wore monk’s robes and peaked hats with feathers as high as their gray beards were long.

  Something about them reminded him of ancient Egypt: the sandstone skin, the hieroglyphic nonsense that came from their hidden lips; but they were older than Egypt, older than mankind. Yet he did not look away, for he recognized the craggy, merciless cast of their faces. They were judges.

  One of them took his shoulder and pressed him down into his true shape. You must present your ka, my son, to enter.

  He didn’t understand, but this was no time to show weakness. “You can’t stop me. I faced the thing outside, and I beat it. I’ve come to open the gate of dreams…” In the name of the gods Burroughs-Wellcome, Bechtel and Wackenhut … “I claim the right to pass for all humankind…”

  The judges looked at one another. Nasht, the one who touched him, carved a question in the air, and his brother, Kaman-Thah, answered with a shattering laugh.

  The thing you defeated is the diseased dreaming of all your brothers and sisters. You saw it as it saw itself, for that is its sickness. Each of you hates the whole as it hates itself, and so you can never be free of each other, and so you can never be one. Separated from your souls, you can only be reunited in dreams. So they may never pass into the land of deeper sleep, as you may still … but where is your ka?

  “My what?”

  The judge held up a mirror. In its murky depths Tre saw, for just a moment, Ariadne reaching out to him as she fell into the countless mouths of the thing that chased them, but then he only saw himself, gasping like a beached fish.

  Your soul, boy … what have you done with your soul?

  He tore free of them and raced toward the wall of doors. They moved after him so fast their human masks slipped, and for just a moment he glimpsed their true faces. But they couldn’t stop him, because he knew what he was looking for.

  She showed him. He thought she had betrayed him, but she had showed him what none of the others had discovered, the true nature of the only door that opened. At last, he would do something that mattered. He would set himself free, and the whole human race—

  With his eyes wide open and his hands steepled in a diver’s prayer, he leapt into the pillar of living flame.

  The fire was blinding and all-consuming.

  Beyond it lay a place made of joy. He had dreamt of it before, but now that he had truly reached it, he found a purity that rendered reality a pallid, dirty shadow. The light resolved and softened, and he saw the lands of Dream—

  And then he was dragged backward through the fire.

  Only by slow, agonizing degrees did he come to realize that he was under restraints in bed and being jolted by temporal electrical shocks. Awake.

  “Hey, the shitbird’s still alive. What’d I tell you?”

  “I didn’t bet you.”

  “Whatever. Hey, kid—which one of these tubes is he breathing through? Hey, kid, you want to talk now?”

  He looked right through them. This was just another bad dream. He would wake up any moment, in the Dream that was more real than waking.

  “Drop the act, kid. You’ve only been in solitary for forty-eight hours. The sooner you tell us what they said, the sooner you can go back.”

  This wasn’t a dream. With cold surgical tools, they pinched about ten places on his body that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was awake, that had him begging to tell them everything.

  But the words wouldn’t come.

  So that night, they started all over again.

  THE PRISM OF DARKNESS

  Darrell Schweitzer

  Darrell Schweitzer is the author of The Shattered Goddess (Donning/Starblaze, 1983), The White Isle (Borgo Press, 1989), The Mask of the Sorcerer (NEL, 1995), Living with the Dead (PS Publishing, 2008), and others. His more than 300 short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. He has published books about H. P. Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany, and much other literary nonfiction. He is a four-time World Fantasy Award nominee and one-time winner and was for nineteen years coeditor of Weird Tales.

  THE LAST NIGHT ON EARTH OF DR. JOHN DEE, MORTLAKE, England, March 1609:

  He knew what was coming for him on the stairs. What he found fearsome about the dark was not the unknown terrors it might hold, or the fathomless abyss which he had come to contemplate more and more in these past weeks and months, but that he knew precisely what was there.

  He heard the footsteps.

  The room filled with a black mist. The candle on the desk where he worked assumed a strange halo.

  Still, as if this were no more than an ordinary visitation, he puzzled over a difficult passage in the Greek text he was translating, and jotted down some notes without looking up until he was done.

  Before him, like a paper lantern floating in swirling black smoke, hovered a yellow mask, strangely fashioned, the shape behind it not quite possessing the familiar contours of humanity.

  The eyes opened, and they were very dark, but somehow intense at the same time, like obsidian fire.

  Remembering a play he had once seen, back when he’d had time for such things, he spoke aloud, “Ah, Mephistophilis…”

  The other quoted back at him, “Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of Heaven.”

  Dee laughed. “I hardly think so. I hardly think you have come to offer me that, my old friend.”

  “Am I your friend,” said the other, “or your patron?”

  He looked at the growing piles of pages before him, the fragile, half-charred copy of the Greek text, and the newly scribbled, growing pile of the English version he had worked so long to render. Yes, this other had commissioned it of him, when all his human colleagues turned away from him and laughed, or just forgot about him, as the king and the emperor had forgotten about him in his old age and poverty.

  Only his a new patron cared.

  Or his master.

  He looked at the pages. Even as he sat there, his palsied hands trembling, his fingers barely able to hold his pen, the pages seemed to increase in number all by themselves, covered with his own handwriting or something like it, as if the dark and forbidden work on which he had embarked now had continued from its own inertia, as if the book were translating itself, without any further effort on his part.

  What was the purpose of the translation anyway? He could only wonder. Surely learned men could already read the Greek, or, easier still, a Latin version that was purported to exist, and this was hardly the sort of thing to be popular with the half-literate, rowdy crowds that finger-stained their way through broadsides and quarto copies of frivolous plays.

  Surely the only purpose for such a translation was so that the content of the book, the thoughts and vistas and terrors that it contained, could be filtered through a single mind, even a mind as drifting, as failing as his own. If that was what was really going on. If the book really was, now, translating itself. He was no more than a focal instrument now, like a prism through which light passes. Or in this case, darkness.

  “A prism of darkness,” he said aloud.

  Indeed, the darkness seemed to close around him. The candle’s light lost its color, until it was almost gray.

  The mask floated before him, and before him too, as if revealed from out of the folds of some infinitely dark, indistinguishable cloak, was a single pale hand, not quite skeletal, but thin, delicate, and somehow shifting before his uncertain eyesight like mercury made flesh.

  “Are you ready to go with me then?” said the other.

  �
��I am. I would see these wonders about which I have thus far only read.”

  He reached out to take the hand that reached for his. He slid down from his high stool, but his legs buckled under him, and he stumbled, and fell, and hit his head on something.

  “Father!” someone cried. “Father! Oh, help him up!”

  Strong hands took hold of him. He reached up to where his head hurt. A more gentle hand pulled his own away.

  “I think it’s only a bruise.”

  “Shall we send for a doctor of physic?”

  “Sister, I am a doctor of physic.”

  They were helping him to his feet, and the deeper of the two voices said, “Can you stand, sir?”

  “Will he be well?”

  “I think we should get some wine in him. Then put him to bed.”

  “He’s worked so hard at his labors.”

  “He needs rest.”

  Now they were gently easing him down the stairs. They sat him in a large, comfortable chair before a table. There was a cup pressed into his hands.

  For a time it seemed that the voices around him were that almost bird-like babble-babble of the Enochian tongue, the language of the hosts of angels, which he had once tried so hard to learn. But no, they were only speaking English, and he knew them.

  He opened his eyes fully and saw that he was seated before the table in his own dining room, on the first floor of the house. There was no swirling black mist. The candles had no strange halo, nor had the color been leached out of their light. A fire burned merrily in the fireplace.

  “Father, look,” said his daughter, Katherine, who cared for him in these last years, “it’s Arthur, come to visit.”

  “Back from school?”

  “No, Father. From court. I spoke to the king some days ago.”

  “Ah yes, God save His Majesty… ”

  “Here drink this.” Someone pressed the wine cup to his lips. He drank, and it did seem to relax him. Once brother Arthur and Katherine were convinced that he had not injured himself in his fall, that he was as sound as he might be at such an age, they all sat together. An hour or so passed. They dined. He ate little. Arthur, who was a grown man now, not the boy who had gone away to school, chattered on about his attempts to find royal favor, and how, if he did, the king might send him to Russia in a few years.