Black Wings IV

by Edited by S. T. Joshi

“Azathoth…” Cassandra breathed wonderingly. “Now we know… ”

  Muirhead nodded. “In other words, all things in the universe are one thing manifesting itself as many things. It’s all one Matrix. The early RV pioneers discovered this, but it wasn’t part of our national-security mission, so that insight was kept within the Unit. No need to know for the civilian world.”

  “Go on,” Wentworth urged.

  “Nyatlathotep is an artifact of the implicate order, an issue of Azathoth, from which all reality springs. Now he’s loose on our level. He has one objective: to bring our local reality to a close. Why, we don’t know. But that’s his mission in the explicate order: to fold it back into the implicate order. To uncreate it.”

  “And you think you brought him here?” Wentworth prodded.

  Muirhead winced. “Inadvertently.”

  “But if the world is near the End Times, there’s still Jesus.” Muirhead thinned his lips. “I don’t know that,” he said at last.

  “It says so in the Bible. Have you ever read your Bible?”

  “It’s not my Bible, sir,” Muirhead said stiffly. “But I would like to venture a working hypothosis. It is this: nothing was known of Target N until H. P. Lovecraft evidently channeled a brief piece of writing describing how he would come out of Egypt during a time of tribulation and augur the end of life as we know it. Such a time would be marked by political upheavals and unusual heat.”

  “And the ice caps are melting,” Wentworth said thickly.

  “Yes, the ice caps are melting. We’re deep in October and its feels like August. But hear me out. One element of the theory is that all minds are one mind, and godlike in their capacity to create reality. We now know that as individuals, bubbled off from our Source, we exist disconnected from our innate divinity.”

  “I don’t buy this line of thinking,” Wentworth snapped. “There’s only one deity, indivisible…”

  “As individuated sparks of the godhead,” Muirhead went on steadily, “we can sometimes manifest miracles unconsciously. Specific examples are innumerable and range from drawing long-lost objects back to us through synchronic chains of events to poltergeist-class telekinesis.”

  “Superstition!” spat Wentworth.

  “He’s going somewhere with this, sir,” Cassandra inserted. “Please hear him out.”

  Wentworth subsided. He was sweating profusely now.

  “I have been told twice that ‘Love’ is the creator of Nyarlathotep. We have so far assumed that meant God. For ‘God is Love’ is a recurrent tenet of all major religions.”

  Muirhead paused. He let the statement hang in the still hot air.

  “Suppose what was meant wasn’t God Almighty, as in a divine creator being, but a particular spark of that supposed entity? One highly imaginative although bizarre spark. An eccentric unique among his kind.”

  Wentworth frowned. “I don’t quite follow.”

  “Suppose Nyarlathotep was the product of the powerful unconscious mind of a long-dead writer of cosmic horror stories, Howard Philips Lovecraft. Suppose he didn’t merely channel Nyarlathotep. What if he created him, and all his train? The Ultimate Gods, Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth. What if Lovecraft was powerful enough to create these dark forces he wrote about, and one of them has come to sweep the Earth—if not the galaxy—of all life?”

  “Dear sweet Jesus!” Wentworth exploded.

  Cassandra began sobbing raggedly.

  Muirhead went on dully. “We can’t jam the genie back in the bottle because the one who created him, and the only one powerful enough to constrain Nyarlathotep and his intentions, lies dead in his grave. And once created nothing can be uncreated. At least, not by us.”

  “This is a joke,” Wentworth choked out.

  “A cosmic joke,” Muirhead corrected. “On humanity. I once had an encounter out there that proved—”

  “Let me tell you,” Wentworth interrupted savagely. “It will take more than a wild-ass theory to shake my faith in a living God. I believe in the Rapture and the Resurrection. It’s been promised to us. Two thousand years of Christianity can’t be wrong.”

  “One worshipper’s Rapture is another man’s Ragnarok,” Muirhead said. “Out there, Manton used the term ‘Dark Redeemer.’ I think he meant Nyarlathotep.”

  Wentworth bristled. “I’d have a see a sign before I swallow—”

  Cassandra vented a sudden shriek. A shaking finger pointed past Wentworth’s head. All eyes tracked it.

  On the wall was nailed a crucifix. Where the Savior of Men had formerly hung in agony was a lean black figure, head smooth as an eggplant, a spiked tail enwrapped about its left leg.

  “There’s your sign,” Carl Muirhead said softly. “Nyarlat Comes in Peace from beyond the Audient Void.”

  “My God!” Cassandra breathed. “It makes sense. The Void is listening for…what?”

  “For Nyarlathotep to visit his final peace on us all,” Muirhead said. “Just as the Greeks invented their gods to avoid facing the horror of primal chaos, the ancients created Jesus to mask the true myth of the one who will return at the End of Days.”

  Dr. Wentworth straightened his Princeton tie, wiped a suddenly cold sweat mustache off his upper lip and cracked, “Excuse me.”

  After he stepped into his private bathroom, a loud report was heard. There was no accompanying sound of a fall, but very soon a flow of blood began to seep out from under the door sill.

  “We’re done here,” Muirhead said quietly. “We’re done everywhere. Everything is. Marrs said we were scheduled for demolition. He couldn’t have been more clear.”

  Cassandra clutched at the armrests of her chair. “But my children!”

  “Won’t exist much longer. Nothing will.”

  She came out of her seat like a tigress, spitting her words savagely. “But—what do we do? We can’t just not do anything!”

  “There’s nothing to be done. Once it’s all dissolved back into the quantum field, it won’t matter. There won’t be any more of any of us. It will be as if we never existed.”

  “But—”

  “If it’s not today or this month or this year, then next year, “ Muirhead went on raggedly. “It’s only a matter of when and how they want to do it.”

  “Are you even human? We have to stand up. We must! The race. Think of the human race. Future generations!”

  Muirhead stared off into space. “Don’t you understand? We can’t stop Nyarlathotep. We are Nyarlathotep. All of us. We are one with Nyarlathotep!”

  “I refuse to accept this! I won’t! I won’t! I won’t!”

  “Remember my visit to the Throne of God? I didn’t tell you the whole story. It was empty, Cassandra. No one sat there. No one ever had.”

  “No, no, no…”

  “I decided to go back,” Muirhead continued sadly. “To make sure I understood the experience. I went out there and I beheld the face of God. It was radiant, as if it were composed of electrons. I approached. And as I approached, whatever energy composed the face of God separated, the way stars in a galaxy would separate if you flew through it. The face of God was like the face of the man in the Moon—an illusion. It wasn’t there after you got close to it. Behind it, I saw in the underlying reality… others…”

  “What others?”

  “Other gods or beings, or what have you. They were exactly what Lovecraft described. Blind cosmic godlets, mindless and ignorant. I didn’t understand then what they symbolized. I do now.”

  Cassandra was moaning in a low, inarticulate way. Her grief could not find utterance.

  Muirhead kept on. “The earliest minds in the universe must have created them before the religions took hold. Before the concept of One God took root in civilized societies. By that time, it was too late. Just as we create our earthly reality today, they created the Ultimate Gods in the eons long before anyone knew better, just as Lovecraft accidentally created Nyarlathotep, adding to the primal inchoate chaos the Greeks said predated the rise of the Olympian gods, which t
hey imagined because the truth was too terrible to contemplate.” He bowed his head. “There are no gods. No one Creator. There is just the Audient Void of unconscious creation, and since no governing mind, no overriding spiritual authority exists, what was created was absolute chaos. Ultimate Chaos. The crawling chaos. It’s been crawling for untold trillions of kalpas, and will continue to crawl long after Nyarlathotep finally dismantles this segment of creation.”

  Cassandra buried her face in her hands. “Don’t. I—”

  “It’s no use, Cassandra. I’ve correlated my experiences. That’s where they lead…”

  Night had finished falling. A nearly full moon was coming up over a stand of trees. It was breathtakingly big. A pure effulgence seeped through the closed office window. It made one almost feel hope.

  “We should go now,” Muirhead muttered. “They’ll be looking for him soon.”

  Quietly, they exited the NRO building in Chantilly, Virginia, and reclaimed Muirhead’s Honda CR-V. The early evening heat was oppressive. They got into the vehicle like the dead climbing into their coffins. Words rose in their throats, only to die unborn and unuttered.

  Muirhead started the engine. Suddenly it was very dark. Too dark.

  “Where is it!” Cassandra cried, craning her neck upward.

  “Where is what?” Then Muirhead made the connection. It was hard not to. The rising moon had been coming up over the trees, limning them so that the branches resembled spectral cobwebs of wood. But now it was no longer there. A clear night sky was gathering early stars. No cloud obscured them. But where had hung the moon was simply a void.

  “The moon couldn’t just…vanish…” Cassandra moaned, thick-voiced.

  Muirhead scanned the skies. His voice came ragged as cloth. “It didn’t. It’s still there. You just can’t see it. It’s been doused.”

  “Doused? Doused? What are you trying to—” From the glove compartment, she grabbed a flashlight and shone it upward in a foolish effort to locate the lunar orb.

  “Please get hold of yourself,” Muirhead said gently. “The moon reflects light, remember? The light of the sun. We can’t see the moon because it has nothing to reflect.”

  The flashlight fell from her impotent hand. “The sun…”

  Muirhead released a long sigh of complete surrender. “On the other side of the Earth,” he said wistfully, “they’re probably witnessing it firsthand. But we’re fortunate. We have time to say our goodbyes. Not that they matter…”

  “Ridiculous! The moon’s gone behind a cloud, that’s all. We’re jumping at clouds and shadows.”

  Muirhead keyed the engine. “A cloud would be visible. And would block out the stars, too.”

  Unnoticed, a blue-white star flared out of existence low on the horizon. Another followed. Then two more. The entire Milky Way was winking out, soundless and unexpected, dissolving back into the undifferentiated quantum soup from which it first emerged.

  Cassandra scanned the heavens. “I…I don’t see Mars. Or Venus.”

  “Dead worlds with nothing to reflect, just like Earth….”

  Muirhead drove in silence, eyes stony. Above him the unlit lamp of night continued to rise, perhaps for the last time. No human eye could see it, but Carl Muirhead saw it clearly in his hyper-receptive mind. It was round and black and featureless like the mocking mask of Nyarlathotep….

  Deep in his skull, he felt the subauditory vibration of relentless drums, beating, beating, beating the dark music of Ragnarok.

  IN THE EVENT OF DEATH

  Simon Strantzas

  Simon Strantzas is the author of Beneath the Surface (Humdrumming, 2008), Cold to the Touch (Tartarus Press, 2009), Nightingale Songs (Dark Regions Press, 2011), and Burnt Black Suns (Hippocampus Press, 2014). He is the editor of Shadows Edge (Gray Friar Press, 2013). His fiction has appeared in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, and has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award. He lives with his wife in Toronto, Canada.

  THERE WERE MORE PAPERBACK BOOKS IN MY MOTHER’S house than I realized. Pocket-sized, well-thumbed, all with yellowed covers of swashbuckling men and bodiced damsels, they were lurid reminders of a habit that dated back forever. I knew they took up a single shelf, but not boxes beneath her stairs, or shelves in her garage, or crates in her attic. The house overflowed with them, spilling from every corner and nook. So many books, so intricate a reflection of her life, and her own struggles to escape.

  “What are you going to do with them?” Wanda asked as I filled another box.

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  “Do you think you’ll sell them?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know if I could.”

  The answer seemed to satisfy her, though I wondered if she understood what I meant. Then I wondered the same about myself.

  It had been fewer than two days since my mother’s death, but I had not yet had a chance to grieve. There were too many things that needed to be done, too many arrangements to be made, and only me to do them. Wanda helped as much as time allowed, but her job at the hospital was the only thing supporting us as I worked on my novel, and we couldn’t afford her missing a single shift, not if we were to afford the funeral. I’d managed to put the bulk of the arrangements into place, but I needed to choose a dress for my mother to wear and I didn’t feel strong enough alone.

  I hadn’t taken Wanda to the house before, afraid of letting her see where I’d grown up in case it altered the way she felt about me. I knew it made no sense, but there were so many complicated emotions stored within those walls that I failed to see how she could avoid being changed by it all. The house practically vibrated as we stood there.

  Wanda walked from room to room, my mother’s death transforming the place from house to museum, picking up and inspecting items as she did so. Along the mantle was a series of photographs. Wanda studied them, then looked at me.

  “Where’s your father?”

  I shrugged. It was a question I’d asked in different ways my entire life. My father had died of some illness shortly before I was born, and my mother had nothing more to say about it. She had no photographs of him, never spoke his name or acknowledged he had existed, and yet it was clear that she had loved him dearly. I had once gone so far as to ask my Aunt Renée about what had happened, but my question caused her to cross herself vehemently and scold me for not minding my own business. My mother had always been overly protective—her worry when I had terrible nightmares as a child only made them worse, and as a teenager I had to rebel before I could escape her smothering arms—so for years I believed there was some deep secret to his absence and her silence. As I grew older I quietly realized that sometimes there are wounds that never heal, and pressing only causes them more pain. I decided if it was easier for my mother to forget, I wasn’t going to keep reminding her.

  Wanda and I went through her closets slowly, looking for the right item. Had it been up to me I would have picked the first thing I found, but Wanda was more careful. She knew better what my mother liked, what she thought she looked her best in. I didn’t argue, happy to have one burden lifted from me, though all the same worried that one less distraction meant my grief took one step closer.

  As my wife pulled down another shoe box from the closet’s top shelf, an envelope came free and fluttered to her feet. She bent down and picked it up. Reading the front, she frowned.

  “It’s addressed to you.”

  The envelope felt lifelessly thin, and printed beneath my name in my mother’s hand was: TO BE OPENED IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH. In my mind’s eye I traveled to the past to watch her carefully scripting those words, and the vision was too much to bear. It took a few minutes and my wife’s arms around my neck before I was able to break the seal.

  I don’t know what I’d hoped to find. The letter was prefaced by a few painful words urging me not to cry or miss her, followed a list of instructions letting me know where she kept her banking information and how best to acces
s matters of her estate. None of this surprised me: my mother had been a practical woman and remained so until the end. It was reassuring, in its own way. She concluded the list with two requests. The first was that her entire collection of paperbacks be delivered to my Aunt Renée who, despite how I might have felt about her, had been her closest friend since childhood; the second was that I never read the diary she kept in her nightstand drawer. To be certain, she wanted it buried with her.

  Despite my hopes, there was nothing in the letter revealing the mystery of my father’s death.

  Behind me was the infamous nightstand. I had memories of tracing the patterns carved in its legs with my finger while my mother folded laundry or read one of her novels. It was a piece of furniture I knew very well, yet never once did I realize it had a drawer until I took a closer look. History makes us blind. History, and time.

  I gently rocked the handle and slid the small drawer out. Inside was yet another paperback novel, Lord Vanity, bookmark halfway between its rich covers of scarlet and gold, and lying beneath it a small diary with a brown faux leather cover. Its pages sealed with a flimsy lock.

  “You aren’t going to read it, are you?” Wanda asked me. The horror she felt was folded into her face.

  “Of course not,” I said, though I could not deny my curiosity. If my mother had written at all about my father, wouldn’t it have been there? Part of me wanted to scour its pages, but the rest was terrified. I had spent so many years blanketed by her worry that I couldn’t disobey her final wish, even if it meant the answers to all my questions.

  Assuming they were answers I wasn’t too frightened to read.

  I pulled myself out of bed the next morning, the funeral still a day away, and drove an hour to Maple to see my Aunt Renée. I went alone, my wife deciding she’d rather nurse her unhappiness in front of a piano than endure another painful visit. Instead, boxes of old paperbacks kept me company, filling the car with a musty tangy odor. It smelled of the past.

  I had other motives for the trip beyond delivering the boxes, most of them centering around the revelation of my mother’s diary. It raised questions I hoped my aunt could answer.