Black Wings IV

by Edited by S. T. Joshi

  As he made his way down the reticulated ramp, his mind began to clear, and his steps became more sure. The cool night air revived him. The chanting continued, rising and falling in intensity. Eric became aware of a change in the stones beneath his shoes. They began to ripple as though under the influence of a small earthquake. A faint humming, so deep that it was almost below the level of human hearing, raised the hairs along the back of his neck. It was as if the stones were responding to the chant with a song of their own. And beneath all this there was a lower vibration, a series of booms with long intervals of silence between, like the slow, deliberate footfalls of a giant.

  He left the bottom of the ramp and ran across the desert sand to where the Rover was parked. Not far from it sat Azotha’s rented car, partially concealed behind a decaying wall of one of the outlying city ruins. Eric stopped, an internal battle of wills raging within him. He knew that the wise course would be to jump into the Rover and drive away from the valley before Azotha or Sheila could move to stop him. They had tried to murder him once and would not hesitate to try again. He started slowly toward the Rover. An invisible force descended on his limbs and held him still. An intelligence of great power spoke within him below the level of words, but intuitively he understood. He must stop the Arab and his wife from finishing the ritual.

  He remembered this silent voice. It had spoken to him five decades ago, when he had run from the city and climbed the Wall with the medallion clutched in his fist. He had been powerless to disobey. He felt the same acquiescence within his soul he had experienced then. It was not a surrender but an acknowledgment of a higher wisdom and a superior will.

  As he began to jog across the uneven sands and loose stones of the desert, his eyes downcast to guard against a stumble, the chanting abruptly ceased. There was silence except for his gasping breath and the dull, slow booms that seemed to emanate from the depths of the earth. Then the voices of Azotha and Sheila began to cry out in unison a single repeated barbarous word of evocation. Eric recognized it as one of the words his wife had uttered earlier.

  “Kthulhu, Kthulhu, Kthulhu … ”

  He stopped and stood bent in half with his elbows resting on his knees as he struggled to regain his breath. At sixty-seven, he was too old for moonlit sprints across the desert. He spat the taste of blood from his mouth and straightened. An instinct caused him to turn around, and the sight that met his gaze made him quail inwardly.

  The lower two-thirds of the Wall had become transparent. In the center of this glassy expanse turned a vast spiral wheel of radiating energy that was a sickly green in color. It was not the spiral wheel of force that horrified him, but what lay beyond. By the penetrating light of the moon he could see through the stones of the Wall and into the dark waters on the other side. Shadow-shapes moved through that water, large shapes. Their outlines did not resemble anything Eric had ever seen. Deeper still, beyond these restless shadows, something vast and hideous approached on slow serpentine limbs. As it dragged itself forward, it emitted a dull boom each time its bulk settled to the sea floor.

  How Eric could see such things in the darkness, how he could distinguish the shape of the approaching horror through countless meters of water, he made no attempt to understand. In some way he knew that what he saw was true, that his eyes were being assisted to penetrate the distance and gloom of the ocean depths, and more than this, that what he saw was not merely present in the deeps of the sea but also existed on some plane of reality that had been merged with the earthly plane by the chanted words. Azotha and his wife truly were insane, for they intended to open the Wall wide enough to allow that lumbering thing to enter this world.

  The shouted evocation abruptly ceased. For a few seconds there was silence, then screams split the night. They came from human throats, but so great was the terror of those who made them that they sounded like the cries of pain-maddened beasts. The screams multiplied on the night breeze and ascended in pitch.

  Eric began to run toward the nameless city, careless of where he put his feet. It was impossible to believe that such cries could continue for more than moments, but they went on and on. He thought of the face of his wife and felt sick. One of the voices was hers. The other sounded like that of Azotha, but was so shrill it might have been the screams of a young girl.

  Long before he reached the outskirts of the ruins the screaming stopped. He approached the stones with cautious steps, struggling to catch his breath. The walls of the ruined structures came no higher than his waist in this portion of the city. He was able to look across the irregular rectangles of foundation stones that had once defined the houses of the ancient race of the valley. The ruins were utterly deserted. Conscious that Azotha might be crouching behind any corner waiting to put a bullet in his heart, Eric made his way down the broad central street toward the plaza of the black stone.

  The plaza stood empty. He swept his gaze past two low shadows near the base of the pedestal stone, seeking any sign of his wife. As he crept toward the stone, alert for the lurking Azotha, the shadows defined themselves, and he recognized the bodies of human beings. Each naked corpse was completely covered in blood. No, he corrected himself, they were not covered in blood, but made of blood, along with glistening organs and exposed bones. Both bodies had been stripped of their skins. The wet blood appeared black in the moonlight.

  10

  Eric put one hand on the octagonal stone to steady himself as he stared down at the female body. Just in time he turned his head and vomited sour liquid over the plaza. The booms from behind the gate continued to increase in force. His mind numb, he allowed the sounds to draw his gaze. The green spiral had not diminished with the cessation of the chant. If anything, it was larger and revolved with greater urgency. Through its translucent rays he saw the shadow outline of the vast thing more clearly. It was closer to the Wall. Not the Wall, he corrected himself, the portal. The opened portal.

  A gleam of gold caught his eye. The wheel of his medallion rested in the center of the pedestal stone, exactly as he remembered seeing it in his boyhood memory. It was even oriented to the moon in the same way. He fumbled to pick it up. It adhered to the stone as though magnetized. When at last he pried it loose with his fingernails, a blue spark crackled between the medallion and the pedestal. At the same moment a trilling cry arose from deeper in the ruins of the city on the eastern side of the plaza. The walls were higher there, blocking his view, but the cry had not been human.

  As though in response, from beyond the swirling portal issued a subsonic rumble that Eric felt in his chest rather than heard with his ears. The sheer fury of the sound compelled his attention, and he saw the spiral eye on the transparent stones begin to close. In the dozen seconds he stood mesmerized by the sight, it dimmed and shrank.

  Behind him the trilling he had heard earlier was repeated. A second trilling arose from another part of the ruins, followed by a strange sifting and grinding noise, as though heavy cables were being dragged along a beach.

  Eric became aware of his danger. He bent his head and ranged back and forth across the plaza, searching for Azotha’s automatic. Eventually he found it, some dozen meters from the corpse of the Arab. The hammer was cocked, with a round in the chamber and the safety catch off. Why had Azotha not fired to defend himself and Sheila from their attacker? The image of the terror of his nightmares returned to him with photographic clarity. At the last the dark man’s courage had failed him. Or maybe he refused to fire upon the emissaries of his god. The sandy grinding did not cease, but drew relentlessly closer. It came from two places in the depths of the ancient city. He peered into the ruins and saw a shadow pass over the stones of a crumbling house wall, but the thing that made it was still obscured.

  Eric did not wait to have his terror confirmed. With the gun in his right hand and the medallion clutched in his left, he ran wildly down the valley toward the Rover. The full moon hung in the west above the Wall and lit his way, but in spite of this advantage Eric was soon forced to slow h
is pace to little more than a fast walk. The race up the incline of the valley floor to the city had left him utterly exhausted. His head throbbed and his eyes blurred, so that he found it difficult to keep his balance. The trilling sounded behind his left shoulder and was answered from somewhere further back to the right. The sifting noise did not get nearer, but neither did it fall behind. In the still night air it was impossible to tell the distance that separated him from his closest pursuer.

  He risked a glance over his shoulder. The strength drained from his legs and caused him to collapse to his hands and knees on the hard stones. It was not just the horror of the following things, but their familiarity. They were the nightmares of his youth, returned to haunt him, as they had haunted his sleep all the days of his adult life. Every night he ran from them, and every morning he blocked them from his memory.

  A ring of short, thick tentacles around its base provided the creature with locomotion across the desert. It was from these that the grinding and sifting emanated. From its apex writhed longer and more slender members that reminded Eric of a cluster of vipers with their tails tied together. Some of the snake-like appendages had black barbs on their ends resembling the curved, black legs of insects. These dripped with fluid that was flung off from them as they writhed, so that it scattered through the moonlight like milky pearls. Along the lengths of these upper tentacles were reddish-black hooks that resembled curved thorns. It was not difficult to imagine what had stripped the clothing and skin from the living bodies of his wife and the dark man.

  Just beneath the serpentine crown of the creature were three black eyes, equally spaced around the circumference of its body. As it rocked from side to side over the loose stones, the trailing eyes came alternately into view for an instant, but it was the central orb that held Eric’s attention. It glared at the fallen man with an unmistakable malice. The second monster was like the first. It had remained further back and ranged to the right, as though seeking to block his escape should he choose to flee along the road and up the pass between the mountains.

  He pushed himself to his feet without realizing that he had fallen. The gun was gone, lost amid the shadows, but the medallion remained in his closed fist. In the seconds it took him to get up, the nearest of the creatures closed almost half the distance that separated it from its prey. He turned and ran on. The nightmare repeated itself. Simultaneously, he was a terrified seventeen-year-old and an old man grieving for his lost innocence. With some part of his mind he realized the spiral vortex of the dimensional portal had vanished. The transparency of the black stones also began to fade. The bright circle of the moon kissed the top of the great barrier and slipped into the waters beyond as he ran beneath the black shadow of the Wall.

  He rounded the rear bumper of the Rover and jerked the driver-side door open. Even as he reached for the key in the lock, some instinct warned him that it would not be there. He fumbled over the steering column and then across the floor mats. He remembered leaving the key inserted. It had to be there. In the moonless shadow, the noise of the approaching horror was deafening. He could not see it, but he could feel its nearness. The truth struck him at the same instant he rolled from the driver’s seat and ran toward the dark bulk of the other vehicle. Azotha had removed the key, probably at the time of his arrival, to insure that he would not drive away while Azotha was still climbing the ramps.

  The car was unlocked, but no key rested in its steering column. He felt along the dashboard and over the passenger seat, then turned down the sun visors, praying that a spare might be tucked behind them. He cursed. The keys for both vehicles must be in the plaza of the ruined city, lying amid the fragments of clothing that surrounded the skinless bodies of his wife and her accomplice. As he spun out of the car, a metallic rasp indicated that the thing following so close behind had slid one of its barbed tentacles over the metal of the Rover’s body. It sounded remarkably similar to fingernails dragged across a blackboard by a malicious child.

  For an instant Eric considered trying to slip past the monster in the darkness of the lunar shadow and making his way back toward the pass that was the only egress from the valley. But the trilling of the second creature came from directly between where he stood and the way to safety. He did not even consider that this might be an accident. These things could not have known about the keys, but they had no intention of allowing their human prey to outflank them. In any case, he had little reason to suppose that the nearer of the beings was blinded by the darkness.

  A barbed tentacle lashed out and struck the opened door of Azotha’s car with a harsh clang, not more than three paces from where Eric stood. The immediacy of his danger galvanized him. He ran in the opposite direction, toward the base of the northern ramp. His eyes had become accustomed to the almost total darkness in the Wall’s shadow, so he was able to keep his feet and stay ahead of the pursuing nightmare. He thought of casting the medallion onto the ground behind him, but some guiding awareness not his own made him keep it tightly pressed in his left fist. Again came the uncanny feeling of déjà vu, the certainty that he had experienced an identical impulse to cast the medallion aside, and received the same directive not to do so, on the night of its discovery five decades ago.

  He was able to climb the first in the series of ramps only by putting his hands against his knees and pressing down with each step. His legs trembled and burned. Each weighed as much as the stones he climbed. At one point he managed to laugh bitterly when he realized why the Wall was ascended by inclines rather than stairs. It had not been constructed for human feet, but for the stubby, ambulatory tentacles of the monsters. Had he come to this realization in the security of his university flat, surrounded by his books and papers, it would have been the crowning achievement of his career; but now it merely mocked his ignorance.

  He had researched the valley of Asshur-sin for five decades and had learned nothing of importance. All the while he had kept some of the answers suppressed just beyond his reach in his own memories. His young wife had known more about the Wall than he had learned in all his years of research. So had Johnny Azotha. With agonizing clarity he realized what a fool he had been.

  The trilling only two ramps below him was answered by an identical trill that echoed from the rocky slope on the opposite side of the Wall. The other creature had moved quickly to cut off his escape. There would be no chance to cross the causeway and descend by the southern ramps. It was exactly as it had been on that night, so long ago, when he had fled similar beings. How had he escaped that night? Eric racked his memory as he fought his way up the endless reticulated incline, but the final part of that night of terror remained as hidden as the face of the moon.

  Three deaths awaited him at the top, should he retain enough strength in his legs to reach it. One lay on the hard stones at the base of the Wall so far below. The other was wrapped in the chill, choking waves of the ocean. The third hung on the barbs and hooks of the tentacles of the dread guardians of this passage to the underworld. Three ways of death, and perhaps a single way of salvation, if only he could remember.

  11

  After what seemed more than a lifetime, he crawled on his hands and knees from the final ramp to the level stones of the causeway. It was almost more than he could bear to force his bruised and bloody knees to straighten and hold him erect. How long he had crawled, he did not remember, but it could not have been more than a few of the ramps or the creature would have caught him. It was close behind. The moon had just set below the horizon of the ocean in the west. An eerie phosphorescence illuminated the waves as they struck the side of the Wall. The stars had begun to pale overhead, indicating that morning was not far away. He wasted a moment to glance at the eastern mountains and saw the rose-gray tint of approaching dawn.

  Hope surged in his heart. At last he remembered the final minutes of that night, so long ago. Swaying, he staggered on stiff legs from the horror that tipped itself upright onto the top of the causeway, so close behind. If only he could stay in front o
f it, he had a chance of survival. But the thing moved faster on a level surface than it had on the sloping ramps, and faster still across the smooth stones than on the rocky valley floor. It seemed to sense his thoughts, for it increased its speed. Had he stumbled, he would never have risen again. The smooth stones that speeded the hellish thing behind were his own blessing. He was able to drag his nerveless feet across their surface without catching his toes or heels. Somehow he managed to keep his balance.

  As he neared the center he heard an exultant trilling in front of him. The other creature has finished its ascent and now barred his path. He continued to shuffle toward it. There was nowhere else to go. As it approached, he had more opportunity than he wished to examine its writhing, hooked appendages and leathery body. He dared not look away for fear of losing his balance and sprawling on his face. The thing behind was very close. He heard the barbs of its tentacles click against the stone just behind his heels.

  Finally, there was nowhere else to run. Eric turned and stared defiance into the lidless black central eye of the monster that followed. A strange peace descended into his body, as though a cooling cloak of silk had been draped across his skin. Fear left him. He felt a sense of recognition for the horror that closed swiftly upon him with its barbed ropes lashing the air. He saw it, not with his own eyes, but with the eyes of an older and wiser soul that had in some inexplicable way merged with his own. The monster abruptly stopped and appeared indecisive. Eric knew that by some psychic faculty it had perceived the same presence within him.

  It was this possessing presence, not Eric, that passed the medallion into his right hand and threw it far out over the waves. It vanished from view against the paling stars while in the air, but as it struck the water it cast up a small splash of luminous white.