Black Wings IV

by Edited by S. T. Joshi

  Eric experienced a rush of liberation. A debt had been paid. An obligation had been fulfilled. Calmly he turned to face the nearer of the tentacled things and awaited his own death.

  Even as the creature glared malignancy and thrust itself forward for the killing lash, a ray of the rising sun struck its tortuous crown. At once its leathery body became transparent, just as the stones of the gate had become transparent under the moonlight. It writhed in a frenzy of frustration and threw itself forward on its stubby, squamous legs. Eric closed his eyes. He felt a tingling on his skin. He opened his eyelids with surprise, then turned. The monster has passed completely through his body, as though it were no more than a projection of light.

  The two creatures came together and stopped. They seemed to converse. Eric heard their trilling voices, which sounded strangely remote, as though they came from many miles away. Under the strengthening rays of the sun their bodies faded and became as clear as glass, and within a few moments more, they vanished.

  Eric blinked at the sun. He was too numb to feel emotion, but he knew the ordeal had ended. The things had disappeared into whatever dimension of reality had spawned them, the same way they had faded into nothingness on the morning of that night so many decades ago. The destiny of his life, so long postponed, was at last fulfilled. Later there would be time to reflect on the meaning of what had taken place, time to grieve for the death of his wife and to ponder her hidden purposes, time to piece together the bits of information he had gleaned from his own memories and from Azotha’s words, but for the present he merely enjoyed the sunrise.

  Behind him, a sinuous rope of gray flesh as thick as his waist rose silently from the waves. It wrapped around him in a gentle coil, as though embracing a lover, and with a smooth arc slipped beneath the surface of the sea. Where it passed, the stones were empty. Ripples spread from the place of its descent, but soon the waves erased this brief memorial.

  FEAR LURKS ATOP

  Tempest Mount

  (After H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear”)

  Charles Lovecraft

  Charles Lovecraft, an Australian writer who legally changed his name to reflect his devotion to the dreamer from Providence, started writing in 1975, after encountering the works of H.P .Lovecraft. In 2007 he created P’rea Press, to publish weird and fantastic poetry, nonfiction, and bibliography. He has published one and edited fourteen books to date. Charles has seen his verse published in Eldritch Tales, Fantasy Tales, Pablo Lennis, eye to the Telescope, Cthulhu Haiku, Buzzkill: Apocalypse, The Poet’s Press, and Weird Fiction Review.

  I. The Shadow on the Chimney

  It thundered mad the night I went atop

  Old Tempest Mount to seek the lurking fear.

  The lurking fear—what foul name dares adhere

  To elder devilry inbred, to hop

  And taint to the blackest heights that mountain top.

  So I took two stout men with me to steer

  A path through all delusion wrought so queer,

  And to weird rumours and mad fearings crop.

  We slept, each side by side, with guns, and watched

  A shadow on a chimney that was cast

  By fulminating rod of lightning blast.

  Those men were never seen again, hope scotched.

  I wish to God I’d never set foot there,

  Or climbed upon old Tempest’s stony stare.

  II. A Connoisseur in Horrors (The Search for Reasons Why)

  The hellish mountain wore a crown of snake.

  Medusa of the skies, by its lightnings formed

  And wriggled fiendishly in clouds and stormed

  Dilated dread to wider counties’ sake.

  The soul cried out to cleanse and great steps take

  To fully extirpate that fame deformed,

  And to recalibrate the earth that swarmed,

  To that which had been lost, mud’s slimy wake.

  Still other chat suggested shocking eyes’

  Opposing colours—blue and brown—and sere

  Beliefs, such as the thunder called the fear

  And set it loose amongst the night’s red cries

  Of satanism from dark centuries past.

  Possessed poor devils shuddered all aghast.

  III. A Passer in the Storm

  My studies in the outré and the weird

  Were always problematical for me.

  One never quite knew when to stop, or free

  The genii of the madness from its beard.

  And yet there was a friend of mine who shared

  These diabolical pursuits. Thus he

  It was who came with me to that high scree—

  Though neither was prepared for that which neared.

  In cabin broken down the door had skewed.

  We paused, to keep out of the rain. But I

  Am all to blame for his demise, and sigh.

  I went there with a man whose head was chewed

  And gouged so silently on windowsill.

  That face…licked clean…I see it clearly still.

  IV. What the Red Glare Meant

  The portals of red danger soon were thrown.

  The night was filled calamitous with sound,

  For nightmare now had trumped and I was bound;

  And hard beneath my feet the mountain stone.

  I had to spare all else and went alone,

  And digged there frantically ’neath slab and mound.

  At last in graveyard pit I fell through ground;

  A tunnel led away through a hacked zone.

  I loped on when, engulfed in black, two dots

  That glared, shone out red points of Hell from my

  Cold, dying torch. The thing moved fast. Just by,

  Through ruddy skeins of rotted earth, wild shots

  Of lightning lampion leapt and killed it there.

  But God—did this mean more than one lurked here?

  V. Earlier Grisly Discoveries

  The woods around the Martense mansion bent

  Bestowed no sense of safeness, but a well

  Of seething fears whose viciousness could swell

  Upon the stories of dead bodies rent.

  I walked along, mid musty, bestial scent,

  And tripped on loathsome bloated wood and fell.

  Weird roots engorged with overflowing hell

  Fed fat from an unwholesome nourishment.

  With an acute and an uncanny fear

  I searched environs made of pits and holes,

  And trees loomed large with gnarled and twisted boles

  As, blindly in the gathering dark, to steer

  Now heedless of my own self’s health, I set

  To find the pinnacle where all Hell met.

  VI. A Mountain’s Ghastly Fame

  I started, from a voice of thunder’s sound.

  Its timbre growled and called on what at last?

  I knew it blackly summoned, what—repast?

  I heard it call. My heart could only pound,

  And even the mere breath I barely found.

  In all the world my soul was set to blast

  All my emotions dead, and chill fear cast

  An acid dashed in face, a fuming mound.

  The growing fear now gouged my mind with mark

  Of Cain, the ken of knowing far too much

  In that black pit, as, stirring from a hutch,

  There waddled something forth, a something dark.

  I’d found the nightmare creeping death and paled

  As silent abnormalities assailed.

  VII. Formless Phantasms—The Demon Lurking Fear

  Oarless into a blighted sea I flowed.

  I’d dumbly come to seek uncanny fame

  Now my own mental dissolution came.

  We are not helped. We each have sere coins sewed

  On lips and eyes and that to time are owed.

  For all I now beheld I was to blame.

  The thing had chewed and gouged, and
now it came

  And in the frightful lurking cellar crowed.

  It was a thing beyond all sanity—

  A slithering, rat-like scurrying, a hazy

  Genetic wrongfulness, a nameless, crazy

  Tearing thing, scratching out the mind’s lost eye.

  I merely shuddered then, as wave on wave

  Of horror pounded on me to the grave.

  VIII. An Acheron of Multiform Diabolism

  The thing was spawn of Hell, a nauseous flood

  Of stinking froth, a schume that overran

  All sense of peace and jaded godly plan.

  Anon, distended bits now wrenched fresh blood;

  Still other claws detached from the black brood

  And hideously stalked the weaker clan;

  Whereon its horde of demon brother, cousin,

  Fiend, set upon and ate, with jaw lines crude.

  Delirious with all that is unclean

  In this black universe—the charnel heart

  Of this dark cosmic plane to tear apart

  With rabid jaws and teeth those dear I’d seen—

  I knew that I would never more retain

  The sense of simple safety, or be sane.

  IX. The Horror in the Eyes

  There broke loose all the storm of horror come—

  A demon scratching slithering, a night-

  Spawn of diseased and nameless panic fright.

  My God, there must have thousands been of them,

  As there, behind a desiccated scum

  Of shrub by which I hid and by the light

  Of lightning bolts that struck a thicket blight,

  The straggler that loped last now had come home.

  The voice of alien thunders loudly burst

  But I was merely gored there to the spot,

  And even as the thing devoured I shot

  It dead as a great squeal of lightning cursed;

  And now I just recall the look of it

  As it died there—blue-brown eyes from the pit.

  X. A Nether World of Unknown Nightmare

  A red glare flashed in fulminant far glow,

  And my poor mind was left embanked behind.

  That bank was empty of all cash—sane mind—

  And I was merely ready for dice throw,

  With no collateral that I might view.

  As with the gods the fates are never kind

  But only to their wheel of Ixion bind

  The hapless fool no matter his IQ.

  For now in that black cellar poured the ire

  Of all mankind, the remnant of the darks

  Of maddened mountain-tops. Dual-coloured sparks

  Of eyes there swarmed to ghoulishly conspire.

  Six shots rang out, revolver’s rapid burst,

  At stewing leprous legions here accursed.

  XI. The Ineffable Horror of It All—The Mound-Burrows

  The house is gone, praise God, and those things dead,

  The ghoulish vegetations, eerie weeds—

  One can but postulate on what foul deeds

  Those swollen nameless things had long been fed—

  The gored, gnarled face of fear and shapeless dread.

  The roots that once groped round in rabid greeds

  The mansion of Martense now curl their breeds

  Of over nourishment on other bread.

  And scurrying seething abnormalities?

  They—one can only hope—were killed when house

  And mountain-top alike were blown to humus

  By detonations’ wildest savageries,

  Enhanced to workmanlike degree of fate,

  To seal off those mound-burrows’ lurking hate.

  XII. From Pits Remote and Unimaginable

  The fattened, baleful trees that circled round

  The mansion of Martense in knotted roots,

  In ganglias of horror whose black shoots

  Sought out unhealthy nourishments, were found

  In an acute, uncanny meaning bound—

  In total lack through moonless nights of hoots

  Of owl, or bird to screech from blackened coots,

  And only left a demon scratching sound.

  For life itself now causes me regret.

  The fear has gouged my face with untold mark

  From rat-like, creeping vermin of the dark,

  And from that other thing I shan’t forget—

  When I saw face to face without defence

  Those devil cannibals of Jan Martense.

  BLACK WINGS IV

  Copyright © 2015 The Individual Contributors

  The right of The Individual Contributors to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Originally published in printed book form by PS Publishing Ltd in 2015. This electronic version published in September 2015 by PS by arrangement with the authors. All rights reserved by the authors.

  FIRST EBOOK EDITION

  ISBN 978-1-84863-341-4

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  PS Publishing Ltd

  Grosvenor House

  1 New Road

  Hornsea / HU18 1PG

  East Yorkshire / England

  www.pspublishing.co.uk

  editor@pspublishing.co.uk

  Contents

  BLACK WINGS IV

  INTRODUCTION

  ARTIFACT

  HALF LOST IN SHADOW

  THE RASPING ABSENCE

  BLACK SHIPS SEEN SOUTH OF HEAVEN

  THE DARK SEA WITHIN

  SEALED BY THE MOON

  BROKEN SLEEP

  THE PRISM OF DARKNESS

  NIGHT OF THE PIPER

  WE ARE MADE OF STARS

  TROPHY

  CONTACT

  CULT OF THE DEAD

  DARK REDEEMER

  IN THE EVENT OF DEATH

  REVIVAL

  THE WALL OF ESSHUR-SIN

  FEAR LURKS ATOP

  BLACK WINGS IV