It was the old woman’s foul breath that betrayed her. O’Brian smelled her exhalation as it brushed his lips and reached up in time to grasp the hand that held the knife before its edge touched his throat. She was much stronger than he would have believed possible, but he fought for his life, and despite the unfortunate news he had received from Goldman, he discovered that he very much wanted to keep on living.
The two of them ended up on the floor beside the bed, entangled in the blankets. He managed to get his elbow into the old woman’s throat as he struggled to pry the knife loose from her powerful fingers. Something crunched, and she began to wheeze and gurgle. After around a minute her arms went slack, and he tore the knife from her lax hands. With a feeling of dread in his heart, he scrambled to his feet in the darkness and cast off the blankets that still clung around his legs. He stood listening, holding his breath, the knife at the ready in his hand, but there was no other sound from the floor or from the dark hallway.
He still had matches in his pocket. He found the solitary wooden chair with his suit draped over it and got out a wooden match, then used it to light the wick of the lamp on the bureau. What he saw made his stomach roll. Old Maggie lay grotesquely dead in a tangle of blankets, staring up at him with her one good eye as though in accusation, her tongue poking from her mouth. Her hands were held up in front of her face defensively. They reminded O’Brian of the crooked talons of a hawk.
As he looked, a low gurgle came from her mouth that almost stopped his heartbeat. He realized it must be some kind of death rattle and forced himself to relax. He had to think. He had just killed a woman. True, she had tried to kill him first, but there was nothing to prove that. If the insane mob of the night before had chased him without a reason, they had very good reason now.
Was any of what dead Maggie had told him true? He thought about it and shook his head. It was the ramblings of a senile old woman. It must be.
Even so, while waiting for the first light of dawn, he found some of her son’s clothes and put them on. He even went so far as to put on underwear and socks from a lower drawer of the bureau, so that his disguise would be complete. He knew the old woman had talked crazy talk, but for some reason he could not bring himself to ignore her words. It would do no harm to play along with the story, he rationalized to himself. In any case, his suit was soiled and he needed clean clothes. The son’s churchgoing leather shoes fitted his feet surprisingly well.
He didn’t leave the house at first light, reasoning that if he was the only person on the streets, he would draw attention to himself. Instead he waited until the sounds of passing feet on the boardwalk began to filter into the silent downstairs sitting room. When there was a break in the foot traffic, he slipped out the door.
There was a rat hole in the corner of the side board of the step. Glancing left and right, he slipped into it his watch and wallet, pushing them as deep as his elbow. Thankfully, nothing bit him. He couldn’t leave the wallet in the house or his name might be linked to Maggie’s corpse, but he couldn’t carry it in his pocket in case he was stopped and searched.
He made his way along the canal toward the nearest street. He tried to look casual and unhurried as he worked his way up the hill and back into the heart of the city.
Wherever he was, he was not in the city he remembered. The unfamiliar streets had a vintage look that resembled the period shortly before the introduction of the automobile. Wagons and carriages rattled by, but most of the traffic was on the sidewalks. If anything made him wonder whether he really might be in some other world, it was the sight of all these people walking instead of driving. None of them were fat, he noticed. Their clothes were just strange enough to be unsettling. The colors were not as bright as they should have been. Nobody was wearing tennis shoes or jeans. The women had on modest dresses that almost dragged on the bricks, or long skirts and white blouses, and all the men without exception wore hats.
There were little differences that jumped out from the drab background. A boy about eighteen years of age passed him riding a bicycle that was not driven by pedals that moved on cranks in a circle, but by levers that went up and down as he put his weight on them. On one corner, a dirty little street urchin was hawking newspapers that were the wrong shape and color—instead of broad white rectangles they were yellow and fan-folded in narrower strips.
I must be hallucinating, he thought, trying not to gawk and draw attention to himself. Could what the old woman had told him be true? He shook his head in answer to his own question. Which was more likely, that he had gone crazy from the stress of finding out that he way dying of cancer, or that he had fallen through a wall between two realities? Cancer, that was another thing—the old woman had not known the word cancer. And the priests paid for cancer tumors. That was too much of a coincidence. The little speech from Dr. Goldman must have caused a mental breakdown, and he was dreaming all this.
But it seemed so real! He could feel the grit of ashes under the leather soles of his new shoes, and smell the smoke from coal stoves. The breeze on his face felt plausible enough. He looked up and saw gray clouds creeping across the sky behind the cornices of old-fashioned buildings, none of which was taller than ten or twelve stories. Between the clouds were patches of blue sky.
Raised voices drew his attention to the sidewalk in front of a theatre beneath a projecting awning, where a young woman lay on her back with her hands raised. A crowd of five or six men and women had gathered around her, and more were running across the street.
“Waller! It’s a Waller!” a woman beside him said with excitement.
She dropped her brown shopping bag onto the sidewalk and hurried forward.
O’Brian followed in a kind of trance, mesmerized by the scene and with a sense of horror rising within him.
“I saw her first,” a man said harshly.
He waved a knife in the air, and the people around him backed off a step. It had a long, thin blade, like the kind of knife used to fillet fish.
O’Brian saw that the girl lying on her back was young, probably no more than thirteen or fourteen years old. She wore a short skirt with a bright red stripe across it and white tennis shoes. Her hair was dyed purple. What really sickened him was the realization that she had metal braces on her teeth. She reminded him of his daughter, Anne.
“Help me harvest her, Jack. I’ll give you part of it,” the man with the knife said.
Another man knelt quickly and began to rip the clothes off the girl, while the crowd milled around with excitement. When he couldn’t get them off fast enough, he dug into his pocket and flicked open a knife, then used it to cut the remaining clothes away. Everyone in this place must carry a knife, O’Brian thought.
The girl began to scream. She thrashed around and tried to writhe away, but the second man held her down with his knee on her chest between her small breasts, her wrists locked together in his hands against the sidewalk. The first man knelt and, with an expert motion of his knife, cut into the white side of her abdomen. He felt around inside the gash and extended his blood-stained knife into the wound, then withdrew something and held it up in triumph.
“Lucky bastard,” one man next to O’Brian muttered with disgust.
He looked at O’Brian. There was a nasty cold sore on his upper lip that O’Brian found himself staring at, the way a bird stares at a snake.
“Yeah, lucky,” he said faintly, trying to imitate the accent of the old woman.
A drop of sweat ran down the side of his nose. He resisted the reflex to wipe it away. The other man held his gaze for a moment, then turned back to the bloody scene on the sidewalk. The friends of the first man with the knife were gathered around him, congratulating him and laughing with excitement. He had wrapped his prize in a white handkerchief and cradled it close to his chest, his lean face twisted in an expression of possessive ecstasy. The other spectators began to move slowly away, casting envious glances back at the nearly naked, bloody corpse, which still wore its tennis shoes but little
else.
5
Walking at a casual pace past the body and the scattered clothes that lay around it, O’Brian turned into the first empty alley he came to and went behind some oak barrels to throw up. There wasn’t much in his stomach. He spat out the acid taste and wiped his lips on the palm of his hand, than transferred the wetness to the side of his pants. He found himself wiping his hand over and over along his leg, and forced himself to stop.
Eddies of wind swirled bits of paper, lifting them high and then dropping them. Like everything else in this world, the alley had a rundown, neglected look. This other world, he thought. This world not my own. As much as he wanted to be crazy, or in a coma dreaming, he no longer believed it. The sickening smell of fresh blood when the girl’s side was slashed open still lingered in the back of his nose. Her staring dead eyes had watched him as he walked past her body. He looked around. These barrels, stained with tar, bleached by the sun, were real. These red bricks in the wall, longer and narrower than the bricks he was accustomed to, were real. He could touch them, feel their rough surface.
He rested his forehead against his arm on the wall and closed his eyes. A wild panic struggled to rise inside him, but he fought it down, knowing that if he gave in to it, he would run from the alley screaming and end up in a pool of his own blood with his side cut open.
If what the old woman said was true and he had fallen through a wall in his own world, then maybe he could fall the other way, out of this world and back into his own. He tried to remember the last thing he had been doing before waking up in this place. He had leaned back against the brick wall of an alley much like this one, about to smoke a cigarette. He patted his pockets, then remembered that he had left his cigarettes back at the house of the old woman. His matches were in the pocket of his suit pants, also back at the house.
He turned around and allowed his shoulders to press against the cool bricks. Glancing at the mouth of the alley to see if anyone watched him, he closed his eyes.
Now what do I do? he thought. Do I just will myself through the wall?
He tried imagining the wall becoming soft like the surface of water. In a moment he would slip under its surface. He just had to let go. It would happen any second now, as he released the memories of this world from his mind and thought about his own house, his office, his car, his wife and daughter. Any second now. Any second.
With a soft curse, he opened his eyes and turned to look at the bricks behind him. They were just bricks. Maybe they were long and thin, but they were as hard as any bricks in his world. He thumped the top of one of the barrels with the heel of his hand. It made a dull sound. It was filled with something. Something real. Everything here was real.
Setting his mouth in a grim line, he tried again, harder this time. Nothing. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, he thought. He tried again. This time instead of trying to push himself back through the bricks by the force of his will, he let his mind go soft and empty, as it had been in the other alley. He had been half-drunk and tired, and had just wanted to relax. After ten minutes or so, he opened his eyes. Nothing.
He left the alley and started to walk along the sidewalk of the street with his hands in his pockets and his head down. It was not smart to do anything that would attract attention. From the corners of his eyes he watched the people who passed. They ignored him. Apart from their old-fashioned clothes and funny hairstyles, they looked normal. Thank God his own hair beneath his hat was the same length as that of the men.
I can live here, he thought. If I am careful and don’t ask any questions, I can find work and get a room. Maybe if I practice, I’ll catch onto the knack of falling backwards through walls.
He giggled. A woman glanced at him. He hunched his shoulders and hurried on.
Who am I kidding, he thought. I’ve got terminal cancer. At best I might live three months, and I won’t be walking around at the end, either. Say two months of real living. Eight weeks. Fifty-six days. That’s what I’ve got to look forward to, best-case scenario—I don’t get my guts cut open, and I drop dead in three months.
A slow, hot rage built inside him. All this was so damned unfair! What had he ever done to deserve this? He should be sitting at his office desk right now, going over columns of numbers. Instead, he was screwed, not just by this crazy world, but by the cancer. It was so over the top, so overkill.
Fuck it, he thought. If I’m going to die anyway, I might as well get some answers.
6
The church was at the end of a little triangular park with a conservative-looking stone structure he guessed to be a bank on one side and a tall office building on the other. The bank had stone columns in front of it, but they were smooth, not fluted like the Greek and Roman columns he was accustomed to seeing. Maybe all old banks everywhere had stone columns in front of them. Only this bank probably wasn’t that old, he corrected himself, it just looked old to him.
As was true of everything else in this crazy place, the church resembled a church, but did not look exactly like any church he had ever seen before. He crossed the grassy triangle between cast-iron park benches and made his way up the stone steps, which ran the full width of the high-roofed building. It had an enormous round window of stained glass over three sets of oak doors at the top of the steps, and was impressive enough to be a cathedral.
The right side of the middle door that he tried must have been twenty feet in height, but it opened soundlessly with surprising ease. He closed it gently behind him.
It was cooler inside. Sunlight slanted through the round window and cast bits of bright color over the rows of pews and the altar. Marble columns ran down either side of the long nave. They were smooth like the pillars on the front of the bank, but highly polished to show the different colors in the stone. The church was the most colorful thing he had seen in this world, he thought, apart from the clothing and the blood of the murdered teenage girl.
It appeared to be empty. He walked slowly up the carpeted aisle, his soft footfalls echoing down from the stone arches in the painted ceiling. The altar was of polished black stone and huge—it rose four feet or so above the floor and had a triangular surface that could not have been less than nine feet long on each side. The top was covered with an embroidered black cloth edged with gold braid that showed the design of a white tree with three spreading branches bearing lush green leaves. From the tree hung numerous small, bean-shaped white seeds. The tree had three sinuous, curling roots resembling great serpents, the wedge-shaped heads of which came together and seemed to drink from a round pool of red blood at the base of the tree.
He turned to look back down the center aisle the way he had come, and for the first time noticed the design worked into the round stained-glass window above the doors. It had not stood forth clearly when viewed from outside the church. S-shaped lines radiated from its center to divide it into three parts, each of which held a monstrous head. One was like the head of a dragon, another resembled the head of a bird with an enormous beak and a spiky crown of feathers, and the last looked something like the head of a hyena. All three seemed to stare down directly at the altar. The effect was unnerving. O’Brian had the uneasy sense that they watched him.
He heard footsteps from one end of the church transept, where there was a side door, and turned to see a mature woman in a white robe edged in gold approach with a smile. She had a full figure, her large and somewhat heavy breasts balanced by broad hips, and a round face with startlingly pale gray eyes and a small colorless slot of a mouth. Her curling, dark-blond hair was cut short enough to reveal her ears and was streaked with gray. Around her neck hung a silver ring that was divided into three parts by radiating S-shaped lines, just like the church window.
The woman extended her plump hand. O’Brian took it hesitantly, wondering what the custom in this world might be, but the woman shook his hand up and down in the usual way and released his fingers.
“How may I help you, child?” she asked in a gentle voice.
“Are you a p
riest?”
She regarded him with curiosity for a moment before she replied.
“I am Mother Theodora, a priestess of the Givers of Life. As you see by my robes.”
O’Brian glanced around the church.
“Are we alone?”
“For the moment,” the priestess said. “Why do you ask? I hope you don’t intend to rob the church?”
She laughed, and O’Brian realized she was joking. He forced a smile and shook his head.
“Not today. I’d just like to talk with you for a few minutes, if I may.”
“Of course, child. What troubles you?”
O’Brian dropped his eyes. He didn’t want her staring into them while he was lying to her.
“Mother, I’m feeling confused about my faith.”
“Don’t be ashamed, child,” she said in a warm, gentle tone. “Everyone has moments of confusion. It will pass.”
“It would help me if you would answer some questions for me.”
She took his hand and guided him to the nearest pew.
“Here, let’s sit down while we talk. Now what do you wish to know?”
“About the two worlds,” he began.
“Three worlds,” she corrected gently. “The divine world, the real world, and the world of illusion.”
“The world of illusion is the Plantation, right?”
She studied his face with curiosity.
“That’s right.”
“Mother, I’ve been wondering if it is truly as unreal as everyone says. I’ve been wondering if maybe it could be as real as this world.”
She smiled with amusement.
“Many children say that, but I seldom hear it from a grown man.”
“But how do we know it’s unreal, if nobody has ever been there?” he persisted. “And aren’t the Wallers real when they fall out of the other world into our world?”
Black Wings III - New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror Page 15