Black Wings of Cthulhu 2

by S. T. Joshi

  “That’s why they cut it off,” she murmured with conviction. “They couldn’t stand seeing themselves, so they toppled the statue and struck off its face before burying it.”

  “I expect you are right,” Amundson said, shuffling the printouts of readings from the machine. “Look, Luce, I’m really quite busy now—”

  She sat across his thighs, her arms around his shoulders, and forced her tongue into his mouth before he could finish the sentence. Her robe fell open, and the erect nipples of her firm young breasts pressed against his shirtfront. She arched her back to raise herself and slide her breasts from side to side over his face. With a moan of desire, she dug her hand between his legs.

  Amundson found himself thrusting into her as she lay diagonally across his cot. With part of his mind he realized she was naked, and that he wore only his open shirt. He had no memory of moving across the tent, or of taking off his pants. He shrugged out of the shirt with annoyance, relishing the freedom from its encumbrance. He felt wholly alive, like some powerful beast awakened from long sleep. When she bit his shoulder, he slapped her across the face, back and forth, until her upper lip split and blood marked her bared white teeth.

  Only when he had exhausted his lust and lay panting across her did she push him off and leave the cot. Her eyes held a restless look, sliding over him as though he were of no further interest. Neither spoke. Shame mingled with regret welled inside Amundson when he looked at the blood on her lip. He might be many things, but he had never hit a woman. She bent to pick up her silk robe and slid into it, then flipped it closed and tied it with a sharp tug of its sash. Without a backward glance she left the tent.

  Amundson lay naked across the cot, listening to the sound of his own breathing. What the hell had just happened? In an instant he had gone from bored indifference to white-hot lust mingled with violence. The sight of blood on the girl’s face had excited him. That had never happened before. Sex had always been good for him, but nobody would ever describe it as anything other than white bread. The outburst of passion had left him drained. Suddenly, it was all he could do to keep his eyes open. He shifted himself on the cot into a more comfortable posture and knew nothing more until the following morning.

  6.

  WHEN HE LEFT HIS TENT, THE SUN WAS ALREADY WELL above the eastern horizon and the morning chill had been driven from the stones that lay scattered across the pebbly ground. He was almost glad to discover that he had overslept and that the rest of the camp, with the sole exception of Sikes, had already left for the passage excavation. In the main tent, Sikes gave him scrambled eggs and toast, with black coffee. He sipped the bitter liquid with gratitude. A headache throbbed between his temples, making it hard to focus his eyes.

  Sikes must have had a rough night of his own. The little Englishman was uncommonly quiet and seemed to perform his housekeeping duties in a meditative daze. After he finished clearing away the breakfast dishes and silverware, he announced to Amundson that he was leaving to help with the excavation work.

  The engineer nodded absently at him and did not turn his head to watch him go. His thoughts were preoccupied by the question Luce had asked the night before. Why their own faces? What did it mean to see oneself, to have one’s essential pattern exposed?

  He had brought the printout into the dining hall with him. It rested on the table beside his coffee cup, face down. Turning it over, he held it up and studied it. The face, which was most definitely his own, stared back at him. There was a trace of amusement at the corners of its lips—or was that only his imagination? The longer he stared into the eyes of the image, the more variable the expression of the face seemed to become. It shifted from wry amusement to arrogance to lip-curling contempt. Its mouth trembled as though it were trying to speak to him.

  Amundson set the sheet of paper down and rubbed his eyelids with his thumb and index finger. Little wonder his mind was playing tricks, given the stress he had been under for the past few days.

  He took up the paper and regarded it again, striving to separate himself from it. This could not be an image. It had to be some sort of symbolic code series designed to affect the human mind at the deepest level and provoke the same illusion in every person who looked at it. He was not seeing the code, he was seeing only the effect of the code, but the code itself must be printed on the paper in his hand, just as it had been impressed onto the stone face of the colossus so many thousand years in the past.

  There was a popular name for a self-executing code that reproduced itself from one medium to another. Virus. What he was looking at on the paper, without actually being able to see it, must be some form of symbolic mind virus, transmitted through the visual sense.

  He turned the paper face down, his fingers trembling. The sophistication required to produce such a code was terrifying in its implications. No ancient human culture could have designed it, or at least no culture recognized by science. Unless the code had been generated by some intuitive process, or channeled from some higher external source. Perhaps if he divided the code into parts, he could analyze it without being affected by it.

  He slammed the flat of his hand against the table and pushed himself to his feet. It was pointless to speculate in the absence of data. He would run another scan, varying the parameters from the first scan to see if it achieved a different result. It would probably be best to do an entire series of scans under as many conditions as possible.

  Bright spots of light danced before his eyes as he left the main tent. He gathered up the processing computer and the laptop from his own tent and carried them toward the canvas enclosure around the colossus, where he busied himself connecting wires and preparing for the scan. His mind was not on his work.

  If a copy of the face were published in major world newspapers and shown around the globe on the nightly television news, in a single day it would imprint itself on the minds of perhaps a billion human beings. That was a sobering thought. Before releasing it to the press he would have to assure himself that the coding of the image was not harmful.

  Thus far, it had not caused any damage. His thinking was still clear. It was absurd even to consider withholding the results of the test from the media: once it became public, his fame and prosperity were assured. He would write a book and it would become a bestseller. He wondered why the idea of withholding the results had even crossed his mind and laughed to himself. The eerie chuckle startled him, until he realized that it had proceeded from his own mouth.

  The desert was filled with strange sounds this morning. On the other side of the canvas barrier, he heard a distant barking. It was followed by a series of drawn-out howls, like those of a wolf. He wondered idly if there really were wolves in the Gobi. It would be a fine state of affairs if the archaeologists returned to camp at the end of the day and discovered his wolf-mauled corpse. He couldn’t let that happen. Was there a weapon in the camp? He decided to look for a knife or a gun, even a good solid club.

  The ghosts were waiting for him when he emerged from the enclosure. They stood silent and motionless all over the open ground, watching him with dead eyes. Their bodies were translucent and colorless, but they wore some kind of ancient apparel that resembled none he had ever seen before. There were soldiers, priests, merchants, slaves, maidens, matrons, whores. Some were even children, but they stood as impassively as the rest.

  The weight of their dead eyes on Amundson was like a physical force, compelling him to do something, but he knew not what. It produced an unpleasant twisting sensation in his lower belly. Coupled with his headache, it made him irritable.

  “I don’t know what you want,” he muttered to them. “You’ll have to be clearer, I don’t know what you want.”

  He walked through them on his way to Laski’s tent. He needed to acquire a weapon before the wolves reached the camp and tore him apart. The touch of the dead against his skin was similar to the brush of cool silk. The ghosts made no attempt to stop him, but merely turned to regard him with mute accusation.

>   Inside Laski’s tent, the sweet-sick smell of fresh blood struck him in the face. He blinked in the dimness. The Mongolian archaeologist lay on his back on the bed with his throat torn out. Damn wolves, Amundson thought. The shy grad student, Maria Striva, crouched on his chest, naked, her body streaked with blood. She glared at the engineer, blood and bits of flesh clotting her teeth, her nose, the corners of her mouth, and her chin. Her bloodshot eyes were so wide open that he could see their whites all the way around their brown irises. There was no sanity there.

  With some part of his mind Amundson realized that she had become a wolf. The desert was filled with wolves. Why didn’t the Mongolians kill the verminous creatures? If the wolves were permitted to roam free in this way, sooner or later everyone would be attacked.

  The woman threw herself off the bed, her blood-covered fingers clawing for his throat, but her feet became tangled together and she fell heavily onto her face and breasts, knocking the wind from her lungs with a sharp yelp. Calmly, Amundson stepped across her body and picked up a short-handled pickaxe that rested on the floor next to a travel trunk. As the woman pressed herself up on her hands, he sank the point of the pickaxe into the top of her skull. She collapsed, dead.

  One less wolf to deal with, he thought with satisfaction. He remembered why he had entered the tent and rummaged through the trunk. At the bottom he found a revolver. When he left the tent, the ghosts nodded their heads at him with satisfaction.

  7.

  AS AN EXPERIMENT, HE SHOT ONE OF THE GHOSTS. THE report of the revolver rolled across the desert and lost itself on the dusty wind. As expected, the bullet did nothing. The ghost merely smiled at him, and its translucent head became a naked, grinning skull. That was to be expected, but he was a scientist after all, and of what use was surmise without verification? Thereafter, he ignored the ghosts, even though they followed him all the way to the entrance of the passage.

  He recognized the two corpses that lay near a mound of tailings, not far from a black hole in the ground, bodies grotesquely twisted in their death-throes. One was the red-headed grad, Jimmy Dolan, and the other was Sikes. Amundson tilted his head as he studied the tableau. It appeared that Dolan had stabbed Sikes in the back with a tent spike, and that Sikes—plucky little man that he was—had managed to bash in Dolan’s brains with a rock before he died. Two more wolves taken care of, the engineer thought with satisfaction.

  He climbed down the aluminum ladder into the pit and entered the mouth of the slanting passage, which descended into the solid bedrock at a downward angle of around twenty degrees. The light soon failed behind him, but he saw a tiny square of brightness at the end of the long, straight tunnel, and continued on, feeling his way along the wall with his left hand. The stone felt smooth beneath his fingertips, almost like polished marble.

  At the end, Amundson had to pick his steps with care over uncleared rubble. An opening had been made that was large enough to crawl through. He emerged into a vaulted chamber of thick, square pillars. The portion of it near the tunnel entrance was illuminated by the glowing mantle of a propane lantern. From the corners of his eyes, Amundson saw carved statues resembling animals and manlike beasts. They nodded their heads at him in approval, but he paid scant attention.

  On the open floor lay the bodies of Laski and his wife, horribly mutilated. Between them, a naked Luther White, his muscular dark body glistening with sweat in the light from the lantern, stretched across the corpse of Luce Henders. She also was naked and lay face down on a low platform of polished stone. With scientific detachment, Amundson noticed that her head was missing. He glanced around but failed to locate it.

  White was busy thrusting his erect member into the dead girl’s pale, blood-streaked backside, and did not notice the intrusion. With each thrust he grunted, “ugh-ugh-ugh,” and the headless body jerked on the altar as though by some undead animation. From the darkness beyond the reach of the lantern, ghosts began to gather. Amundson threw back his head and howled.

  “She’s mine,” White snarled at him. “You can’t have her.”

  He thrust himself away from the corpse of the girl and stood up, still impressively erect, his penis coated with blood. Between the buttocks of the headless corpse there was only a mass of chewed flesh that resembled raw beef. White looked around with quick jerks of his head from side to side. He lunged and grabbed up a shovel with a short D-handle. Holding it like an axe, he advanced with cautious steps toward the engineer.

  Amundson shot the black man in the chest. White looked down at the hole until it began to ooze blood, then laughed.

  “Bullets can’t kill me,” he cried through lips caked with dried blood.

  Amundson howled again and shot White two more times. The second bullet found his heart. The black grad student dropped like a marionette with its strings cut. The ghosts clustered close and nodded, their translucent eyes shining in the lantern glow like pearls.

  The engineer thrust the revolver into his belt. The sharp tang of gunpowder cut through the cloying scent of blood. He felt strong. More powerful and more potent than he had ever felt before. His mind was clear, his thoughts ordered and supremely rational. He realized that his sexual organ was engorged with blood and gazed down at the headless corpse with a speculative eye.

  “No, mine,” he murmured to himself, and began to giggle.

  Something drew him more strongly than his lust. In the darkness beyond the circle of the lantern light he sensed a vast space that extended downward, like the inverted vault of starry heaven. That was what the ghosts were trying to tell him. He must explore that space. It was his destiny, the only thing for which he had been born into this world. He listened, and now he could almost hear the whispers of the ghosts. If he remained in the darkness with them, it would not be long before they could talk to him and teach him. He could remain here a long time. There was ample food. Was that his own thought, or the thought of the ghosts?

  As he started forward, his boot slipped in White’s blood, and he fell heavily to the floor, the back of his head striking and rebounding from the polished stone. Something rolled beneath his hand when he struggled to get up. He blinked and held it to the light. Recognition entered his thoughts—the oval black stone he had put into his shirt pocket and then forgotten about.

  As he held up the stone, a kind of sigh arose from the throng of the dead. Acting on some impulse below the level of thought, Amundson extended the stone toward the ghosts. The pallid forms withdrew like mist from flame. He blinked heavily and shook his head. What was he doing here in this dark cavern? The vague memory of leaving the camp and climbing down into the passage came into his mind. He tried again to stand, then cursed and began to crawl toward the lantern with the stone clutched firmly in his left hand.

  Awareness came to him in flashes, between which there was oblivion. He was in the tunnel. He stumbled across the loose stones of the desert. He pushed through the resistless ghosts in the camp. Then he was sitting at the table in the main tent. Everything looked completely normal. He picked up his half-emptied coffee mug and felt a faint trace of warmth, or perhaps it was only his imagination. The printout of the face lay beside him on the table. He turned it over and looked at it. Fame. Fortune. Prestige. Success. Acclaim.

  He let it drop from his hand. It drifted under the table. He realized with surprise that he still held the oval talisman clutched in his left fist and laid it with care on the table. He sat staring at the doorway of the tent. Through the opening he could see the ancient ghosts walking to and fro in their eternal procession of the damned.

  With quick, economical motions he drew the revolver, cocked the hammer, put the muzzle into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

  8.

  GENERAL GOPPIK SURVEYED THE CORPSE OF THE American with distaste. Blood and brains had splattered the wall of the tent around the hole left by the departing bullet. The man’s pale eyes stared sightlessly, already starting to shrivel in the dry desert air. He picked up the black stone that lay on th
e table and regarded its carved surface with curiosity before putting it into his pocket. A keepsake for his young son, he thought.

  There were corpses everywhere. The more his soldiers searched, the more bodies they found. Evidently the entire party of foreigners had gone mad and murdered one another with extreme violence—all except this one, who had taken his own life. It was a propaganda nightmare. The Western press would never stop talking about it. The archaeological dig at Kel-tepu would have to be closed down, naturally. There was no other course of action to follow. The entire site would have to be sanitized, and some story invented to account for the massacre. Terrorists, perhaps. Yes, terrorists were always useful.

  Noticing a sheet of paper on the floor beneath the table, he bent and retrieved it. The paper bore some sort of computer printout of a black-and-white photograph, not a very clear one at that, showing a Mongolian man. He frowned and squinted at the image. There was something familiar about this face. He had seen it before, perhaps in some rogue’s gallery of wanted criminals.

  Grunting in dismissal, he started to crumple the paper in his hand, then thought better of it and smoothed it out on the table before folding it and putting it into his inner vest pocket. More than likely it held no importance, but it was evidence at a crime scene. He would take it back with him when he returned to Ulaanbaatar. If the face were publicized in the newspapers, perhaps someone would recognize it.

  * * *

  The History of a Letter

  AS RELATED BY JASON V BROCK

  Jason V Brock’s writing and art have been published in Butcher Knives & Body Counts, Animal Magnetism, Calliope, Like Water for Quarks, Ethereal Tales, Dark Universe (comic), Logan’s Run: Last Day (comic), San Diego Comic-Con’s Souvenir Book, Fangoria, and many other venues. He is Art Director/Managing Editor for Dark Discoveries magazine and coeditor (with William F. Nolan) of The Bleeding Edge (Cycatrix Press, 2010). His films include the documentaries Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone’s Magic Man, The AckerMonster Chronicles, and Image, Reflection, Shadow: Artists of the Fantastic. He lives in the Portland, Oregon, area and loves his wife, Sunni, reptiles/amphibians, and vegan/vegetarianism.