Through a Mythos Darkly

by Glynn Owen Barrass

  At last, Arneson vomited and twisted away from the sun. His eyes streamed tears and blood streamed from his nose.

  “This is bullshit,” Kirazian snarled. “If I’m going to die, I’ll die smoking.” Wriggling out of the shackles, he lit a cigar and hobbled over to Arneson.

  High in the sky, a rumble became a series of shocking detonations, and then a steadily rising howl shook the sky.

  “Leave me…” Arneson said. “Leave me…”

  “Where would we go?” Kirazian asked. “The whole world…Feh, most of it, He can have.”

  “Let’s go to that bunker and kick that bookworm fella’s ass,” Norm said, using up his quota for the week in one throw.

  “No…” Arneson rasped.

  The howling grew too loud to ignore. When they looked up, the sun seemed to be falling from the sky on their heads. Kirazian rushed to pick the lock on Arneson’s shackles and moved to Bernstein when the blazing rocket came tumbling out of the sky like a spent firework and smashed into the bunker.

  The explosion displaced a skyscraper’s worth of sand. The shockwave flung Kirazian ass over teakettle fifteen feet and finally swept away his top hat. The others received second-degree burns. Arneson’s eyesight returned within a few hours, by which time the four survivors of the last B-17G of the 303rd Bombardment Group of the Mighty Eighth had slogged back to the ghost town of Los Alamos to refuel their motorcycles. Before they left, Arneson and the others painted the backs of their jackets with the name the crew of 30338-B had once proudly painted on the nose of their Flying Fortress.

  Hell’s Angels.

  Scrimshaw

  Jeffrey Thomas

  MASSACHUSETTS, 1851

  THE ROAR HAD BEEN GOING ON WITHOUT CEASE FOR THREE SOLID days now.

  It came from out to sea, but it rolled through the streets of New Bedford like an unbroken boom of thunder, causing people to speak very loudly or even yell to be heard in conversation, causing people to stuff their ears at night with little balls of candle wax so they might sleep, or try to sleep. The roar was so deep in tone it rumbled inside one’s body like a vibration, though occasionally there would be overlapping notes, layers of other sounds. One of these was like a sustained blast, or series of blasts, on a trumpet…carrying from far away but abrupt enough to make one flinch. Superimposed over these sudden bleats and the consistent roar, there might be a crystalline ringing sound which penetrated one’s ears like icicles. Usually, however, it was just the baritone roar.

  “Perhaps it is a snore, not a roar,” Nathanial Hittle said to Charlotte, who had early on invited all the ship’s crew to call her by the nickname her husband, Captain Grigg, used, which was Lottie. Nathanial in turn had asked her to call him Nate.

  “I am sorry—what did you say?” she cried, tilting her pretty head toward him. She had come to see him in his parents’ home, to insure that he had fully recovered from the illness he had suffered aboard the Coinchenn.

  “I said,” Nate shouted, “perhaps it is a snore, not a roar!” Lottie Grigg still looked confused, so he explained, “What I mean is, perhaps the thing is sleeping.”

  “Ah! But what I have heard said is, the Fallen were sleeping, but at that time they were absent from our world. When they awoke, they came to be among us.”

  “It was but a joke,” Nate said.

  Lottie, perhaps not having heard him, went on speaking with the projection of a stage actress who wanted the last rows to hear her. “My husband tells me they simply move far more slowly than we do, because the current of time they live in is not the same time we occupy. The Fallen are here with us temporally in the sense of the body, but not temporally when we speak of time.”

  Was the captain such an expert on these entities, then? Being seen by society as superior to the common man—certainly, Grigg perceived himself to be, and impressed that belief upon his crew—was he privy to knowledge that the likes of Nate and even Mrs. Grigg were not?

  “So I have heard it said, as well,” Nate said, edging a little closer to Lottie so that she might hear him better, though that was not the only reason he wished to minimize the space between them. “Which is why this roar causes me concern. This is the longest yet heard from one of them, at least to my knowledge. What might be only a short cry to this creature—say, a brief exclamation of rage or dismay, or some emotion utterly inconceivable to us—for us could go on for days longer. Or weeks. What if it goes on for years? What if it never stops?”

  “Oh, please don’t say it!” Lottie pressed a hand to her chest, unconsciously covering the vein-shot pendant she wore, and laughed nervously. “I am sure I should go mad!”

  Nate stared at the hand she had flattened against her body. He could remember holding it when she had administered to him during his illness aboard the ship. She had offered it to him, soft and warm, her fingers squeezing tight, his sweat transferring itself to her palm as his fever turned delirious. How he ached to reach out, lift it from her breast, and take hold of it again. He murmured, too softly for her to hear, “I trust we would all go mad.”

  He cocked his head toward the window, its panes shivering so subtly one would need to lay their fingertips against them to realize it. More loudly, he asked, “Do you suppose it is angry that we are cutting into it?”

  “Oh, they are so immense, Nate, I scarcely think our labors are any more to them than the bite of a flea. And we have been doing so for all this time. You are too young to recall—they were here a year before your birth—but I clearly remember the day this one and all the rest appeared, though I was but six years old then. They have been here for two decades, and we began harvesting from them more than fifteen years ago, without any objection or opposition throughout.”

  Why must she remind him of their difference in years? As if she were his mother’s age, and not so young, still, and so beautiful. But then, the difference in years between her husband and herself was even greater, was it not?

  He replied, “You said so yourself…they are in a slower flow of time than our own. These cries began only several years ago, and they have gradually become louder and longer. Perhaps they are only now feeling the cutting.” After a pensive pause, he added, “And if a flea bites my flesh, my impulse is to catch it between my nails, and crush it.”

  “I see your meaning. Yet even if they are angered, with these beasts being so ponderous it might be generations more before our descendants feel their wrath…and by then, they will have hopefully found a means to defend themselves from them. Or even to kill them.”

  “One may hope,” Nate said, “indeed.”

  There was an uncomfortable moment of silence…if it could be considered silence, with that incessant cry. “Well…” Lottie began, as if to call an end to her visit.

  “I have something for you,” Nate blurted, where before he hadn’t known whether he would have the courage to present his gift. “Something I began aboard the ship, and only finished last night. It is a small token of my gratitude, for your great kindness in caring for me.”

  “Oh!” Lottie said, as he turned away from her. When he turned back, he proffered a sphere, and she took it into her own hands delicately.

  It was a souvenir from the harvesting: an orb about the size of a large orange, such a pure white it seemed almost luminous, but this quality had marked it as unsuitable for its potential use. A good orb—called a scrying ball—would be transparent, though with black veins throughout as if it had cracked inside. The milk orbs, as they were called, were only good for breaking down and shaping into buttons, knickknacks, or faux pearls like those that made up the necklace Lottie wore, from which hung a pendant fashioned from a polished oval fragment of a damaged scrying ball. Because of their limited value, seamen were often allowed to keep a milk orb and craft it into scrimshaw. This was what Nate had done, in the idle hours when there had been no chores, no harvesting going on.

  Using his pocketknife, and a needle one of the ship’s sailmakers had given him, into the naturally glossy surfa
ce of the milk orb Nate had etched an image of a mermaid, rising up from the waves so that most of her scaly, sinuous tail was out of the water, and its finned end poking up to one side of her. She was nude, but her long hair covered her breasts. In the background a shoreline was suggested: a sketchy silhouette of the rooftops and steeples of New Bedford, while a few gulls glided in the sky. He had popped out the lines of the etching with soot he had collected from the ship’s stove.

  Lottie’s gaze was fixed on the ball in the palms of her hands and Nate wondered if she had focused on the mermaid’s face in particular. The vibration of the roar from out to sea got inside his heart.

  She looked up, her expression subtly nervous, Nate felt, but her eyes wide and gleaming, and she said, “It is so beautiful, Nate. I had no idea you were in possession of such an artistic gift. You must have spent many hours working on this.”

  “I only wish it were more beautiful.” To do you proper justice, he wished he could say, but his throat locked up. It was already as if he had placed his quaking heart into her hands.

  “Are you certain you want me to have this?”

  “I could not be more certain. It is an expression of my…my high regard for you, Lottie.”

  “I shall cherish it, Nate.” Her eyes still shone brightly. Had they even blinked since they had first taken in the sphere? He prayed the strange intensity of her expression denoted affection, and not discomfort. He couldn’t tell. He had no frame of reference; a woman had never loved him.

  Did she love that husband of hers? If so, he must be a different man with her than he was with his crew. There was another nineteen-year-old crewman aboard Grigg’s ship, Dobbin Coates, with whom Nate had grown up in New Bedford. One morning Dobbin was too sickened by an excessive intake of smuggled whiskey the night before to perform his duties, and on top of that in his drunkenness he had spread around a scandalous rumor about the captain. To make an example of him Grigg had punished the young man with lashes from “the captain’s daughter,” as it was nicknamed: a cat o’ nine tails. Grigg had assembled the entire crew on the deck to witness the punishment, and he himself had wielded the cat. This had been during the journey before last; Mrs. Grigg had not been aboard on that occasion.

  This most recent excursion of the Coinchenn, just past, had been Lottie’s first time accompanying her husband. Had he requested that she join him, or had it been her idea? Though a former three-masted whaling ship, usually with a crew of thirty-five, the Coinchenn did not undertake journeys lasting three years as many whaling vessels of similar size did. Under those circumstances, one might imagine why a captain’s wife would prefer to endure hardship rather than be apart from her man for so long a time. But the Coinchenn, a harvester that sailed out only to the one nearby Fallen, was seldom out of New Bedford’s harbor for more than a few weeks; a month at the longest. Was it really that she couldn’t bear to be away from her husband for even so short a duration? Nate preferred to believe it was that she was simply too bored at home alone, especially as she had no children. Or could it be, he wondered, that Grigg was too jealous a man and too threatened by Lottie’s beauty to trust her, any longer, to be alone on the mainland for an extended period?

  In any case, Lottie had taken on various duties on her first voyage, helping to wash and mend clothing, to cook, and to tend to the sick. Thus had she come to care for Nate when he had fallen ill and become confined to his bunk in the forecastle, in the ship’s bow, sitting close beside him on his sea chest. On one occasion, when his fever was at its worst, holding his hand and speaking to him soothingly…tenderly.

  “I really must be returning home,” she said, briefly touching his arm. “Please, I would like to say goodbye to your charming mother before I depart. It was a pleasure meeting her.”

  “Certainly,” Nate said, sweeping his arm for Lottie to precede him. She did so, holding the milk orb in front of her belly in both hands as if to protect it from dropping, shattering.

  Following her from the living room in which they had talked, Nate couldn’t have felt more heartsick to see Lottie leave for her expensive house up on the hill overlooking town than if he had been her husband setting sail on a three year whaling voyage.

  Captain Simon Grigg had a wharf named after him, Grigg’s Wharf, and there he owned a building in which associated businesses rented space. Among them were the counting office of harvesting merchant Charles Bradford, and the shipsmith shop of Joseph Morgan, who fashioned ironwork for whaling and harvesting vessels, and the sail loft of John Mallory, who had prospered by changing his technique—that is, the material from which he made his sails —fifteen years earlier. This large stone building also of course housed the office of Captain Grigg himself, and it was here he had summoned Nate today.

  Being a mere foremast hand, the lowest caste of a harvester’s or whaler’s crew, Nate had never been inside this building before, let alone his captain’s office. When Grigg called out for him to enter, Nate found the man—dark-haired and bearded, forty-six years old—sitting behind his desk and moving a circular magnetic block across a plate of metal that rested in front of his scrying device. “Good afternoon, my boy,” Grigg said, looking up. He caught Nate craning his neck in an attempt to get a better look at the brass-housed instrument that squatted atop the desk. “Have you never seen one of these before?”

  “Not closely, sir,” Nate replied, loudly enough to be heard over the roar.

  “Come here.” Grigg gestured. “Come, come…do not be shy.”

  Nate approached the desk, came around to its side and saw the scrying device from the front. Its upright circular glass screen appeared foggy at its outer edge, but toward its center the image became much sharper. What he saw was the bustling waterfront of New Bedford, and a denuded forest of ships’ masts with their sails furled, seen from on high. A gull fluttered past very close, and Nate flinched, startled. He might have thought he was looking out through a window, such as a porthole in a ship’s hull. He knew, though, this was an image transmitted to the device by a scrying ball, fixed in a kind of crow’s nest atop the tallest mast of the docked Coinchenn.

  “See here,” Grigg said, and he again moved the magnetic disc across the metal plaque in front of him. The viewpoint on the glass screen shifted, turned to gaze out toward the mouth of Buzzards Bay and the open sea beyond. It was a clear day, and on the far line of the horizon as if painted upon the sky loomed the white double pillars of the Fallen, colossal and misted with distance. “A God’s eye view of three hundred and sixty degrees. And then there is this.” Grigg reached to a knob carved from a milk orb and turned it with a click. From inside the instrument’s brass housing there came the brief ticking of a delicate mechanism, though it went unheard under the circumstances.

  Now the screen was a window with an altogether different view: the shadowy, subtly undulating depths of the water of New Bedford Harbor. This view was projected to the scrying device by another veined ball mounted on the ship’s lower surface. Again, the view shifted as if a great eye was turning in its socket as Grigg moved the magnet. There was, of course, no accompanying sound to these visuals.

  “The gifts the Fallen have given us, eh? This is what we strive for, both you and I, in our own ways. I imagine you have never seen the source of this magic? The brain of such a machine, as it were?”

  “I have not, sir.”

  Grigg rose from his rich leather chair and leaned forward to open a hinged door on one side of the scrying device’s base. He pinched the edge of a panel slotted into the machine’s interior and drew it out a little ways. It was like a canvas mounted in a small metal picture frame, and there were three others like it slotted into grooves inside, horizontal and close together. Their material, stretched taut inside these picture frames, was white like canvas, in fact, but black veins of various thickness squiggled across the whiteness. Grigg couldn’t, or didn’t dare, pull the panel out all the way for fear of stressing those particular veins, perhaps two dozen, that had reached out from thi
s panel to its neighbor and created connections. These sheets of material joined each other spontaneously over time, as if mindlessly trying to mend the body from which they had been removed.

  “Turning a knob, as you saw me do, changes very slightly the nearness of one panel to another, thus varying the perspective. But the means of calculating such things is more than this humble seaman can explain,” Grigg said. “Do they remind you of anything, these fillets?”

  “Yes, sir. Our sails.”

  “Exactly. And we have yet to discover all the uses for the substances of the Fallen. Might we make living clothing from their tissues, that heat us when we are cold, cool us when we are hot, as our own flesh protects us? Pages in books that spell out to us the knowledge of the Fallen, their own living nerves forming words? It causes one’s imagination to soar, does it not?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  In fact, Grigg’s words reminded Nate of the story Dobbin Coates had shared with himself and others when he’d been drunk, the story that had got his flesh scored with the “captain’s daughter.” Dobbin had been tasked with bringing to the captain’s cabin two bottles of wine from the supplies, while Grigg and his officers were dining. Dobbin claimed he had seen Grigg quickly cover up with a domed plate cover a platter heaped with veiny white slabs of meat. But…if the flesh of the Fallen was edible, why wouldn’t that be common knowledge? Wasn’t there enough of it to be made available to all folk; wouldn’t such an enterprise reap great reward? Or was it, as Dobbin had suggested, that the meat imparted special qualities or knowledge to those who partook of it, joined them in some exclusive brotherhood, like a demonic communion?

  Grigg said, with an alteration of tone that betrayed bitterness, “These gifts are the least they can do for us, as we are now forced to endure this maddening call.” He slid the panel back into place, closed the compartment and seated himself behind his desk again. “In any case…First Mate Denton tells me you declined to sign aboard for our next excursion. Why is that? Have you found other work?”