Through a Mythos Darkly

by Glynn Owen Barrass

  His Negroid hair had been plaited and his eyes were filled with rage. Although his head was as big as a bushel basket, Boo had the chinless face of the Whateleys. Manacles encircled his foot-thick wrists and a chain went round his chest. It was clear that each photographer’s flash was causing him pain, yet these gentlemen of the press continued to rack up torture points in the name of journalism.

  “Stop it!” I yelled. “Stop you are hurting him!”

  Boo’s giant eyes found me.

  As did Amasa’s and Mr. Nathan’s from the front row.

  Then the monster bellowed my name, “Nell, Nell Lee!”

  No one had ever really looked at me that wasn’t either a blood relative, classmate, or teacher. I could feel the weight of his regard. I could feel at that moment what Mayella’s mind must have been like before it exploded into madness. I also felt deep, deep shame at the gaze of so many hundreds of people watching me during this intimate, archaic, and terrifying moment. Of all my later experiences of sex and death and religion, none even amount to a tenth of a tenth of that time.

  In my mind was a terrible howling, “I must break through, unite the spheres.”

  I looked toward Tru and Mr. Viereck. They were staring at me with horror as though I had just lost some cosmic lottery of doom. Viereck looked back at Kong/Boo and said, “I knew it. He is Jewish. We must run.” He grabbed Tru, who truly screamed like a girl. But at that moment came three great snapping sounds. Boo pulled his right arm up, snapping a chain, then the left. Then he stood fully and the two chains attached to those on his waist snapped off. Every throat including mine and Boo’s screamed at this moment. He put his massive hands on the bars of his cage and bent them as though they were pipe cleaners. I tried to follow Viereck who was holding a protesting Tru above his head, but the brave man next to me shoved me to the floor and walked over me. Two more people likewise used me as a carpet, before I pulled myself to my feet. Boo was free of his cage, like Polyphemos he was eating men. The blood of reporters ran down the chinless Whateley face.

  He began striding through the mass of fleeing humanity, his thick lizard feet unhurt by the crushing of theater seats. I knew, with the same certainty that one knows things in dreams, that I was his target. I tried to run but his huge eyes held me. I have tried to describe at various times why I could not run. It was not fear nor curiosity nor pity nor (as an article by Richard Shaver disgustingly suggested), lust. It was another emotion, and not a human one.

  Boo slapped the people away from me with simple swats as though they were offending gnats. He caught me up in his right hand and blotted out the world of sight for several long minutes. Subjectively several long centuries.

  In the warm dark I could hear screams. Then some gunshots. I heard Amasa yelling at them to stop shooting—his daughter was in the creature’s fist for God’s sake. He promised to save me. I heard Nathan screaming some words of gibberish that made my brain hurt. The words swirled through my brain, they too were an alien emotion, but cold, and made me think of the cells in the basement of the Monroe County courthouse.

  Then I felt Boo stand still and yell back, “Momma loved me more than she did you. You sorry bastard!” Then I heard Nathan scream real loud—his voice began below where I was and then was above where I was—then there was a big jolt and his voice traveled rapidly downward and ended with a splattering sound.

  The smell was horrible. Snakes and sewage and dead things all at once with other things probably not of this Earth.

  I could hear sirens and screams and we were moving along fairly quickly. I guess he was running.

  Images kept coming intro my brain. Birds. All sorts of birds. Finches (because of my mother’s maiden name I guess), whippoorwills and mockingbirds, cuckoos and ibises and ravens, and strange reptile birds that I later found out were pterodactyls). There was a need to get higher, nearer the sky. The night sky was Daddy. The night sky loved him. It was all written there.

  There were more sirens. I could hear a man yelling in Italian at Boo. Boo stopped and rolled some large wooden thing and the man let out a yelp. Then the regular swinging of the right arm stopped and there was a jerky motion. I felt like I was being pulled up and I was so scared. I could feel in my bones that he was going to drop or fling me to the ground like his twin brother. Each jerk took me six or seven feet up. He grasped me tighter and all the places I had been trampled upon began to ache. I wondered if he would squash me.

  More images came into my mind. I could see people gathering below and someone setting a search light. No! Don’t shine it in his eyes!! Boo let out a deep rumble of pain and squished me so hard I screamed too. He pictured the dusty streets of Monroeville—he was looking from behind the blinds. He was watching Jim and Tru and me playing with the tire. He was too tall, he had to bend down. His body was too elastic. He must not have bones like we do. He wanted to go someplace where light and dark talk to you…where sound makes space and where time has a smell like vanilla and hot copper. He climbed faster, he was looking for a crack in the sky. He was listening to the Jansky waves.

  I heard bi-planes. They were coming to rescue me. Then I realized they were not. One little girl from Alabama was not big on the Yankee priority list. I realized the scale of the world then. In the big picture there weren’t small pictures, and when fear is in the mix, small human beings will be trampled every time. The fear of Boo was a sun to the moon of caring about the little girl. My fear of Boo began to fade and I began to fear my fellow pure-bred humans.

  Boo swatted at the planes as they strafed him. I hoped Mr. Viereck wasn’t watching; their ineffectual attack didn’t make our air force look good, and I didn’t want him to tell Mr. Hitler. In addition to treating the planes like gnats on a summer evening, Boo gestured wildly at the stars. He seemed to expect them to move.

  A violet beam thinner than a pencil shot out a few feet above my head and it smelled like Mr. Tesla’s room. It shot again and again. Thankfully missing me, but missing Boo as well. I was praying for Boo to just calm down. We could all get on the train, Boo and Amasa and even Tru and just go back to Monroeville, but even then I was old enough to know that things didn’t happen like that. Eden is where stories start, not where they end up. The beam shot out again, and for the first time I was brave enough to watch something other than Boo. Across the way on the Chrysler building stood Tru, Tesla, and Amasa. Tesla was firing his particle beam weapon. He was a much better genius than a marksman. My daddy took the weapon from him. He drew aim and fired. The beam struck Boo’s leathery chest, cutting a small searing steaming hole. I had no idea that my father knew how to shoot, he had always complained of the weakness of his eyes. I remember when my uncle had given my brother and me air rifles and Amasa had declined to instruct us, giving us only the rule that we were to use our weapons against tin cans and the such. In particular, father had advised us not to kill some songbird or another claiming it was a sin to kill something harmless. At the time I thought he had said pigeon, but that was because of the love Mr. Tesla had for his bird. I was to recall the actual bird years afterward. In many ways Boo had certainly been harmless for many years, simply giving the children (and some of the adults) something to marvel at. I yelled at my father to stop.

  God the smell was awful. I braced myself on my tiny ledge fearing that the smell would knock me out, or that Boo fighting above me would take me with him on the gravity elevator. Either my prayers were answered or Mr. Tesla’s device was faulty, because I saw the gun burst into a little purple fireball and my father fling the burning mass away from him.

  I yelled at Boo, trying to reassure him that everything was going to be well. In fact I had no reason to be making any such claim, but my fear had vanished and some hitherto unknown maternal instinct raised itself up in me. One of Boo’s crotch tentacles snaked itself over to me and snatched me up. He pulled me to the mass of what in men would be their men parts. Amid the forest of strange growths, I now saw there were eyes. Dozen of eyes which if it were not for
their alien arrangement, would be the eyes of a small frightened boy. Surely not the eyes of my race, which is to say the human race, but small and scared eyes nonetheless. I saw myself reflected in each eye. I saw a dozen tiny Harpers. I wanted to tell him that human love was as real as fear and hate. I wanted to be David to his King Solomon.

  Boo was trying to understand the gap between us, between his alien parent and his Whateley mother, between some ultimate line of Us and Them that he was fated to straddle. He drank my image, and a great shudder went through him. I felt him give up on holding to this world, and I saw his eyes reflecting the unknown color of another world. He sat me back down again. I could hear planes flying toward us.

  Boo was yelling the same sort of gibberish his brother had. It was the kind of thing you hear at Holy Roller revivals, “Ygnailh…ygnaiih… thflthkh’ngha…Yog-Sothoth…” rang the hideous croaking out of Alabama. “Y’bthnk…h’ehye–n’grkdl’lh…” I could feel his pain. He was just like Jesus on the cross, like every Negro we’ve lynched. Pigeons began gathering on the building. Hundreds of pigeons. They were cooing in rhythm with the gasps of Boo. His tail and his other appendages were writhing wildly. The beam struck again. Boo was leaking now, great gouts of whitish liquid. He bellowed again, “Eh-y-ya-ya-yahaah—e’yayayaaaa… ngh’aaaaa…ngh’aaa…h’yuh…h’yuh…HELPHELP!…dd—dd—dd—DADDY! DADDY! YOG-SOTHOTH!”

  His right hand, that had been clutching the radio tower, spasmed open, and the thick saurian feet uncurled. At the very last moment he pushed away from the building so that he wouldn’t take me with him as he fell. The whoosh of air near froze me. Above me I could see the biplanes were having difficulty with a glowing spot in the air—I think it was the Opening Boo wanted. It vanished with a sound of thunder. Suddenly all of the pigeons were squawking, and then they too were falling by the hundreds. There was a big empty space in my head where Boo’s thoughts and images had been. I knew I would be spending the rest of my life trying to fill that hole. The filling wouldn’t just come to me like a glass slipper delivered by the anxious Prince.

  It seemed no time passed until a man on a rope ladder climbed down to rescue me. The firemen had been waiting behind closed doors on the observation deck. They gently placed a blanket around me and kept saying, “There, there.” But I didn’t know where they meant.

  Boo’s big broken body lay on the street covered with hundreds of pigeons. It had begun to liquefy. Great white streams of mucus were running off in the gutters and the smell was horrible, but horrible in a normal sort of way. The police kept their great searchlight on the body as though fearing a resurrection, and some of the more scientifically minded folk were seeking bottles and jars to collect the death residue. I wanted to go to him, but they held me back. I had been right with my guess about his lack of bones.

  Amasa, Tru, and Tesla arrived. Many reporters swarmed around Tesla, asking his opinions about the “monster.” Mr. Tesla said that it was not his weapon that had killed the beasts, but my symmetry. This line was dumbed down when they made the movie, and the government removed all reference to Mr. Tesla’s death ray. Boo’s extra crotch limbs, eyes, and saurian parts were likewise forgotten since they play no part of a sane world that has nothing to fear except fear itself.

  I was famous for a brief time; some of your parents or grandparents may have seen my face on a newsreel. They didn’t get my name right, they used my nickname of Nell. Nell Finch, they said. Mr. Tesla had remembered my bird name. In the genius’ mind birds and angels were of a oneness. I suppose that I should be glad that I wasn’t Nell Pigeon.

  The death of a single boy, no matter how tall, from Alabama made the headlines. If people remember 1933 at all, they remember it as the year Hitler became Chancellor. Four years later the Hindenburg became a fireball, and a year after that the Martians landed in New Jersey.

  It was years before I saw Tru again. By then he had evolved beyond the little boy of Monroeville, he had heard other voices and had been in other rooms. He begged me to write it all down, but I demurred. The popular account had been written by a Weird Tales writer who had made some reputation as a ghost writer having written for Harry Houdini. The government had forced him to censor it a great deal, but I have heard that the whole incident deeply affected him and that he had left New York for his native Providence. I felt that if I wrote it people would take it as allegory about racism with Kong as some giant black figure in a crucifixion scene. The last thing I wanted was to see buttons that said, “KING KONG DIED FOR YOUR SINS.” In 1961 I did indeed see such buttons, but I had already dealt with Boo and Monroeville in my own way. I made my own statement about the love I felt in his eyes and the horror of being different.

  Tesla died alone and poor in 1943, a few months shy of a decade after the only public display of his particle beam. In the middle of the war with Germany and Japan, nobody noticed. He was said to have developed a strange theology after that night wherein he believed that dying human souls could be transferred into pigeons. Such had been Boo’s fate. It was true that Tesla could have been a billionaire, but chose to fight for free power all of his days. He was a man as gentle as Arthur Whateley, and I hope that his soul is flying, somewhere in the great night of the cosmos he understood better than so many men.

  The Last Quest

  William Meikle

  ARTHUR PENDRAGON, FORTY-NINTH HOLDER OF NAME AND TITLE, watched from Westminster Palace as the Saxon dirigibles rained fiery death from above. Londinium burned for the twelfth night in succession, and Arthur was only too aware that all he could do was stand on the balcony and look splendid in his too shiny armor that had never even seen a battle.

  “The people need a symbol.” He’d heard the phrase—his whole line of ancestors had heard it—heard it so often that it was almost the family motto.

  “This is all your fault, you know,” Arthur said to the much smaller robed and hooded figure at his side. Merlin—first and only of the name, at least to Arthur’s knowledge, did not say anything in reply, so Arthur went on. “Do something, man—call up your old magic—send them home. Do your duty.”

  Merlin laughed at that, a harsh, low chuckle that came with a watery rumble, as if something was broken deep in his chest.

  “Duty now is it, Sire? I was called to your family all those years ago—bound to you by chains you will never begin to understand, and yet you have the nerve to speak to me about duty? Shame on you, Arthur—you are the king here, not I. I may have grown old over the years, but at least I have not yet grown soft. All of your machinations in the name of progress, all of your politics and treaties and kowtowing to the Northmen has only led us here, to this fiery end. The Saxe-Coburgs have torn up every treaty, walked over all of our old allies in weeks—and here they are perched on our doorstep—and burning down the house. And now that disaster is upon us, you look to me for answers, as you and yours have always done. And as always, you already know what is needed—the land needs its king, and the king needs the sword and the grail—as it ever was, as it ever shall be.”

  “The grail is lost,” Arthur said.

  “And forever will be, unless you look for it,” Merlin replied.

  It was an old argument, and one that was not going to be resolved any time soon. Arthur dragged his gaze from the burning city, turned his back and stepped inside, into the great hall, where the knights sat in session at the table. They would look to him for guidance—but as yet he did not have the slightest idea what he could tell them.

  Arthur saw Lancelot look up from his ale. The flickering light from the gas lamps only accentuated the gold and blue inlays of his ceremonial armor, the sharpness of which was in contrast to the sagging jowls of his cheeks and the flabby sausage fingers that brushed at his overly manicured beard as he spoke.

  “Tell me, Merlin, have you always been so dashed ineffectual?”

  Merlin merely smiled. “Perhaps you should ask your mother?”

  Lancelot tried to push his chair back and rise to the challenge,
but his armor was far too heavy for the grossly overweight body it surrounded, and all he could do was stare sullenly as the wizard took his seat at Arthur’s right hand at the table.

  A page arrived with a silver platter. On it was a single note—a telegram, timed and dated that very hour. It only took him a minute to read it. The glow from the fires outside overwhelmed the dim yellow gaslight, casting a red pallor over everything in the hall, and the hum of the propellers as the great balloons went by overhead meant that Arthur had to almost shout to be heard as he put the note down.

  “The Saxe-Coburg queen has called for our surrender,” he said. Unconditional, and with myself and Merlin to be taken to Kassel as hostages—a sign of our good faith. If we do not comply immediately this bombardment will continue, until there is nothing left of Londinium but ash and rubble.”

  Persifal laughed. He wore his own armor lightly, and moved with the grace of a fighter, being one of the few around the table who had kept to the old ways and actually enjoyed the enforced rigors of weapons training.

  “Let them come. This city has burned before, and survived it. And they are only Saxons after all—they have never bested an Arthur on these shores, and our people know it.”

  Arthur saw that several of the knights agreed—Bedivere, Gawaine and Kay among them—but Lancelot was not convinced—Lancelot was rarely convinced by anything save a woman, a beer, or a fight—and these days the beer usually won over the rest. Galahad, quiet as ever, sat at Lancelot’s side, the familial bond plain to see. Old rivalries died hard around this table, and it seemed that even an imminent invasion was not enough to heal the schisms.