Black Wings Of Cthulhu: Volume Two Part 22

"Storm's on the way," the proprietor said, staring at the water. The harbormaster's warning horn sounded. By this point, the scene had grown unbearably tense, and I knew I should take my leave-[illegible] just forget this horrible place and its contents for good.

"[Illegible]," the shopkeeper said at last; then he crept over to the display and reached in. I wiped the sweat from my forehead again, my stomach in turmoil and competing with the pain in my head.

"Perhaps it is too much effort-" I said. My voice was hoa.r.s.e, a whisper.

"No, no: just one moment; it always takes a moment to [illegible]..."

Another odd statement from the owner; I was beginning to wonder if the old man was losing his grip on reality.16 The wind kicked up again; it was now completely dark outside. A stroke of lightning split the night, followed by a low roll of thunder. As I watched, several denizens staggered against the mounting gale-they seemed unnatural, pained, ensconced in tattered overcoats and filthy gloves that obscured their features. They determinedly made their way in the wind toward the opening night of the Ceremony,17 no doubt driven by the long tradition of the Rituals;18 indeed, I had forgotten that this was the return of that savage and disturbing five-year spectacle.19 Backward hamlets such as this are places so entombed in their traditions, so ossified by their histories that they appear to have lost all [illegible] and rational thought when it comes to these "historic" defences of orchestrated mayhem. Rotting leaves plaster the windows, whipped onto the loose panes by the tempest, and the lights in the store, already dim, lower. Finally I look away, awash once more in the anxious sensation of inhabiting a nightmare, but knowing this could not be the case. At that moment the keeper was at my side, brandis.h.i.+ng the foul item from the window.20 "This is what you seek?" he stated more than asked, thrusting the obscenity into my hands, his thin flesh clammy and vaguely scaly to the touch. I was horrified to behold the object up close, and for a moment just stared into the cold, rheumy eyes of the proprietor. "Go on," he commanded, his voice clotted, distant, as he pushed the artifact toward me. "Take it-there's not another on Earth."

As I held it in my hands, unsure if it were real or imagined, living or dead, I felt its dark energy course through my fingers... so much pain... so much filth... so much strength and cosmic wisdom... so much power. It appeared alive somehow, even conscious. Once again, the world started to tumble...

"How-how did you come to possess-this?" I asked, fingering the smooth, hard curves and planes, studying the bizarre runes and glyphs adorning the dreadful object. My impulses were divided as I hefted the thing: part of me wanted to destroy it, smash it into pieces, while another part of me longed to fall down in wors.h.i.+p, inwardly cringing at its simultaneous beauty and loathsomeness.

"Mon Dieu-now that is a good question," he said, his smile dark, macabre, like a bruise on the face of a bride. It seemed starkly out of place. I glanced down-my hands were covered in what appeared to be blood: the thing was oozing a sticky red fluid; its rigidity was lessened and it now felt p.r.i.c.kly, malleable. "Sadly," the shopkeeper said, "there is no answer: it comes from yesterday and tomorrow. It came to me long ago in a dream..."

A gust howled against the windows, and the light failed: suddenly a revolting, deformed face pressed against the iced gla.s.s of the storefront. A mewling din surged over the wind, and an ominous crowd began to gather outside the shoppe.

The proprietor laughed behind me, [illegible] I felt frozen, unable to move. As everything vanished from view, I thought about how this was the strangest thing in all the world... the most dreadful thing.... And then the idol was twitching in my hands... birthing...

Darkness: I awoke in darkness on the windswept street, my hands stained crimson, my palms singed and painful, though I have no memory of how I got there. I could not find the store, and the relic was gone...

SINCE THAT TIME, I HAVE BEEN TROUBLED BY A PECULIAR dream.

In the reverie, I am approaching a decrepit house on a devastated plain. The moon hangs low, bloated and blue in the sky. Fog snakes the ground. As I get nearer, a sickly yellow light winks on in an upstairs window, and a shadow pa.s.ses in front of it. The wind blows, and a low rumble grows in the distance. The air is frosty, biting.

Closer now, the door opens: its hinges groan and the inside is darker than the outside; the smell of wet earth is robust, sickly.

In the foyer, on a table, there is a bundle of unbound, mildewed papers, tied together with a string. I untie it, and as I leaf through the stained ma.n.u.script, I notice that nearly every inch of the yellowed parchment is covered in weird symbols, incomprehensible diagrams, and crude ill.u.s.trations.

And then, a few pages into the doc.u.ment, there it is: a hasty pen-and-ink sketch of the thing in the window!

I hurl the stack of papers to the ground and sense that I am not alone. Every time I have the dream, I am able to peruse more of the leaves in the bundle before I reach the drawing, and more of the presence reveals itself. Turning around, I can barely make out a ramshackle spiral staircase near the back of the room, which ascends to the ceiling, but not an ordinary one: it is instead a galactic canopy of stars and swirling celestial bodies, and the stairs climb into the face of a terrible midnight sun, its merciless solar flares blinding me, scorching my skin...

Then it appears: the idol from the shoppe. But not as some hand-held miniature, no. Instead it is a ma.s.sive, jabbering horror, rending the fabric of my sanity with its tormented shrilling, its ultra-human sonorities.... It reaches to me across the aeons, the gulfs of eternity, and holds my broken body in its awful clutches-now I am the miniature!

I always awake screaming, and, more recently, I have had... injuries. Burns. Scratches. [Illegible] I feel that I must be hurting myself in my sleep, but, even though I take precautions against unintentional self-mutilation, the injuries are becoming more serious...

I SUSPECT THAT THE DREAM HAS SIGNIFICANCE; THAT IT means I am destined to find the ghastly relic again. Since that horrible day all those years ago, I have been obsessed: searching for, but unable to find, the mysterious antiquarian dealer's shoppe. I still look for it daily amidst the new and unknown alleyways and shuttered businesses littering the darkened ends of the port. Every face I encounter I study, looking for the old merchant, to no avail. The place and its owner seem to have vanished from the Earth.

[Illegible] I recall the [illegible] shoppe to be has in its stead a mapmaker's facility; they claim that the establishment I look for was there once-but more than a hundred years previous. I have moved away several times, trying to forget what I saw that fateful evening, but the strange pull of the place compels me back. There must be a reason for this; I hold it as a sign.

I have carried this with me for so long now, Dearest One. The dreams are becoming more intense, more frequent, more vivid... I sense that I am on the verge... I know that am at the cusp of some great insight, some stupefying revelation... I must get to the bottom of it before I draw my last breath, but the way things are proceeding, I am not confident that this will happen. [Illegible]

If I ever find the infernal object again, I know what I must do... and I will do it.21 Heaven help me, Dearest, I have22 FINAL THOUGHTS.

THIS LETTER IS AN INTERESTING DOc.u.mENT: IT RAISES more questions than it answers.

My hope is that I will one day be able to sort out where the port is located, what happened to the author, perhaps even understand the strange information seemingly "encoded" in the note. The vagueness of the memo and the obscured ident.i.ty of its author are puzzling, tantalizing. Colleagues have even suggested that it is some elaborate hoax, but the content and the delivery make me wonder. Besides, to what end? So that, one day years later, someone would try to sort out the conundrum after the involved parties are (one would presume) all deceased?

Buddhists have a saying: "When the student is ready, the Master will appear." Perhaps this is one of those times: I have a theory that the phenomenon of deja vu (touched upon in the letter several times) is related to the process of dreaming.

It might be a way for the unconscious or the subconscious to process the reliving of events from multiple lifetimes, or of the same life lived multiple times. Another religious group, the Hindus, have long held that life is a cyclic, recurring event (reincarnation), and that there might even be different physical selves, but with the same soul (read: consciousness) over vast spans of time. Who is to say that there could not be the same consciousness relived repeatedly in the same physical self in some other, parallel universe?

Since finding this letter, my life has changed: I have had increasing incidents of lucid dreaming, and have even envisioned myself in the same terrible house that the writer describes so richly in the note. Lately, too, I have had bouts of amnesia: I find myself scribbling-unconsciously-in my notebooks, and always in a strange script, in alien characters; later, fully cognizant, I cannot decipher the cryptic symbols, the bizarre drawings I have scrawled.

Perhaps these notations are a key?

Only time will tell.

1 Bataille was a prolific and important French author whose works frequently dealt with surrealism, as well as the entanglements of human s.e.xuality and mortality; other notable works of his include The Solar a.n.u.s; The Tears of Eros; Erotism; and The Trial of Gilles de Rais.

2 Story of the Eye in English, as by Lord Auch (a pseudonym that Bataille employed because of the p.o.r.nographic nature of the work).

3 A venerated and excellent resource for bibliophiles in the Pacific Northwest.

4 The addressee is not identified, but appears to have been a love interest.

5 The writer is never revealed, but references suggest a male.

6 The author does not elaborate on why both parties appear to be in danger.

7 The letter is not dated, but the condition, and the parchment-like material of the paper, appears to be from the early 1900s, or perhaps even older.

8 I could find no record of any such place in the United States; there are several so-called ethnic areas like this in Europe, however, notably in Prague (unfortunately, most of the others were destroyed during World War II). Some of the notations in the margins of the doc.u.ment appear to be either Cyrillic or Czech characters; also, there are several words and references in French in the letter, so it is possible that the writer was in Europe, or was European.

9 Unnamed.

10 It is possible that the author had tuberculosis, a common malady of the apparent era in which the letter was written.

11 This term was used in reference to much of the Middle East in previous times.

12 Possibly the author is German or Jewish?

13 This might be a reference to World War I (either a civilian or a military casualty). It could also be related to work or an accident; it is noteworthy that the object of the letter seemed unaware of the brother's fate or not involved with the author at this point in time.

14 Interesting geographic clues, but still quite vague.

15 A reference to a pre-electric time. Combined with the geographic descriptions, the locale could be England (or perhaps the writer is British, as a few of the spellings seem to indicate), Paris, or even America (especially New England).

16 An interesting point in light of the next few paragraphs.

17 No doc.u.mentation.

18 No doc.u.mentation.

19 A good clue: there are several "festivals" such as this throughout Europe and America, usually related to historic events or the harvest. It is possible that the one referred to here is related to a military victory over the local indigenous peoples.

20 The references here are never fully explained: it is unclear exactly what the "object" actually is.

21 An ominous statement.

22 The letter ends here, in the middle of the page; the only other marks on the page are a series of dark brown spatters.

Appointed CHET WILLIAMSON.

Chet Williamson is the author of over twenty novels and a hundred short stories, which have appeared in the New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire, and many other magazines and anthologies. His fiction has been nominated for the MWA's Edgar Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Bram Stoker Award, and his short story collection Figures in Rain (Ash-Tree Press, 2002) received the International Horror Guild Award. Many of his e-books and audiobooks are now available from Crossroad Press.

"CHRIST, HE LOOKS OLDER EVERY YEAR."

"He is older every year. So are we."

"Well, h.e.l.l yeah, but you know what I mean. At least we try to stave it off. I don't think he even cares any more. Look at him."

Sybil Meadows took a good look and thought that what she saw was not only sad, it was what could be her own future, which was sadder still. It was s.h.i.+tty enough that here she was, in her early sixties, behind a table at h.e.l.lCon 4, for Christ's sake, about to peddle her photos for twenty bucks each. What was s.h.i.+ttier was that Glenda Garrison was right next to her.

Glenda was friendly enough, but she could be a b.i.t.c.h on wheels. Her claim to fame had been a series of B-movies she'd made in her twenties and thirties, before her b.o.o.bs had drooped to where she couldn't do the nude scenes that had made her such wet dream bait for teenage boys. She'd lucked out with a supporting role as the hero's mom on one of Joss Whedon's series that had run for less than a year, but that was enough to let her make a decent living doing the con circuit.

Unlike Sybil, who was happy both to sell and to sign her eight-by-tens from her years in the British series, Donna Darkness, for twenty bucks each, Glenda was a gouger. She charged twenty for the photo and another twenty to sign it or whatever piece of memorabilia anybody dragged in. She sold issues of Playboy with her photo spread (and spread it was) for thirty dollars, and signed it right across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s on the first page, for an extra twenty, of course.

Wesley Cranford, whom Sybil now observed as he slowly and methodically set out his various photos and DVDs, marketed similarly to Sybil, selling both photo and signature for a reasonable sum. Of course he, like Sybil, had never made a career out of displaying himself naked, the way Glenda had. On the contrary, the fame of her fellow Briton, such as it was and as far as Sybil knew, was based on only one film, but one that had made an impression on several generations of horror fans.

In 1963, he had played a character named Robert Blake in a low budget version of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Haunter of the Dark." The film had done next to no business when it had opened, but over the years had become a cult favorite and had overshadowed Cranford's subsequent career, which had consisted primarily of poverty row leads, B-movie supporting roles, and TV one-off appearances. Sybil saw him at various cons on the blood 'n' gore circuit, and he had been at the three previous h.e.l.lCons. Two years before, he had even hit on her, discreetly enough for her to pretend not to recognize his intentions, thus letting him down gently. Always a gentleman, he had never tried again.

What Glenda had said was true, though. There was something sad and slightly seedy about Wesley Cranford, a few hairs out of place, an area on his jawline that had escaped the ministrations of his razor, a grease spot on the carefully knotted necktie, the shoes scuffed beyond polis.h.i.+ng. He appeared a poor man who dreamed himself rich, or at least carried himself so as to project the illusion of richness to others. He certainly seemed gentlemanly, though Sybil suspected that he drank more than he should.

As if sensing she was looking at him, he looked up from his table, smiled, and gave a small wave. She waved back, then turned her attention to straightening her stacks of photos for the coming mob.

WESLEY CRANFORD LOOKED DOWN AT THE VARIOUS images of his younger self staring back at him and thought that if Sybil Meadows had only known him thirty years ago, even twenty, she would surely have found him worthy of more than a quick wave. That man with the dark hair and full moustache who stared up so coolly from the studio portrait was the same person who now sat down with a sigh, easing himself into the plastic chair on which he would spend the next six hours, except for bathroom breaks and the frequent standing up for fans who wanted to have their pictures taken with "Robert Blake."

Cranford patted the left side of his spindly chest to a.s.sure himself that his small flask was still there, filled with the bracing single malt scotch that was his sole luxury. A nip or two when no one was looking would help to sustain him through the weekend ahead. He made himself remember that this was the celebrity room and he was a celebrity, no matter how depressed and foolish he felt.

It was whorish, he felt, to peddle images of himself and his signature when he should have been making his money by doing what he had done ever since he was seventeen-acting. None of these fans, who asked him the same questions over and over about Haunter of the Dark, ever asked about his Hotspur and Romeo with the RSC or his Henry V and Coriola.n.u.s for the Stratford Festival, about the times he had shared a stage with Olivier and Richardson and Gielgud. But it was no wonder. Whatever took place on the stage was fleeting, transient, while film...

Film went on forever, didn't it? Cranford pursed his lips as he looked at the piles of Haunter DVDs he was offering for sale: barebones single disc, two-disc special edition with the commentary track he had recorded six years earlier, and now the Blu-Ray, priced at fifteen dollars more. A nearly fifty-year-old film and people still bought them at his inflated prices, just to have him sign the paper inserts tucked into the plastic sleeves, and so that he could smile with their hand on his shoulder as the red lights of the little digital cameras blinked and blinked again and captured fan and star.

His reverie was interrupted by the opening of the main doors into the hotel ballroom and the swift entrance of the fans, most of them in black T-s.h.i.+rts with the blood-drenched logos of current horror movies emblazoned on the fronts. For a moment, flight seemed the most attractive option, but Cranford steeled himself. These people were nothing like him. They had completely different tastes and concerns, yet they were the ones upon whom his survival depended. Were they not to buy his wares, there would be no money for rent or food or single malt.

And now it was time to smile and look approachable and friendly. He felt no dislike for the fans. Truth to tell, he was appreciative of those who remembered his work in Haunter or any of his other, even more obscure films. What was discouraging were those cretins, most often dressed in the height of punk goth "fas.h.i.+on," and sometimes in horrific makeup and even costumes, who would ask, "So, who are you?"

It seemed an unnecessary question, since the standing placard on his table stated in large print Cranford's name, and beneath it: "'Robert Blake' in HAUNTER OF THE DARK, and star of many other films!" Still, Cranford was always polite and told them the otherwise readily available information, had they had the patience to read it.

The first hour of the con, however, was gratifying for Cranford. He actually had a line of sorts, not as long as Glenda Garrison's, which he knew would be fairly constant throughout the weekend, and nowhere near that of George Romero, on the other side of the large room. Still, there were two or three people always waiting that first hour, and Cranford smiled and evinced graciousness and grat.i.tude and posed with his arm around their shoulders and collected the twenties as he signed the DVDs and photos.

At last there was a lull when no one was waiting for or talking to him, and he leaned back in his uncomfortable chair, took a quick look around, then had a surrept.i.tious swig of the scotch, savoring the taste of it in his mouth before allowing it to trickle down his throat, smoothly s.h.i.+ning its way into his stomach, where it nestled like a warm living creature. And it was as he was sitting there, feeling the scotch inside him, feeling relatively happy with the day to the point where he could forget that there would be hours ahead of sitting there unnoticed and unloved, that he noticed the person in the costume with the silken mask.

A costume in and of itself was nothing in this exhibitionistic crowd. There would be a costume contest Sat.u.r.day evening, and many of those who would enter were already stalking the halls and ballrooms of the hotel. Some were the more traditional creatures of horror, such as Death with a skull face, cowl, and scythe, or zombies with gruesome makeup effects of chewed flesh and severed stumps of limbs. Others were more fantastical in nature. A tall and slender young Asian woman was costumed as some vampire/demon hybrid whose main purpose in her undead life seemed to be to show as much tanned flesh as possible. A pair of five-foot-long, brilliantly realized leathern wings extended from her exquisitely curved back, and she had held Cranford's attention for some time when she had walked past his table and chatted with several admirers.

But the attention he had given her was only perfunctory in comparison to that which he gave the person in the yellow mask. There was more to the costume than just a mask, of course. The masquer wore a long robe of pale yellow, nearly the same color as the mask, embroidered simply but richly with st.i.tching of various shades of brown and tan. A red sash contrasted starkly with the gentler colors.

The hands, Cranford thought, had been skillfully made up. At first he a.s.sumed they were rubber gloves, like the large monster hands he had seen children wear at Halloween, but the naturalness of the fingers' movements told him there was more to it than that. They seemed hideously thin, like spiders' legs rather than fingers, and Cranford wondered if they were purely prosthetic, their motion operated by hands hidden inside the costume.

The feet were equally well constructed, broad appendages covered with a coa.r.s.e, thick hair that looked as if it had come off a burly animal rather than being made from some rayon fake fur. The claws that thrust themselves from the ma.s.s of hair were the shade of old ivory and had an iridescent realism that even extended to blood vessels visible just beneath their surface. Only, Cranford observed, the blood was a sickly green in color. Nice touch.

But what set off the whole ensemble was the mask. It glowed with a faint luminescence, and the eyeholes were pure black-the result, Cranford a.s.sumed, of using sheer black material, possibly cut from women's hosiery. The true novelty was the shape of the imagined head beneath the mask. The many folds were draped in such a way as to give the suggestion of the head of a non-human ent.i.ty beneath, with features that bulged where human features would have receded, and showed hollows where a normal face would have boasted a nose, a jaw, a forehead. It was, Cranford thought, quite hideous through suggestibility alone.

The hooded person walked slowly through the aisles, seemingly unjostled by the teeming fans, none of whom, Cranford was surprised to see, seemed to pay much if any attention to him. Perhaps, Cranford thought, the costume was too subtle for those whose tastes ran generally toward the gory. The person continued to walk until he or she stood directly in front of Cranford's table, then turned toward him.

The misshapen head tilted down until whatever eyes were behind the black pits of darkness in the mask were looking at the seated Cranford. Cranford started to give an appreciative chuckle, but it caught in his throat. The friendly smile he had planned likewise departed before arrival. The eyes, or the absence of them, discomfited Cranford, especially when he realized the eyeholes were not on the same horizontal level. The one on the left was an inch below the other, and neither was in the place where one would expect the eyes to be.

Another clever conceit, he thought, intended to bring a further alien touch to the whole. He forced the original smile back onto his face and said, as jovially as he could, "Well, that's quite a costume!"

The person said nothing. Only the long spidery fingers twitched.

"Are you planning to enter the contest?" No reply. "You should, you know."

Still there was no response from the masked figure. Cranford made himself look away, out over the throng.

"A lot of excellent costumes here this year, really. Were you here last year?" Cranford didn't look back at the person. Instead he looked down at his tabletop and adjusted the position of some of the stacks of pictures and DVDs, neatly aligning them and aligning again, as though he were trying to find the perfect marketing feng shui. He kept his head tipped down so that he couldn't even see the figure of the standing person.

He was planning to say, Well, I'm sure you'll want to see some of the makeup tables in the other room when he looked back up again, but when he did the masked figure was gone. Cranford's gaze darted about the room, but the yellow-robed countenance was nowhere to be seen. Cranford was relieved, yet puzzled. How could the man have gotten away so quickly and silently?

Practice, he wryly told himself. Yellow alien stealth ninjas must practice a great deal. Cranford shook off the feeling of unease and made himself grin, but took another large sip from the flask just the same and felt better as a result.

Six o'clock finally arrived, and Cranford tallied his take. It was nearly fourteen hundred dollars, which meant that he'd sold an average of a photo or a DVD every five minutes. Not bad. Sat.u.r.day morning, with its new influx of fans, might be even better.

He pocketed his stash and thought about dinner. Sybil, G.o.d bless her, invited him to dine with her and Glenda Garrison. He could have done without Glenda, but he wanted the company, so they walked outside and crossed the plaza to the Italian restaurant in the suburban hotel complex where the convention was held.

The walk was cold, and he was glad he'd worn his coat. Overhead the sky was bright with stars, jutting out like pinp.r.i.c.ks on black velvet. Inside, the food was acceptable (though the menu offered only a few Italian items) and the conversation could have been worse. Sybil was always lovely to be with, though Glenda's coa.r.s.eness dismayed Cranford. Still, the shots of scotch he'd had that afternoon, another double in his room before dinner, and two gla.s.ses of Chianti with his meal loosened him up until he could chuckle at Glenda's crude jokes.

He did discover one thing he had never known before, and that was that Glenda had actually been in Haunter of the Dark, in the small role of the girl on the altar, the sacrifice that the villain was making to bring back the Old Ones. Cranford had never met her because her scenes were shot separately and then edited in.