Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror (24 page)

  "It wasn't interested."

  Brad's cell phone rang.

  "You get good reception up here," Musky said.

  Brad tugged the phone out of his pocket, flipped it open.

  "Hello?"

  "Brad?"

  "Meta?"

  "Where are you, honey? I've been trying to call you. I've been going crazy. I called the police. I even called Sheriff Winslow, although why—"

  Brad could see her standing in the kitchen, holding the wall phone's receiver up to her ear, her eyes red and puffy from crying. He could see her clearly, as though she stood right in front of him; he could count the freckles on her cheeks.

  Her tears, the flush in her cheeks, the acceleration of her heart, he saw these things, saw the untenable vascular system, the ephemeral ever-failing creature, designed by the accidents of time.

  He was aware that the cell phone had slipped from his fingers and tumbled to the stony ledge and bounced into the bright abyss. He leaned over and watched its descent. Something was moving at the bottom of the glowing pit, a black, twitching insectile something, and as it writhed it grew larger, more spectacularly alive in a way the eye could not map, appendages appearing and disappearing, and always the creature grew larger and its fierce intelligence, its outrageous will and alien, implacable desires, rose in Brad's mind.

  He felt a monstrous joy, a dark enlightenment, and wild to embrace his destiny, he flung himself from the ledge and fell toward the father of all universes, where nothing was ever lost, and everything devoured.

David J. Schow

David J. Schow began publishing short stories in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone magazine in the 1980s. His first novel,
The Kill Riff
(Tor), appeared in 1988.
In 1990 he  published three books: the novel
The Shaft
(Macdonald) and the story collections
Seeing Red
(Tor) and
Lost Angels
(New American Library/Onyx). He has gone on to publish several further collections—
Black Leather Required
(Ziesing, 1994), 
Crypt Orchids
(Subterranean Press, 1998),
Eye
(Subterranean Press, 2001),
Zombie Jam
(Subterranean Press, 2005), and
Havoc Swims Jaded
(Subterranean Press, 2006), and the novels
Bullets of Rain
(Morrow, 2003), and
Rock Breaks Scissors Cut
(Subterranean Press, 2003). Schow is also the author of
The Outer Limits Companion
(Ace, 1986; rev. ed. GNP Crescendo Records, 1999) and the editor of the anthology 
Silver Scream
(Dark Harvest, 1988).

 
 
ou will forgive me if my recollections of Denker seem fragmented. I do know that his Nobel Prize was rescinded; that seemed unfair to me, but at the same time I understand the thinking behind it, the dull necessity of the counter-arguments, all the disparate points of view that had to swim together into a public accord in an attempt to salve the outrage.

  It used to be held as common superstition that if you paint an interior door in your home with a certain kind of paint, the door might open into another time. The paint was lead-based and longprohibited. In 1934, there were doors like this all over the place. The doors generally had to be facing south. People have forgotten this now.

  Chinese horticulturalists discovered that dead pets, buried in a specific pattern around the entryways to houses and gardens, not only seemed to restrict access by spirits, but lengthen daylight by as much as half an hour. Type of animal, number of burials, interment pattern, and even the sexual history of the pet owner all seemed to have modulating effects.

  I cite these stories as examples among thousands—the kind of revelations that seem to defy not only physical laws thought to be immutable, but logic itself.

  Nevertheless, they took Langford Meyer Denker's Nobel Prize away from him. They—the big, faceless "they" responsible for everything—probably should not have. Denker made the discovery and fathered the breakthrough. "They" claimed Denker cheated; that is, he did not play by strict rules of science. But there are no such things as rules in science; merely observations that are regularly displaced by new, more consolidated observations.

  Some said that the dimensional warp door Denker created was real, that it worked. Others held that it was a flashy deception; sleight-of-hand rather than science. Still others maintained that Denker's demonstration was inconclusive. By the time the furor settled, all of them said Denker had cheated. Denker had used the book.

  Denker's machine was a gigantic, Gothic clockwork; an Expressionist maze of gears, liquid reservoirs, lasers, and lenses. Lathed brass bins held clumps of humid earth. Common stones were vised by hydraulics in that peculiar way you can squeeze an egg between your palms with all your might and not break it. Particle-emitters were gloved in ancient lead. Imagine a medieval clepsydra wirelessly married to countless yottabytes of computing power and stage-managed by a designer who had been seduced by every mad scientist movie ever made. The containment chamber was made of pitted bronze shot through with rods of chemically pure glass; it weighed several tons and was completely non-aerodynamic, yet Denker claimed that once the whole package was transposed into a realm where earthly physics were irrelevant its properties recombined according to perverse rules to render the device as safe as a pressurized bathysphere or commercial space capsule.

  Of course the earliest naysayers called him mad.

  I remind you at this point in the story that without a totally arbitrary baseline of normalcy, "insanity" is not possible. (It has been said that normalcy is the majority's form of lunacy, which I suppose explains Christianity.)

  Colors can drive people mad. It follows that there are spectra yet unknown to us, flavors and timbres that might catalyze our air, our light, in new and unpredictable ways. "Sounds that were not wholly sounds"—that sort of thing. The scientific community's rebuke of Denker was a denial of the most commonplace protocols of experimentation, but by that time the point was to demonize the man, not disprove the theory.

  A portal to another universe different from our own perceived reality? Something that functioned so far out there that what we thought of as our physical laws seemed irrelevant? Fine.

  A glimpse into the unutterable? Also fine.

  But Denker had used the book. Not fine.

  I ask you to stop right now and consider the purpose of a book that was
never intended to be read.
What is the point?

  Consider this: You take an ordinary bible, which credits supernatural forces for all the bloodshed and horror in the world. They still make people swear on this book in courts of law; its symbolism has become part of ritual.

  Denker's book was no mere opposite pole or gainsaying counter-dogma, although many people tried to discredit it that way. That's an irony: the arrogance to assume you can neutralize something that will not be denied.

  Where Denker found the book, if he ever truly possessed it, I do not know.

  Scholars claimed the book was a repository of forbidden knowledge, therefore much sought or shunned through millennia. Bait for fanatics. A grail for obsessives; a self-destructive prize for the foolhardy. Unless it was akin to a key or a storage battery—a necessary link in a logic chain—it was still a dead end, because in the end (as one story went) you wound up dead too. Denker's philologists rapidly proved that trickle-down translations of the book (about 400 years' worth) were virtually worthless because there was no way to reconcile different languages to the concept of the unnameable. Latin held many of the book's conceits in polar opposition to the Greek interpretation, and so on. In many ways the book was like a tesseract, partially unfolded into a yetundiscovered realm.

  But Denker did not stop at etymology. His scheme advantaged the top skim of curious geniuses all over the world. He used crypto experts to translate partial photo plates from Arabic—an iteration long thought lost forever. No one ever saw more than an eighth of a full page. Then he used colloquialists to defang the language piecemeal, in order to render down the simple sense of highly convoluted and frequently unpronounceable arcana. The resultant text was presented to a hand-picked and highly elite international group preselected by Denker for the interests he knew he could arouse.

  When he had exhausted one scholar, Denker moved to the next, and you have probably already heard the story about how Rademacher Asylum gradually filled up with his depleted former colleagues.

  These were not dazzled hayseeds or the easily swoggled rustics of a fictive Red America, nor were they the deluded zealotry of one improbable religion or other. These were minds capable of the most labyrinthine extrapolations—the first, second, and third strings of pawns to fall to Denker's inquiry.

  Denker followed his instincts, and in the hope of discovering an anti-linear correlation presented his findings to a physicist who was then in the grip of Alzheimer's. He consulted South Seas tribal elders with no word for "insane" in their lexicon. Then philosophers, wizards, the deranged and the disenfranchised. With a brilliant kind of counter-intuitiveness, he allowed children to interpret some of his findings. Then autistics. The man with Alzheimer's was said to have "lost his mind completely" prior to his death. But as I've told you, the mad are always safe to expose. The mad enjoy hermetic protections unavailable to the mentalities that judge them unfit for normal human congress. "Normal humans" were the last thing Denker wanted.

  Darwin pondered natural selection for twenty years before going into print; Denker did not have that kind of leisure. Our science these days is competitive; cutthroat; the Sixties-era model of the Space Race has overrun all rational strategy. There are very few scientific rock stars and most of our millionaires are invisible. Resources may be accessed at the fierce cost of corporate sponsorship, which often mandates blood sacrifice or the occasional bitterly humbling obeisance: while the former can be a mental snap point, the latter is often a more serious derailment of any kind of exploratory enthusiasm, crushing instinct and logic into the box of fast, visible progress. Expediency becomes cardinal. This was the bind in which Denker found himself, in both senses—he embraced the delirious possibilities of risk and, using stress as a motivator, discovered his own interior limitations.

  Coleridge wrote that "we do not feel horror because we are haunted by a sphinx, we dream a sphinx in order to explain the horror that we feel." Borges, after Coleridge, wrote, "If that is true, how might a mere chronicling of its forms transmit the stupor, the exultation, the alarms, the dread, and the joy that wove together that night's dream?" This was in essence the chicken and-egg riddle that governed Denker's inquiries. Possessed of a fanciful mind, he did not believe the most transporting inspirations to be reduceable to mere mathematical schemata, yet that was the task set before him. Others had failed. Replacements waited hungrily. More tempting, to Denker, was that capacity which Apollonius Rhodius coined as "the poetics of uncertainty," itself reducible to the twentieth-century argot of doing a wrong thing for the right reason.

  All this citation makes Denker sound stuffy or cloistered or pretentiously intellectual, so I need to give you an example of the man's humor. He referred to the book as his "ultra-tome-bo"—at once conflating the Spanish
ultratumba
(literally, "from beyond the grave") with the Latin
ultima Thule
(i.e., "the northernmost part of the habitable ancient world")—thereby hinting with a wink that his quest aimed beyond both death and the world as we know it. Knew it, rather.

  (He further corrupted
ultra
into
el otro—"the
other." The other book, the other tomb. He was very witty as well as smart.)

  I hope you can follow this without too much trouble. Sometimes my memory itself is like a book with stuck-together pages; huge chunks of missing narrative followed by short sections of overdetail. If I have learned one thing, it is that harmonics are important. You may sense contradictions in some of what I am telling you, and I would urge you to look past them—try to see them with new eyes.

  Denker's so-called scientific fraud was revealed when his device was taken from his stewardship and disassembled. The machinery held a bit of nuclear credibility, but the heart of the drive was an iron particle accelerator that resembled a World War Two-era sea mine, a heart fed by cables and hoses and fluid.

  Empty inside.

  Because Denker had removed his fundamental component— the book.

  Having spent three-quarters of a billion dollars in corporate seed money and suffering the deep stresses of delivery-to-sched ule that such funds can mandate, Denker cheated the curve. Science failed him, but when he combined science with sorcery, he was able to give his backers what they thought they wanted. All he had to do then was word his interviews precisely enough to feature that hint of arched-eyebrow evasion as to method. Money was already coming at him from all sides.

  Most people don't know exactly how an internal combustion engine functions, but they drive automobiles. In kind, Denker's device could transcend space-time boundaries; the point was that it worked. Never mind that on the other side of the boundary might be a group of surly cosmic Vastators, or the displaced First Gods of our entire existence, itching for a rematch now that we have evolved, devised technology, and gotten ourselves so damned civilized.