Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror (39 page)

  In the end, guess what? Somebody really did wrap me up in a blanket like a little baby and hand me a cup of hot chocolate.

  Yes, I did time in institutions after that, in high, red-brick prisons where you have to wear pajamas all day and night in the company of crazy people who think you are one of them, where the bright lights are always on and there is no darkness, except what you can carefully, secretly nurse within yourself, despite the best efforts of so many cooing and clucking Professionals to gently probe you with words and drugs and Get To The Root Of Your Problem. They want you to confess, confess,
confess,
as relentless as any Inquisition, their pretend-gentleness as insidious as the rack and the thumbscrew.

  
Confess.

  Yet I held out. I hoarded my secrets. Eventually, for lack of evidence or lack of guilt or lack of interest, or maybe something as mundane as lack of continuing funds, after many stern lectures about how I was apparently devoid of all normal human emotions, I was cast up at eighteen, an orphan, shipwrecked and alone, onto the shore of the Real World to make my way in it.

  The rest is fraud. Imposture. With darkness in my heart, with my secret cunningly concealed, I gained, at first, marginal jobs and marginal acquaintances, and learned to impersonate a human being, going through all the motions of "normal" life, becoming so convincing in my falsehood that I even managed to marry Marguerite, a much more accomplished person than myself, and to father a daughter by her, whom we called Anastasia, whose name means "resurrection," as in the resurrection of hope.

  But it was all just one more part of my plan. Another part was that we had to leave our native Pennsylvania, and by cunning degrees I eased us into the necessity of moving the entire family to Arizona.

  It spooked them. No doubt about it. A place of vast
emptiness,
where there are immensities that no one from the East can really comprehend, and you can easily go hundred miles at night between the last gas station and a truck stop, seeing absolutely nothing in between. A little town like Page perched on a hilltop with its stores and green lawns seems like a whimsical speck of paint on an otherwise completely empty canvas. Ten miles down the road can be as barren as the moon. I took Marguerite to see the Grand Canyon by starlight, and she was terrified of its vastness even as I wanted to leap out and swim into its abyss, in which there was no up or down and no distance, where infinity is very close, and at its heart swirls the black chaos whose name may never be spoken.

 
 
You came to me.

I knew the way.

An awakening, into darkness.

Yes. Because I have done a terrible thing.

Then listen.

  
And we both listen. It makes no difference that I am partially
deaf in the real world, because this is a sound from out of the
immensity of the darkness. We gaze down from atop a remote mesa
over a desert landscape that stretches off into black nothingness,
without the light of a house or a highway or any glow on the
horizon to suggest that mankind has ever set foot on this planet—
from out of that distance and that darkness, from beyond the squat,
round hills that are visible only because they block out the starlight,
comes a howling which I have indeed heard before and have never
stopped hearing all the days of my life, a sound no human throat
ought ever to be able to utter.

  
You hear it? my companion asks.

  
Yes, of course.

  
In such places, in the darkness, we are closer to the outer spheres.
Dimensions, gateways, whatever you want to call them, touch.

  
Do other people hear this?

  
The Christians say it is the howling of a damned soul. The
Native peoples, who have been here longer, have other, older ideas.

  
We stand in the darkness, gazing into the farthest distance, and
for an instant the stars seem to be rippling, as if they're a reflection
in a mirror-smooth pond and something has just gone skittering
over the surface.

  
My companion takes my hand, as he did that first time, in the
dark. It is a surprisingly human, tender gesture.

  
The howling sound is all. It fills the universe. I cannot hear
anything else. I cannot speak or hear, and we two reply, joining an
impossible chorus even as the presences close in around us, and I
feel their wings beating against me like the wind. Their claws or
hands or whatever it is they have tear at my to-be-sloughed-off
flesh as they seize hold of us and lift us into the air, off the top of the
mesa, sweeping over the landscape, into the stars and the darkness
beyond.

  
I am still able to touch the thoughts of my companion and converse
with him after a fashion that is not speech, except perhaps the speech
of dreams. His words form inside my mind, as if they are my own.

 
 
This is my tragedy, I come to understand.

  I have done a terrible thing, but not terrible enough.

  For a while, during the years of my imposture, I didn't feel like a damned soul at all. It was very beguiling. Marguerite awakened within me emotions I did not know I even had. We were
happy.
When our daughter was born, it was a
joy.
She taught me how to
laugh,
something I had not done in a very long time.

 
 
That must be sloughed off.

 
 
I had a life.

  And I lost it.

  Again.

  I have done a terrible thing.

 
 
It is of no matter. Such things do not exist in the dark.

 
 
But what if I can't slough it all off? What if the condition of
nihil
is only incompletely achieved? What if, in the end, my sin is a very petty and human one, a routine mixture of cowardice and prideful despair?

 
 
Now the stars swirl around us in a vast whirlpool, and then there
are more dark dust clouds whirling, obscuring the light, and we
pass through, borne by our captors, for I believe that is what they
are, the ones to whom we have surrendered ourselves. Once again
the ice-plain stretches below us, beneath the black suns, and the enormous stone visage looms before us, and the stone jaws grind and the
stone throat howls, speaking the names of the lords of primal chaos,
and of the chaos itself which cannot be named at all.

 
 
I have done a terrible thing.

  History, family history, has a way of repeating itself, and the sins of the fathers are visited, etc., etc., but not precisely and not the way you think, because the terrible thing was simply this, that at the end of many long and happy years together with Marguerite, she began to leave me, not because she was unfaithful or wanted a divorce, much less because I blew her brains out with a heavy-caliber pistol or induced her to do the same to herself. More simply, she developed brain cancer, and after the seizures and delirium and withdrawals into hospital wards, where I last saw her hooked up to monitors and tubes like a thing, not the person I loved, who had taught me, quite unexpectedly, how to be human—after I no longer had the courage to visit her or whisper her name, I looked into the darkness once more and remembered all those strange things from my youth, and my companion, my mentor, my friend with the many funny names I'd made up for him and no name at all, was waiting for me as if no time had passed.

 
 
Cowardice and despair. How terribly, disappointingly human at the last.

Falling down from out of the black sky toward the immense thing
that is more of a god than anything imagined in human mytholo
gies, I realize that my only crime is that I am a liar, that I claimed
to be ready for this journey when I am not, that I have not managed
to slough off my humanity at all; that if anything I have suddenly
regained it.

  
I call out to my companion. I speak strange words, like an apostle
babbling in tongues. I ask him if he is my friend, if he has been my
friend all my life. I tell him that I have a name, which is Joseph. I
ask him his own name, and somehow I am able to press into his
mind.
I
catch
glimpses
of
his
life
and
learn
that
he
was
an
astronomer who worked in in Arizona about 1910, named Ezra
Watkins, and he too has some deeply buried core of sorrow, a secret
pain that he is terrified I might uncover and force him to confront
before the darkness can swallow him up utterly and forever.

  
He draws away from me in something very much like panic,
shouting that these things must be gotten rid of, discarded, sloughed
off—the phrase he uses over and over again, chanting it like a
mantra—and I can feel his immeasurable, helpless, despair as
memories of his discarded humanity begin to awaken within him.

  
He begins to scream, to make that unbelievable, indescribable
howling noise, and for once I cannot join him in his song. From out
of my mouth issue only words, like a little boy's voice, not loud
enough to be heard, breaking, shrill.

  
Consternation among our winged bearers.

  
This one is too heavy. He is not pure.

  
They let go of me. I am falling from them, through space, burning
among the stars, blinded by light, away from the stone god, away
from the black suns and the swirling dark.

  
I call out to Ezra Watkins. I reach for his hand.

  
But he is not there, and I can feel my ears bleeding.

 
 
Maybe my daughter Anastasia inherited my alleged total lack of human emotions, because she disappeared about the time her mother became ill, and I never heard from her again; but I am, alas, a very poor liar, which is my single crime, of which prideful despair, cowardice, and self-delusion are mere subsets, what I have failed to slough off.

  I alone have escaped to tell thee.

 
 
My eyes do not glow. That is an illusion. In the dark, there is no
light.

  
I wait. I have walked too far in the dark spaces. I have waded
barefoot
among
the
fiery
stars
and
the
black
stars
and
burned
myself. I cannot walk upon the Earth again, but only wander in the
darkness, howling.

 
 
The Christians say it is the howling of a damned soul. The Native
peoples, who have been here longer, have other, older ideas.

  They're both right.

 
 
Nobody is going to make this better with a blanket and a cup of hot
chocolate.

  Now that you have come to me, you must tell the story.

Brian Stableford

Brian Stableford is an acclaimed British author of science fiction and horror novels, including
The Empire of Fear
(Simon & Schuster UK, 1988),
Young Blood
(Simon & Schuster UK, 1992),
The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires
(Mark V.Ziesing, 1996),
The Werewolves of London
(Simon & Schuster UK, 1990),
The Angel of Pain
(Simon & Schuster UK, 1991), and
The Carnival of Destruction
(Simon & Schuster UK, 1994). He has also edited
The Dedalus Book of Decadence
(Dedalus, 1990–92; 2 vols.) and is the author of such critical studies as
Scientific Romance in Britain 1890–1950
(Fourth Estate, 1985) and
The Sociology of Science Fiction
(Borgo Press, 1987).

 
 
he doorbell didn't ring until fifteen minutes after the time we'd agreed on the telephone, but I hadn't even begun to get impatient. Visitors to the island—even those who've only come over the Solent from Hampshire, let alone across the Atlantic from Boston—are always taken by surprise by the slower pace of life here. It's not so much that the buses never run on time as the fact that you can't judge the time of a walk by looking at the map. The map is flat, but the terrain is anything but, especially here on the south coast, where all the chines are.

  "Do come in, Professor Thurber," I said, when I opened the door. "This is quite a privilege. I don't get many visitors."

  His face was a trifle blanched, and he had to make an effort to unclench his jaw. "I'm not surprised," he muttered, in an accent that was distinctly American but by no means a drawl. "Who ever thought of building a house here, and how on earth did they get the materials down that narrow track?"

  I took his coat. There were scuff-marks on the right sleeve because of the way he'd hugged the wall on the way down rather than trust the hand-rail on the left. The cast-iron struts supporting it were rusted, of course, and the wood had grown a fine crop of fungus because we'd had such a wet August, but the rail was actually quite sound, so he could have used it if he'd had the nerve.

  "It is a trifle inconvenient nowadays," I admitted. "The path was wider when the house was built, and I shudder to think what the next significant landslip might do to it, but the rock face behind the house is vertical, and it's not too difficult to rig a blockand-tackle up on top. The biggest thing I've had to bring down recently is a fridge, though, and I managed that on the path with the aid of one of those two-wheeled trolleys. It's not so bad when you get used to it."

  He'd pulled himself together by then and stuck out his hand. "Alastair Thurber," he said. "I'm truly glad to meet you, Mr. Eliot. My grandfather knew your. . . grandfather." The hesitation was perceptible, as he tried to guess my age and estimate whether I might conceivably be Silas Eliot's son rather than his grandson, but it wasn't so blatant as to seem impolite. Even so, to cover up his confusion, he added: "And they were both friends of the man I wrote to you about: Richard Upton Pickman."

  "I don't have a proper sitting-room, I'm afraid," I told him. "The TV room's rather cluttered, but I expect you'd rather take tea in the library in any case."

  He assured me, quite sincerely, that he didn't mind. As an academic, he was presumably a bibliophile as well as an art-lover and a molecular biologist: a man of many parts, who was prob ably still trying to fit them together neatly. He was, of course, younger than me—no more than forty-five, to judge by appearances.

  I sat him down and immediately went into the kitchen to make the tea. I used the filtered water and put two bags of Sainsbury's Brown Label and one of Earl Grey in the pot. I put the milk in a jug and the sugar in a bowl; it was a long time since I'd had to do
that.
On the way back to the library I had a private bet with myself as to which of the two salient objects he would comment on first, and won.

  "You have one of my books," he said, before I'd even closed the door behind me. He'd taken the copy of
The Syphilis Transfer
off the shelf and opened it, as if to check that the words on the page really were his and that the book's spine hadn't been lying.

  "I bought it after you sent the first letter," I admitted.

  "I'm surprised you could find a copy in England, let alone the Isle of Wight," he said.

  "I didn't," I told him. "The public library at Ventnor has Internet connections. I go in twice a week to do the shopping and often pop in there. I ordered it from the U.S. via Amazon. I may be tucked away in a chine, but I'm not entirely cut off from civilization." He seemed skeptical—but he had just walked the half a mile that separated the house from the bus stop on the so-called coast road, and knew that it wasn't exactly a stroll along Shanklin sea-front. His eyes flickered to the electric light bulb hanging from the roof, presumably wondering at the fact that it was there at all rather than the fact that it was one of the new curly energy-saving bulbs. "Yes, I said, "I even have mains electricity. No gas, though, and no mains water. I don't need it—I actually have a spring in my cellar. How many people can say that?"

  "Not many, I suppose," he said, putting the book down on the small table beside the tea-tray. "You call this place a chine, then? In the U.S., we'd call it a gully, or maybe a ravine."

  "The island is famous for its chines," I told him. "Blackgang Chine and Shanklin Chine are tourist traps nowadays—a trifle gaudy for my taste. It's said that there are half a dozen still unspoiled, but it's difficult to be sure. Private land, you see. The path isn't as dangerous as it seems at first glance. Chines are, by definition, wooded. If you were to slip, it would be more a slide than a fall, and you'd probably be able to catch hold of the bushes. Even if you couldn't climb up again you could easily let yourself down. Don't try it at high tide, though."

  He was already halfway through his first cup of tea, even though it was still a little hot. He was probably trying to calm his nerves, although he had no idea what
real
acrophobia was. Finally, though, he pointed at the painting on the wall between the two free-standing bookcases, directly opposite the latticed window.

  "Do you know who painted that, Mr. Eliot?" he asked.

  "Yes," I said.

  "I knew the moment I looked at it," he told me. "It's not on the list I compiled, but that's not surprising. I knew it as soon as I looked at it—Pickman's work is absolutely unmistakable." His eyes narrowed slightly. "If you knew who painted it," he said, "You might have mentioned that you had it when you replied to my first letter."

  Not wanting to comment on that remark, I picked up
The
Syphilis Transfer.
"It's an interesting thesis, Professor," I said. "I was quite intrigued."

  "It was quite a puzzle for a long time," he said. "First the Europeans argued that syphilis had started running riot in the sixteenth century because sailors imported it from the Americas, then American scholars motivated by national pride started arguing that, in fact, European sailors had imported it to the Americas. The hypothesis that different strains of the spirochaete had evolved in each continent during the period of separation, and that each native population had built up a measure of immu nity to its own strain—but not to the other—was put forward way back in the seventies, but it wasn't until the people racing to complete the Human Genome Project developed advanced sequencers that we had the equipment to prove it."

  "And now you're working on other bacterial strains that might have been mutually transferred?" I said. "When you're not on vacation, investigating your grandfather's phobic obsessions, that is?"

  "Not just bacteria," he said ominously—but he was still on vacation, and his mind was on Richard Upton Pickman. "Does it have a title?" he asked, nodding his head toward the painting again.

  "I'm afraid not. I can't offer you anything as melodramatic as 'Ghoul Feeding,' or even 'Subway Accident.'"

  He glanced at me again with slightly narrowed eyes, registering the fact that I was familiar with the titles mentioned in the account that Lovecraft had reworked from the memoir that Edwin Baird had passed on to him. He drained his cup. While I poured him another, he stood up and went to the picture to take a closer look.

  "This must be one of his earlier works," he said, eventually. "It's a straightforward portrait—not much more than a practice study. The face has all the usual characteristics, of course—no one but Pickman could paint a face to make you shudder like that. Even in the days of freak-show TV, when the victims of genetic disasters that families used to hide away get tracked through courses of plastic surgery by documentary makers' camera crews, there's still something uniquely strange and hideous about Pickman's models . . . or at least his technique. The background in this one is odd, though. In his later works, he used subway tunnels, graveyards, and cellars, picking out the details quite carefully, but this background's very vague and almost bare. It's well-preserved, though, and the actual face . . . "

  "'Only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear,'" I quoted.

  He wasn't about to surrender the intellectual high ground. " 'The exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright,'" he went on, completing the quote from the Lovecraft text, " 'and the proper color contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.' "

  "But you're a molecular biologist," I said, as smoothly as if it really were an offhand remark. "You don't believe in latent instincts, hereditary memories of fright, or a dormant sense of strangeness."

  It was a mistake. He turned round and looked me straight in the eye, with a gaze whose sharpness was worth more than vague suspicion. "Actually," he said, "I do. In fact, I've become very interested of late in the molecular basis of memory and the biochemistry of phobia. I suppose my interest in my grandfather's experiences has begun to influence my professional interests, and vice versa."

  "That's only natural, Professor Thurber," I told him. "We all begin life as men of many parts, but we all have a tendency to consider ourselves as jigsaw puzzles, trying to fit the parts together in a way that makes sense."

  His eyes went back to the painting—to that strange distorted face, which seemed to distill the very essence of some primitive horror, more elementary than a pathological fear of spiders, or of heights.

  "Since you have the painting," he said, "you obviously do have some of the things that Silas Eliot brought back to England when he left Boston in the thirties. May I see them?"

  "They're not conveniently packed away in one old trunk and stowed neatly in the attic or the cellar," I said. "Any items that remain have been absorbed into the general clutter about the house. Anyway, you're really only interested in one thing, and that's something I don't have. There are no photographs, Professor Thurber. If Pickman really did paint the faces in his portraits from photographs, Silas Eliot never found them—at least, he didn't bring any back with him from Boston. Believe me, Mr. Thurber, I'd know if he had."