Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror

back, Brad-O,' he said, which didn't cheer Brad at all. And yet, Brad felt no urgency about returning to work. Work felt like some remote, arcane endeavor, the rituals of some strange religion in which he had long ago ceased to believe.

Having plenty of time on his hands, Brad read Parkington's book, Haunted Mountains: Atlantis in the Desert. The bulk of the book, after its author had argued unconvincingly for a sunken Atlantis near the town of Silo, presented the usual lost civilization stories. The only part of the book that was interesting (and poignant for the insights it offered) was Parkington's revelation that his own father, a lawyer and amateur paleontologist, had encountered an Entity (his father's word) while camping in the mountains outside of Silo. Parkington's father referred to this alien visitation as a 'remnant manifestation' and had embarked on a book about this visitation. He believed that there was an alien enclave established under the mountains in a 'waiting configuration' that would transform the world when its time came round.

The author's father disappeared in 1977 after a sudden decline in his mental state, characterized by paranoia, hallucinations, and a fervid hatred and fear of Christian doctrine. On more than one occasion, the man had entered one of Silo's numerous churches during a Sunday service, wild-eyed and disheveled, and beseeched the minister and his congregation to 'be silent and know that the only thing that hears you is monstrous and indifferent to prayers.' Much of the man's rant was in an unknown tongue, and he was committed to private mental asylums on two occasions, but he was never at such places for long, because he grew remarkably calm and rational after a brief period of confinement. When he disappeared, he left a note for his son, which, Park ington writes, 'I destroyed after reading, or, rather, after I had read as much as my sanity could bear.'

It was this last part of the book that spoke most directly to Brad, because it explained the author's attempt to find some explanation for his father's last years. The book Brad held in his hands was an artifact of two generations of pathology, and, as such, it was sadder and more profound than its cliched, sensational subject initially suggested.

There was no mention of the swarm attacks, and Brad assumed that such attacks were a more recent phenomenon.

Brad's health improved, and he ceased to rely on the wheelchair. The cast came off his leg, and his ribs were protected by a more flexible, shower-friendly fiberglass cage. With the help of a cane — he'd never had any success with the crutches, which promoted a form of locomotion too unnatural to be taken seriously — he was able to hobble to the kitchen and back to the bedroom, exhausted at first but slowly regaining his stamina, reclaiming his will.

He had much time for solitary reflection, because Meta, on his urging, had returned to her job at the UT library. In the evenings, she'd talk to him about her day, her voice his only window on a larger world.

Brad found his attention straying from her words. His mind, his heart was otherwise occupied: he was waiting (every day, every hour, every second) to feel, again, her presence. Since the accident, she had turned invisible. and opaque. Both words described her, despite their warring definitions. She was a ghost in his mind when out of his sight. His psychic compass could no longer find her. She could be anywhere, pursuing any activity — and he imagined her in the strangest places: curled amid warm towels in a clothes dryer; hanging upside down in a closet; smiling with her eyes open while underwater in the upstairs bathtub — and when she was in front of him, he did not know her. She seemed to study him with cool interest and an absence of any binding emotion. Even her voice had altered, and he found himself marveling at how skillfully this woman reproduced his wife's sounds, failing only in recreating certain resonances that were within the province of her soul.

He should have been afraid, but he was not — not, that is, until he received a call from Sheriff Winslow, who informed Brad that Michael Parkington had left Silo, abruptly and without notice. The date of his departure was uncertain, since he kept to himself. Only when Parkington failed to show up on the first with the rent check did anyone (i.e., his landlord) evince interest in his whereabouts.

Brad was wondering why he had been called, since he had only met the man once, but the sheriff must have been anticipating this question, because he answered it before Brad asked.

'I called because we don't know whether the man is dead or alive, and he may be dangerous.' Winslow explained that, on entering Parkington's apartment, they had immediately been confronted with a wall of photographs and newspaper clippings, and while the bulk of these items had yet to suggest anything relevant to the man's disappearance, the investigation had discovered an interesting and disturbing connection between four people (one woman and three men). These people were all the subjects of hometown newspaper articles (newspapers in Newark, El Paso, Phoenix, and Santa Fe) and had all, prior to the appearance of these articles, been interviewed by Dr. Parkington.

'We also discovered a small digital recorder and listened to your interview,' Winslow said.

'I still don't understand why you called me,' Brad said, mildly irked, again, for having allowed Parkington to record him.

'Those newspaper articles are about people who have disappeared. They are the people Parkington interviewed. Since they all disappeared between one and four months after he interviewed them, and since he took the trouble to track those clippings down and stick them on his wall, it is likely those vanished folks are connected, in some way, to Parkington. I wanted to call and give you a heads up, in case he comes knocking on your door. You might not want to open it.'

'You think he killed those people?' Brad had difficulty envisioning a homicidal Parkington.

'I don't know what to think. Do you?'

Brad didn't, and he promised to call if Parkington showed up in Austin.

After he replaced the phone in its cradle, he went to the refrigerator and got a beer. He drank half of it and decided to call Meta at work.

'She left early today,' someone told him. 'A couple of hours ago, I guess.'

Brad sat in a kitchen chair and drank the rest of his beer. He had no idea where she was.

But he did. He realized he did know. Not in the way he had always known, not with that magical (gone and now precious) lost sense but with the new cold logic that had replaced it. She was on her way to Silo, the town where it had all unraveled and where, now, some accursed force awaited her.

He set off at once, driving toward Silo, stopping every hundred miles or so to empty his bladder and take on gas and supplies (which consisted primarily of beer and snacks). He wasn't up for such a trip, not fully recovered from the accident and emotionally exhausted by Meta's betrayal, her retreat from his love and protection into the arms of some monstrous Casanova from Atlantis — and, yes, he admitted that he now swallowed Parkington's nutcase scenarios, and they went down easy; there was something out there in the mountains — under the mountains — that had reached out and wrecked his marriage and was now dragging Meta toward its lair.

But he was exhausted and would be no good at all unless he rested. So, on the far side of midnight, miles away from morn ing, he pulled into a rest stop and turned the engine off and slept.

The sun was up when he woke, and it was late afternoon when he drove down Silo's Main Street. It was a lean town, not given to airs, saturated with the sun's weight, sidewalks cracked by time, two old men on a bench in front of Roy's Restaurant, the Silo Library next door, then a barbershop called Curly's Quick Hair. Brad parked in front of a bar, B&G (which he knew, having eaten lunch there with Meta on a therapeutic outing from the hospital, stood for Bar & Grill, minimalist humor or the lack of it).

Brad wasn't a drinker, and his overindulgence of the day before was now taking its toll. So he went into B&G and sat at the bar counter. He ordered a beer and a fried egg sandwich from the barmaid, a middle-aged woman of undecided hair color with a tattoo on her shoulder that said «Dwayne» over a heart. Under the heart, clearly the work of a less skilled artist, it read: 'Stinks.' It made Brad sad, that tattoo. He thought of the entropy inherent in all relationships, and he ordered another beer. He considered a plan of action.

He didn't have one, he realized. The certainty that had brought him here had drained out over the miles, and he was left with a panicky sense of abandonment. Who did he know in town? No one. Well, Sheriff Winslow, but what could he say to him? Nothing relevant. He'd sound like a madman.

Am I? he wondered. But it was the truth itself that was mad, and how could it help but irradiate him, taint his own sanity?

His musings were interrupted by the barmaid, shouting 'Musky! Hey Musky! Wake up! Come on. I got a