Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror

couple of beers for you if you take out the trash.'

She was leaning over a man and shaking his shoulder. He stirred, raised his head like an ancient bloodhound scenting a rabbit, and said, 'Trash.' He was a bearded man with a pocked face and heavy-lidded eyes stained yellow, the same color as the bar's smoke-saturated walls, and he had been sleeping in a corner booth, the only other patrons an elderly couple who were dancing to tinny sounds from the jukebox, the sort of music you could make with a comb and a piece of wax paper.

Brad watched the man lumber past the bar counter and through a door that must have led to the alley in back. Brad called to the barmaid, and when she came over, he asked her who she'd just been talking to.

'You mean old Musky?' She looked a little incredulous, a little suspicious. 'Musky?'

'That's his name?'

'It's what he answers to, yeah. Why you want to know?'

Brad hesitated. 'I thought he might be somebody I heard of recently. But I believe that person's name was Charlie.'

'Ain't nobody calls him that anymore. But that's what he was born. Born Charlie Musgrove, the light of his momma's eye, and as full of promise. you won't credit this, 'cause he looks about a hundred years old now, but we were in high school together.'

'What happened?' Brad said.

'Shit,' the woman said. 'Ain't that what the bumper sticker says? Shit happens. He drank up all his opportunities 'cept the opportunity to drink more.' She backed up and narrowed her eyes. 'Why you want to know about Musky? What makes him any of your business?'

Brad explained, starting with the wasps that had attacked him and his wife in the desert. He did not mention Atlantis under the mountains or the alien theft of his wife's soul, however. He did tell her how Charlie Musgrove figured in the narrative.

'Rattlesnakes!' she said. 'You want old Musky to tell you about them rattlesnakes that tried to get him!'

'Yes,' Brad said, not wishing to explain, in detail, what he really wanted.

'Hell, he's been hard to shut up on that subject. You won't have any trouble there. If you say the magic words, you'll get an earful. I guarantee it.'

'What are the magic words?' 'Can I buy you a beer?' she said.

* * *

'Turn here,' Musky said. They followed a winding road into the mountains. The car leaned upward, as though the stars above were their destination. Musky took a swig from the beer bottle and lurched into song again: 'Away in a manager no crib for his bed, the little Lord Jesus was wishin' he's dead. No.»

It hadn't been hard to elicit the rattlesnake story from Musky — who hadn't responded to Brad's initial Charles Musgrove? query — and Musky had a few things to say about Michael Parkington. 'That fellow told me I didn't see no rattlesnakes, said I lucinated them. I didn't tell him I'd read that fool book he wrote. Yep, found a copy in a dumpster, autographed to Cindy Lou with his cell phone number, but I guess that didn't work out. That book was a lot of crap, all that Atlantis stuff.'

'You don't believe there is some alien force in these mountains?'

Musky finished the beer and threw the empty bottle out the window, which made the Austin-environmentalist in Brad cringe when he heard the shattering glass. 'Oh, there's something awful and ancient in these mountains. My grandfather knew all about it, said he'd seen it eat a goat by turning the goat inside out and sort of licking it until it was gone. He said it was a god from another world, older than this one. He called it Toth. A lot of people in these parts know about it, but it ain't a popular subject.'

He opened another beer and drank it. 'Anyway, I think those rattlesnakes were real.'

They bumped along the road, flanked by ragged outcroppings, shapes that defied gravity, everything black and jagged or half erased by the brightness of the car's rollicking headlights.

'Okay! Stop 'er!' Musky said. Brad stopped the car. Musky was out of the car immediately, tumbling to the ground but quickly staggering upright with the beer bottle clutched in his hand. Brad turned the ignition off, put the key in his pocket, and got out.

Brad followed the man, who was moving quickly, invigorated, perhaps, by this adventure. The incline grew steeper, the terrain devoid of all vegetation, a moonscape, and Brad thought he'd soon be crawling on his hands and knees. Abruptly, the ground leveled, and he saw Musky, stopped in front of him, back hunched, dirty gray hair shivered by the breeze.

'There's people who would pay a pretty penny to see this,' he said, without turning around. Brad reached the man and looked down from the rocky shelf on which they stood. Beneath them, a great dazzling bowl stretched out and down, a curving motherof-pearl expanse, a skateboarder's idea of heaven — or imagine a giant satellite dish, its diameter measured in miles, pressed into the stone. No, it was nothing like anything. He knew he would never be able to describe it.

He felt a sharp, hot ember sear into the flesh immediately above his right eyebrow, brought his hand up quickly, and slapped the insect, crushing it. He opened his fist and looked at the wasp within. Its crumpled body trembled, and it began to vibrate faster and faster, emitting a high-pitched whirrrrr. It exploded in a purple flash that left an after-image in Brad's mind so that, when he turned toward the sound of Musky's voice, part of the man's face was eclipsed by a purple cloud.

'I always bring them up here,' he said. 'Toth calls 'em and I bring 'em the last lap.'

'You brought my wife here?' Brad asked.

'Nope. Just you. She wasn't savory somehow. She had the chemicals in her, and it changed her somehow. Wouldn't do. Mind you, I ain't privy to every decision, I just get a notion sometimes. I think she was poison to it, so it didn't fool with her.'

'But it changed her,' Brad shouted, filled with fury, intent on killing this traitor to his race.

'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.

Denker's Book 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