Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror

Midnightman, Mr. Deathwalker, but names, too, are to be sloughed off.

I remember opening the back gate, but beyond that I do not think we walked through familiar places at all, certainly not across suburban back yards and streets, beneath the widely spaced streetlights, the strange, dark man and the naked, pale boy, who surely would have caused some consternation when caught in the headlights of the occasional passing car.

I wonder if we even left footprints in the snow. I am certain only that we came to a high, dark place beneath brilliant stars and perched at the edge of a precarious precipice, so that with the slightest tumble, not to mention an intentional leap, we could have hurled ourselves off into the black sea of infinity forever.

The presences gathered all around us. I could feel their wings brushing against my bare back and shoulders like the wind.

That was when the man who had waited for me all this time, who had brought me here to this place, first taught me how to speak the speech of the dark spaces. Maybe he began with a series of syllables that went something like whao-ao-ao — but it was a howl, high and shrill like nothing I had ever imagined a human throat could produce, a screaming beacon that could reach across interstellar spaces, beyond the universe itself, into the great, black whirlpool at the core of Being. It was so loud. It filled everything, obliterated everything. Did my eardrums burst? Was there blood oozing out of my ears? The body is to be discarded, and for a moment it seemed it was, as in a kind of vision my companion bore me up, surrounded by howling, dark angels, and we hurled through infinities without number until we came at last to a flat and frozen plain, beneath two black suns, and we knelt down and abased ourselves, and shrieked that impossible shriek before a miles-high eidolon that might have had the form of a man, but never was a man. And this thing opened its stone jaws to join us in our song. It spoke, without words, the secret name of the primal chaos that turns in the heart of the black whirlpool, that unnameable name which no human tongue can ever form, nor can any human ear — with or without broken eardrums — ever hear.

That was almost thirty years ago, I say, uselessly. A lot of water under the bridge since then.

There no time, the stone man says.

Indeed, he has not changed at all. If he is truly alive, he does not age.

You are ready, then?

Yes. I have done a terrible thing.

Somehow I found my way back home. I must have arrived a while after my father came home from work, because I discov ered him sitting amid the ruins of our trashed living room, staring at the heavy-caliber pistol on the floor and at the brains and blood splattered all over the furniture and walls. My sister was sprawled head-first down the front stairs. My mother lay right in front of Dad, curled up as if she were asleep.

He was weeping uncontrollably.

He never noticed that I was naked and wet and half frozen, or that I was burned where either the stone man or any of the winged ones had touched me. I stank of sweat the way you do when you've shivered really hard. When I tried to say something it came out as a weird, trailing howl. Lights glared and whirled all around the house, blinding me, and the sounds were all strange and distorted, people talking to me at the wrong speed, all growling and distorted, like the voices of broken machinery. Maybe there was blood running down my cheeks. One of my eardrums had burst. I've been partially deaf in that ear ever since. The house was spinning, shifting, and nothing made a great deal of sense. My feet hurt intensely from where they had touched the stars, as if I had been wading ankle-deep in the burning sky.

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