Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror

'About the science,' I said, 'not much more than I read in your excellent book and a couple of supplementary textbooks. About the witchcraft. well, how much of that can really be described as knowledge? If what Jonas Reid understood was vague, what I know is. so indistinct as to be almost invisible.' I emphasized the word almost very slightly.

'Witchcraft?' he queried, doubtless remembering the allegation in Lovecraft's story that one of Pickman's ancestors had been hanged in Salem — although I doubt that Cotton Mather was really 'looking sanctimoniously on' at the time.

'In England,' I said, 'they used to prefer the term cunning men. The people themselves, that is. Witches was what other people called them when they wanted to abuse them — not that they always wanted to abuse them. More often, they turned to them for help — cures and the like. The cunning men were social outsiders, but valued after their fashion — much like smugglers, in fact.'

He looked at me hard for a moment or two, then went back to his lunch. You can always trust an American's appetite to get the better of his vaguer anxieties. I watched him drain his tea-cup and filled it up again immediately.

'Is the ultimate goal of your research to find a cure for. shall we call it Pickman's syndrome?' I asked, mildly.

'The disease itself seems to be virtually extinct,' he said, 'at least in the form that it was manifest in Pickman and his models. To the extent that it's still endemic anywhere, the symptoms generally seem to be much milder. It's not the specifics I'm interested in so much as the generalities. I'm hoping to learn something useful about the fundamental psychotropics of phobia.'

'And the fundamental psychotropics of art,' I added, helpfully. 'With luck, you might be able to find out what makes a Pickman. or a Lovecraft.'

'That might be a bit ambitious,' he said. 'Exactly what did you mean just now about witchcraft? Are you suggesting that your cunning men actually knew something about phobic triggers — that the Salem panic and the Boston scare might actually have been induced?'

'Who can tell?' I said. 'The Royal College of Physicians, jealous of their supposed monopoly, used the law to harass the cunning men for centuries. They may not have succeeded in wiping out their methods or their pharmacopeia, but they certainly didn't help in the maintenance of their traditions. A good many must have emigrated, don't you think, in search of a new start?'

He considered that for a few moments, and then demonstrated his academic intelligence by experiencing a flash of inspiration. 'The transfer effect doesn't just affect diseases,' he said. 'Crop transplantation often produces new vigor — and the effect of medicines can be enhanced too. If the Salem panic was induced, it might not have been the result of malevolence — it might have been a medical side-effect that was unexpectedly magnified. In which case. the same might conceivably be true of the Boston incident.'

'Conceivably,' I agreed.

'Jonas Reid wouldn't have figured that out — he wouldn't even have thought of looking. Neither would my grandfather, let alone poor Pickman. But your grandfather. if he knew something about the traditions of cunning men.»

'Silas Eliot wasn't my grandfather,' I told him, unable this time to repress a slight smile.

His eyes dilated slightly in vague alarm, but it wasn't the effect of the unfiltered water in his tea. That wouldn't make itself manifest for days, or even weeks — but it would make itself manifest. The contagion wasn't the sort of thing that could be picked up by handling a book, a damp wall, or even a fungus-ridden guardrail, and it wouldn't have the slightest effect on a local man even if he drank it. but Professor Thurber was an American, who'd probably already caught a couple of local viruses to which he had no immunity. The world is a busy place nowadays, but not that many Americans get to the Isle of Wight, let alone its out-of- theway little crevices.

I really didn't mean him any harm, but he had got too close to the truth about Pickman, and I had to stop him getting any closer — because the truth about Pickman had, unfortunately, become tangled up with the truth about me. It wasn't that I had to stop him knowing the truth — I just had to affect the way he looked at it. It wouldn't matter how much he actually knew, always provided that the knowledge had the right effect on him. Pickman would have understood that, and Lovecraft would have understood it better than anyone. Lovecraft understood the true tenacity and scope of the roots of horror, and knew how to savor its aesthetics.

'You're not claiming that you are Silas Eliot?' said Professor Thurber, refusing to believe it — for now. His common sense and scientific reason were still dominant.

'That would be absurd, Professor Thurber,' I said. 'After all, I haven't got the fountain of youth in my cellar, have I? It's just water — it isn't even polluted most of the time, but we have had a very wet August, and the woods hereabouts are famous for their fungi. Some poor woman in Newport died from eating a deathcap only last week. You really have to know what you're doing when you're dealing with specimens of that sort. The cunning men could probably have taught us a lot, but they're all gone now — fled to America, or simply dead. The Royal College of Physicians won; we — I mean they — lost.'

The trigger hadn't had the slightest effect on him yet, but my hints had. He looked down at his empty tea- pot, and he was already trying to remember how many taps there had been in the kitchen.

'Please don't worry, Professor Thurber,' I said. 'As you said yourself, the disease is very nearly extinct, at least in the virulent form that Pickman had. The attenuated form that your grandfather had, on the other hand. it's possible that you might still catch that — but what would it amount to, after all? You might become phobic about subways and cellars, and your acrophobia might get worse, but people mostly cope quite well with these things. The only that might be seriously inconvenient, given your particular circumstances, is that it might affect your attitude to your hobby. and to your work. Jonas Reid had to give it up, didn't he?'

His eyes were no longer fixed on me. They were fixed on something behind me: the painting that he had mistaken, understandably enough, for a Pickman. He still thought that it was a Pickman, and he was wondering how the mild fear and disgust it engendered in him might increase, given the right stimulus. But biochemistry only supplies a foundation; in order to grow and mature, fears have to be nurtured and fed with doubts and provocations. Pickman had understood that, and so had Lovecraft. It doesn't actually matter much, if you have the right foundation to build on, whether you feed the fears with lies or the truth, but the truth is so much more artistic.

'Actually,' I told him, 'when I said that I knew who'd painted it, I didn't mean Pickman. I meant me.'

His eyes shifted to my face, probing for tell-tale stigmata. 'You painted it,' he echoed, colorlessly. 'In Boston? In the 1920s?'

'Oh no,' I said. 'I painted it right here in the chine, about twenty years ago.'

'From memory?' he asked. 'From a photograph? Or from life?'

'I told you that there aren't any photographs,' I reminded him. I didn't bother shooting down the memory hypothesis — he hadn't meant that one seriously.

'You do carry the recessive gene, don't you?' he said, still the rational scientist, for a little while longer.

'Yes,' I said. 'So did my wife, unlikely as it might seem. She was Australian. If I'd known. but all I knew about then was the witchcraft, you see, and you can't really call that knowledge.'

His jaw dropped slightly, then tightened again. He was a scientist, and he could follow the logic all the way — but he was a scientist, and he needed confirmation. Our deepest fears always need confirmation, one way or another, but once they have it, there's never any going back. or even, in any meaningful sense, going forward. Once we have the confirmation, the jigsaw puzzle is complete, and so are we.

'The chance was only one in four,' I said. 'My other son's body is a veritable temple to human perfection. and he can drink the water with absolute impunity.'

Now, the horror had begun to dig in, commencing the long and leisurely work of burrowing into the utmost depths of his soul.

'But I have a family of my own at home in Boston,' he murmured.

'I know,' I said. 'They have the Internet in Ventnor public library; I looked you up. It's not really that contagious, though — and even if you do pass it on, it won't be the end of the world: it'll just engender a more personal and more intimate understanding of the anatomy of the terrible, and the physiology of fear.'