Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror

movers are coming out again. Why not go inside and talk? Why couldn't you wait, Worklan?'

Worklan stood there, stiff and straight, eyeing the apartments, his lips quivering slightly, his gaze scanning the courtyard and the windows as if trying to recall some lost or forgotten memory. He shook his head.

'Come on, Worklan,' said Sorensen. 'We should stay together.'

'You're making a mistake,' said Worklan. 'We've been safe. But all of us should move now.'

The movers came out carrying a mirrored bureau that brilliantly reflected the windows and brick of the apartment house. They brought it down the steps and across the courtyard toward the sidewalk while the small group of tenants made room. A determined Worklan shook hands with Grandfather, then nodded to the others. 'Goodbye.'

By sundown, the movers had gone, and Mr. Worklan's apartment at the end of the second-floor hall was empty.

'He's left, and we might not hear from him again,' said Grandfather that night.

'We won't really know. ' said Aunt Evelyn.

'Keep your voices down,' said Grandmother. 'David might hear.'

'He's asleep,' said Aunt Evelyn.

But instead, I lay awake listening, thinking, wondering anxiously. Was there an essential fact about our lives I didn't know, that no one talked about? Would everyone leave? Where would I go?

'If we just stick together. ' said Aunt Evelyn. 'We should never have left Billings.'

'You don't mean it, Evelyn,' said Grandmother. 'We got away.'

'What about Worklan?' said Aunt Evelyn. 'There aren't as many of us now. It's not fair.'

'Is it supposed to be fair?' said Grandfather. 'For Chrissake!'

'Please keep it down,' said Grandmother. For a moment there was silence, and I thought someone would come to check on whether I was still asleep, but no one did.

'Worklan could turn up missing like Lars Johnson,' said my aunt. 'Remember Johnson, the boss on the East River side?'

'I remember them all,' said Grandfather.

'They run away,' said Aunt Evelyn nervously. 'Why don't they stay? They run away and eventually they disappear. What happens if.»

'I don't blame them,' said Grandfather.

'Oh, why can't we just get someone to help us?' said Aunt Evelyn. She was crying. Her fretful, harsh sobs drifted through the hall into my room, where this time the door had been accidentally left ajar.

'We've been through that, too,' said Grandmother resignedly.

'We should find David's father,' said my Aunt. 'We should get David to his father.'

'He thought we were insane.'

'Please keep it down,' said Grandmother.

'Sorry,' said Grandfather in a barely audible voice. 'But Evelyn's right. It was fine as long as David was living with his mother and father, but now he's not safe with us, and we're getting too old to move again. We have to make a stand.'

'God,' said Aunt Evelyn, 'I don't know.'

'This time we'll have to wait,' said Grandfather.

'What will we tell David?' said Aunt Evelyn. There was a long silence, and during the silence I struggled to keep from yelling in terror, rushing into the living room and pleading with them to tell me what was happening to us. Eventually, I fell asleep exhausted. And in my dreams they came again from below in their tunnels — slick, pasty horrors without eyes.

In the morning I watched Grandfather sitting in his chair, smoking his pipe, occasionally looking toward me where I played grimly with toy horses. His gray features were a cruel poker face. I fought with the determination of a chess player to stay calm. I was afraid to speak.

When the sun was low one day and the light glared through the front-door glass into the building's entry hall, I sat on the lower step of the staircase. Mrs. Turnbull was cleaning her apartment and had made one or two trips out the back door behind the main staircase, now carrying a grocery bag of garbage that smelled of used coffee grounds. I heard the garbage can lid rattle onto the can in the alley, and from Mrs. Turnbull's open apart ment door I could hear the soap-opera voices of Stella Dallas coming from her radio. I heard the back door close, watched Mrs. Turnbull start back down the long hallway, then turn.

She suddenly walked back toward me, a hurricane of thick makeup and bright red lipstick. Her face was like a shrunken plaster cast, her pale eyes like marbles of blue and white fire. 'Your grandmother hasn't told you anything,' she said hastily. 'They spoil you.' Her left eye twitched slightly in its cavity of dry flesh. 'You shouldn't be here. Do you think we're all going to pack up and move again? Tell your grandpa and grandma what I said.' She bent down, a frightened caricature. 'It doesn't matter because I'm not going to live much longer, you know what I mean? What dying is? Or,' she smiled, 'haven't they mentioned that little item to you either?' She started to say more, but saw tears in my eyes. She quickly turned, as if from the scene of a crime, and retreated toward her apartment with the soap-opera voices.

Late that evening, I believe some kind of a meeting was held. After I heard my grandmother, grandfather, and aunt go out and shut the front door, I put on my robe, came out of my room, and went into the outside hall. There was the sound of people treading through the lower hallways and down the stairs to the first floor. There was that feeling, barely comprehensible to me then: I am inside a tomb, here are the dead people moving around. I went back into the living room and sat in Grandfather's overstuffed chair.

I didn't know how long I slept, but when I awoke, I pictured the downstairs hall in my mind, thought about the first-floor tenants and the front door glass, which must have been a tall dark rectangle at that time of night.

Aunt Evelyn had said, 'How could they come from under the ground if we're on the fourth floor?' I realized how misleading that comment had been, and I remembered Mrs. Turnbull taking out her garbage along the short passage that went past a door that led to the basement. Down there, our storeroom locker was packed with old furniture, boxes of bedding, tools, and other things. The basement room with its rows of wooden foundation posts extended under the entire length of the building and included a big boiler. I had been down there once or twice with Grandfather, but never alone.

I went out into the hall. It was dark because of a burned-out light bulb, but a flood of light came up the stairwell. I went downstairs to the short hall that led to the alley. Midway along it was the cellar door. Ten feet away was the alley exit door, and through its window I could see a dim illumination of streetlight on the bricks of the old fire station.

I turned the cold brass of the cellar doorknob. A light was on in the basement; the old stairs descended into dimly lit space. Frightened but curious, I stepped down one at a time.

The underground room extended into the dark shadows among the row of foundation posts.

In this bizarre place, under a dim light bulb near the center of the bare floor, sat my grandmother. She was rocking slowly back and forth in a high-backed rocking chair. Her hands worked a pair of knitting needles, nervously starting and stopping while the chair creaked. I recognized the chair as one that had recently been put in our storage locker next to a pair of old snow tires. She had rocked me in that chair many times.

I stepped quietly down to the bottom of the stairs. Grandmother wore the brown plaid overcoat she'd used while walking with me. It was cold down here.

'Grandmother?' I whispered.

Her hands stopped knitting.

'Grandmother?'

The chair stopped, she looked up in surprise and stared in my direction.

'David?'

'It's me.'

'Why are you down here?' she said in a dry voice. She started to get up. The knitting fell from her lap onto the concrete floor. She stood up. 'Oh. you have to go back upstairs. How did you find your way down here?'

'I didn't know where anyone was.'

'Well, you're supposed to be in bed.' Her voice fluttered in an unnatural way. 'You'd better go now, right