Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror

wouldn't have screwed, given half a chance.' She paused, here, tapping ash onto the floorboards. 'So, if you're not a fag, just what are you? A kike, maybe? You sort of look like a kike.'

'No,' I replied. 'I'm not Jewish. My parents were Roman Catholic, but me, I'm not much of anything, I'm afraid, but a painter you've never heard of.'

'Are you?'

'Am I what, Miss Endecott?'

'Afraid,' she said, smoke leaking from her nostrils. 'And do not dare start in calling me 'Miss Endecott.' It makes me sound like a goddamned schoolteacher or something equally wretched.'

'So, these days, do you prefer Vera?' I asked, pushing my luck. 'Or Lillian?'

'How about Lily?' she smiled, completely nonplussed, so far as I could tell, as though these were all only lines from some script she'd spent the last week rehearsing.

'Very well, Lily,' I said, moving the glass ashtray on the table closer to her. She scowled at it, as though I were offering her a platter of some perfectly odious foodstuff and expecting her to eat, but she stopped tapping her ash on my floor.

'Why am I here?' she demanded, commanding an answer without raising her voice. 'Why have you gone to so much trouble to see me?'

'It wasn't as difficult as all that,' I replied, not yet ready to answer her question, wanting to stretch this meeting out a little longer and understanding, expecting, that she'd likely leave as soon as she had what I'd invited her there to give her. In truth, it had been quite a lot of trouble, beginning with a telephone call to her former agent, and then proceeding through half a dozen increasingly disreputable and uncooperative contacts. Two I'd had to bribe, and one I'd had to coerce with a number of hollow threats involving nonexistent contacts in the Boston Police Department. But, when all was said and done, my diligence had paid off, because here she sat before me, the two of us, alone, just me and the woman who'd been a movie star and who had played some role in Thurber's breakdown, who'd posed for Pickman and almost certainly done murder on a spring night in Hollywood. Here was the woman who could answer questions I did not have the nerve to ask, who knew what had cast the shadow I'd seen in that dingy pornographic film. Or, at least, here was all that remained of her.

'There aren't many left who would have bothered,' she said, gazing down at the smoldering tip-end of her Gitane.

'Well, I have always been a somewhat persistent sort of fellow,' I told her, and she smiled again. It was an oddly bestial smile that reminded me of one of my earliest impressions of her — that oppressive summer's day, now more than two months past, studying a handful of old clippings in the Hope Street boarding house. That her human face was nothing more than a mask or fairy glamour conjured to hide the truth of her from the world.

'How did you meet him?' I asked, and she stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray.

'Who? How did I meet who?' She furrowed her brow and glanced nervously toward the parlor window, which faces east, toward the harbor.

'I'm sorry,' I replied. 'Pickman. How is it that you came to know Richard Pickman?'

'Some people would say that you have very unhealthy interests, Mr. Blackman,' she said, her peculiarly carnivorous smile quickly fading, taking with it any implied menace. In its stead, there was only this destitute, used-up husk of a woman.

'And surely they've said the same of you, many, many times, Lily. I've read all about Durand Drive and the Delgado woman.'

'Of course, you have,' she sighed, not taking her eyes from the window. 'I'd have expected nothing less from a persistent fellow such as you.'

'How did you meet Richard Pickman?' I asked for the third time.

'Does it make a difference? That was so very long ago. Years and years ago. He's dead —»

'No body was ever found.'

And, here, she looked from the window to me, and all those unexpected lines on her face seemed to have abruptly deepened; she might well have been twenty-seven, by birth, but no one would have argued if she laid claim to forty.

'The man is dead,' she said flatly. 'And if by chance he's not, well, we should all be fortunate enough to find our heart's desire, whatever it might be.' Then she went back to staring at the window, and, for a minute or two, neither of us said anything more.

'You told me that you have the sketches,' she said, finally. 'Was that a lie, just to get me up here?'

'No, I have them. Two of them, anyway,' and I reached for the folio beside my chair and untied the string holding it closed. 'I don't know, of course, how many you might have posed for. There were more?'

'More than two,' she replied, almost whispering now.

'Lily, you still haven't answered my question.'

'And you are a persistent fellow.'

'Yes,' I assured her, taking the two nudes from the stack and holding them up for her to see, but not yet touch. She studied them a moment, her face remaining slack and dispassionate, as if the sight of them elicited no memories at all.

'He needed a model,' she said, turning back to the window and the blue October sky. 'I was up from New York, staying with a friend who'd met him at a gallery or lecture or something of the sort. My friend knew that he was looking for models, and I needed the money.'

I glanced at the two charcoal sketches again, at the curve of those full hips, the round, firm buttocks, and the tail — a crooked, malformed thing sprouting from the base of the coccyx and reaching halfway to the bend of the subject's knees. As I have said, Pickman had a flare for realism, and his eye for human anatomy was almost as uncanny as the ghouls and demons he painted. I pointed to one of the sketches, to the tail.

'That isn't artistic license, is it?'

She did not look back to the two drawings, but simply, slowly, shook her head. 'I had the surgery done in Jersey, back in '21,' she said.

'Why did you wait so long, Lily? It's my understanding that such a defect is usually corrected at birth, or shortly thereafter.'

And she almost smiled that smile again, that hungry, savage smile, but it died, incomplete, on her lips.

'My father, he has his own ideas about such things,' she said quietly. 'He was always so proud, you see, that his daughter's body was blessed with evidence of her heritage. It made him very happy.'

'Your heritage. ' I began, but Lily Snow held up her left hand, silencing me.

'I believe, sir, I've answered enough questions for one afternoon. Especially given that you have only the pair, and that you did not tell me that was the case when we spoke.'

Reluctantly, I nodded and passed both the sketches to her. She took them, thanked me, and stood up, brushing at a bit of lint or dust on her burgundy chemise. I told her that I regretted that the others were not in my possession, that it had not even occurred to me she would have posed for more than these two. The last part was a lie, of course, as I knew Pickman would surely have made as many studies as possible when presented with so unusual a body.

'I can show myself out,' she informed me when I started to get up from my chair. 'And you will not disturb me again, not ever.'

'No,' I agreed. 'Not ever. You have my word.'

'You're lying sons of bitches, the whole lot of you,' she said, and with that, the living ghost of Vera Endecott turned and left the parlor. A few seconds later, I heard the door open and slam shut again, and I sat there in the wan light of a fading day, looking at what grim traces remained in Thurber's folio.

* * *

October 24, 1929

This is the last of it. Just a few more words, and I will be done. I know now that having attempted to trap these terrible events, I have not managed to trap them at all, but merely given them some new, clearer focus.

Four days ago, on the morning of October 20th, a body was discovered dangling from the trunk of an oak growing near the center of King's Chapel Burial Ground. According to newspaper accounts, the corpse was suspended a full seventeen feet off the ground, bound round about the waist and chest with interwoven lengths of