Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror

ancient ritual song. He turned as he chanted, sending the smoke and the cryptic words first in one direction and then another, finally coming all the way back around to face me, and as his timeless face turned again in my direction, the final words of the song took form in my mind: 'Gwai-ti, Gwai-ti.' I awoke with these impressions still fresh in my memory and walked far into the night hours trying either to understand the sounds I had heard or to dispel their memory. I paused among the great black gravestones in St. John's churchyard off Benefit Street and tried to collect my thoughts, finally rousing myself and making my weary way back home with no desire to sleep again. After reading awhile I feel asleep nonetheless, and, so far as I can remember, did not dream.

Taking the next day off from work, I made an appointment to speak with someone who I suspected might possibly be able to tell me something about my mystery: Professor Carlos Armijo at Brown University. His field was the anthropology of the Southwest, and I had heard him lecture once. I doubted that my nocturnal visions would mean anything to him, but it was worth a try.

I found Professor Armijo to be a soft-spoken and pensivelooking man of middle age, comfortably ensconced in a nest of books and professional journals in his office at Brown. Describing the overall nature of my dreams, I felt increasingly foolish having allowed myself to think there might be any real point in taking up his time with my account, and I barely mustered the courage to mention the nonsense syllables that had become part of my nocturnal visions of the desert, so that I was mightily surprised at his response.

'I have heard these syllables before,' he said in a soft Spanish accent, 'in connections that make them difficult to account for in the dreams of someone unacquainted with the cultures of the Southwest. Even scholars conversant with those cultures would for the most part find the words unknown to them. I only know of them myself because I am a specialist in, let us say, some of the darker aspects of Southwestern lore.'

I was intrigued, though in a way unsure how much I really wanted to know about the origins of an expression having arisen for no discernible reason in my dreams; perhaps Carl Jung was right in theorizing that we all possess a Collective Unconscious capable of tapping into profound shared realms of being, archetypal realms, unknown to our conscious mind yet at some level connected to a sort of reality. 'Please go on.'

Professor Armijo looked out his window for a moment, evidently collecting his thoughts. 'For centuries there was a kind of obscure cult among certain Native American shamans of Arizona and New Mexico,' he said, 'involving what seems to have been the worship of an ancient god unknown in the mainstream of American Indian tradition.' He paused, rather dramatically, and not without cause, it seemed to me. 'That god was apparently known as Gwai- ti.'

I felt my breath catch at this revelation. What did I know of this? What did I really want to know of this? Nothing — yet I had undeniably dreamed the name.

'Very little is known,' the professor went on, 'about this cult or its god, as the whole subject has always been shunned among such few American Indians as have ever even heard of it. Even at places in New Mexico like Nambe Pueblo, where there are very dark and long-standing traditions of Southwest-style witchcraft, in my researches I have found only one shaman who admitted to knowing of the god Gwai-ti, and he spoke of the matter only with reluctance and, I might add, with obvious distaste.

'I gather from his disjointed accounts that Gwai-ti is supposed to have existed from the beginning of time, and to have come to dwell under the earth, showing itself only on rare occasions to hapless souls. There are stories of human sacrifices made from time to time by renegade Indian priests having no standing with the proper spiritual leaders in the region, most of whom, however, regard the supposed activities of the renegade priests as fabrications.'

I was struggling to make some sense of all this. 'And the name? Frankly, I thought it sounded Chinese.'

Professor Armijo nodded. 'I have had some interesting discussions with people in comparative linguistics here about the name Gwai-ti. Indeed there are words within the phonology of Chinese that sound like these syllables. I am given to understand that there is a word gwai that means something like 'strange' or 'monstrous.' There is a word ti that means 'body' or 'form.' And of course ethnologists theorize that Asian peoples migrated in prehistoric times across the Bering Strait into North America, but on the other hand there are virtually no discernible linguistic traces of Asian vocabulary in the languages of Native Americans.'

'How do I know the name?' I asked.

The professor shrugged. 'Perhaps you have heard it somewhere and have simply forgotten.'

I made ready to leave, thanking the man for his time. 'You're right, I must have heard the name somewhere.'

But of course I knew that I had not. Except in my dreams.

A few nights later the dreams began to take on an even more anomalous character.

One night I seemed to crouch in shadows watching some vile convocation in which a semicircle of strangely painted priests chanted: 'M'warrh Gwai-ti, h'nah m'warrh Gwai-ti, ph'nglui w'gah Gwai-ti.' Another time I thought I was looking across a great desert plain in a wash of moonlight, with a distant ring of mountains in the background almost beyond the limits of vision, and watching what at first I took to be a swirl of blowing sand. Before long, though, this impression resolved itself into a young Indian girl running, screaming, flailing her arms in terror. In the inconsistent fashion of dreams, my view of her was suddenly closer than before, so close in fact that she filled my entire field of view. Somewhere I could hear a deep thrumming sound, like the bass tones on a pipe organ, and a voice — it was like the old shaman of my earlier visions — a voice that chanted, in some language known to me in the dream: 'She was chosen, we had to send her.' And in the next instant a great hungry darkness seemed to close around the screaming girl, and she was gone, and the thrumming died away. I awoke drenched in perspiration, and fancied I could still smell the pungent aroma of sagebrush. I was afraid to go back to sleep.

But of course the next night I did have to sleep again, and saw this time a tall, narrow stone in the sand, with ancient petroglyphs carved upon it like runic inscriptions from a bygone age, and I heard again the somber thrumming in the ground, and glimpsed unclear suggestions of movement in the wan moonlight, and only just made out a murmur of the name Gwai-ti before the scene grew grainy and faded away altogether.

It was only a matter of time before I could no longer resist the nameless urge actually to visit New Mexico. I must long since have decided, unconsciously, that whatever unthinkable confluence of realities might have brought me into an awareness of that other world so unlike the waking world of my mundane life, I had to see, in objective truth, the setting of my dreams. I had no idea, of course, where exactly in those vast desertlands my visions might have originated.

Nevertheless, I found myself on an airplane one day, landing in Albuquerque with that odd sense of the unreal that one feels upon first visiting a place about which one has only read. Or dreamed.

I rented a four-wheel-drive vehicle at the airport and drove east and then south. While I had no notion where I should be going, I felt no reluctance just to let my instincts guide me. Threading my way through the foothills of the Sandia Mountains and finding my eyes charmed by occasional glimpses of earth-colored adobe walls and coyote fences, I made my way out into open desert, where distant, majestic mesas stood timeless beyond endless plains of waving prairie grass and nodding islands of mesquite and sagebrush and spikes of yucca. Given my motivations for visiting this land so different from my native New England, I had rather expected the desert to be redolent of subtle dread and unease, but I found myself gathering altogether different impressions.

The place was beautiful. There was nothing sinister about the dizzyingly vast expanse of turquoise sky, the stretches of chaparral, the blue-gray mountains in the distance, the great deep arroyos snaking across the land, the tranquil mesas stretched upon the sandy plain like serene grazing beasts. I scarcely knew now what I had expected, but what I had found was a land of enchanting beauty and peace.

As I drove through this desert pageantry, I wondered aloud that I had ever allowed myself to think that there could be anything spectral or bizarre about this region. I felt more at ease than I had felt for quite a long time, and I reflected that I had been foolish to be disturbed by my odd but essentially harmless dreams. Even those nonsense syllables, so coincidentally similar to some name from obscure Southwestern folklore, were surely something about which I had no need to concern myself.

The sun was beginning to go down behind the purple mountain ranges in the west, and I marveled at the beauty of the desert sunset, wherein the sky exploded in a riotous display of color that would surely challenge the