Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

And the woman with wings and shining bird eyes said her name, Angeline, said her name so it meant things she’d never suspected, some way the name held everything she was in three syllables. One long arm out to her, arm too long and thin to believe, skin like moonlight or afterbirth, fingers longer still and pointing to the door of the cage. Padlocked steel and the interlace design from the threshold again, engraved there like a warning; ‘Please,’ the woman in the cage said, ‘Please, Angeline.’

Angeline Desvernine ran, then, ran from even the possibility of this pleading thing, door slammed shut behind her, closing it away and closing away the fading illusion of her victory. Almost an hour before she found her way back to her own room, trailing pools and crusting smears of blood from her ruined feet; crawling, hands and knees, at the end. She locked her door, and by then the sound of servants awake, distant commotion, her name called again and again, but there was no comfort left after those eyes, the ragged holes they’d put in her. No way not to see them or hear that silk and thorny voice.

Most of the storm’s fury spent by dawn, by the time the maids and cooks and various manservants gave up and called for someone from the stables to take the door off its hinges.

First leadflat light in the empty room, the balcony doors standing open wide and tiny drifts of snow reaching almost to the bed. They found her hanging from the balustrade, noose from curtain cord tiebacks, snow in her tangled black hair, crimson icicles from the sliced flesh of her toes and heels. And her eyes open wide and staring sightless toward the Storm King.

‘They’re my dreams,’ he says, whispers loud, and she says ‘They’re lies,’ and he keeps his eyes on the last colourless smudges of afternoon and says low, mumbled so she won’t hear, ‘Then they’re my lies.’

This time, this dog-eared incarnation of the climb up Storm King and he’s alone, except for the thunder and lightning and rain like wet needles against exposed skin, wind that would take him in its cold fist and fling him, broken, back down to the rocks below, to the impatient, waiting river. No sign anymore of the trail he’s followed from the road, faintest path for deer or whatever else might come this way and now even that’s gone. He can see in the white spaces after the thunder, flashpowder snapshots of the mountain, trees bending and the hulk of Breakneck across the river, Storm King’s twin. Jealous Siamese thing severed by the acid Hudson, and he thinks No, somewhere deep they’re still connected, still bound safe by their granite vinculum below the water’s slash and silt.

Thunder that sounds like angels burning and he slips, catches himself, numb hands into the roots of something small that writhes, woodsy revulsion at his touch, and he’s shivering now, the mud and wet straight through his clothes. He lies so still, waiting, to fall, to drown in the gurgling runoff, until the thunder says it’s time to get moving again and he opens his eyes. And he’s standing at the summit, little clearing and the tall stone at its heart like a stake to hold the world in place. Grey megalith like things he’s seen in England or Denmark or France and in the crackling brief electric flash he can see the marks made in the stone, marks smoothed almost away by time and frost and a hundred thousand storms before. Forgotten characters traced in clean rivulets like emphasis. He would turn and run, from the place and the moment, If you had it to do over again, If you could take it back, but the roots have twisted about his wrists, greenstick pythons and for all his clever, distracting variations, there’s only this one way it can go.

She steps out of the place where the stone is, brilliant moment, thinnest sliver of an instant caught and held in forked lightning teeth; the rain that beads, rolls off her feathers, each exquisite, roughgem drop and the strange angles of her arms and legs, too many joints. The head that turns on its elegant neck and the eyes that find him, sharp face and molten eyes that will never let him go.

‘Nothing from the Pterodactyle, I shouldn’t think,’ says Professor Osborn, standing somewhere behind him, ‘though the cranium is oddly reminiscent of the Dimorphodon, isn’t it?’ and Silas Desvernine bows his head, stares down at the soggy darkness where his feet must be and waits for the leather and satin rustle of her wings, gentle loversound through the storm. The rain catches his tears and washes them away with everything else.

The funeral over and the servants busy downstairs when Silas opened the doors of his gallery; viewed the damage she’d done for the first time, knew it was mostly broken glass and little that couldn’t be put right again, but the sight hurt his chest, hurt his eyes. Heart already so broken and eyes already so raw but new pain anyway. No bottom to this pain, and he bent over and picked up his dodo, retrieved it from a bed of diamond shards and Silas brushed the glass from its dusty beak and rump feathers. Set it back on the high shelf between passenger pigeons and three Carolina parakeets. Another step closer to her cage, the drapes still pulled open, and his shoes crunched. Her, crouched in the shadows, wings wrapped tight about her like a cocoon, living shield against him, and he said, ‘What did you do to her, Tisiphone?’ And surprised at how calm his voice could be, how empty of everything locked inside him and clawing to get out.

The wings shivered, cringed and folded back; ‘That’s not my name,’ she said.

‘What did you do to her, Megaera?’

‘Shut up,’ words spit at the wall where her face was still hidden, at him, ‘You know that I’m not one of the three, you’ve known that all along.’

‘She couldn’t have hurt you, even if she’d wanted to,’ he said, hearing her words but as close as he would ever come to being able to ignore them: her weak, and his grief too wide to cross even for her voice. ‘Did you think she could hurt you?’ he said.

‘No,’ and shaking her head now, forehead bang and smack against brick and he could see the sticky, black smear she left on the wall.

‘Then you did it to get back at me. Is that it? You thought to hurt me by hurting her.’

‘No,’ she said and that was the only time he ever saw her cry, if it was crying, the dim phosphorescence leaking from the corners of her eyes. ‘No, no...’

‘But you know she’s dead, don’t you?’ and ‘Yes,’ she said, small yes too quick and it made him want to wring her white throat, lock his strong hands around her neck and twist until he was rewarded with the pop and cartilage grind of ruined vertebrae. Squeeze until her tongue hung useless from her lipless mouth.

‘She never hurt anyone, Alecto,’ he hissed and she turned around, snake-sudden movement and he took a step away from the bars despite himself.

‘I asked her to help me,’ and she was screaming now, perfect, crystal teeth bared. ‘I asked her to free me,’ and her hurt and fury swept over him, blast furnace heat rushing away from her, and faint smell of nutmeg and decay left in the air around his head.

‘I asked her to unlock the fucking cage, Silas!’ and the wings slipped from off her back and lay bloody and very still on the unclean metal and hay-strewn floor of the cage.

In the simplest sense, these things, at least, are true: that during the last week of June 1916, Silas Desvernine hired workmen from Haverstraw to excavate a large stone from a spot near the summit of Storm King, and that during this excavation several men died or fell seriously ill, each under circumstances that only seemed unusual if considered in connection with one another. When the foreman resigned (monkeyed little Scotsman with a face like ripe cranberries), Silas hired a second crew and in July the stone was carried down and away from the mountain, ingenious block-and-tackle of his own design, then horse and wagon, and finally, barge, the short distance upriver to Pollepel Island. Moneys were paid to a Mr Harriman of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, well enough known for his discretion in such matters, and no questions were asked.

And also, that archaeologists and anthropologists, linguists and cryptographers were allowed brief viewings of the artefact over the next year and only the sketchiest, conflicting conclusions regarding the glyphs on the stone were drawn: that they might have been made by Vikings, or Phoenicians, or Minoans, or Atlanteans; that they might be something like Sanskrit, or perhaps the tracks of prehistoric sea worms, or have been etched by Silas Desvernine himself. The suggestion by a geologist of no particular note, that the stone itself, oily black shale with cream flecks of calcite, was not even native to the region, was summarily ignored by everyone but Silas. Who ignored nothing.

One passing footnote mention of ‘the Butterhill Stone’ in a monograph on Mahican pottery and by 1918 it was forgotten by the busy, forgetful world of men and words beyond the safeguarding walls of Silas’ Castle.