by S. T. Joshi
A muffled thump recalled Cassie’s attention. Two figures, one distinctly larger, now stood below the cavate mouth. The larger individual had just dumped a pack on the ground. As she watched, he began rummaging through it, while his companion held a flashlight.
“. . . Hurry up! I know she’s got that guard out here tonight . . . What’re you looking for, anyway?”
Cassie stiffened as she recognized the voice. If Kit was out here, Len Mason had probably bullied her into it. And come along himself, to confirm the promised cache?
Pulling out a rock hammer and a handful of pitons, he headed for the cliff face and started tapping one in.
“Len . . . !”
A hideous buzzing cut through the air. Moments later, Cassie gasped as the same vibration began inside her skull, filling it like a thousand metallic cicadas—
No, not cicadas. Not anything from this clean planet. Frostbite stinging down her spine told her all she needed to know, and far more than she wanted to.
Beside her, Joshua Yellowtail cursed and drew his pistol. One moon-flyer had flickered out of the dark above Len Mason—straight into Kit’s jittering flashlight beam. Its body was the size of a Rottweiler, with unfurled wings at least double that length, and only knotted cilia above its shoulders. The carapace was translucent. Reddish-purple masses inside pulsed and quivered as it dove on the man, grappling him with several appendages and pulling him close.
Len Mason shrieked. Once.
Then a glistening tube uncoiled from the top of the thing and shoved itself down his throat.
Kit dropped the flashlight and bolted back down the trail, wailing. Cassie grabbed Joshua’s arm as he tried to go after her.
Moments later, a second high scream cut off abruptly.
The buzzing in Cassie’s mind exploded into white pain. As she fought against it, disconnected images flashed past her tear-filled eyes. The moon-flyer’s proboscis whipping back up into that writhing mass of cilia. Mason’s corpse sprawled on the ground, streaming darkness from a ruined mouth. A canteen-style pot gripped by two clawed appendages. Light? . . . Energy? . . . leaking out as other appendages wove thick strands across its neck—
“Cassie?”
Joshua was shaking her by the shoulder. His own eyes still streamed with tears, and a thin trickle of blood marked his upper lip.
Cassie wiped at her own nose. Her own blood. “I’m OK.” She blinked away more tears. “You?”
When he didn’t answer, she followed his gaze to the cliff face—and the batlike crawl of the moon-flyer working its way up. Furling its wings, it scrabbled at the lip of the cavate mouth before disappearing inside. A burst of cicada noises followed.
Then, for several minutes, silence.
When the creature reemerged, it was already launching into the air, wings spreading wide. A webbed and glistening cluster of pots trailed behind it as it rose to meet the moon. Cassie winced. The harvest moon—
Pebbles crunched behind her. Before she could reach the gun at her back, Dr. Alvarez was crouching down beside Joshua. The archaeologist switched on a small flashlight and aimed it forward.
Then switched it off again, fast. “What the hell just happened?”
Nothing I want to discuss out here. Cassie took a deep breath and glanced up, though she already knew what she’d see.
Or not see.
Unclipping a larger flashlight from his belt, Joshua rose and headed for the trail Kit had taken. Cassie and Alvarez followed—one with her gun drawn, the other doing her best to ignore it. As they moved through the dark in silence, McAllister’s field notes haunted Cassie’s mind.
Whatever else they found tonight, she knew, it had happened before. And elsewhere. Pennacook territory, long before the Europeans came. Vermont, in 1927. New Mexico, early and often enough to leave petroglyphs on remote canyon walls. The Outside was nothing if not persistent—
She stumbled as Joshua Yellowtail put out an arm to stop her.
“I found Kit,” he said. “It’s bad.”
“I’ve seen dead bodies before.”
Joshua shook his head. “Not like this.”
No, worse. What her brand new paradigm had left of Zia House’s director, for starters. The fiery end of that charity workshop outside Sheridan. And, just this past winter, a truck plaza parking lot in Warren.
But this was bad enough.
As Joshua finally lowered his arm, Cassie’s breath caught. Kit had fought far harder than Len Mason had, though it hadn’t saved her.
A freshly webbed pot lay a few feet from the body. Its surface was spattered with inky, iridescent liquid, and faint threads of light seeped from its mouth. As Cassie watched, the last of these faded into night.
She glanced at Joshua. He glanced at her.
Then they both moved back at once, nearly running into Alvarez as she stood in the middle of the trail, flashlight dangling from her hand. The archaeologist’s mouth moved silently.
She wasn’t looking past them at Kit’s remains. She was staring up.
Cassie followed her gaze. From several locations in the canyon—and a few beyond it—flickering silhouettes climbed toward the moon. In ones and twos, some towing netted clusters behind them, they converged into a single shadow against its shining disk.
And then they were gone, and there was only moonlight.
* * *
Fat raindrops spattered Cassie’s windshield as she drove north toward Cheyenne, radio tuned to 24/7 weather. The Jeep’s wipers were barely keeping up. Monsoon season was going out with a vengeance, just as Alvarez had predicted.
Tenure wasn’t looking so certain for her, but at least she’d have plenty of time to write up her notes—without McAllister’s field journal, of course. Anticipating another season at the site, she’d already handed the current semester’s course load over to her grad students.
Minus one. Cassie bit her lip. Unable to resist a last perfect pot, Alvarez had retrieved the one near Kit’s body.
It was still awaiting cataloguing.
“. . . flash flood warnings are in effect for the Los Alamos area, including Bandelier National Monument and all nearby canyons. Severe flooding and rockslides are expected to block access for weeks—”
Cassie leaned forward and turned off the radio, grimacing as her back twinged. Several hours with a crowbar, she thought, could do that to a person.
She drove on in silence, listening to the rain.
The Girl in the Attic
DARRELL SCHWEITZER
Darrell Schweitzer remarks that his career seems to be growing tentacles of late. This is recently evidenced by a collection of his Lovecraftian and weird fictions, Awaiting Strange Gods, published by Fedogan & Bremer in August 2015. His historical Cthulhu Mythos anthology, That Is Not Dead, was published by PS Publishing in 2015 and was followed by Tales from the Miskatonic Library (coedited with John Ashmead). His stories have appeared in numerous Lovecraft-related anthologies in the past few years. He coedited Weird Tales for nineteen years and is the author of three novels, The White Isle, The Shattered Goddess, and The Mask of the Sorcerer, in addition to about 300 published stories.
CHORAZIN, PENNSYLVANIA WAS (AND IS) A SMALL town, if you could even call it that: a few farms, a cluster of houses around a single street, a church with the steeple blasted off and its white wooden sides still charred, a one-room schoolhouse by a stream, a general store with gas pumps out front that usually don’t work, and a surprisingly large graveyard near a circle of standing stones where the people gather on certain occasions, at the right time with the turning of the stars and seasons, to perform certain rites. The town itself is a secret, hidden away in the upper, central part of the state near the New York line that is mostly blank on a map, amid long, dark valleys where there are only occasional specks of light at night to be seen from the winding roads.
It has its own secrets, too, some of them hidden even from itself.
In one of those houses, a house where no one lives, and which has been
boarded up for years, there is a girl chained in the attic. She was once strikingly beautiful, almost fully grown. But her face is gone, blown away by gunshots in the course of some adventure. Her mind is gone, so the common report has it, and she sits perpetually on the floor, her head resting on her drawn up knees, her arms limply at her sides. She makes no sound and never stirs, requiring neither food nor water nor cleansing, for her body has turned hard, like wax or even soft stone; she is neither dead nor alive, and she has been thus for years or centuries or just a few days. It is hard to tell on this last point, because time itself in Chorazin can slip, as if trying to climb a muddy slope and sliding back down again.
Despite which, the girl is still kept chained by her ankles to a vertical beam in the center of the room which holds up the roof, just in case.
The elders check on her from time to time, as the stars tell them, and repeat a certain word over her. Then they go away and she remains just a story, though at one time she was none other than the Red Witch of Chorazin, the girl covered in fire, whose wandering along the dark ridgelines beyond the town could be mistaken for a sunset.
But her fire had gone out, her face gone from misadventure, her mind gone, her body a stiff shell.
A secret, without a name. No one spoke her name, though the elders still knew it.
* * *
The secret was that her mind was gone because it had departed elsewhere, traveling in something like dreams, first into the houses nearby, then beyond. People sensed her passage like an unsettling breath of wind, only there for a second, then gone. She drifted over the hills once more, down into adjoining valleys, alone and incorporeal in the night.
Once she met a man in the woods who had parked his car and come up from the highway for some reason. She embraced him, and before he could even scream he burst into flame and was consumed almost to ashes. She herself was not burnt, though she was clothed in flame again, as the Red Witch had been, for a little while at least. If the charred corpse was ever found, it did not matter. The man was a stranger. Possibly the incident found its way into a supermarket tabloid like Weekly World News as a “mystery of spontaneous human combustion,” but if so that did not matter either, because there were no supermarkets in Chorazin and nobody read tabloids. It had rained that night. The forest was wet and the fire did not spread.
Once, too, in her dreams, after she had drifted among the stars, perhaps for an eternity folded back on itself so that the ending of the dream took place at the same instant as the beginning, she dwelt on a black, sunless world in a jagged valley where bestial stone gods sat in two infinite rows, whispering; and one of those gods leaned down, with the thundering voice of an avalanche, and said to her, “Now awaken.”
That was how it began—a secret in the attic.
She raised her head from off her knees, in the attic. The red flame burned within the ruin of her face.
She tried to speak, but made only a little sound.
At first the chains baffled her, but then she stepped out of them, perhaps incorporeally, or else like a snake shedding its skin. She herself did not know how it was done, but the sensation was very physical. She was standing naked in the cold attic. She listened and heard the wind whistling softly over the roof and, somewhere far away, what might be a cowbell ringing. She walked barefoot down the attic stairs, feeling the smooth, gritty steps one by one.
The door at the bottom was closed. She fumbled with the doorknob clumsily, as if her hands had forgotten what to do next. Then she squeezed the knob without turning it, and the door was covered with pale fire, which did not consume and gave off no heat. But that was enough, and the door opened.
She found herself in a familiar hallway. There was a washstand outside one of the rooms, with a big bowl in it, filled with dust. This struck her as an odd place for a washstand. She attempted a smile and continued on.
She came to another room that she knew very well. The door was open. She went in. She wanted light, but there were no candles, and the oil lamp on the stand by the side of the bed was empty. With a concentration of her mind, she made light. It was as natural as breathing. Soon the walls and furniture were all aglow with pale fire, of the sort she’d used to open the attic door, tiny flickering white flames that did not burn or give off heat, like St. Elmo’s fire perhaps, something she’d read about in books, in sea stories. For all she had traveled widely now, she had never seen St. Elmo’s fire, so she could only guess it was like that.
Still naked, oblivious to that fact, she lovingly explored the room, reaching out to touch the things that were hers: a whole shelf of porcelain-faced dolls in fine dresses, now, like everything else, faded and covered with dust. When she’d grown too old to play with dolls, she had placed them on that shelf in a neat row, as a memorial to her former self, and there they had remained.
There was another shelf of her books, and a stack of St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, something else left behind but not discarded. She got down a particularly treasured volume, opened it, and saw written on the endpaper in pencil, in a very childish hand, “This book belongs to: MARIE.” Yes, that was her name, she recalled now, but it was her everyday name, the name she used all the time, not her other name, the one for secrets, which only the elders knew.
Still holding the book, she sat down on the dusty comforter that covered the bed. She read through the book for a few minutes, then put it aside and lay down, stretching languorously, carefully noting and savoring each sensation. She stared up at the ceiling, remembering when she had lain in this bed and stared at that ceiling for so long that she imagined rivers and mountains and whole, strange countries in the ripples and cracks of the plaster; but she had done that when she was very small, and now that she had journeyed much more widely, the ceiling was only plaster.
A tear ran down her ruined face.
After a while she felt cold and sat up. She went through the closet and was distressed to find that most of her clothing was chewed to shreds by moths, but at last she found some things that she could wear, however dusty: underthings, a blouse, a skirt that went down to her ankles, stockings, and high shoes.
Then she sat down at her dressing table to comb her hair, which was indeed a mess. In the mirror, her eyes and nostrils and slightly open mouth and the holes in her cheeks were filled with fire, so she looked a bit like a badly carved jack-o’-lantern.
Now the gentle fire spread through the whole house, consuming nothing but filling the house with light. She listened where she sat, in increasing anticipation, to the house coming alive with sounds and smells. Someone stirring in the kitchen. Pots clanking. A small dog barking. And finally a voice calling out, “Marie! Time for dinner! Come down!”
So she went down, still relishing, exploring every sensation, running her hand gently along the railing, stopping to gaze at each of the framed prints on the wall, which showed either her ancestors, or strange beasts, or both.
“Marie!”
At the base of the stairs she stood for a long time gazing into the parlor to her left. Her sheet music was still on the piano. She noticed her younger brother John’s toy Noah’s Ark on the table there, with the pairs of wooden animals carefully arranged two by two.
“Marie! It’s Thanksgiving!”
Indeed it was. To her right was the dining room. There, indeed, she found her family seated around the table, her father in his three-piece suit with watch-chain, smiling, the ends of his moustache pointing upward as he did; her brother Johnny in his sailor suit, sitting still for once; her mother in her lace-collared dress. The family spaniel, Mister Ears, had settled down in the corner with a bone.
The whole room and the family glowed with the same magical, pale fire that filled the house with light.
It was Thanksgiving, but this was Chorazin after all, so Thanksgiving was not quite the same as elsewhere, any more than her brother’s toy Noah’s Ark in the other room had been quite the standard model. (Two of the creatures were shapeless, flowing things; something
half like a man, half like a cuttlefish crouched on the roof of the Ark to welcome the passengers aboard.) Papa gave thanks to the Whispering Voices of the Air, and to the Winged Ones That Come, and to the Earth Shaker, and to the Gods We Await. The thanks was not so much for the repast before them (turkey and sweet potatoes and beans with almonds, bread, puddings, and candied fruit) but for the expectation that when the earth is cleared off, those who were faithful would find some place in the new, strange, and transformed world. Amen.
Nevertheless, Marie was happy to be here, in this one perfect moment. She wanted nothing more than to remain suspended in it forever like an insect in amber.
If this was a dream, she didn’t want to wake up.
But, to her horror, she heard again the voice of the colossal stone god, the one that bent forward as an avalanche, telling her to wake up, and wake up fully.
No, she said, under her breath.
And aloud she said, “I love you, Mama. I love you, Papa. I even love you, Johnny, and Mister Ears.”
“We love you too,” said her mother.
But her mother was burning. There was a fire behind her face, as if she were a paper doll and a smoldering candle had been shoved inside her. Now the flames burst out—not the gentle flames that illuminated everything, but the kind that devoured.
“Mama!”
Marie tried to concentrate, to will the fire away, and gradually it receded, but her mother’s whole face was gone, and her head began to crumple inward, even though her hands were going through the normal motion of buttering a piece of bread.
Her father began to say something, but he too was burning. Marie rushed from her seat over to him, put her hands on his shoulder, and whispered, “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” and the flames died down, but then her brother screamed. She threw a glass of apple juice in his face. Behind her, the dog exploded like a firework, and flames raced up a curtain. She rushed from one place to another, trying to put the flames out one way or another, but soon the whole house was genuinely on fire and she heard parts of it crashing down upstairs.
