Black Wings of Cthulhu (Volume Six)

by S. T. Joshi

  Again, Aram glanced at the meteorite, as if to make sure it hadn’t moved when he wasn’t looking. “Okay, okay. I give you twenty-four hours. After that—first come, first serve!”

  “Fair enough.” Erin took her Smartphone from her purse and snapped a few pics of the Object from different angles and distances. “I’ll be in touch.”

  She grabbed the box of documents from Aram’s desk and headed out of the office. Before she even got to the door, Aram threw the satin cloth over the Object again, as though he couldn’t bear to look at it or have it look at him.

  * * *

  At 3 A.M. the following morning, Erin was still poring over the scattered photos and papers at the desk in her home office. Wearing only sweat pants and a tank top, she poised a magnifying glass over a sepia cardboard print of a dazed-looking man in a fur parka and compared it with a photo of Thaddeus Bennington she’d called up on her laptop screen from his Wikipedia entry.

  Did both photos actually depict the same man? If so, it was difficult to tell and even harder to believe. The gent in the Wikipedia portrait was a starch-stiff Edwardian in a high wingtip collar and tie, his face clean-shaven, his bearing self-possessed to the point of smugness. The man in the parka wore a grizzled, foot-long beard, and the sunlight reflecting off the polar ice had burnt his fair complexion to dark umber. His eyes gaped at vacancy, oblivious to the photographer and everything else.

  In his arms, he cradled the Object as if it were a newborn.

  Erin eyed the picture with suspicion. It had evidently been taken with a Kodak Brownie, yet she could find no record in the pertinent historical literature of that particular shot or any of the other post-expedition photographs in Aram’s box. One had to be wary of all kinds of digital trickery in photographic evidence these days. The notorious German art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi once had his wife, Helene, pose as her own grandmother in a faked period photo in which his adept forgeries hung on the wall behind her.

  Erin studied and compared the individual features of the man in each picture, focusing on elements of the face that were difficult to alter with makeup: the overall shape of the head, the ratio from scalp to brow and from brow to chin, the size of the eyes and their relation to the nose. She’d read that experts had been able to distinguish the real Saddam Hussein from his body doubles by the shape of his earlobes, but unfortunately, the hood of the parka covered the Bennington lookalike’s ears. He seemed to be Thaddeus Bennington . . . but, like all the other evidence in Aram’s box, the photo stopped short of giving Erin the certainty she needed.

  In the annals of doomed Antarctic explorations, the Aldon-Bennington Expedition had largely been forgotten or, perhaps, deliberately ignored. Cedric Aldon and Thaddeus Bennington had launched their ill-fated enterprise in November of 1910, and their sordid demise was swiftly overshadowed by the grand and tragic “Race to the Pole” of Amundsen and Scott the following year.

  Like their fellow Englishman Scott, Aldon, Bennington, and their team set out for the Pole from a base camp on Cape Evans. Their route took them across what today is known as the Allan Hills Icefield, and along the way they discovered isolated rocks of varying sizes scattered across the ice shelf. Bennington, an avid amateur geologist, was keen to collect Antarctic mineral samples, and his journal indicates that he deduced what is now common knowledge: that these incongruous stones could not have originated from the surrounding terrain and must therefore have fallen from the sky. In later years, Allan Hills and icefields like it would yield some of the world’s rarest and most valuable meteorites, including wayward chips of the moon and Mars.

  “Fabulous find today!” Bennington jotted in his notes for December 19. “The largest specimen yet. A fissure in the exterior reveals it to be hollow and to contain some sort of heterogeneous object within. Will try to get a better look at the enclosed specimen if I can do so without damage to the whole.”

  Historians of the expedition declared this to be the first reference to what they dubbed the Aldon-Bennington Object. Whether Bennington found the Object on the Allan Hills ice sheet or elsewhere, they could not determine, for Bennington’s journal ceased after this entry.

  The chroniclers presumed that some unforeseen disaster struck the expedition—inclement weather, a catastrophic accident—disrupting the ration of supplies crucial to the team’s survival. No one could ascertain how far the explorers had made it toward the Pole before they turned back, but they had soon killed and eaten all their sled dogs. Forced to pull their sledge themselves, Aldon, Bennington, and their three cohorts found the weight of Bennington’s mineral specimens too much to drag along in their weakened state, so they abandoned the meteorites en route.

  All but one.

  Erin fished another cardboard print out of Aram’s box. These photos, if genuine, must have been taken by one of the men Aldon and Bennington had left to tend the base camp while they sought the Pole. This one showed the explorers’ sledge, upon which lay a man whose parka had been torn open like the skin of a flayed animal. The ivory tusks of the man’s barren ribs jutted above the coat’s fur, chunks of gristle and sinew still clinging to the gnawed bones. The man’s head lolled toward the camera, half its face chewed off. The half that remained, however, bore a strong resemblance to Cedric Aldon.

  Bennington had found a novel way to sustain himself long enough to return to base camp. He and the Object were the only survivors.

  When the men at the camp attempted to question Bennington about what had happened, they found him utterly unresponsive and incoherent, mumbling gibberish “as though he were speaking in tongues.” Their only clues to the expedition’s fate were Aldon’s corpse, the journal Bennington still carried in the pocket of his parka, and the Object, which he clutched with an infantile jealousy. Bennington’s condition failed to improve when he and his base camp crew were rescued and returned to Britain, and he died, delirious, thirty-three years later in the asylum at Broadmoor.

  Erin thumbed up one of the snapshots she’d taken of the Object from the album on her Smartphone. She pinched and zoomed until the crabbed figure inside the meteorite swelled to fill the phone’s screen. Then she placed it next to the print of Bennington with the Object and trained the lens of her magnifying glass on the dark cleft of the rock in the explorer’s arms. Was that the outline of one large eye and the suggestion of a curled claw in the depths of the stone’s shadows?

  She moved the lens up and down, trying to sharpen the image, but the photograph’s poor lighting and fuzzy focus refused further resolution. Even if these pictures from the expedition were real, she still couldn’t be sure the thing on Aram’s desk had been the true Aldon-Bennington Object and not a clever replica.

  Groaning, Erin set the photos aside and, in desultory fashion, paged through the ownership records for the Object over the past century. Although the pile of sales receipts, bequests, and estate inventories looked as dry as a CPA’s ledger, they told a tale of serial misfortune beside which the ill-omened Hope Diamond seemed like a lucky rabbit’s foot.

  The woe began when the Object and Bennington’s few remaining personal effects passed to Constance Bennington, Thaddeus’s twenty-four-year-old wife. Left destitute, with her husband a babbling lunatic, she was forced to sell the Object and virtually all their other possessions to pay the debts Thaddeus had incurred fitting out the expedition. Ostensibly “mad with grief,” Constance committed suicide by drinking tea laced with belladonna leaves she’d harvested from the garden of her cottage, which she would have had to vacate the following week.

  Each subsequent owner of the Object had suffered an unrelated yet equally unpleasant fate: the German astronomer who, during a “paroxysm of night terrors,” suffered a massive stroke that left him completely paralyzed and unable to speak for the remainder of his life; the curator who inexplicably stole the Object from her own museum’s collection, only to die in a car accident immediately after she’d sold the meteorite on the black market; the heavy-metal rock singer and dabbler in th
e occult who’d purchased the Object, then promptly spiraled into addiction and overdosed on heroin.

  And so on and so on. In cross-referencing the previous owners’ personal histories, Erin had perversely come to consider a horrible demise confirmation that a given individual had indeed possessed the Object. One would think such a grim history would reduce the Object’s desirability, but over the years the notoriety merely added to its dark glamour.

  Erin started to nod, struggling to keep her eyes open. She’d looked over every scrap in Aram’s box a dozen times, researched every clue the documents offered, yet certainty still eluded her. Ultimately, she would have to decide whether to risk her reputation and career by gambling that the Object was legit.

  She’d sleep on it.

  A kaleidoscopic screensaver bloomed on her laptop display as she left the office for the bedroom. Erin set her cell phone’s alarm for 7 A.M. and lay down on her bed to catnap for a few hours.

  Although she’d hoped to clear her mind of work for a while, the opposite happened. She’d stared so long at the pictures of the Aldon-Bennington expedition that they infected her dreams. Erin found herself in the point of view of the camera, except that she now saw the scene as if it were an old 8mm home movie, in full color and with darting, herky-jerky movements of the lens. A fur-coated man stood shaking his head beside the sledge with Aldon’s corpse. The blood and bits of meat that coated Aldon’s ribs had darkened to a deep carmine as they froze, making the curved bones resemble clawed gouges in the backdrop of white snowdrifts. And yet, although a bitter wind whipped the living man’s parka and he appeared to be shouting something at her, Erin heard no sound except a prolonged treble hum, as of a dial tone after a sudden disconnection or an EKG monitor that has flatlined.

  The dream’s camera swung to the left, where Thaddeus Bennington sat cross-legged in the snow, the Object in his lap. His lips moved, but he stared without awareness as if snow-blind. Now that Bennington was no longer sepia-toned, Erin could see that his swarthy appearance was not merely due to sunburn; freeze-dried blood caked his chin and cheeks and flecked away in black-red snowflakes.

  He suddenly glared up at her, his raving eyes and bared teeth both stained red. His mouth worked furiously and the white-noise tone intensified, rising in pitch and volume, until it seemed as if Bennington himself emitted the sound. He thrust the meteorite at Erin until its gaping crevice filled her view. An ebon eye peered out at her, and the agitated motion of the scene made it appear that one small claw had twitched loose and scissored open . . .

  The high-pitched hum phased into the twitter of Erin’s cell phone ringtone.

  She moaned and rolled over to grab the phone from her nightstand. The screen said it was Aram on the line. Had she overslept? No, the phone’s clock said it was barely a quarter past six. What the hell was he doing calling so early?

  Erin tried to clear the morning phlegm from her throat before answering. “Hello?”

  “Are you ready to make a bid?” Aram asked, skipping the perfunctory pleasantries. “I need to know.”

  His voice sounded as hoarse and fuzzed with sleep as hers, and for a moment, she had the crazy impression he’d awakened from the same dream she had. She was tempted to ask him if that were true, then thought better of it.

  “I’m still preparing the recommendation for my client. I have to call and confer with him later, during business hours,” she said, stressing her annoyance.

  “I need to know,” Aram repeated. “I—I have another buyer.”

  Another buyer? Since 3 P.M. yesterday? Give me a break! Erin thought. “I should have an answer for you by ten.”

  Aram didn’t respond, and Erin wondered if her phone had dropped the call.

  “Commit now, and I can do a half-million,” he said at last. “But you have to take delivery today.”

  Under ordinary circumstances, such a steep cut in price so early in the negotiations would have sent Erin running for the exit. Something was definitely wrong, and Aram wanted to unload the Object as quickly as possible.

  In this case, though, the drop in price triggered an entirely different instinct: to cut out Micah, her client, and buy the Object herself.

  The idea seemed mad on the face of it, but she felt more strongly than ever that the meteorite was the true Aldon-Bennington Object. Erin had already confirmed that Aram had purchased the item legitimately in an estate sale, so she didn’t have to worry that she might be receiving stolen property. Why should she settle for a paltry commission of a couple hundred grand when she might easily compound her investment tenfold at auction?

  “I’ll need a few hours to line up financing,” she told Aram. “But have it packed and ready to go.”

  * * *

  Erin had done well for herself considering that she was only thirty-two, but coming up with half a million dollars on short notice strained even her impressive resources. There was no time to get another mortgage on her condo, so she had to wire-transfer funds out of her retirement accounts, which was going to hurt at tax-time. But she planned to have plenty of money to pay the early-withdrawal penalties by then.

  After a triple espresso to clear her head, she swung by the bank and got a cashier’s check for the full amount on her way back to Aram’s warehouse. The same thug met her at the door when she got there. Apparently, she and Aram weren’t the only ones who’d failed to get much sleep that night, for the goon seemed out of it. Erin couldn’t see his eyes behind his wraparound shades, but the big man’s head was angled away from her as she entered, looking past her, and his lips mumbled silent words as if he were reciting lines to memorize.

  When they got to the office, Aram did not rise to greet her but remained tilted back in his chair, eyes shut, one ring-studded hand on his forehead. On the desk before him rested an oblong cardboard box a little over two feet long.

  Erin approached the desk. “May I check the merchandise?”

  Aram’s eyes rolled open, and he seemed startled to find her there. “Hmm? Oh . . . sure, sure.”

  She lifted the lid of the box and saw it was nearly filled with green Styrofoam peanuts. Erin brushed a few aside and uncovered a lumpy ridge of the meteorite hidden like a reef beneath ocean waves.

  “As we agreed.” She took the check from her purse and laid it in front of Aram.

  “Sure, sure.” He waved her off without bothering to look at the amount. “Vaughn can help you take it out.”

  Erin closed the box and folded its flaps in to keep it shut. Vaughn, the ox, carried it to her car.

  “Appreciate it,” she said as he placed the box in her trunk.

  His lips moved, and Erin could hear the hiss and puff of shaped air, but the words were still inaudible. Without so much as nodding at her, Vaughn headed back into the warehouse, his hand dipping into the breast pocket of his blazer as he left.

  * * *

  When she got the thing home, Erin wished she’d brought Vaughn with her to carry it into the condo, for the box weighed as much or more than one of the 45-pound plates she used on the squat machine at her gym. She lugged the carton inside, hoping she wouldn’t slip a disc in her lower back, and set it on the coffee table in her den.

  Erin levered the Object out of the open box, Styrofoam peanuts avalanching onto the table as she set the meteorite upright. The buzz of morning java and deal-making adrenalin wore off, and she felt a sinking nausea of unease.

  I put my life savings into this. She plucked a few green puffs of Styrofoam out of the stone’s cavity. I must have been out of my mind.

  Uncovered, the eye of the inside figure caught the light from the gooseneck lamp she trained on it and appeared darkly translucent—a clouded opal. Recalling her dream, Erin poked her index finger toward the figure’s claw but feared it might snap at her. When she forced herself to make contact with the etched appendage, she laughed at her silly skittishness. The claw was still immobile, of course, fused to the figure’s side.

  It had to be real. If scientists could prove
that other meteorites came from Mars, there ought to be a way to find out for certain where this one originated.

  Sylvie!

  Erin hadn’t thought of her freshman year roommate since they’d chatted awkwardly at their ten-year class reunion. Even at college, they’d led separate lives—Erin an outgoing campus activist and party girl, Sylvia a cloistered academic. With Sylvie in P-Chem and Erin in Art History, they barely saw each other except when it came to study or sleep. But Erin couldn’t think of anyone else she knew offhand who could help her analyze the chemical composition of a meteorite.

  Energized, Erin got online and combed the social networks. It took awhile because she couldn’t remember Sylvie’s husband’s surname. Fortunately, Sylvie had become a hyphenate: Sylvia Nuñez-Stamberg.

  Hey, roomie! Erin typed in the message that accompanied her friend request. How goes it? Look, I was wondering if I could ask a little favor . . .

  With the note sent, she called Micah to give him the bad news. “Yeah, the Aldon-Bennington thing looked sketchy so I passed on it,” she told her would-be client, holding the cell phone with one hand as she stroked the Object with the other. “I didn’t want you to get burned.”

  * * *

  Erin spent much of that day at her desk, sifting aimlessly through the documentation while waiting for Sylvie to reply. An attention-deficit personality, she left a television on as background noise and glanced up every so often to absorb sound bites from the daytime talk shows.

  Possibly due to her lack of sleep and suppressed stress, a piercing headache caused her vision to shimmer and her ears to ring. Erin hoped she wasn’t getting a migraine. She leaned back in her chair, eyes shut, head propped on one hand, and waited for it to pass.

  The ringing in her ears thrummed like the carrier wave for a radio transmission. Erin could almost make out an intelligible signal that pulsed beneath the tone, and she pictured Vaughn’s lips speaking unheard words that were lost beneath the wavering tone . . .