Black Wings of Cthulhu, Volume 3

by S. T. Joshi

  It doesn’t matter anymore. In my ever decreasing moments of clarity, I find myself wishing that it did. I need the money. I need the byline. I absolutely do not need an editor pissed at me and word getting around that I’m unreliable.

  But it doesn’t matter anymore.

  Wednesday, one week ago, I got my ever-ailing, tangerine-and-rust Nissan out of the garage where I can’t afford to keep it. I left The City, and I left Massachusetts via I-493, which I soon traded for I-93, and then I-293 at Manchester. Then, it will suffice to say that I left the interstates and headed east until I reached The Village nestled here between the kneeling mountains. I didn’t make any wrong turns. It was easy to find. The directions the editor at Discover had emailed were correct in every way, right down to the shabby motel on the edge of The Village.

  Right down to the lat-long GPS coordinates of the hill and the tree and what little remains of the house on the hill. N 43.81591/W -71.37035.

  I think I have offered all these details only as an argument, to myself, that I am—or at least was once—a rational human being. Whatever I have become, or am becoming, I did start out believing the truths of the universe were knowable.

  But now I am sliding down a slippery slope towards the irrational.

  Now, I doubt everything I took for granted when I came here.

  Before I first climbed the hill.

  If the preceding is an argument, or a ward, or whatever I might have intended it as, it is a poor attempt, indeed.

  But it doesn’t matter, and I know that.

  3.

  I IMAGINE THAT THE VIEW FROM THE CREST OF THE hill was once quite picturesque. As I’ve mentioned, there’s an unobstructed view of the heavily wooded slopes and peaks of Mount Passaconaway, and of the valleys and hills in between. This vista must be glorious under a heavy snowfall. I have supposed that is why the house was built here. Likely, it was someone’s summer home, possibly someone not so unlike myself, someone foreign to The Village.

  The librarian I spoke of earlier, I asked her if the hill has a name, and all she said was “One Tree.”

  “One Tree Hill?” I asked.

  “One Tree,” she replied curtly. “Nobody goes up there anymore.”

  I am quite entirely aware I am trapped inside, and that I am writing down, anything but an original tale of uncanny New England. But if I do not know, I will at least be honest about what I do not know. I have that responsibility, that fraying shred of naturalism remaining in me. Whether or not it is cliché is another thing which simply doesn’t matter.

  I reach the crest of the hill, and just like every time before, the first thing that strikes my eyes is the skeleton of that tree. I’m not certain, but I believe it was an oak, until that night eleven years ago. It must have been ancient, judging by the circumference and diameter of its base. It might have stood here when that man I have yet to (and will not) name was buried in 1674. But I don’t know how long oak trees live, and I haven’t bothered to find out. It is a dead tree, and all the “facts” that render it more than a dead tree exist entirely independently of its taxonomy.

  Aside from the remains of the one tree, the hilltop is “bald.” The woods have not reclaimed it. If I stand at the lightning-struck tree, the nearest living tree in any direction, is at least twenty-five yards. There is only stone and bracken, weeds, vines, and fallen, rotten limbs. So, it is always hotter at the top of the hill, and the ground seems drier and rockier. There is a sense of flesh rubbed raw and unable to heal.

  Like all the times I have come here before, there is, immediately, the inescapable sense that I have entered a place so entirely and irrevocably defiled as to have passed beyond any conventional understanding of corruption. I cannot ever escape the impression that, somehow, the event that damned this spot (for it is damned) struck so very deeply at the fabric of this patch of the world as to render it beyond that which is either unholy or holy. Neither good nor evil has a place here. Neither are welcome, so profound was the damage done that one St. Crispin’s Night. And if the hill seems blasphemous, it is only because it has come to exist somewhere genuinely Outside. I won’t try to elaborate just yet. It is enough to say Outside. Even so, I’ll concede that the dead tree stands before me like an altar. It strikes me that way every time, in direct contradiction to what I’ve said about it. Or, I could say, instead, it stands like a sentry, but then one must answer the question about what it might be standing guard over. Bricks from a crumbling foundation? The maze of poison ivy and green briars? A court of skunks, rattlesnakes, and crows?

  The sky presses down on the hill, heavy as the sea.

  From the top of the hill, the wide blue sky looks very hungry.

  What is it that skies eat? That thin rind of atmosphere between a planet and the hard vacuum of outer space? I’m asking questions that lead nowhere. I’m asking questions only because it occurs to me that I have never written them down, or that they have never before occurred to me so I ought to write them down.

  A cloudless night sky struck at the hill, drawing something out, even if I am unable to describe what that something is, and so I will say this event is the author of my questions on the possible diet of the sky.

  Even after eleven years, the top of the hill smells like smoke, ash, charcoal, cinder, all those odors we mean when we say, “I can smell fire.” We cannot smell fire, but we smell the byproducts of combustion, and that smell lingers here. I wonder if it always will. I am standing at the top of the hill, thinking all these thoughts, when I hear something coming up quickly behind me. It’s not the noise a woman or a man’s feet would make. A deer, possibly. An animal with long and delicate limbs, small hooves to pick its way through the forest and along stony trails. This is what I hear, but then, most people think they can smell fire.

  I take one step forward, and a charred section of root crunches beneath the soles of my hiking boots. The sound seems very loud, though I suspect that only another illusion.

  “Why is it you keep coming back here?” she asks. The way she phrases the question, I could pretend I’ve never heard her ask it before. My mouth is dry. I want to remove my pack and take out the lukewarm bottle of water inside, but I don’t.

  “It could open wide and eat me,” I say to her. “A carnivorous sky like that.”

  There’s a pause, nothing but a stale bit of breeze through the leaves of the trees surrounding the lightning-struck ring. Then she laughs, that peculiar laugh of hers, which is neither unnerving nor a sound that in any way puts one at ease.

  “Now you’re being ridiculous,” she says.

  “I know,” I admit. “But that’s the way it makes me feel, hanging up there.”

  “What you describe is a feeling of dread.”

  “Isn’t that what happened here, that St. Crispin’s Day? Didn’t the sky open its mouth and gnaw this hill and everything on it—the tree, the house?”

  “You listen too much to those people in the village.”

  That’s the way she says it, the village. Never does she say The Village. It is an important nuance. What seems, as she has pointed out, dreadful to me is innately mundane to her.

  “They don’t have much to say about the hill,” I tell her.

  “No, they don’t. But what they do say, it’s hardly worth your time.”

  “I get the feeling they’d bulldoze this place, if they weren’t too afraid to come here. I believe they would take dynamite to it, shave off the top until no evidence of that night remains.”

  “Likely, you’re not mistaken,” she agrees. “Which is precisely why you shouldn’t listen to them.”

  I wish I knew the words to accurately delineate, elucidate, explain the rhythm and stinging lilt of her voice. I cannot. I can only do my best to recall what she said that day, which, of course, was not the first nor the last day she has spoken with me. Why she bothers, that might be the greatest of all these mysteries, though it might seem the least. Appearances are deceiving.

  “Maybe there were clouds th
at night,” I say. “Maybe it’s just that no one noticed them. They may only have noticed that flash of lightning, and only noticed that because of what it left behind.”

  “If you truly thought that’s what happened, you wouldn’t keep coming here.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” I say, though I want to turn about and spit in her face, if she even has a face. I presume she does. But I’ve never turned to find out. I’ve never looked at her, and I know I never will. Like Medusa, she is not to be seen.

  Yes, that was a tad melodramatic, but isn’t all of this? The same as it’s cliché?

  “It’s unhealthy, returning to this place again and again. You ought stop.”

  “I can’t. I haven’t…” and I trail off. It is a sentence I never should have begun and which I certainly don’t wish to finish.

  “… solved yet? No, but it is also one you never should have asked yourself. The people in the village, they don’t ask it. Except, possibly, in their dreams.”

  “You think the people in The Village are ridiculous. You just said so.”

  “No, that is not exactly what I said, but it’s true enough. However, there genuinely are questions you’re better off not asking.”

  “Ignorance is bliss,” I say, almost mangling the words with laughter.

  “That is not what I said, either.”

  “Excuse me. I’m getting a headache.”

  “Don’t you always, when you come up here? You should stop to consider why that is, should you not?”

  I’m silent for a time, and then I answer, “You want me to stop coming. You would rather I stop coming. I suspect you might even need me to stop coming.”

  “Futility disturbs me,” she says. “You’re becoming Sisyphus, rolling his burden up that hill. You’re become Christ, lugging the cross towards Calvary.”

  I don’t disagree.

  “Loki,” I add.

  “Loki?”

  “It hasn’t gotten as bad as what happened to Loki. No serpent dripping venom, which is good, because I have no Sigyn to catch it in her bowl.” The story of Loki so bound puts me in mind of Prometheus, the eagle always, always devouring his liver. But I say nothing of Prometheus to her.

  “It is the way of humans to create these brilliant, cautionary metaphors, then ignore them.”

  Again, I don’t disagree. It doesn’t matter anymore.

  “But it did happen, yes? There were no clouds that night?”

  “It did happen.” She is the howling, fiery voice of God whispering confirmation of what my gut already knew. She has been before, and will be again.

  “Go home,” she says. “Go back to your apartment in your city, before it’s too late to go back. Go back to your life.”

  “Why do you care?” I ask this question, because I know it’s already too late to go back to The City. For any number of reasons, not the least because I have climbed the hill and looked at the silent devastation.

  “There’s no revelation to be had here,” she sighs. “No slouching beast prefacing revelation. No revelation and no prophecy. No (Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin) at the feast of Belshazzar.” She speaks in Hebrew, and I reply, “Numbered, weighed, divided.”

  “You won’t find that here.”

  “Why do you assume that is why I keep coming back?”

  This time she only clicks her tongue twice against the roof of her mouth. Tongue, mouth. These are both assumptions, as is face.

  “Not because of what I might see, but because of what I’ve already seen. What will I ever see to equal this? Did it bring you here?”

  “No,” she says, the word another exasperated sigh.

  “You were here before.”

  “No,” she sighs.

  “Doesn’t it ever get lonely, being up here all alone?”

  “You make a lot of assumptions, and, frankly, I find them wearisome.”

  It doesn’t even occur to me to apologize. A secret recess of my consciousness must understand that apologies would be meaningless to one such as her. I hear those nimble legs, those tiny feet that might as well end in hooves. There are other noises I won’t attempt to describe.

  “Is it an assumption that it is within your power to stop me?”

  “Yes, of course that is an assumption.”

  “Yet,” and I can’t take my eyes off what’s left of the charred tree, “many assumptions prove valid.”

  She leaves me then. There are no words of parting, no goodbye. There never is; she simply leaves, and I am alone at the top of the hill with the tree and what little remains of the house on the hill, wondering if she will come next time, and the time after that, and the time after that. I pick up a lump of four-hundred-million-year-old granite, which seems to tingle in my hand, and I hurl it towards faraway Mount Passaconaway, as it I had a chance of hitting my target.

  4.

  ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER. I AM KEENLY AWARE of the casual chain of cause and effect that dictates, as does any tyrant, the events of the cosmos.

  A lightning-struck hill.

  A house.

  A tree.

  A village hemmed in by steep green slopes and the shadows they cast.

  A black lake, and a man who died in 1674.

  I had a lover once. Only once, but it was a long relationship. It died a slow and protracted death, born as much of my disappointment in myself as my partner’s disappointment in my disappointment of myself. I suppose you can only watch someone you love mourn for so long before your love becomes disgust. Or I may misunderstand completely. I’ve never made a secret of my difficulty in understanding the motives of people, no matter how close to me they have been, no matter how long they have been close to me. It doesn’t seem to matter.

  None of it matters now.

  But last night, after I climbed the hill, after my conversation with whatever it is lives alone up there, after that, I made a phone call from the squalid motel room. I have not called my former lover in three years. In three years, we have not spoken. Had we, early on, I might have had some chance of repairing the damage I’d done. But it had all seemed so inevitable, and any attempt to stave off the inevitable seemed absurd. In my life, I have loved two things. The first died before we met, and with my grieving for the loss of the first did I kill the second. Well did I place the second forever beyond my reach.

  If I have not already made it perfectly clear, I have no love for The City, nor my apartment, and most especially not for the career I have resigned myself to, or, I would say, that I have settled for.

  Last night I called. I thought no one would pick up.

  “Hello,” I said, and there was a long, long silence. Just hang up, I thought, though I’m not sure which of us I was wishing would hang up. It was a terrible idea, so please just hang up before it gets more terrible.

  “Why are you calling me?”

  “I’m not entirely certain.”

  “It’s been three years. Why the fuck are you calling me tonight?”

  “Something’s happening. Something very strange, and I didn’t have anyone else to call.”

  “I’m the last resort,” and there was a dry, bitter laugh. There was the sound of a cigarette being lit, and the exhalation of smoke.

  “You still smoke,” I said.

  “Yeah. Look, I don’t care what’s happening. Whatever it is, you deal with it.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Maybe you’re not trying hard enough.”

  I agreed.

  “Will you only listen? It won’t take long, and I don’t expect you to solve any of my problems. I need to tell someone.”

  Another long pause, only the sound of smoking to interrupt the silence through the receiver.

  “Fine. But be quick. I’m busy.”

  I’m not, I think. I may never be busy again. Isn’t that a choice one makes, whether to be busy or not? I have, in coming to The Village, left busyness behind me.

  I told my story, which sounded even more ridiculous than I’d expected it to sound.
I left out most of my talks with the thing that lives atop the hill, as no one can recall a conversation, not truly, and I didn’t want to omit a word of it.

  Whether or not each word is of consequence.

  “You need to see someone.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “No. Not maybe. You need to see someone.”

  We said goodbye, and I was instructed never to call again.

  I hung up first, then sat by the phone (I’d used the motel phone, not my cell).

  A few seconds later, it rang again, and I quickly, hopefully, lifted the receiver. But it was the voice from the hill. Someone else might have screamed.

  “You should leave,” she says. “It’s still not too late to leave. Do as I have said. It’s all still waiting for you. The city, your work, your home.”

  “Nothing’s waiting for me back there. Haven’t you figured that out?”

  “There’s nothing for you here. Haven’t you figured that out?”

  “I’m asleep and dreaming this. I’m lying in my apartment above Newbury Street, and I’m dreaming all of this. Probably, The Village does not even exist.”

  “Then wake up. Go home. Wake up, and you will be home.”

  “I don’t know how,” I said, and that was the truth. “I don’t know how, and it doesn’t matter any longer.”

  “That’s a shame, I think,” she said. “I wish it were otherwise,”

  and then there was only a dial tone.

  You can almost see the hill from the window of the room. You can see the highway and a line of evergreens. If the trees were not so tall, you could see the hill. On a night eleven years ago, you could have seen the lightning from this window, and you could have seen the glow of the fire that must have burned afterwards. Last night, I was glad that I couldn’t see the hill silhouetted against the stars.

  5.

  THE THREE TIMES I HAVE VISITED THE LIBRARY IN The Village, the librarian has done her best to pretend I wasn’t there. She does her best to seem otherwise occupied. Intensely so. She makes me wait at the circulation desk as long as she can. Today is no different. But finally she relents and frowns and asks me what I need.