Black Wings of Cthulhu, Volume 3

by S. T. Joshi

  Perhaps it is absurd to say so—the most bizarre of all my hallucinations—but I was beginning to conceive of the inner spaces of my mind not as a three-dimensional space analogous to the framework of sight, but as something more complex and convoluted. I deem that absurd because, after all, we have no other way of imagining any space other than by analogy with the model created by sight. I say “created by sight” rather than “perceived by sight” because one has to maintain a certain intellectual awareness of the difference between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds, even if perception will not allow us to be aware of any. Intellectual respectability demands Kantian doubt, lest we surrender to the mere brutality of sensory tyranny; we are human, after all.

  Even so, the mere awareness of the theoretical possibility of other modes of sensory perception should not be enough to allow us to imagine them. Conceiving of the idea of a fourth dimension, or any kind of multidimensional plenum of parallel worlds, cannot be enough to allow us to imagine such a fourth dimension or some such plenum inside our heads, whether we are dreaming or focusing our attention as intently as possible, because the analogical apparatus simply is not there… or should not be there.

  And yet… when my eyes were firmly closed, and the illusory floaters produced by my malfunctioning brain were exiled to a purely theoretical space, where they could no longer mimic creatures of the sea, I sometimes began to imagine that I could see beyond their shape, into the dimensions of which those apparent shapes were mere cross-sections, and that in seeing them in that augmented fashion, I could see the imaginary space in which they seemed to be framed as something more, something more far-reaching, something far more complex.

  According to Tillinghast’s thesis, there is no such thing as empty space—merely space whose fabric and contents are inaccessible to our senses: “dark matter,” he called it, although he was at pains to assert that it was neither dark nor matter, and that only the restrictions of the language necessitated the use of such an inadequate label. According to Tillinghast, even before his mental distortion became multidimensional, the space between a man’s eye and his outstretched hand actually contained billions or trillions of parallel universes, which ought not to be imagined as the passages of a book, neatly stacked and similar, but as entities possessed of all manner of shapes and sizes, entangled in unimaginably complex ways, some so tiny as to fit in labyrinthine fashion within the atoms of our universe and others so vast as to fit ours within one of their own atoms.

  “And are there monsters there?” I had asked him once.

  “In some, no doubt,” he said, “but only those few sufficiently similar to ours to have imaginable contents.”

  I tried to put those memories out of my mind while I fought the migraine and tried to force my pineal body to regain its erstwhile quietness. I told myself, sternly, that it did not matter whether the body in question was actually functioning as an organ of perceptions, or whether it was merely a source of illusory nightmares, or whether it really was, as Descartes had proposed, the true seat of the soul. The point was to calm its excitement, reduce it to frigidity and indifference—as Tillinghast clearly had not been able to do. Sometimes I thought that I ought to have been the scientist and he the schoolteacher, but men are paradoxical creatures, whose vocations are not always in harmony with their temperaments.

  The pain didn’t help, of course. Quite the contrary. As it increased, in fact, it almost blotted out the capacity for conscious thought—and without the accompaniment of conscious thought, perception itself becomes incoherent. I wish I could say “impossible,” but far from it; however incoherent it becomes, perception remains—and such is the tyranny that three-dimensional perception exerts on conscious rationality that it is when perception becomes incoherent that it becomes most ambitious, and most perilous.

  I tried to concentrate, very hard, on the real: the disparate sounds of three sets of footfalls, in three different parts of the house; the creaking of the weathervane, more insistent now that nightfall was freshening the sea-breeze; the slight odor of dead fish that the breeze brought with it and insinuated through the cracks in the walls of the house; the tangible beating of my own heart and the susurrus of the blood in my arteries. It worked, to the extent that it could, but the pain grew worse, and distortion of the dimensions became subversive, rebellious, anarchic…

  I have no sympathy with people who describe their pain as “unbearable.” If it were truly unbearable, it would kill them. Whatever we have survived was, ipso facto, bearable. There are times, however, when one cannot help but wonder whether one might, in fact, be on the point of dying—or, at least, on the point of fracture—when pain is hammering away inside one, especially inside one’s head. All pain is, of course, felt within the brain, even when it seems to be coming from an ankle, a finger, or the abdomen, but there is something about the self-referential experience that one’s brain is actually doing the hurting that seems to add an extra twist to the agony…

  But I mustn’t go on. For one thing, there’s nothing more to say. I had a headache—a migraine, in more pretentious terms. It lasted for an hour or so and then began to calm down. That was it. It was bad, but it was manifestly not unbearable. In the beginning, there were strange impressions, odd ideas, wild fancies, but after a while there was only pain. Anything else I might say is retrospective, hypothetical—and perhaps, of necessity, a little crazy.

  The problem I had with sedatives, especially cannabis and laudanum, was that they enhance the craziness. If they numbed the pain—and I’m not entirely sure that they did, in the particular case of my migraines—they compensated by enhancing its illusory side-effects. Given that the pain was, and had proven itself to be, bearable, it seemed to me that what had to be combated, above all else, was the craziness. It was, after all, the craziness that had killed Tillinghast. He had seen something other than mere floaters, something infinitely more terrible. Perhaps, as my kindly ophthalmologist had suggested, it had just been a product of his own particular personality, his idiosyncratic burden of common-or-garden accumulated guilt feelings… but what reassurance was there in that?

  Perhaps, I thought then, if the craziness got too solid a grip on me, I wouldn’t see the same things that Tillinghast saw when he looked up—or, to be strictly accurate, in the direction beyond up—but that might only mean that I would see something even more terrible to me. I honestly didn’t know which was the worse alternative: that I might see the ultimate imaginary incarnation of my own private guilt and fear, or that I might see something real, reaching out from some dimension elsewhere in the plenum to capture me, devour me, rip me apart, or compel me to undergo some kind of radical metamorphosis… which might, hypothetically speaking, be benign, but probably wouldn’t.

  I CAME DOWNSTAIRS AT SEVEN-THIRTY PRECISELY. I wasn’t completely well, as yet, but the pain was ebbing away and I knew that mere movement and conversation could not turn that particular tide. The floaters hadn’t entirely vanished, but they were fading, in a manner that I could not help but deem discreet and polite. It was almost as if the haunters of the house, if any remained from Tillinghast’s unwise evocation, were eager to hear what might come of the confrontation between Rachel and myself on the one hand, and the vultures or jackals on the other, and did not want any of the participants to be unduly inhibited.

  Rachel already had a glass of bourbon in her hand when I appeared in the drawing-room, where the chairs were already set out in the appropriate number and conformation, in accordance with her tidy habits. Craven had brought down the tea-chest containing the remains of the fatal machine, and there were three stacks of paper on an occasional table beside it, with the edges squared to the extent that they could be. She poured me a glass of liquor without asking; she knew that my habits, too, would not have changed overmuch.

  “Are you feeling better?” she inquired, solicitously.

  “Much. Did you find any useful documents in Crawford’s study?” I squirmed in my chair in search of a comfort
able position.

  “I’m hardly competent to judge,” she said, “but you were right, of course. He was scrupulous in dating his observations, and I could find nothing bearing any date within ten weeks of his death. He might well have taken his ultimate secret to the grave. Is there any reason apart from the implicit danger of the line of research, do you think, why I shouldn’t hand them over to Patterway or Crisson?”

  “If you’re wondering whether there might be any practical application of the work, which might one day make Crisson a fortune to compare with Edison’s, then I’m no more competent to judge than you are. I doubt it—but who can tell?”

  “I’m not worried about money,” she said. “Like Crawford—and you—I have enough, and am content with that.” There was the briefest of pauses before she added: “Are you content, David?”

  “With my income, yes,” I said. The implied exception was my state of health; in the circumstances, my ebbing migraine was still uppermost in my mind as a barrier to contentment. She, however, had obviously been thinking along other lines.

  “Why did you never marry?” she asked.

  “I never met the right woman,” I replied, almost reflexively. I didn’t meet her eyes. Had I not been feeling uncomfortable anyway, I think I might have begun at the point—especially if I had met her eyes.

  “Do you feel lonely,” she asked, “now that Crawford’s gone? You’d been fast friends for such a long time.”

  “I suppose I do,” I admitted.

  “I do,” she said. “It may seem absurd to say so, given that we were living apart and very rarely saw one another, but…”

  “But knowing that he was there, somewhere within reach, made a difference,” I finished for her. “I understand.” I thought I did. I had never been in love myself, but I thought I knew enough of human nature to understand why there was a difference between loving someone who was absent but alive, and loving someone who was dead.

  “You’re not too old,” she said—meaning not too old to find the right woman, to marry, to obtain a cure for loneliness, to achieve the goal of contentment. She was right, in a way; age wasn’t the problem. The migraines were. Life may depend on the liver, but true love depends on the frontal lobes. If the brain is out of kilter, contentment is out of reach.

  “No, I’m not,” was what I said aloud, in a politely dismissive fashion.

  “I’m sorry you felt ill,” she said. “It was the octopus, I think. Seafood can be untrustworthy, sometimes. The sea may be the mother of all life, but her cornucopia isn’t entirely reliable.” There was a slight hint of bitterness in her voice. I had no idea whether she and Tillinghast had ever tried to determine why it was that they had never had children, or what the doctor might have given them by way of an explanation why they hadn’t.

  “It might have been partly the octopus,” I agreed, “but I’ve been getting the migraines quite frequently of late, so there must be some kind of inherent flaw.”

  “You’ve consulted a doctor?”

  “Of course, and an eye-specialist. They’re still groping for an effective treatment—but these things sometimes pass of their own accord.” And sometimes don’t, I didn’t add.

  I was feeling more comfortable now, even though I’d hardy touched the bourbon. I took a substantial gulp when the doorbell rang, though. I felt that in order to provide Rachel with moral support, I might well need some of my own.

  Her three visitors had obviously traveled together, on foot rather than by any kind of cab. None of them was out of breath, though—not even Patterway, who must have been ten years older than Dove and fifteen years older than Crisson. Patterway was taller than Dove, and thinner, and had far less hair on his head; of the three, he bore the greatest physical resemblance to a vulture. Crisson was short and plump, but possessed of a kind of healthy glow and exuberance of manner that distanced him from any resemblance to any kind of scavenger.

  There were the customary formal introductions, polite handshakes, and conventional offers of refreshment, but the vultures hastened through all that, keen to get down to business.

  They took the pieces of Tillinghast’s machine out of the tea-chest and laid them out on the carpet, reverently but with a hint of careless disorder that must have offended poor Rachel. They picked them up, passed them from hand to hand, turned them over, and bemoaned their parlous state. They took turns poring over the three piles of documents, no more enthused.

  Eventually, they got around to the inevitable question.

  “Are you sure that there isn’t anything more?” Patterway asked Rachel.

  “Quite certain,” she said. “There’s nothing hidden away in some safe or secret drawer—my husband wasn’t that kind of man, as you know.”

  “Which leaves us,” Crisson said, “with only one as-yet-untapped resource.” He was looking at me.

  “I can’t help you, gentlemen,” I said. “Mrs. Tillinghast didn’t ask me here in order that I might give you information, but merely as a family friend. In any case, Tillinghast never gave me any papers to look after. I really don’t have anything to offer you.”

  “Don’t be disingenuous, Mr. Dearden,” said Dove, silkily. “Tillinghast talked to you, and even if you didn’t fully understand what he said, you heard it. More importantly, you saw the machine set up and working, and even if you didn’t understand what you saw, you did see it. You may not know how much you know, or appreciate the importance of its details, but you certainly know things that no one else knows.”

  And how, I thought.

  What I said aloud was: “I really don’t remember how the components of the machine were configured, and I’m perfectly certain that Tillinghast said nothing to me that would be of use to you. He treated me as any scientist would treat a high-school history teacher, as an ignoramus incapable of understanding the words that he would normally employ in communication with his fellow scientists, only able to follow the most rudimentary explanations couched in layman’s terms. I’m sure that he went into greater detail regarding the fundamentals and direction of his research when writing to you than he ever did in talking to me.”

  They weren’t satisfied. How could they be? They were no longer paying much attention to Rachel, although I daresay that she could have reclaimed their attention, had she wanted to, by initiating some kind of bargaining process with regard to the scattered remnants of Tillinghast’s machine. She, however, was content to let me take the pressure off, to serve as her protective knight—and the vultures wanted to know what had happened when Tillinghast’s machine had functioned, as exactly as I could remember it. It was not going to be easy to keep them at bay, now that they were gathered around me.

  “Perhaps we can give you some guidance,” Patterway suggested. “If we can spell out the extent of our knowledge, you might be in a better position to judge whether you can add anything to it. What I understand is that Tillinghast was attempting to deploy electrical current in the generation of a new form of energy, distinct from light, heat, or Hertzian waves, and perhaps from the entire electromagnetic spectrum. I’m not entirely clear as to what detection and measuring devices he intended to use in order to register the presence and estimate the properties of this new energy, but…”

  “I do,” Dove put in. “You’re looking at it. Dearden was the detector, and the measuring device—or, to be more precise, his brain.”

  “I don’t want to get into all your nonsense about sixth senses and other dimensions at present, Dove,” Patterway interjected. “Fundamentally, this is a problem in physics—or, at least, the physics is prior to any question of application. That’s why the apparatus has to be examined carefully and properly, in a university laboratory, rather than simply being handed over to Crisson so that he can tinker with it. If there’s any possibility that Tillinghast was on the track of some fundamental discovery—however slim the probability might be—then it needs expert and disciplined investigation. It’s unlikely that he obtained a significant result, but the man was cer
tainly no fool. The components of his machine aren’t very exotic, but that’s not surprising. The key will lie in the way they were connected up—and any chance we had of establishing that easily has gone, not so much because of Mr. Dearden’s unfortunate stray bullet as the casual way in which the police dealt with the damaged apparatus thereafter.”

  “That’s why we need you to do your utmost to remember every last detail that you can,” Crisson put in. “If we can put the jigsaw together, as it were, sufficiently to reveal some sort of tangible effect—any sort of effect—then we’ll be able to set off on the track of Patterway’s novel radiation… and any practical applications it might have.”

  “Producing the radiation isn’t the central issue,” Dove said, sounding slightly exasperated. “For all we know, the radiation might be all around us, in the same way that all sorts of electromagnetic radiation are around us, unapprehended by our senses and measuring devices—indeed, it almost certainly is, although Tillinghast’s machine presumably intensifies it in some way. In the same way that Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays depended on the accidental presence of a photogenic plate in a drawer to render their properties evident, however, we need some way of detecting and paving the way to an analysis of Tillinghast rays… or whatever they might end up being called. Tillinghast was convinced that, under the right conditions, his radiation would be directly perceptible by the human sensorium, and if he was right… well, Mr. Dearden ought to be able to tell us far more about that than about the set-up of the machine, any details of which he can remember will probably turn out to be trivial. What I’m particularly interested to know, Mr. Dearden, is what else you saw, in addition to the assembled machine.”

  It is easy to refuse such requests when they come by letter, or even when they come singly in person—but under the right conditions, they can build up a pressure that is hard to resist. However skeptical Patterway the pure physicist and Crisson the technological tinkerer might have been about the mystical aspects of Dove’s theories, they knew that he had a point. In any case, I had already let go of part of my secret in making Rachel party to it, and the only reason I had for holding on to the rest was the fear that talking about it might make me seem crazy.