Black Wings of Cthulhu, Volume 3

by S. T. Joshi

  “Tillinghast’s machine caused hallucinations,” I said, wearily. “I don’t pretend to know how, exactly, but I know that it did—and if hallucinations can be produced chemically, by opium and other compounds, then I can’t see any a priori reason why they shouldn’t be produced by some kind of radiation. Perhaps they are, routinely, when consciousness relaxes and we become vulnerable to dreams; perhaps all that opium and other chemical hallucinogens do is relax consciousness in such a way as to let ambient Tillinghast radiation take fuller effect. That isn’t my province. On the other hand, even though you might think that being a high-school history teacher isn’t much of an intellectual qualification, I’m no fool, and I’ve been carrying out my own retrospective investigation of what I saw.”

  I told them, then, what the ophthalmologist had told me about floaters and migraines, and how I’d extrapolated it to take account of what I had seen while Tillinghast’s machine had been operative—and what he had seen, to the extent that he had communicated it to me. I even admitted to having fired at the machine deliberately, to cut short its terrible effect.

  “You couldn’t just have unplugged it?” suggested Crisson, bitterly.

  “I wasn’t thinking entirely logically,” I admitted.

  “How come you had a gun, anyway?” Crisson demanded.

  “I was robbed at gunpoint in East Providence last year,” I told him. “It shook me up rather badly. I began carrying a gun because it restored something of my shattered sense of security.”

  “You’re not carrying one now, I hope?” Patterway observed.

  I didn’t answer that. “The point is,” I said, “that the machine is dangerous, Tillinghast radiation is dangerous. Perhaps, if my nerves hadn’t still been a little raw after the robbery, I wouldn’t have been so vulnerable to it. I don’t know what caused Tillinghast’s vulnerability, although it can’t have helped that he’d probably been going without sleep for days on end. It can’t have helped, either, that his servants had packed up and left, so determinedly that the police couldn’t find them—although I don’t suppose they looked very hard, once they were told that his death was perfectly natural. Whatever the reason was, though, he was frightened, and he was always a trifle volatile. My one regret, looking back, is that I didn’t act sooner… much sooner. I don’t regret the gunshot—only that took me so long to fire it. And if I had simply unplugged the machine, I dread to think what might have happened when Tillinghast activated it again—because he would have done so, terrified as he was.”

  “Of course he would,” said Patterway. “He was a scientist.”

  “As you would, James,” said Crisson, “and will, when we solve the mystery he left behind.”

  “Do you have such confidence in your own ability to resist terror, gentlemen?” asked Rachel, a trifle mischievously.

  “Although he was a scientist of distinction, madame,” said Patterway, trying to choose his words carefully, “your late husband did have a slight tendency to… volatility, as Mr. Dearden put it. Not that there is anything wrong in a scientist having passion, of course, but firmness in objectivity is an invaluable asset, and…”

  “And you believe that you have it in excess, professor,” Dove interjected. “I agree—and before Mr. Crisson begins boasting on his account, I will agree that he too has a valuable dullness of feeling to compliment his natural energy and intellectual acuity… but there are times when mental flexibility is an asset too. Would it be presumptuous of me to suggest that there might be strength in numbers in an inquiry of this sort—that the four of us might constitute a much stronger unit than any one or two of us in isolation.”

  “Four?” Rachel queried, perhaps having counted five.

  “Four?” queried Patterway and Crisson, undoubtedly reluctant to go beyond three, even if they could be persuaded to go that far.

  “Whatever you do,” I said, “you must do it without any collaboration from me. But aren’t you getting ahead of yourselves, gentlemen? At present, even if Mrs. Tillinghast is willing to sell or give it you, you have only the remnants of a shattered machine, and whatever information Tillinghast communicated to you while his project was still at a relatively early stage.”

  They barely glanced at Rachel, having evidently concluded that she would hand over the machine, one way or another. Their attention was focused on me; all three were convinced that I had to know more. I met their silent censure as forthrightly as I could.

  “Are you sure that noise is coming from the weathervane, David?” Rachel put in, perhaps thinking that moral support ought to be mutual, and that I might be in need of a certain relief. “Surely we shouldn’t be able to hear it all the way down here as loudly as we could in the attic.”

  I suspect that the three visitors hadn’t paid any conscious attention to the creaking until then, dismissing it from consciousness as a mere trifle unworthy of concern—but when Rachel mentioned the word “weathervane” all three of them looked up, reflexively.

  I didn’t. Instead, I said: “It’s louder because the wind has increased in force since we were in the laboratory. Local breezes often generate turbulence once darkness has fallen, because the land cools more rapidly than the sea, and…”

  “You know, Dearden,” said Dove, interrupting me with a slight edge of anxiety in his voice, “I believe you were right about the canneries. I can detect the odor….”

  “That’s not the canneries,” said Patterway. “I’ve lived in these parts all my life, and I know what the canneries smell like. That’s the distant stink of a dead whale washed up on the shore.”

  “No it’s not,” said Crisson. He leapt to his feet and went to the front door, and threw it open. “It’s not coming on the breeze at all—it’s coming from somewhere in the house.” He stepped out on to the verandah and then leapt down the wooden steps, in order to look back at the house—and up.

  Rachel made as if to follow him, but I grabbed her by the shoulders. Save for polite handshakes, it was the first time I had ever made physical contact with her. “Don’t,” I said, urgently. “Hold your nose, close your eyes, and try not to listen to that infernal weathervane. Where are Janine and Craven?”

  “In the kitchen, I think.”

  “Good. Go and join them. Talk to them. Make sure they stay there. Leave this to me. I’m your knight in rusty armor, remember. Trust me now.”

  Her blue-green eyes bored into me. Had I been on my own, I think she would have objected, perhaps even thought me mad—but Dove stepped forward and said, rapidly: “Dearden’s right, madame. I felt it when I was here this afternoon—and I knew that he felt it too, although he was still in denial then. Don’t be afraid—I really do believe that the four of us can face it together… but something is coming, is it not, Dearden?”

  I nodded my head, wanting to get on with it—and whatever Rachel read in my face, she decided that this was no time to argue.

  Dove was only half-right, of course. Nothing was coming, because it had been here all along, since long before the fatal night of Tillinghast’s last experiment. It had been dormant, but it had been here, or at least lurking in some vaster multidimensional space in which here was located, waiting for… what? A trigger? An invitation? A catalyst?

  Waiting, at any rate, for me.

  From outside, I heard Crisson’s voice asking, presumably of Patterway: “What do you make of that glow, James? What could cause a weathervane to shine like that, when the moon’s a mere crescent?”

  And I heard Patterway reply, in a similarly intimate fashion: “It’s not the vane itself, Bob—it’s definitely some kind of reflection, but I can’t make out whether it’s coming from above not below, or…” He ran out of alternatives then.

  “Get them,” I said to Dove. “I’m not so sure that an army could face them, but I’m damned if I’m going up there on my own.” And doubly damned if I don’t go up at all, I didn’t add.

  THE STAIRS UP TO THE ATTIC WERE TOO NARROW TO allow us to go up four abreast, but not so na
rrow that we had to go up in single file. I was glad to have Dove by my side and Patterway and Crisson at my back. Suddenly, we were all friends, all ready to stand together, needing to believe that we were capable of standing together. I felt direly ungrateful at having thought of them as vultures, or jackals. Now, I wanted them to be knights, like me: knights questing for a Holy Grail, who might actually be about to confront it, and might—please God—prove worthy, if not to touch it, at least to withstand its accusing glare, its merciless judgment.

  I wanted them to be cool, too, and mentally disciplined, immune to the passionate flaws that had made Tillinghast so vulnerable. I was confident of my own icy objectivity; I had to hope that they could match it, no matter what the monster in the house—the monster above the house—proved capable of doing, now that it had been enabled by Tillinghast’s recklessness and my clairvoyance.

  I opened the door and stepped through, as if entering another world rather than another room. When all four of us were inside, able to stand in a line again, Crisson closed the door behind him.

  I couldn’t be sure whether the fear I could feel was mine or theirs, but I knew that I shouldn’t let the fear feed itself, amplifying itself in a positive feedback loop. I’d made that mistake before.

  “What is that?” Crisson whispered, referring to the source of the glow.

  I had the advantage; I recognized it.

  “It’s either a hallucination,” I said, “or you’re not the only ones who’ve been trying to duplicate Tillinghast’s machine.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Patterway—but he only meant that it was “impossible” in the vulgar sense that none of his colleagues or rivals could have got in ahead of him, and certainly couldn’t have sneaked up the stairs while we were in the drawing-room, in order to connect it up to Tillinghast’s batteries. He didn’t mean “impossible” in the sense that it was impossible that there was someone or something out in the wilderness of the manifold of parallel worlds clustered in and around the attic that had observed Tillinghast’s experiments from afar—an afar of which Patterway had no conception—and had been far better able than I had been to understand it, to piece it together, and to set it in operation. Clearly, that wasn’t impossible at all. It had happened.

  “Now’s your chance,” I told them all. “Real or illusory, every detail that I saw, you can now see. Brace yourselves, because you’re about to see a lot more….”

  I was really talking to myself, because I knew, in my heart of hearts, or the hidden depths of my brain, that I was about to see far more than I had seen before. I had known all along that what I had seen before was not purely hallucination, but consciousness is such a valiant shield, such a loving traitor, that I had actually contrived to talk myself out of knowing it while the new sight still lay dormant in me. I had known all along that Tillinghast had been at least half-right, or at least not completely deluded, that his machine hadn’t simply produced hallucinations, however monstrous, but really had made contact of a sort with the dark matter and dark energy making up the infinite leaves of the ever-present plenum… and that once the pineal body had been altered to recall its ancestral sensory functions, it couldn’t possibly forget them again.

  Some kinds of eyes can’t be closed—but they can open further to let more light in.

  Distantly, I heard Patterway—I think it was Patterway—start screaming. I heard someone else—Crisson, I presume—battering the closed door with his fists, unable to find the handle or to remember how to turn it. You couldn’t just have unplugged it? I thought, unkindly. Most of all, however, I heard the screech of the whizzing weathervane, registering a storm like none that New England, or any other place on Earth, had ever experienced.

  The attic was crowded now, not with mere floaters, but with creatures that were undoubtedly solid, in their own frameworks of existence, but could only form phantoms in our narrow three-dimensional space, which was far too narrow to contain them. I saw jellyfish that were not jellyfish, cephalopods that were not octopodes, and dead whales that were neither dead nor whales, although they surely stank to high heaven. I heard hisses that were not made by snakes, gurgles that were not made by fermentation in swamps or sewers, and screams that were probably not those of the damned in hell.

  And all that was before I looked up.

  I did not see a monster. Indeed, I did not see any kind of object at all, solid, liquid, or vaporous, sharp, sticky, or slimy. There were no fangs, no tentacles, no glutinous maws. I could see beyond that now. I could see beyond whatever substitutes for hands had forged the replica of Tillinghast’s machine out of whatever elements they had found to substitute for those of the tidy periodic table. I could see the entire mass of the dark matter constituting the unseen plenum, and the interplay of the dark energy that gave it activity, and light, and life.

  I could see everything.

  And in seeing everything, I could see how pathetically tiny, infinitely thin, and direly tawdry our mere universe of stars really is, how forlorn the chasms between the stars are, how feeble the fires in the hearts of stars.

  Mercifully, there was nothing there to perform the function of a mirror. I could not see myself.

  What, in any case, was there to see? Some poor matchstick figure, some pathetic drop of bloody pulp, with a gun in his hand.

  Yes, obviously I was still carrying the gun. How could Patterway have imagined, even for a moment, that my mind could have settled sufficiently not to need that absurd prop any longer, even while I was utterly convinced that I was a victim of hallucination?

  Had I been a volatile man, I dread to think what might have happened, but I am not. I am an unemotional man, a soul of granite, unbreakable even in the face of the unbearable: an intellectual knight in icy armor.

  I took aim, and I fired.

  I didn’t fire at anything, because there was nothing at which to fire. There was no monster. But I did take aim, however paradoxical that might sound. I took aim at what I could see, even though it was as infinite as it was incoherent and insubstantial. I took aim, not with my dazzled, terrified eyes, but with my other sight, the sight of my pineal eye.

  In this universe, the bullet went between two of the roof-beams, crashed clean through the roof-tile and its supporting felt, and hit the ancient weathervane, whose iron must have been exceedingly fatigued, because it shattered into smithereens.

  But the space through which the bullet passed, in our universe, wasn’t empty. It was full. In normal circumstances, its fullness would have been utterly irrelevant to the flight of the bullet, because its substance and momentum would not have been perceptible in any of the universes it traversed—but the circumstances were for from normal. The replica of Tillinghast’s machine had been displaced from one of those other universes, and it had been activated.

  If its activators had known what its effect might be, how dangerous it might be, would they have dared? Perhaps, if they were scientists, more passionate for discovery than safety.

  However paradoxical it might seem, I didn’t just fire the bullet in our universe. At any other moment of my life, with one possible exception, I could not have fired it in any other universe but this one, but at that particular moment, when the replica of Tillinghast’s machine had opened not merely a gateway between the parallel worlds of the plenum, but an infinite series of gateways, that single bullet, or its ricochets, or the backwash of its passing, smashed through a whole series of universes—only a tiny fraction of those packed into the relevant space, in all likelihood, but trillions, of all sorts of shapes and sizes. In some, no doubt, the bullet or its effects would have been no more significant than a drifting particle of dust, but in others…

  Size is relative, but size matters.

  I cannot be certain, but I firmly believe that I destroyed entire universes. I cannot be certain, but I firmly believe that I created others. I cannot be certain, but I firmly believe that I precipitated metamorphoses in others, Or rather, whatever it was that had opened that
catastrophic series of gateways, whatever it was that had created that uniquely privileged instant, that unparalleled opportunity, had allowed and caused me to wreak havoc on a literally unimaginable scale.

  Should I have held my fire? Perhaps—but think on this: if I had not fired that shot so rapidly, or had my aim not been as true, what might have happened to our universe?

  Maybe nothing. Maybe the intentions of the duplicators of Tillinghast’s machine were benign. Maybe they had no intention of destruction, and maybe any metamorphosis they wrought, accidentally or deliberately, would have been paradisal in its consequences. I don’t know. But I know that I was afraid. I know that that I was terrified. I know that when I saw everything, in spite of my coolness of mind and my indomitable indifference, I was overwhelmed by such an appalling cosmic horror that I was not at all sure that I could return from that existential brink alive or sane.

  I honestly believe that firing that shot saved my life, and the lives of my companions, and the lives of Rachel and her servants, if not those of the entire human race, even though my dutiful, mercilessly objective conscience persists in telling me, coldly, that my miserable, wretched, discontented life—even if multiplied a billion times—could not possibly counterbalance a trillionth of the damage that I did, in the pan of any reasonable scales of cosmic justice. In the ultimate scheme of things, there is probably no evil greater than mine, for the time being.

  But I did live through it, and I believe that I have conserved my sanity… or the better part of it, at least… or, if not the better part, the remainder….

  My companions lived too, and perhaps it was as well, for my sake, that they were there, to lend me their tacit support. They swore afterwards that no replica of Tillinghast’s machine had ever been there, and that all the entities they had seen were mere hallucinations, precursors of terrible migraines. They lost all interest in reconstituting Tillinghast’s machine themselves, however, even though they had seen its constitution for themselves, before it was folded away into some fourth-dimensional pocket, or sewer, or bottomless abyss.