Black Wings of Cthulhu

by S. T. Joshi

  “Where?” He couldn’t manage more than a dry whisper.

  “Oh, you know,” Sly said, and laughed. “C’mon, bucko—we’ve been beaming this into your brain for months—”

  “No. Not possible. I’ve worn my tinfoil hat every day.”

  “—our system orbits a brown star, and it’s cold, so we nestle in heaps and mounds that rise in ziggurats and pyramids. We swim in blood to stay warm, wring it from the weak the way you might squeeze juice from an orange.”

  Pershing recognized the voice from the vent. “You’re a fake. Why are you pretending to be Bobby Silver?”

  “Oh. If I didn’t wear this, you wouldn’t comprehend me. Should I remove it?” Sly grinned, seized his own cheek, and pulled. His flesh stretched like taffy accompanied by a squelching sound. He winked and allowed it to deform to a human shape. “It’s what’s underneath that counts. You’ll see. When we come to stay with you.”

  Pershing said, “I don’t want to see anything.” He tried to flee, to run shrieking, but this being a dream, he was rooted, trapped, unable to do more than mumble protestations.

  “Yes, Percy, you do,” Ethel said from behind him. “We love you.” As he twisted his head to gape at her, she gave him the soft, tender smile he remembered, the one that haunted his waking dreams, and then put her hand against his face and shoved him into the dark.

  HE STAYED OVER AT HER PLACE FOR A WEEK—HID OUT, like a criminal seeking sanctuary from the Church. Unhappily, this doubtless gave Wanda the wrong impression (although at this point even Pershing wasn’t certain what impression she should have), but at all costs he needed a vacation from his suddenly creep-infested heat trap of an apartment. Prior to this he’d stayed overnight fewer than a dozen times. His encampment at her house was noted without comment.

  Jimmy’s twenty-sixth birthday fell on a Sunday. After morning services at Wanda’s Lutheran church, a handsome brick building only five minutes from the Broadsword, Pershing went outside to the quiet employee parking lot and called him. Jimmy had wanted to be an architect since elementary school. He went into construction, which Pershing thought was close enough despite the nagging suspicion his son wouldn’t agree. Jimmy lived in California at the moment—he migrated seasonally along the West Coast, chasing jobs. Pershing wished him a happy birthday and explained a card was in the mail. He hoped the kid wouldn’t check the postmark as he’d only remembered yesterday and rushed to get it sent before the post office closed.

  Normally he was on top of the family things: the cards, the phone calls, the occasional visit to Lisa Anne when she attended Berkeley. Her stepfather, Barton Ingles III, funded college, which simultaneously indebted and infuriated Pershing, whose fixed income allowed little more than his periodic visits and a small check here and there. Now graduated, she worked for a temp agency in San Francisco and, embarrassingly, her meager base salary surpassed his retirement.

  Toward the end of their conversation, after Pershing’s best wishes and obligatory questions about the fine California weather and the job, Jimmy said, “Well, Pop, I hate to ask this...”

  “Uh, oh. What have I done now? Don’t tell me you need money.”

  Jimmy chuckled uneasily. “Nah, if I needed cash I’d ask Bart. He’s a tightwad, but he’ll do anything to impress Mom, you know? No, it’s...how do I put this? Are you, um, drinking? Or smoking the ganja, or something? I hate to be rude, but I gotta ask.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  There was a long, long pause. “Okay. Maybe I’m... Pop, you called me at like two in the morning. Wednesday. You tried to disguise your voice—”

  “Whaat?” Pershing couldn’t wrap his mind around what he was hearing. “I did no such thing, James.” He breathed heavily, perspiring more than even the weather called for.

  “Pop, calm down, you’re hyperventilating. Look, I’m not pissed—I just figured you got hammered and hit the speed dial. It would’ve been kinda funny if it hadn’t been so creepy. Singing, no less.”

  “But it wasn’t me! I’ve been with Wanda all week. She sure as hell would’ve noticed if I got drunk and started prank calling my family. I’ll get her on the phone—”

  “Really? Then is somebody sharing your pad? This is the twenty-first century, Pop. I got star sixty-nine. Your number.”

  “Oh.” Pershing’s blood drained into his belly. He covered his eyes with his free hand because the glare from the sidewalk made him dizzy. “What did I—this person—sing, exactly?”

  “‘This Old Man,’ or whatever it’s called. Although you, or they, added some unpleasant lyrics. They slurred...falsetto. When I called back, whoever it was answered. I asked what gave and they laughed. Pretty nasty laugh, too. I admit, I can’t recall you ever making that kinda sound.”

  “It wasn’t me. Sober, drunk, whatever. Better believe I’m going to find the bastard. There’s been an incident or three around here. Wanda saw a prowler.”

  “All right, all right. If that’s true, then maybe you should get the cops involved.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And Pop—let me explain it to Mom and Lisa before you get on the horn with them. Better yet, don’t even bother with Mom. She’s pretty much freaked outta her mind.”

  “They were called.”

  “Yeah. Same night. A real spree.”

  Pershing could only stammer and mumble when his son said he had to run, and then the line was dead. Wanda appeared from nowhere and touched his arm and he nearly swung on her. She looked shocked and her gaze fastened on his fist. He said, “Jesus, honey, you scared me.”

  “I noticed,” she said. She remained stiff when he hugged her. The tension was purely reflexive, or so he hoped. His batting average with her just kept sinking. He couldn’t do a much better job of damaging their relationship if he tried.

  “I am so, so sorry,” he said, and it was true. He hadn’t told her about the trouble at the Broadsword. It was one thing to confide in his male friends, and quite another to reveal the source of his anxiety to a girlfriend, or any vulnerability for that matter. He’d inherited his secretiveness from Pop who in turn had hidden his own fears behind a mask of stoicism; this personality trait was simply a fact of life for Dennard men.

  She relented and kissed his cheek. “You’re jumpy. Is everything all right?”

  “Sure, sure. I saw a couple of the choir kids flashing gang signs and thought one of the little jerks was sneaking up on me to go for my wallet.”

  Thankfully, she accepted this and held his hand as they walked to her car.

  A STORM ROLLED IN. HE AND WANDA SAT ON HER BACK porch, which commanded a view of the distant Black Hills. Clouds swallowed the mountains. A damp breeze fluttered the cocktail napkins under their half-empty Corona bottles, rattled the burnt yellow leaves of the maple tree branches overhead.

  “Oh, my,” Wanda said. “There goes the drought.”

  “We better hurry and clear the table.” Pershing estimated at the rate the front was coming they’d be slammed inside of five minutes. He helped her grab the dishes and table settings. Between trips the breeze stiffened dramatically. Leaves tore from the maple, from trees in neighboring yards, went swirling in small technicolor cyclones. He dashed in with the salad bowl as the vanguard of rain pelted the deck. Lightning flared somewhere over the Waddel Valley; the boom came eight seconds later. The next thunderclap was five seconds. They stood in her window, watching the show until he snapped out his daze and suggested they retreat to the middle of the living room to be safe.

  They cuddled on the sofa, half watching the news while the lights flickered. Wind roared around the house and shook its frame as if a freight train slammed along tracks within spitting distance of the window, or a passenger jet winding its turbines for takeoff. The weather signaled a change in their static routine of the past week. Each knew without saying it that Pershing would return to the Broadsword in the morning, and their relationship would revert to its more nebulous aspect. Pershing also understood from her melancholy glanc
e, the measured casualness in her acceptance, that matters between them would remain undefined, that a line had been crossed.

  He thought about this in the deepest, blackest hours of night while they lay in bed, she lying gently snoring, her arm draped across his chest. How much easier his life would be if his mock comment to Elgin and Mel proved true—that Wanda was a lunatic; a split personality type who was behind the stalking incidents. God, I miss you, Ethel.

  “HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM,” MEL SAID. HE’D BROUGHT ham sandwiches and coffee to Pershing’s apartment for an early supper. He was rattled. “I checked around. Not just you hearing things. Odd, odd stuff going on, man.”

  Pershing didn’t want to hear, not after the normalcy of staying with Wanda. And the dreams... “You don’t say.” He really wished Mel wouldn’t.

  “The cops have been by a couple of times. Turns out other tenants have seen that chick prowling the halls, trying doorknobs. There’s a strange dude, as well—dresses in a robe, like a priest. Betsy Tremblay says the pair knocked on her door one night. The man asked if he could borrow a cup of sugar. Betsy was watching them through the peephole—she says the lady snickered and the man grinned and shushed her by putting his finger over his lips. Scared the hell out of Betsy; she told them to scram and called the cops.”

  “A cup of sugar,” Pershing said. He glanced out at the clouds. It was raining.

  “Yeah, the old meet-your-cute-neighbor standby. Then I was talking to Fred Nilson; he’s pissed because somebody below him is talking all night. ‘Whispering,’ he said. Only problem is, the apartment below his belongs to a guy named Brad Cox. Cox is overseas. His kids come by every few days to water the plants and feed the guppies. Anyway, no matter how you slice it, something peculiar is going on around here. Doncha feel better?”

  “I never thought I was insane.”

  Mel chuckled uneasily. “I was chatting with Gina about the whole thing, and she said she’d heard someone singing while she was in the bath. It came up through the vent. Another time, somebody giggled in the closet while she dressed. She screamed and threw her shoe. This was broad daylight, mind you—no one in there, of course.”

  “Why would there be?”

  “Right. Gina thought she was imagining things; she didn’t want to tell me in case I decided she was a nut. Makes me wonder how many other people are having these...experiences and just keeping it to themselves.”

  The thought should have given Pershing comfort, but it didn’t. His feelings of dread only intensified. I’m almost seventy, damn it. I’ve lived in the woods, surrounded by grizzlies and wolves; spent months hiking the ass end of nowhere with a compass and an entrenchment spade. What the hell do I have to be scared of after all that? And the little voice in the back of his mind was quick to supply Sly’s answer from the nightmare, Oh, you know. He said, “Food for thought. I guess the police will sort through it.”

  “Sure they will. Maybe if somebody gets their throat slashed, or is beaten to death in a home invasion. Otherwise, I bet they just write us off as a bunch of kooks and go back to staking out the doughnut shop. Looks like a police convention some mornings at Gina’s store.”

  “Wanda wants me to move in with her. I mean, I think she does.”

  “That’s a sign. You should get while the getting’s good.”

  They finished the sandwiches and the beer. Mel left to meet Gina when she got home from work. Pershing shut the door and slipped the bolt. The story about the strange couple had gotten to him. He needed a stiff drink.

  The lights blinked rapidly and failed. The room darkened to a cloudy twilight and the windows became opaque smudges. Sounds of rain and wind dwindled and ceased. “Gracious, I thought he’d never leave.” Terry Walker peeked at him from the upper jamb of the bedroom door, attached by unknown means, neck extended with a contortionist’s ease so his body remained obscured. His face was very white. He slurred as if he hadn’t used his vocal chords in a while, as if he spoke through a mouthful of mush. Then Pershing saw why. Black yolks of blood spooled from his lips in strands and splattered on the carpet. “Hello, Percy.”

  “You’re alive,” Pershing said, amazed at the calmness of his own voice. Meanwhile, his brain churned with full-blown panic, reminding him he was talking to an apparition or an imposter.

  “So it seems.” Terry was unchanged from youth—cleanshaven, red hair curling below his ears, and impressive mutton chop sideburns in the style that had been vogue during the seventies.

  “It was you in the vents?” Then, as an afterthought, “How could you terrorize my family?”

  “I got bored waiting all week for you to come back. Don’t be mad—none of them ever cared for you anyway. Who knows—perhaps we’ll get a chance to visit each and every one; make them understand what a special person you are.” Terry grinned an unpleasant, puckered grin and dropped to the floor, limber as an eel. He dressed in a cassock the color of blackened rust.

  “Holy crap. You look like you’ve come from a black mass.” He chuckled nervously, skating along the fine line of hysteria. There was something wrong with his friend’s appearance—his fingers and wrists had too many joints and his neck was slightly overlong by a vertebra or two. This wasn’t quite the Terry Walker he knew, and yet, to some degree it was, and thus intensified Pershing’s fear, his sense of utter dislocation from reality. “Why are you here? Why have you come back?” he said, and regretted it when Terry’s smile bloomed with Satanic joy.

  “Surveying.”

  “Surveying?” Pershing felt a new appreciation for the depths of meaning in that word, the inherent coldness. Surveying preceded the destruction of one order to make way for another, stronger, more adaptable order.

  “What else would I do? A man’s got to have a niche in the universe.”

  “Who are you working for?” Oh Lord, let it be the FBI, Homeland Security, anybody. Still trying for levity, he said, “Fairly sure I paid my taxes, and I don’t subscribe to American Jihadist. You’re not here to ship me to Guantánamo, or wherever, are you? Trust me, I don’t know jack squat about anything.”

  “There’s a migration in progress. A diaspora, if you will. It’s been going on...well, when numbers grow to a certain proportion, they lose relevance. We creep like mold.” Terry’s grin showed that the inside of his mouth was composed of blackened ridges, and indeed toothless. His tongue pulsed; a sundew expanding and contracting in its puddle of gore. “Don’t worry, though, Earthman. We come in peace.” He laughed and his timbre ascended to the sickly-sweet tones of a demented child. “Besides, we’re happy to live in the cracks; your sun is too bright for now. Maybe after it burns down a bit...”

  The bathroom door creaked open and the woman in the black dress emerged. She said, “Hullo there, love. I’m Gloria. A pleasure to meet you.” Her flesh glowed like milk in a glass, like the sugar bowl in his visions. To Terry, she said, “He’s older than I thought.”

  “But younger than he appears.” Terry studied Pershing, his eyes inscrutable. “City life hasn’t softened you, has it, pal?” He nodded at the woman. “I’m going to take him. It’s my turn to choose.”

  “Okay, dear.” The woman leaned her hip against the counter. She appeared exquisitely bored. “At least there’ll be screaming.”

  “Isn’t there always?”

  Pershing said, “Terry... I’m sorry. There was a massive search. I spent two weeks scouring the hills. Two hundred men and dogs. You should’ve seen it.” The secret wound opened in him and all the buried guilt and shame spilled forth. “Man, I wanted to save you. It destroyed me.”

  “You think I’m a ghost? That’s depressingly provincial of you, friend.”

  “I don’t know what to think. Maybe I’m not even awake.” He was nearly in tears.

  “Rest assured, you will soon make amazing discoveries,” Terry said. “Your mind will shatter if we aren’t careful. In any event, I haven’t come to exact vengeance upon you for abandoning me in the mountains.”

  Th
e woman smirked. “He’ll wish you were here for that, won’t he?”

  “Damn you, you’re not my friend,” Pershing said. “And lady, you aren’t Gloria, whoever she was—poor girl’s probably on a milk carton. You wear faces so we will understand, so you can blend in, isn’t that right? Who are you people, really?”

  “Who are you people?” Gloria mimicked. “The Children of Old Leech. Your betters.”

  “Us?” Terry said. “Why, we’re kin. Older and wiser, of course. Our tastes are more refined. We prefer the dark, but you will too. I promise.” He moved to a shelf of Pershing’s keepsakes—snapshots from the field, family photos in silver frames, and odd pieces of bric-a-brac—and picked up Ethel’s rosary and rattled it. “As I recall, you weren’t a man of any particular faith. I don’t blame you, really. The New Testament God is so nebulous, so much of the ether. You’ll find my civilization’s gods to be quite tangible. One of them, a minor deity, dwells in this very system in the caverns of an outer moon. Spiritual life is infinitely more satisfying when you can meet the great ones, touch them, and, if you’re fortunate, be touched...”

  Pershing decided to go through the woman and get a knife from the butcher block. He didn’t relish the notion of punching a girl, but Terry was bigger than him, had played safety for his high school football team. He gathered himself to move—

  Gloria said, “Percy, want me to show you something? You should see what Terry saw...when you left him alone with us.” She bowed her neck and cupped her face. There came the cracking as of an eggshell; blood oozed through her fingers as she lifted the hemisphere of her face away from its bed. It made a viscid, sucking sound; the sound of bones scraping together through jelly. Something writhed in the hollow. While Pershing was transfixed in sublime horror, Terry slid over and patted his shoulder.