Black Wings of Cthulhu

by S. T. Joshi

  Brad watched the man lumber past the bar counter and through a door that must have led to the alley in back. Brad called to the barmaid, and when she came over, he asked her who she’d just been talking to.

  “You mean old Musky?” She looked a little incredulous, a little suspicious. “Musky?”

  “That’s his name?”

  “It’s what he answers to, yeah. Why you want to know?”

  Brad hesitated. “I thought he might be somebody I heard of recently. But I believe that person’s name was Charlie.”

  “Ain’t nobody calls him that anymore. But that’s what he was born. Born Charlie Musgrove, the light of his momma’s eye, and as full of promise...you won’t credit this, ’cause he looks about a hundred years old now, but we were in high school together.”

  “What happened?” Brad said.

  “Shit,” the woman said. “Ain’t that what the bumper sticker says? Shit happens. He drank up all his opportunities ’cept the opportunity to drink more.” She backed up and narrowed her eyes. “Why you want to know about Musky? What makes him any of your business?”

  Brad explained, starting with the wasps that had attacked him and his wife in the desert. He did not mention Atlantis under the mountains or the alien theft of his wife’s soul, however. He did tell her how Charlie Musgrove figured in the narrative.

  “Rattlesnakes!” she said. “You want old Musky to tell you about them rattlesnakes that tried to get him!”

  “Yes,” Brad said, not wishing to explain, in detail, what he really wanted.

  “Hell, he’s been hard to shut up on that subject. You won’t have any trouble there. If you say the magic words, you’ll get an earful. I guarantee it.”

  “What are the magic words?”

  “Can I buy you a beer?” she said.

  “TURN HERE,” MUSKY SAID. THEY FOLLOWED A WINDING road into the mountains. The car leaned upward, as though the stars above were their destination. Musky took a swig from the beer bottle and lurched into song again: “Away in a manager no crib for his bed, the little Lord Jesus was wishin’ he’s dead. No...”

  It hadn’t been hard to elicit the rattlesnake story from Musky—who hadn’t responded to Brad’s initial Charles Musgrove? query—and Musky had a few things to say about Michael Parkington. “That fellow told me I didn’t see no rattlesnakes, said I lucinated them. I didn’t tell him I’d read that fool book he wrote. Yep, found a copy in a dumpster, autographed to Cindy Lou with his cell phone number, but I guess that didn’t work out. That book was a lot of crap, all that Atlantis stuff.”

  “You don’t believe there is some alien force in these mountains?”

  Musky finished the beer and threw the empty bottle out the window, which made the Austin-environmentalist in Brad cringe when he heard the shattering glass. “Oh, there’s something awful and ancient in these mountains. My grandfather knew all about it, said he’d seen it eat a goat by turning the goat inside out and sort of licking it until it was gone. He said it was a god from another world, older than this one. He called it Toth. A lot of people in these parts know about it, but it ain’t a popular subject.”

  He opened another beer and drank it. “Anyway, I think those rattlesnakes were real.”

  They bumped along the road, flanked by ragged outcroppings, shapes that defied gravity, everything black and jagged or half erased by the brightness of the car’s rollicking headlights.

  “Okay! Stop ’er!” Musky said. Brad stopped the car. Musky was out of the car immediately, tumbling to the ground but quickly staggering upright with the beer bottle clutched in his hand. Brad turned the ignition off, put the key in his pocket, and got out.

  Brad followed the man, who was moving quickly, invigorated, perhaps, by this adventure. The incline grew steeper, the terrain devoid of all vegetation, a moonscape, and Brad thought he’d soon be crawling on his hands and knees. Abruptly, the ground leveled, and he saw Musky, stopped in front of him, back hunched, dirty gray hair shivered by the breeze.

  “There’s people who would pay a pretty penny to see this,” he said, without turning around. Brad reached the man and looked down from the rocky shelf on which they stood. Beneath them, a great dazzling bowl stretched out and down, a curving mother-of-pearl expanse, a skateboarder’s idea of heaven—or imagine a giant satellite dish, its diameter measured in miles, pressed into the stone. No, it was nothing like anything. He knew he would never be able to describe it.

  He felt a sharp, hot ember sear into the flesh immediately above his right eyebrow, brought his hand up quickly, and slapped the insect, crushing it. He opened his fist and looked at the wasp within. Its crumpled body trembled, and it began to vibrate faster and faster, emitting a high-pitched whirrrrr. It exploded in a purple flash that left an after-image in Brad’s mind so that, when he turned toward the sound of Musky’s voice, part of the man’s face was eclipsed by a purple cloud.

  “I always bring them up here,” he said. “Toth calls ’em and I bring ’em the last lap.”

  “You brought my wife here?” Brad asked.

  “Nope. Just you. She wasn’t savory somehow. She had the chemicals in her, and it changed her somehow. Wouldn’t do. Mind you, I ain’t privy to every decision, I just get a notion sometimes. I think she was poison to it, so it didn’t fool with her.”

  “But it changed her,” Brad shouted, filled with fury, intent on killing this traitor to his race.

  “It wasn’t interested.”

  Brad’s cell phone rang.

  “You get good reception up here,” Musky said.

  Brad tugged the phone out of his pocket, flipped it open.

  “Hello?”

  “Brad?”

  “Meta?”

  “Where are you, honey? I’ve been trying to call you. I’ve been going crazy. I called the police. I even called Sheriff Winslow, although why—”

  Brad could see her standing in the kitchen, holding the wall phone’s receiver up to her ear, her eyes red and puffy from crying. He could see her clearly, as though she stood right in front of him; he could count the freckles on her cheeks.

  Her tears, the flush in her cheeks, the acceleration of her heart, he saw these things, saw the untenable vascular system, the ephemeral ever-failing creature, designed by the accidents of time.

  He was aware that the cell phone had slipped from his fingers and tumbled to the stony ledge and bounced into the bright abyss. He leaned over and watched its descent. Something was moving at the bottom of the glowing pit, a black, twitching insectile something, and as it writhed it grew larger, more spectacularly alive in a way the eye could not map, appendages appearing and disappearing, and always the creature grew larger and its fierce intelligence, its outrageous will and alien, implacable desires, rose in Brad’s mind.

  He felt a monstrous joy, a dark enlightenment, and wild to embrace his destiny, he flung himself from the ledge and fell toward the father of all universes, where nothing was ever lost, and everything devoured.

  Denker’s Book

  DAVID J. SCHOW

  David J. Schow began publishing short stories in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone magazine in the 1980s. His first novel, The Kill Riff (Tor), appeared in 1988. In 1990 he published three books: the novel The Shaft (Macdonald) and the story collections Seeing Red (Tor) and Lost Angels (New American Library/ Onyx). He has gone on to publish several further collections— Black Leather Required (Ziesing, 1994), Crypt Orchids (Subterranean Press, 1998), Eye (Subterranean Press, 2001), Zombie Jam (Subterranean Press, 2005), and Havoc Swims Jaded (Subterranean Press, 2006), and the novels Bullets of Rain (Morrow, 2003)—and Rock Breaks Scissors Cut (Subterranean Press, 2003). Schow is also the author of The Outer Limits Companion (Ace, 1986; rev. ed. GNP Crescendo Records, 1999) and the editor of the anthology Silver Scream (Dark Harvest, 1988).

  YOU WILL FORGIVE ME IF MY RECOLLECTIONS OF DENKER seem fragmented. I do know that his Nobel Prize was rescinded; that seemed unfair to me, but at the same time I understand the thi
nking behind it, the dull necessity of the counter-arguments, all the disparate points of view that had to swim together into a public accord in an attempt to salve the outrage.

  It used to be held as common superstition that if you paint an interior door in your home with a certain kind of paint, the door might open into another time. The paint was lead-based and long-prohibited. In 1934, there were doors like this all over the place. The doors generally had to be facing south. People have forgotten this now.

  Chinese horticulturalists discovered that dead pets, buried in a specific pattern around the entryways to houses and gardens, not only seemed to restrict access by spirits, but lengthen daylight by as much as half an hour. Type of animal, number of burials, interment pattern, and even the sexual history of the pet owner all seemed to have modulating effects.

  I cite these stories as examples among thousands—the kind of revelations that seem to defy not only physical laws thought to be immutable, but logic itself.

  Nevertheless, they took Langford Meyer Denker’s Nobel Prize away from him. They—the big, faceless “they” responsible for everything—probably should not have. Denker made the discovery and fathered the breakthrough. “They” claimed Denker cheated; that is, he did not play by strict rules of science. But there are no such things as rules in science; merely observations that are regularly displaced by new, more consolidated observations.

  Some said that the dimensional warp door Denker created was real, that it worked. Others held that it was a flashy deception; sleight-of-hand rather than science. Still others maintained that Denker’s demonstration was inconclusive. By the time the furor settled, all of them said Denker had cheated. Denker had used the book.

  Denker’s machine was a gigantic, Gothic clockwork; an Expressionist maze of gears, liquid reservoirs, lasers, and lenses. Lathed brass bins held clumps of humid earth. Common stones were vised by hydraulics in that peculiar way you can squeeze an egg between your palms with all your might and not break it. Particle-emitters were gloved in ancient lead. Imagine a medieval clepsydra wirelessly married to countless yottabytes of computing power and stage-managed by a designer who had been seduced by every mad scientist movie ever made. The containment chamber was made of pitted bronze shot through with rods of chemically pure glass; it weighed several tons and was completely non-aerodynamic, yet Denker claimed that once the whole package was transposed into a realm where earthly physics were irrelevant its properties recombined according to perverse rules to render the device as safe as a pressurized bathysphere or commercial space capsule.

  Of course the earliest naysayers called him mad.

  I remind you at this point in the story that without a totally arbitrary baseline of normalcy, “insanity” is not possible. (It has been said that normalcy is the majority’s form of lunacy, which I suppose explains Christianity.)

  Colors can drive people mad. It follows that there are spectra yet unknown to us, flavors and timbres that might catalyze our air, our light, in new and unpredictable ways. “Sounds that were not wholly sounds”—that sort of thing. The scientific community’s rebuke of Denker was a denial of the most commonplace protocols of experimentation, but by that time the point was to demonize the man, not disprove the theory.

  A portal to another universe different from our own perceived reality? Something that functioned so far out there that what we thought of as our physical laws seemed irrelevant? Fine.

  A glimpse into the unutterable? Also fine.

  But Denker had used the book. Not fine.

  I ask you to stop right now and consider the purpose of a book that was never intended to be read. What is the point?

  Consider this: You take an ordinary bible, which credits supernatural forces for all the bloodshed and horror in the world. They still make people swear on this book in courts of law; its symbolism has become part of ritual.

  Denker’s book was no mere opposite pole or gainsaying counter-dogma, although many people tried to discredit it that way. That’s an irony: the arrogance to assume you can neutralize something that will not be denied.

  Where Denker found the book, if he ever truly possessed it, I do not know.

  Scholars claimed the book was a repository of forbidden knowledge, therefore much sought or shunned through millennia. Bait for fanatics. A grail for obsessives; a self-destructive prize for the foolhardy. Unless it was akin to a key or a storage battery—a necessary link in a logic chain—it was still a dead end, because in the end (as one story went) you wound up dead too. Denker’s philologists rapidly proved that trickle-down translations of the book (about 400 years’ worth) were virtually worthless because there was no way to reconcile different languages to the concept of the unnameable. Latin held many of the book’s conceits in polar opposition to the Greek interpretation, and so on. In many ways the book was like a tesseract, partially unfolded into a yet-undiscovered realm.

  But Denker did not stop at etymology. His scheme advantaged the top skim of curious geniuses all over the world. He used crypto experts to translate partial photo plates from Arabic—an iteration long thought lost forever. No one ever saw more than an eighth of a full page. Then he used colloquialists to defang the language piecemeal, in order to render down the simple sense of highly convoluted and frequently unpronounceable arcana. The resultant text was presented to a hand-picked and highly elite international group preselected by Denker for the interests he knew he could arouse.

  When he had exhausted one scholar, Denker moved to the next, and you have probably already heard the story about how Rademacher Asylum gradually filled up with his depleted former colleagues.

  These were not dazzled hayseeds or the easily swoggled rustics of a fictive Red America, nor were they the deluded zealotry of one improbable religion or other. These were minds capable of the most labyrinthine extrapolations—the first, second, and third strings of pawns to fall to Denker’s inquiry.

  Denker followed his instincts, and in the hope of discovering an anti-linear correlation presented his findings to a physicist who was then in the grip of Alzheimer’s. He consulted South Seas tribal elders with no word for “insane” in their lexicon. Then philosophers, wizards, the deranged and the disenfranchised. With a brilliant kind of counter-intuitiveness, he allowed children to interpret some of his findings. Then autistics. The man with Alzheimer’s was said to have “lost his mind completely” prior to his death. But as I’ve told you, the mad are always safe to expose. The mad enjoy hermetic protections unavailable to the mentalities that judge them unfit for normal human congress. “Normal humans” were the last thing Denker wanted.

  Darwin pondered natural selection for twenty years before going into print; Denker did not have that kind of leisure. Our science these days is competitive; cut-throat; the sixties-era model of the Space Race has overrun all rational strategy. There are very few scientific rock stars and most of our millionaires are invisible. Resources may be accessed at the fierce cost of corporate sponsorship, which often mandates blood sacrifice or the occasional bitterly humbling obeisance: while the former can be a mental snap point, the latter is often a more serious derailment of any kind of exploratory enthusiasm, crushing instinct and logic into the box of fast, visible progress. Expediency becomes cardinal. This was the bind in which Denker found himself, in both senses—he embraced the delirious possibilities of risk and, using stress as a motivator, discovered his own interior limitations.

  Coleridge wrote that “we do not feel horror because we are haunted by a sphinx, we dream a sphinx in order to explain the horror that we feel.” Borges, after Coleridge, wrote, “If that is true, how might a mere chronicling of its forms transmit the stupor, the exultation, the alarms, the dread, and the joy that wove together that night’s dream?” This was in essence the chicken-and-egg riddle that governed Denker’s inquiries. Possessed of a fanciful mind, he did not believe the most transporting inspirations to be reduceable to mere mathematical schemata, yet that was the task set before him. Others had f
ailed. Replacements waited hungrily. More tempting, to Denker, was that capacity which Apollonius Rhodius coined as “the poetics of uncertainty,” itself reducible to the twentieth-century argot of doing a wrong thing for the right reason.

  All this citation makes Denker sound stuffy or cloistered or pretentiously intellectual, so I need to give you an example of the man’s humor. He referred to the book as his “ultra-tome-bo”—at once conflating the Spanish ultratumba (literally, “from beyond the grave”) with the Latin ultima Thule (i.e., “the northernmost part of the habitable ancient world”)—thereby hinting with a wink that his quest aimed beyond both death and the world as we know it. Knew it, rather.

  (He further corrupted ultra into el otro—“the other.” The other book, the other tomb. He was very witty as well as smart.)

  I hope you can follow this without too much trouble. Sometimes my memory itself is like a book with stuck-together pages; huge chunks of missing narrative followed by short sections of over-detail. If I have learned one thing, it is that harmonics are important. You may sense contradictions in some of what I am telling you, and I would urge you to look past them—try to see them with new eyes.

  Denker’s so-called scientific fraud was revealed when his device was taken from his stewardship and disassembled. The machinery held a bit of nuclear credibility, but the heart of the drive was an iron particle accelerator that resembled a World War Two-era sea mine, a heart fed by cables and hoses and fluid.

  Empty inside.

  Because Denker had removed his fundamental component—the book.

  Having spent three-quarters of a billion dollars in corporate seed money and suffering the deep stresses of delivery-to-schedule that such funds can mandate, Denker cheated the curve. Science failed him, but when he combined science with sorcery, he was able to give his backers what they thought they wanted. All he had to do then was word his interviews precisely enough to feature that hint of arched-eyebrow evasion as to method. Money was already coming at him from all sides.