Black Wings of Cthulhu

by S. T. Joshi

  But in common with his younger self, and with Lovecraft too, there was Providence. Justin had never encountered ghosts and aliens elsewhere. And perhaps he could also share with Lovecraft the distinction of being the same kind of fish, in a manner of speaking. Minutiae cluttering his brain for half a lifetime were paying their rent at last! In letter or essay, Lovecraft had reported seeing nymphs and satyrs under the oaks in his backyard during his childhood, and at this time of year. If he’d tried to join them, would he have met the fate Justin had narrowly escaped tonight? Plenty of people disappeared forever, without motive or signs of foul play, from their home streets or front porches. Wasn’t there an author, Charles Fort, who based his whole career on compiling hundreds of such cases?

  The angler had most definitely made an impression on Lovecraft, subconsciously or not, and a line or two in his mountain of correspondence might testify to that. In one aspect, Lovecraft had been among the lucky ones, insofar as timing and placement and mental state had never combined to block his path with irresistible temptations and a hole in space. How much longer would that luck have held out if Lovecraft hadn’t died at forty-six? Had a “Damned Thing” of sorts eventually ambushed the elderly Ambrose Bierce in Mexico? Would even Charles Fort have gone out on that limb to explain Bierce’s disappearance?

  Justin had to blame the driven presence in his head for the ideas bubbling up so furiously. He’d generally be nodding off by this stage of the evening. His skin, meanwhile, crawled at visions of what had fastened on him. He felt violated, unclean, as at louse or ringworm infestation. Not that he was in immediate danger, for what consolation that offered! As if the barrier between his world and the angler’s were a surface of ice on which it impatiently trod, the angler could only lower bait and lure its prey through openings at fixed earthly locations, and at fixed earthly times. As for the sleepwalking toward doom that afflicted the story’s character, the entity had needed weeks, and not paltry days, to impose that much influence, if those episodes were ever more than Lovecraft’s dramatic invention.

  Justin would be leaving town by Tuesday, one way or another. Though his worries had ballooned to a grander order of magnitude over the weekend, he did have business tomorrow with Palazzo. It had seemed so pressing Friday night, without entering into his considerations since. Better late than never, he tried mapping out a plan of attack, how he’d parry attempts by Palazzo or his secretary at the runaround. But the aggressive current was rapidly ebbing from his body, and before he could exploit its sputtering last, he was asleep, fully clothed on top of the blankets, TV nattering through the night.

  His eyes opened at the customary 7 a.m. The room temperature was normal for once. However, he needed a minute to remember his age, and what year it was. The public access channel was airing a community bulletin board to the accompaniment of jazz fusion. The remote control still rested on his stomach. He flipped to a so-called morning news program, for the short while he could stand the medley of fluff and atrocities. He gave up during reportage of one more missing pregnant wife and of unfaithful husband under suspicion, when he couldn’t tell in which category it belonged. Nagging hunger and raw nerves were in remission, as if they’d been a weekend-long dream. The entity had relented, or the stars had ceased to be right. Either way, Justin could tackle his last B&B breakfast strictly for the sake of returning well nourished and caffeinated to the List Building.

  He ate, packed, checked out, and hastened to the parking lot behind the inn. The management probably wasn’t sorry to see him go. His dingy ’85 Dodge van could only detract from any ambience they intended to cultivate. Yet for all the patches of gray undercoat where cobalt blue paint had flecked off, and rust damage like a row of ragged buttonholes between the front and back wheels, and other cosmetic shortcomings, the old Ram refused to die, and it wasn’t in him to junk it. But at his first eyeful of it in days, he winced with the shock of seeing it as others did. Blessedly, that passed as soon as he was in the driver’s seat. He was out the gate at a commendable 8:45.

  Some forethought before confronting Palazzo would have been preferable, but last night he was too exhausted, and now he was busy navigating. Resigned to winging it, he parked alongside the List Building. So where in all this cement did the division head hole up? The gallery attendant dislodged her designer-punk self from a semiotics primer and answered him audibly the second time. There was an elevator, but climbing the fire stairs to Palazzo’s floor possibly delivered more oxygen to Justin’s brain.

  The door beside the room number was open. Into the breach! This could have been the anteroom of any dentist or accountant, save for the pricier art on ivory-white walls. The trophies included Lichtenstein, Ben Shahn, David Hockney. Justin stopped there. Conspicuous enough consumption for his blood. The receptionist wore tortoiseshell glasses and her brown hair in a bun, and would have looked bookish apart from an ingrained pout. He requested an appointment sometime that day with Palazzo. She didn’t know if he’d be in or not and didn’t bother asking what his business was, which made him suspect that Palazzo had warned her about him. Through the closed door behind her, he could hear someone tromping around and the scrape of a wastebasket across tiles. Neither of these people seemed to have a very high opinion of him.

  He smiled broadly and said he’d wait, that he had all day. He took one of several squeaky leather seats along the wall, and she began typing with unnecessary force at her computer. She sighed a lot. Justin zoned out, to conserve energy. He owed all he had to his refusal to go away, and today was shaping up as no exception.

  Half an hour crawled by. He approached the desk, cleared his throat, and asked the frowning secretary for a blank reimbursement form, in case Palazzo had misplaced the one from the gallery director. She claimed not to have any. The door behind her opened silently a hair’s breadth, and Justin’s eyes chanced to meet the eye that peeked out. The door closed swiftly but silently.

  The receptionist’s phone chirped several seconds later, while Justin was still watching the door. She swiveled away from him and whispered. She hung up, and the inner door swung wide as if proclaiming Hail fellow, well met. The ever-impeccable Palazzo briskly invited Justin in, but didn’t proffer a handshake.

  Justin hadn’t finished taking the liberty of sitting down when Palazzo launched into preemptive strike. “You’ve come back at a very exciting time! Great things are underway all over campus. And we’re a part of that too, you and I.”

  Justin greeted this with the polite reflex of a weak nod. Misgivings were already fluttering in his stomach.

  “This university is gearing up for the biggest phase of growth in its history, thanks to a hugely successful capital drive. And we’re going to be enlarging this department too.”

  “Enlarge it how? Where is there room? What are you going to do, declare war on the library next door?” The prospect of even more demolition of his beloved old Providence made Justin queasy, and outraged, and remorseful at displaying his work here.

  “Oh, we leave that to the professionals.” Had Palazzo actually chortled? “So you see, we have tremendous amounts of funding tied up in all this. I don’t find any record of contributions from you, though.”

  That smelled much more like guesswork than the results of research, and not terribly astute guesswork either. Justin’s misgivings were fluttering harder.

  “If I remember what you’re up here for,” Palazzo ventured, “I’d consider it a personal favor, and an appropriate gesture, if you’d regard the money in question as a donation to the future of our department.” Justin was amazed at how ghastly an ingratiating smile could look.

  Easy, now! “Listen, I had an understanding with the gallery director. A deal. There are e-mails to that effect. I put a lot of time and effort into installing the exhibit here on short notice, and I’m getting nothing out of it myself. I really need what you owe me.”

  “I don’t owe you anything.” How quickly the worm turned! “She didn’t consult with me first. She went over m
y head, and not for the first time. You made your deal with her, not me. There’s plenty I could have done with that wall space for two weeks.”

  Justin shrugged and spread his hands. “That’s not my problem. I came to town in good faith.”

  “Well, you invested your faith badly. And yes, it is your problem.” With the tiniest adjustment of facial muscles, Palazzo would be gloating.

  “You can’t be serious. Where is the gallery director, anyway? I’d like to hear her side of this.”

  “She’s called in sick.”

  Justin wouldn’t put it past Palazzo to lie, but he conceded the point. “And I suppose you’re going to fire her as soon as she gets well? If you haven’t already?”

  “Oh no, that would be crude. Her contract is nearly up. We won’t renew her, that’s all.” God forbid that any whiff of discord emanate from Pictorial Arts!

  Palazzo had inadvertently helped Justin plot his next move. Si le geste est beau, as the French said. But in good conscience, he had to brave the direct route as last resort. “So are you going to pay my hotel bill or not?”

  “How simple do I have to make it for you? No!” Justin had pushed the decorous Dr. Palazzo into quaking like an aspen. Maybe that short fuse had propelled Palazzo’s rise to the bureaucratic top, Justin speculated.

  “Fine, then.” Justin stood up unhurriedly. It behooved him to take the high road, though he’d have been more satisfied, and eminently within his rights, to vent a resounding Fuck you. When Justin began to speak, Palazzo lost his cool altogether and shouted at him to get out and stay out, but Justin doggedly followed through on the grounds that he’d always hoped for the occasion to say what he was saying, whether Palazzo was listening or not. “You know, Doc, for some people, the present represents an accumulation of everything past, like it’s all there to some degree as a source of inspiration. For others, the present only represents as clean a break from the past as possible, and the less history there is to get in the way of business, the better. It’s just too bad a city like this has you, or anyone like you, in the position you’re in.”

  Palazzo, red, heaving, goggle-eyes hurling malice, was temporarily out of steam.

  “Did a word of that sink in?” Justin asked.

  Palazzo gathered breath for another tirade, but this time Justin had the drop on him. “Anyway, fuck you,” he summed up, ambled out, and closed the door with overweening deliberation till it clicked, amidst new barrage about how vulgar and unimportant he was. The receptionist was gaping at Justin as if he’d blown up the dam. “Boy, he’s going to be fun for the rest of the day,” Justin forecast. Only when he was on the fire stairs did he realize how much he was shaking.

  He paused outside the gallery. A cursory mental survey located reasonably clean blankets and towels in the van, for art-swaddling purposes. He’d removed and stacked three 18” by 24” frames from the wall before the attendant was at his elbow.

  “It’s all right, I’m the artist,” he told her.

  “Are you sure it’s okay? Isn’t this show up for a week or two?” A good do-bee in spite of spiky pink hair!

  “If you’re worried, call Palazzo. In fact, I wish you would.”

  She said no more, and was nowhere in sight when Justin set another frame on the pile and debated carrying four at once. He was out to the van and back, and had voted against more loads that size, when Palazzo and the attendant arrived at the doorway. He barked at her to come back in an hour. He stormed in, but halted judiciously out of swinging range while bellowing, “What do you think you’re doing? This is unacceptable! What are people going to say when there’s nothing on the walls?”

  Justin begrudged him a morose glance. “Call it a matter of trust. I don’t feel safe leaving my artwork with you. You’ve already expressed a rather dismissive attitude toward it.” He was also, admittedly, loath to stay or return where a grotesque death was in store, were the stars ever “right” again.

  “Have you any idea how unprofessional this is?”

  Justin shook his head impassively. “Maybe some token on your part would help. Something tangible. Otherwise, I don’t know.”

  “You want money? This is childish! This is blackmail!”

  “Well, that’s not how I’d describe it.” Justin reached for another picture, but stopped as Palazzo charged from the room. Would he enlist campus security? And make a scene strong-arming an exhibiting artist and “honored alum”? Justin doubted it.

  Then the gallery lights went out. Brightness from the doorway made negligible impact in the mineshaft blackness. He anticipated Palazzo would let him stew a while and was reconciled to waiting in the dark. If the stalemate dragged on long enough, how would Palazzo respond to inquiries about the gallery blackout and Justin alone inside? Justin was conversant with feeling ridiculous, but he’d wager Palazzo was not. A drawback in these circumstances!

  The dark was coming to seem less absolute. Were his eyes adjusting? No, not exactly, because he still couldn’t see his pictures on the walls. Just the same, a glow was spreading through the room, as if someone were almost imperceptibly upping a dimmer switch, to reveal surfaces at right and acute angles to each other, which dwindled to a vanishing point miles beyond the rear gallery wall. And as if it had never been absent but only lurking below a subliminal threshold, ravenous appetite welled up in him again. Nor would it scruple to take a bite out of Palazzo at the least provocation.

  He also hungered for what had attained depth and sharp outlines in soothing twilight. He was standing on a mossy slate terrace, facing west. No List Building surrounded him, no high-rises rudely interrupted the scarlet horizon of western hills, and even the massive Colonial Revival courthouse on Benefit Street had reverted to rows of antique gables and gambrels. The tallest structure by five stories or so was the bracket-shaped Hospital Trust bank across the canal. A few electric signs lent primary colors to the bricks and masonry of downtown, but only the one for the Old Colony Hotel was within reading distance. Sunset made the gold dome of the Congregational church on Weybosset Street gleam softly. The streetlamps ought to be on in a minute.

  Here was the unmodern Providence of his dreams, and of heightened poignancy after a weekend in the brave new Providence. Lovecraft had not emerged beckoning, but that would have been impossible really. This was the Providence of Lovecraft’s schooldays, and since Justin couldn’t imagine Lovecraft as a child, that version of him couldn’t materialize. In any event, it was very beautiful over there, and Justin could have it for the rest of his life, if he simply walked into it.

  He was aware at the same time of how short such a life would be, and that the cosmic angler’s hidden eye had to be glowering down at him. He also belatedly recognized how cunning the angler had been, to give the fish all the line it wanted, and an illusion of freedom, while that fish spent its strength and the hook stayed embedded in unfeeling lip.

  None of this stopped Justin from shuffling his feet eagerly. His hankering for that place was inseparable from the hankering of something that regarded him as food, and he had no means to pull out the psychic hook, any more than a fish could sprout hands to save itself. How covertly active had the entity been after the line had gone slack? What kind of orchestrations had been involved for Justin to end up back at List, in the dark?

  A phrase from Lovecraft’s story echoed at Justin, even as his left foot rose in defiance of better judgment: “I am it and it is I.” Did the “it” in question feel or understand any of Justin’s yearning for the mirage it created for him, the way he suffered its hunger pangs, its anxiety, because Justin wasn’t in the net yet, and meals were few and far between? Did Justin want to help assuage that cruel hunger? All he had to do was be eaten!

  “Now will you please come out and behave reasonably?” Palazzo’s outburst confused Justin and threw him off-balance. It sounded so clear and immediate, but how could that be? Justin was virtually a world away. “What are you doing in there?”

  Palazzo was too worked up to be observant
, or else from outside the gallery was still in darkness. But Justin soon learned that it wasn’t necessary to be him to see what he was seeing. Palazzo was beside him, directing eyes wide with horror north and south, east and west. “Where are we? What the hell is going on?”

  Justin, despite everything, smiled wryly. “It’s Providence.”

  Palazzo became even more distraught. “Where’s our building? Where’s everything that’s happened in the last hundred years? All that progress gone! Everything we’ve achieved! This is terrible! Why are you smiling, you little son of a bitch?”

  Justin had been about to tell Palazzo it was all in his head, but stopped himself. Not after that abusive tone!

  Palazzo wasn’t doing especially well at coping with the situation. He began babbling about what they could do to fix all this. Justin could have suggested leaving the room or taking some flash photography, but why put himself out? And would Palazzo listen to someone as unimportant as him? Remarkable, in any case, that Palazzo was so susceptible to psychic influence, taking the reality of their vista at face value. Maybe he had too much else on his mind to think critically about this. Dotted lines of streetlamps were beginning to incandesce hither and yon.

  Justin understood what happened next, because it was also happening to him by dint of celestial meeting of minds. Traveling across any surface obviously entailed the risk of slipping on that surface, particularly at stressful moments. Those who fished through a hole in the ice were always one misstep away from an unfriendly medium. And now Justin’s idyllic Providence descended instantaneously from mellow dusk to heavy gloom. Big and low in the gray northern sky floated the denser black of what first seemed the moon in eclipse. But pale stars, and not craters, were scattered across its surface, in a range of sizes from pinpoint to grapeshot. Here was the angler’s native sky, as glimpsed through the hole in space where the three-lobed eye had glared down and dispensed visions till brief clumsiness dislocated it. If Justin had blinked, he’d have missed it, for there followed a thud that shook the unseen gallery floor and rattled the unseen pictures on the walls, and the hole in space was jammed with frantic, ciliated tissue that bulged like a bubble into the room. On contact with the atmosphere it shone pink, then hot red.