by S. T. Joshi
In that span of seconds, a mounting stench of scorching mold and incinerated carcasses made Justin choke, and he reeled at a protracted, inhuman wail that was as much between his ears as in them, and that also spewed from his own mouth. It distorted as if channeled through cheap microphone. The surroundings, meanwhile, kept flickering between darkness and dim simulation of bygone Providence.
Then further sound impinged on him. Palazzo was still babbling in the same rhythm, at the same tempo, but the syllables had devolved into baby talk, and their volume had drastically risen. Callously or not, Justin felt a burden melt from his shoulders, and a release of tension in his chest. Palazzo going mad had saved Justin from doing the same. This chaos wasn’t simply an expression of Justin’s lone delusion. He needn’t doubt, or abandon, his own sanity!
The entity broke free of vacuum seal between dimensions, and in its wake left unmediated the passage between here and there. A sonic boom knocked Justin off his feet, and the walls in the dark room rumbled, and all his artwork plummeted with a crash of shattering glass. The sour air began to whistle by his face. He lay as flat as possible, and his lunging hands bumped and clung to the cold steel siding of the attendant’s desk. Praise the Lord, it was bolted down!
A hole in space, left on its own, couldn’t be stable. It had to collapse soon. But the leakage between dimensions was still accelerating, lifting Justin off the concrete floor, when Palazzo flopped onto his belly and grabbed Justin’s ankles. Justin’s sweaty handhold on the sharp edge of slick metal panel began to loosen. He couldn’t hang on much longer in this wind tunnel with patrician dead weight doubling his own. He kicked out as if swimming the Australian crawl, once, twice, and screaming Palazzo lost his grip. Had Justin done what was needful to save himself, or had he outright killed a man? The keening airflow was already beginning to tug less fitfully at him, and with a moral issue assailing him on top of everything else, his overtaxed consciousness gave way, though his fingers knew better than to let go.
Justin opened his eyes to bright gallery illumination. The attendant was standing beside him, studying him fretfully. She evidently knew where to find the circuit-breakers, or at least the janitor. Justin was lying on his right side and had unhanded the desk. He and the girl gawked at each other a minute. He didn’t feel impelled to say anything yet.
“You okay? You want me to call the infirmary?”
Infirmary? The word dredged up long-lost campus lore of sub-par doctors burning warts off the wrong hand. Last thing he needed now. “Oh no, not those butchers.”
She shrugged. “A friend came and got me from upstairs when she heard a noise and saw the lights were out. Was there an earthquake in here or something?”
“Something, yeah.” He raised himself on bruised and achy elbow. By the grace of whatever laws governed pressure or gravitation or aerodynamics between worlds in tangent, little had been scooped up from the edges of the room. Most of his photos lay face-up on the floor, though a lot of busted glass had crossed over. “I’m a lucky bastard,” he mumbled.
“What?” The girl wasn’t going to freak out, was she? “Where’s Dr. Palazzo?”
“I don’t know.” Not the lie it sounded like! “Pretty sure the earth didn’t swallow him up.”
She assessed the damage with a few bird-like turns of her head. “There’s not much glass.” She crinkled her nose. “Do you know what that smell is?”
Pleasantly for her, most of the stink had been funneled into the void. Justin started to get up, but one foot skidded out from under him when he put his weight on it. He sat awkwardly with leg outstretched. The attendant had skipped back several prudent steps, and waved toward his less trustworthy foot. “What’s that?”
He shifted the foot aside, drew his leg in, and huddled forward for a closer squint. The item on the floor had the circumference of a pancake, and was related to humanity somehow, but was hard to define because it was so out of context. Aha! Palazzo’s majestic head of wavy silver hair really had been a toupee. “It’s Palazzo’s,” he told the girl, who persisted in her puzzled stare. “Looks like he flipped his wig,” Justin hinted. Comprehension dawned. Understandably, she made no move to pick it up.
He managed to stand. He might be in shock, but theorized that if he chose not to think about it, he could function indefinitely. “Look, if you’re not busy, help me load the rest of my stuff in the van, will you?”
“Are you sure it’s all right? I thought Dr. Palazzo wanted everything to stay.”
“He left it up to me.” Was that less than a half-truth? Did it matter? “Now come on. I want to be in the Catskills by nightfall.”
She wavered as if tossing a figurative penny, then with a fraction of a nod capitulated. What the hell, why not? A bigger relief than Justin dared let on! Sooner or later, Palazzo’s disappearance would be police business, and they might well talk to the girl and go from there. Justin gave her two frames to carry at a time, and dawdled so that she always went out by herself. The more trips she made, the more chances she had to snoop around the van, fore and aft, and ascertain that it contained no corpus delicti.
He thanked her afterward, but she only made a noncommittal sound and scurried for the shelter of the List Building. Was he really such an unnerving presence? Just as well she was gone, anyhow. A bothersome soreness and itch below his left ribs called for investigation. He untucked his shirt. Thank God the psychic link was compromised when the careless alien faltered onto the hole! Otherwise, instead of a puffy, flaming red welt, wide and round as a CD, he’d have an empathic third-degree burn to explain at the emergency room. He was a lucky bastard all right. Even if he was stuck with the bed-and-breakfast bill.
He hit the road. Minutes later, according to a sign on the median strip, Massachusetts welcomed him. He’d made a scot-free getaway, or had he? Ten days went by, in which the angry red welt faded; he e-mailed the gallery director an unacknowledged apology for yanking the show, and he reframed his photos, and then the phone rang. The Providence police wanted to have their inevitable talk, and he obliged them on the way home from his Philly opening. They recorded the diffident, submissive Justin for posterity. His account contained no untruths and hoisted no red flags. He did omit any nonsense about nostalgic hallucination, hostile alien, hole in space, and kicking Palazzo into that hole. In the official version, he fell unconscious during a local tremor that interrupted an argument with Palazzo, and when he came to, Palazzo was gone. The police didn’t ask about Palazzo’s toupee. It must have landed in the trash before anyone realized what it was, before Palazzo was numbered among the missing. And the gallery attendant had forgotten or hadn’t troubled to mention it. Justin owed her for that!
The police let him go. He was undeniably the last man on earth to see Palazzo alive, but only he knew that for a fact, and Palazzo must have had longer-standing, uglier imbroglios with others. Hopefully Justin was shut of Providence forever. Foolhardy to second-guess when next the stars above town would be “right” again!
Behind the wheel, it gave him pause to consider how blithely he was sidestepping any remorse about his role in Palazzo’s demise. Technically, he’d killed the guy, unavoidably or not, willfully or not. But what about the hundreds of more cold-blooded, premeditated murders on the books that went unsolved? Plainly a crowded field of killers had learned to live with themselves, and go to work every day, and get married, and raise kids, and collect a pension. Justin wasn’t even asking as much of life as all that. He too would learn to live with himself, just as he had learned the ropes of so many careers in his checkered adulthood. That malaise seeping up from the bedrock of his conscience would settle down if he ignored it, and stay down for months or years like any of his other wellsprings of guilt. What good would confession do himself or anybody? He was under no illusion that a jail cell or padded cell would “cleanse” him. To be honest, wasn’t the world better off minus one arrogant yuppie?
Next afternoon, he was in his sunny, cluttered parlor, with its rugged mountai
n view that had seemed so breathtaking, prior to his glimpse of interstellar gulf. He was finally unpacking the duffel bag in which dirty clothes had accumulated since homecoming weekend. He should have emptied it before stuffing in more to wear in Philly, but if he’d arrived at a greater appreciation of anything lately, it would be that he wasn’t perfect.
From the bottom of upended sack, his digital camera plopped onto a cushion of stale shirts. He couldn’t figure out what it was for a second. He started picking it up, then slung it across the table as if it were electrified. In it was documentation, unique in human history, immensely valuable, of alien life, of alien interaction with this unwitting planet. Personally, on the other hand, it was a reminder of near-death experience, a preamble to homicide. If his eyes lingered on the camera for any time, that dizziness from back in the B&B, when he thought he would topple into that viewfinder miniature of a cosmic gateway, overtook him again. Would he always be a fish with an immaterial hook in his lip to draw him into that hole?
He went on with life, as he trusted he would, crisscrossing the world on photo shoots, exhibiting his work, making enough money, and he let the digital camera gather cobwebs where it lay, religiously averting his eyes from it. He never felt or acted particularly crazy, to the best of his knowledge, not even when visitors were apparently looking at his dusty camera on the table, and he startled them by roaring, “There’s your murderer, right in there!” Nobody ever dared inquire what he meant, and he always seemed fine after a minute of probing lower lip with upper incisors, as if for a foreign object.
Howling In The Dark
DARRELL SCHWEITZER
Darrell Schweitzer is a prolific fiction writer, critic, and editor. Among his short story collections are We Are All Legends (Doning, 1982), Tom O’Bedlam’s Night Out (Ganley, 1985), Transients and Other Disquieting Stories (Ganley, 1993), Refugees from an Imaginary Country (Owlswick/Ganley, 1999), Necromancies and Netherworlds (with Jason Van Hollander; Wildside Press, 1999), Nightscapes (Wildside Press, 2000), and The Great World and the Small (Wildside Press, 2001). He has written the novels The Shattered Goddess (Donning, 1982), The White Isle (Weird Tales Library/Owlswick, 1989), and The Mask of the Sorcerer (New English Library, 1995). Sekenre: The Book of the Sorcerer (Wildside Press, 2004) is a volume of linked sequels to The Mask of the Sorcerer, and Living with the Dead (PS Publishing, 2008) is a story-cycle/novella. He has compiled many anthologies of criticism of horror and fantasy fiction and was the editor of Weird Tales from 1988 to 2007.
He sits there in the dark, silent, a hard, lean man of truly indeterminate age, like a creature of living stone. If his eyes seem glowing, that is my imagination. No, they are not.
He wants me to tell this story, so that I may slough it off.
I WASN’T AFRAID OF THE DARK AS A CHILD. NO, IN FACT, I enjoyed it. Where my older sister Ann used to huddle at the edge of her bed with her face as close to the nightlight as possible until she got to sleep, I would, whenever I could, listen to her breathing and wait until she was clearly asleep, and then reach over and remove the nightlight from the wall.
The dark contained things that the lighted bedroom did not. I knew that even then. I could feel presences. Hard to define more than that. Not ghosts, because they were not remnants of former living people, or human at all. Not guardian angels, because they were not angelic, nor were they in any sense my guardians. But something. There. All around me. Passing to and fro and up and down in the darkness on their own, incomprehensible business, in their own way beckoning me to follow them into spaces far beyond the walls and ceiling of the tiny bedroom.
Then, inevitably, my sister would wake up screaming.
When we were old enough to have separate bedrooms, that solved the immediate problem, but it was not enough. My mother would all too often come in and put her arms around me and ask Why are you sitting here in the dark? What are you afraid of? and I could not answer her. Not truthfully, anyway. Because I did not know the answer. But I wasn’t afraid.
Sometimes I would drop silently out the window onto the lawn very late at night, into the darkness when the moon was down. I’d stand there in the darkness, under the eaves of the house, as if the roof provided me with a little extra shadow; in my pajamas or just in shorts, barefoot, and if it was cold that was all the better because I wanted the dark to touch me, to embrace me and take me away into the remote reaches of itself, and if I shivered or my toes burned from the cold, that was a good thing. It was an answer. It was the dark acknowledging that I was there.
I’d look up at the stars and imagine myself swimming among them, into some greater darkness, to the rim of some black whirlpool that would carry me down, down and away from even their faint light.
“Are you crazy? You’ll catch your death of cold!” was what my mother inevitably said when I got caught. There would be a scolding, followed by hot chocolate, being bundled up in an oversized robe, and eventually being led back to bed.
Yet I could provide no explanation for my behavior. Mom began to talk about doctors and psychiatrists.
There are no words, the man in the dark tells me, the ageless man whose eyes are not glowing. No explanations that can be put into words. Never.
There was a particularly inexplicable incident when I was thirteen and was discovered early one morning by a ranger in Valley Forge Park, twenty miles from where I lived, in the middle of a low-lying area that was half woods and half swamp. It was November and the half-frozen ground crunched underfoot. Here I was wearing only a particularly ragged pair of denim cut-offs, soaked, muddy, exhausted from hypothermia and covered with bruises.
I couldn’t remember very much. There were a lot of questions, from the police, from doctors; and yet another round of bundling the poor little darling up nice and warm and giving him hot chocolate. What I did know was more about how I had touched the presences in the darkness and how they had borne me up into the night sky on vast and flapping wings. But they carried me only for a moment, either because I was afraid, or because I was not ready, or because I was not worthy.
So they let go, and I tumbled into the woods, crashing through the branches, which was how I’d gotten the bruises.
Nobody wants to hear about that. I refused to tell.
It was only after a particularly tearful display on my mother’s part that I was allowed to go home at all.
Oh, I knew what my interrogators wanted me to say. Things were not going well at home, it was true. My father and mother screamed at one another. There were fights, violent ones. Things got smashed up. My sister Ann had bloated up into a 300-pound, terminally depressed monstrosity, who was ceaselessly excoriated by the kids at school as a retard, a whore, and a smelly bag of shit. I got a lot of that too, as the kid brother of same. Ann used to sit up long nights in the bright glare of lights cutting herself all over with a razor, carving intricate hieroglyphs into her too, too voluminous flesh, so that the pain would reassure her that she was somehow still alive.
She had her little ways. I had mine.
I was beaten regularly too, usually by my father, with fists or a belt or whatever happened to be handy, but no, it wasn’t like what the police or the doctors or my teachers were trying to get me to blurt out. No one had the slightest lustful interest in my nubile young body. I was just the weird and silent kid at the back of the class who had a secret he didn’t want to share, who would never make it as a poster boy for child abuse.
Such preconceptions must be cast aside. Humanity must be cast aside. Sloughed off.
I met the living stone man whose eyes do not really glow on the night my mother and sister both committed suicide. We will not go into details. Those things must be cast aside. Lives end. My mother, who had been a teacher, and my sister, who wanted to be a singer, terminated themselves. My father, who worked as an electrician when he managed to work, would drink himself to death within the year.
It is the way of things, which are to be sloughed off, discarded and forgotten.
; That night, relishing both the cold and the danger—it was winter; there was snow on the ground—I went out into the back yard, completely naked. I understood by then that if you are to surrender yourself utterly to the darkness, you must achieve total vulnerability, which is why virgin sacrifices are always naked.
The stone man, whom I had known only in dreams before that night, was waiting for me. He took me by the hand. His touch was indeed as hard and fleshless as living stone, and yet somehow lighter in a way my senses could not define, as if he were only partially made of material substance at all.
He led me into the further dark, heedless of my nakedness, because the human body is just one more thing to be sloughed off in the darkness, and of no interest to him. If we are to achieve our place in the whirling darkness beyond the stars, he explained to me, inside my head without words, we must become nihil, nothing.
He didn’t have a name. Childishly, I made up a whole series of names for him, Mr. Graveshadow, Mr. Midnightman, Mr. Deathwalker, but names, too, are to be sloughed off.
I remember opening the back gate, but beyond that I do not think we walked through familiar places at all, certainly not across suburban back yards and streets, beneath the widely spaced streetlights, the strange, dark man and the naked, pale boy, who surely would have caused some consternation when caught in the headlights of the occasional passing car.
