Black Wings of Cthulhu

by S. T. Joshi

  “How can the underground things stay secret?”

  “We don’t know—but sometimes you can be near something for a long time and not know it’s there. We’ve been trying to find other people who know about them. Once, we thought we’d found someone. He wrote in a magazine that he’d been exploring a deep cave and had seen moving white things in a grotto, but he wouldn’t respond to our letters asking if he’d had strange dreams. We tried to tell him about how the underground world is inhabited by these creatures and how they may threaten us. The world is a confusing place, David, and we alone had discovered the strangest thing about it. The man who wrote the article teaches at a university, and in the article he said he believes that there may be many discoveries yet to come about life underground. But we gave up writing to him.”

  Grandfather’s voice wavered slightly. “Most of us are tired now, David, like Turnbull’s wife, but still afraid. Now and then one of us tried to tell someone else about the creatures, but no one believed—because none of their experiences included what was seen in the tunnel that day. They are right not to believe, David, because what was seen doesn’t jibe with what’s known. When we began to dream about them again, there was usually time to move, pack up, and run. But we’re getting old, and we can’t run anymore.”

  His voice weakened. “We kept the secret from our children for a long time. Your Aunt Evelyn found out because she came back to live with us. Your mother was lucky because she’d grown up during a time when there weren’t any bad dreams. We think the dreams come when the things are near, and they affect those close to us. When the children were growing up, we had to move only once, from Minnesota to Montana. When all our children were old enough, we told them the story, but they didn’t know what to think about it. We told your father, too, but he thought we were crazy. He said maybe we had been given drugs in our water supply down in the tunnel.”

  “Where’s Mother?” I asked. “Why didn’t she take me with her?”

  His hands shook slightly. “We haven’t heard from her. She was very upset after her divorce from your father. She talked about getting an apartment and finding a job before sending for you. She knew you’d be safe for a while. We couldn’t understand why she didn’t tell anyone before she left. It was very cruel, David, and we didn’t know what to say or do. We’re sure she’ll come back for you, David. Perhaps she started to have dreams, too.”

  Aunt Evelyn came into the kitchen.

  “Most of us decided to stay,” Grandfather continued, “to keep watch, and see what happens, though the dreams are strong now.” He smiled grimly. “It’s early, but I’m going to take your grandmother’s watch now. Mr. Sorensen will take my place in two hours. We are going to take turns listening in the basement. Our only chance now is to wait for them.”

  “Maybe it’s just dreams, Grandfather!”

  Grandfather eased me off his lap. He bent forward and hugged me with his lumberman’s strength.

  Then he brushed by Aunt Evelyn and went out through the living room. I started to run after him, but my aunt grabbed me and held onto me.

  Grandfather left to go downstairs.

  My mind, half numb, groped for whatever reality I could cling to in my now disassembled universe: the horrible creatures, Grandfather’s story. Might there not have been some other explanation for the dreams?

  I went into the living room and sat on the sofa. Finally I said, “We have to get help!”

  “Yes,” said my aunt, “when the time comes.” She reached out and gripped me gently by the shoulder.

  I got up, broke angrily free of her grip, and ran out of the apartment into the hall. I hurried down the main stairs and to the cellar door.

  I went down into the basement. Grandfather rocked peacefully in the chair. He was holding a book, and looked up at me slowly. Grandmother turned to leave, then also saw me.

  “David. My God, what are you...down here again! Listen to me! Get upstairs right now!” Her voice echoed among the foundation posts.

  “I...can’t,” I said. “Not until you come.”

  Grandfather got up from the chair, took me firmly by the hand, and they both led me up the basement stairs.

  “Come on, David!” said Grandmother.

  “I’d better stay,” said Grandfather.

  “No!” I yelled.

  “Better help me get him upstairs,” said Grandmother. “It won’t take but a few seconds.”

  We three came out of the basement and rounded the landing halfway to the second floor while I slid my hand miserably along the railing.

  I was put to bed. The room was black except for a bit of light that shafted under the door, illuminating a few floorboards. I listened intently for my grandparents, wishing the time forward. I fought to keep from calling out, and the window shade next to my bureau seemed to symbolize what had been kept from me. After a time, I fell asleep.

  Our ability to confirm the memories of childhood is often based upon cruel or doubtful reconstructions, but it was in the confusion that followed that I learned how tenuous our grip on reality can be.

  I was awakened by a frightening noise.

  A thunder sound, coming up from far below, tore at my senses. I’d never heard a sound like it—or was I dreaming?—the sound of thick concrete cracking deep down in the basement. The building shook slightly, as if in an earthquake.

  I jumped out of bed and rushed into the living room, where my aunt grabbed onto me. Ripping my pajama top, I wrenched free of her and ran out into the upper hall. I had to find Grandfather. I heard his familiar voice coming up from the stairwell.

  “Timing!” he yelled angrily, his voice distinguishable amid the noises of people shouting and running in the hallways.

  I ran barefoot down the stairs, my aunt yelling after me. I got to the first floor. My grandfather was standing at the entrance to the cellar door. Huge cracking sounds, as of thick concrete snapping, wooden supports breaking, came from below. Mr. Sorensen was handing Grandfather cans of gasoline that he then poured down the cellar stairs. The other people in the entry hall, including my grandmother, began to run back up the stairs or out through the front door. People were yelling “Fire!” They ran through near or far exits of the building. Mrs. Schulte stayed behind. She was holding two unlit torches. One of these she passed to Grandfather, who tensely lit it with a cigarette lighter and then threw it down into the cellar. Flames quickly roared up through the cellar door as Grandfather and Mrs. Schulte backed away. Grandfather turned, saw me standing there, ran toward me, picked me up in his huge hands, and, without seeming to think, bounded back up the stairs with me in his arms.

  He set me down on the second-floor landing.

  “Stay here!” he yelled at me. “I was supposed to be on the first floor!”

  I grabbed onto him. “No!”

  He got loose from me and stumbled back down the stairs to the entry hall. The hot flames burst across the downstairs ceiling and licked up into the stairwell. I heard a commotion. I looked up, and there were other tenants, the familiar faces I knew, peering down from the various landings toward Grandfather, who yelled up at them from below. “Get to the fire escapes!” Then he turned his attention to a red-framed glass box on the wall. I’d seen it many times before. He grabbed the little hammer and smashed the glass. The alarm, which was attached to our apartment house, rang fiendishly in the alley out by the garbage cans. Now Mr. Sorensen, holding two more cans of gasoline, rushed by me on the landing. Grandfather came up the stairs to meet him, and together they poured the gasoline, which sloshed down the stairs, splashing onto the walls and railing.

  The cans were almost empty when we heard what sounded like the floor below breaking all along the length of the building. We heard people yelling “Fire!” and banging on doors in the distance. Mrs. Schulte, from a few steps up, handed Mr. Sorensen the second handmade torch, this time already lit. Grandfather tossed it down onto the stairs where the gasoline pooled and dripped into the soaking carpet. The stairwell exp
loded in a tempest of heat and flames. The walls, carpet, and woodwork caught fire all at once. While I was dragged up to the fourth floor, I looked down into the roaring conflagration. People die in fires, I thought. Die!

  An acrid smell filled the air. In the flames and smoke I saw something alive. Something monstrously white was writhing in or behind the waves of heat, fire, and smoke roaring up the stairwell. A second one appeared. Then up into the mid-air blackness, screaming, I was lifted and carried into our apartment. Grandmother, Grandfather, Aunt Evelyn, and I made our exit through the big double-hung kitchen window and out onto the fire escape. We descended amid the sounds of the fire station alarm and the apartment alarm. Other tenants did the same. A fire engine roared around to the front of the apartment building while we huddled on the lower escape landing. Grandfather lowered a metal ladder—an object I’d always failed to see because it had been part of the metal grid. We climbed down to the pavement.

  The old people gathered near the fire station wall. They whispered to each other in the darkness; then, in a group, they moved down the alley and out to the street in front of the old apartment building.

  I watched the firemen point their brass-nozzle hoses toward the orange flames that beat out of the second-story windows like tattered rags in a harsh wind. People were talking, shouting, while the alarms continued to sound. I stood on the cool pavement while the fire spread upward.

  That building, which on the outside looked like one of Poe’s haunted mansions and on the inside like a tomb, was now engulfed in flames. The firefighters had been right next door, but the fire had started so quickly and spread so fast that even the advantage of location was minimized, and in the glow of the fire people were expressing astonishment all around me, now pointing toward the burning roof. The alley was soon blocked by policemen, and I could only stand with my bare feet on the pavement and gaze at the tall brick walls. High up, at the fire escape landing, smoke poured through our broken kitchen window. I heard the sounds of breaking glass and hissing steam; and finally, as the fire was at last extinguished in that huge sooty building, the survivors remained huddled together, the crowd thinned out, and within the hour I could hear the lonely sound of dripping water.

  There was the familiar face of John, the fireman, from Station No. 7, standing next to us, looking upward at the black windows, annoyed and bewildered. He looked at the dozen anxious wrinkled faces in the darkness.

  When he spoke, some unaccountable fragment of confusion clung to his words. “How’d it start?” he asked quietly.

  Grandfather looked at John for a few seconds, watching his youthful face, seeming to ponder an act of trust that I later realized might have been planned, but in the end he said nothing.

  John removed his helmet and ran his hand through a tangle of thick brown hair. He was uneasy, frightened, looking back at my grandfather’s silent expression, visions perhaps of something incredible retreating in the flames. He looked at the old faces.

  “What in God’s name were they?” he asked.

  IT WAS SWEPT INTO THE PAST, ALL THE UNACCEPTABLE facts or fantasies, but I stayed the rest of that night and all the next day in the fire station. Our dark blue 1940 Ford miraculously contained family treasures—photo albums, jewelry, clothing, a few books, some phonograph records, and even some of my toys—all the important things that had been placed in it by Grandmother and Aunt.

  My mother found out about the fire. She returned and took me away to the suburbs, where I went to grade school. No one ever admitted starting the fire, so it was attributed to persons unknown. Aunt Evelyn eventually moved to Boise, Idaho, while my grandparents went south to California.

  My mother tried to make me forget what she called a cult of delusion and the fantasies told by my grandfather of his days in the Hudson tubes. It was a story concocted to scare off non-union workers, she said—and in time I might have begun to question the reality of my dreams and the accuracy of my memories.

  Yet, even as she spoke, the Seattle papers printed the story of unexplained tunnels under the old apartment building, nearly vertical tunnels that had collapsed into unaccountable depths.

  City officials chose not to speculate as to the origin of the passages, the men of Fire Station No. 7 declined comment, and the mysterious holes were eventually filled by many tons of earth and rock.

  My grandparents passed away, and Aunt Evelyn, now eighty-six, has not reported any bad dreams. Yet I wonder if workers in some underground project will make a new report. Has some shift in habitat or consciousness started to bring the worms to the surface? Given what I have seen, and what we know of their tiny brethren on our planet, their number may be too horrifying to contemplate.

  The Correspondence of Cameron Thaddeus Nash

  ANNOTATED BY RAMSEY CAMPBELL

  Ramsey Campbell is one of the most distinguished authors of supernatural fiction of his generation. He published a collection of Cthulhu Mythos tales, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Other Unwelcome Tenants (Arkham House, 1964), at the age of eighteen. His second collection, Demons by Daylight (1973), was a landmark in the history of weird fiction. Among his later collections are Dark Companions (Macmillan, 1982), Waking Nightmares (Tor, 1991), Alone with the Horrors (Arkham House, 1993), and Told by the Dead (PS Publishing, 2003). Among his many novels are Incarnate (Macmillan, 1983), Midnight Sun (Macdonald, 1990), The Long Lost (Headline, 1993), The House on Nazareth Hill (Headline Feature, 1996), and The Darkest Part of the Woods (PS Publishing, 2002). Most of his Lovecraftian tales were gathered in Cold Print (Tor, 1985; rev. ed. Headline, 1993). PS Publishing is to publish the definitive set of his Lovecraftian short fiction.

  IN 1968 AUGUST DERLETH WAS SENT A NUMBER OF letters that had apparently been received by H. P. Lovecraft. The anonymous parcel bore no return address. Although the letters had been typed on a vintage machine and on paper that appeared to be decades old, Derleth was undecided whether they were authentic. For instance, he was unsure that someone living in a small English village in the 1920s would have had access to issues of Weird Tales, and he could find no obvious references to Nash in any of Lovecraft’s surviving correspondence. Derleth considered printing some or all of Nash’s letters in the Arkham Collector but decided against using them in the Winter 1969 issue devoted to Lovecraft. Later he asked me to think about writing an essay on Lovecraft for a new Lovecraftian volume that might offer the letters a home, but the project was shelved. Intrigued by his references to the Nash letters, I persuaded him to send me copies, including the other documents. It isn’t clear what happened to the originals. When I visited Arkham House in 1975, James Turner knew nothing about them, and he was subsequently unable to trace them. He did mention that in Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside, Frank Belknap Long referred to an English writer who “thought it was amusing to call people names,” by whom Lovecraft had supposedly been troubled for several years. Since Long was unable to be more specific, Turner deleted the reference. I reproduce all the letters here, followed by the final documents. Nash’s signature is florid and extends across the page. It grows larger but less legible as the correspondence progresses.

  7, Grey Mare Lane,

  Long Bredy,

  West Dorset,

  Great Britain.

  April 29th, 1925

  My dear Mr. Lovecraft,

  FORGIVE A SIMPLE ENGLISH VILLAGER FOR TROUBLING such a celebrated figure as yourself. I trust that the proprietors of your chosen publication will not think it too weird that a mere reader should seek to communicate with his idol. As I pen these words I wonder if they might not more properly have been addressed to the eerie letter-column of that magazine. My fear is that the editor would find them unworthy of ink, however, and so I take the greater risk of directing them to you. I pray that he will not find me so presumptuous that he forwards them no farther than the bin beside his desk.

  May I come swiftly to my poor excuse for this intrusion into your inestimably precious time? I have sampled six issues of t
he Unique Magazine, and I am sure you must be aware that it has but a single claim to uniqueness—the contributions of your good self. I scarcely know whether to marvel or to be moved that you should allow them to appear amongst the motley fancies which infest the pages of the journal. Do you intend to educate the other contributors by your example? Are you not concerned that the ignorant reader may be repelled by this commonplace herd, thereby failing to discover the visions which you offer? The company in which you find yourself reads like the scribbling of hacks who have never dared to dream. I wish that the magazine would at least emblazon your name on the cover of every number which contains your prose. I promise you that on the occasion when I mistakenly bought an issue which had neglected to feature your work, I rent it into shreds so small that not a single vapid sentence could survive.

  I am conscious how far any words of mine will fall short of conveying my admiration of your work. May I simply isolate those elements which remain liveliest in my mind? Your parable of Dagon seems to tell a truth at which the compilers of the Bible scarcely dared to hint, but I am most intrigued by the dreams which the narrator is afraid to remember in daylight. The quarry of your hideous hound declares that his fate is no dream, yet to this English reader it suggests one, brought on by the banal Baskerville investigations of Sherlock Holmes. Your narrator de la Poer dreams whilst awake, but are these reveries shaped by awful reality or the reverse? As for the descendant of the African union, perhaps he never dreams of his own nature because he has a germ in him—the same germ which infects the minds of all those who believe we are as soulless as the ape. But it is your hypnotic tale of Hypnos which exerts the firmest hold on my imagination. May I press you to reveal its source? Does it perhaps hint at your own experience?1