Dark Aeons

by Z. M. Wilmot



  Dark Aeons

  Z. M. Wilmot

  Copyright Z. M. Wilmot 2012

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Books by Z. M. Wilmot

  The Jakken Trilogy

  The Loneliness of Stars

  The Light of Civilization

  The Libel of Blood

  Other Works

  Dark Aeons

  For a current and complete list of books, go to:

  https://zmwilmot.com

  Many thanks to my editors and literary advisors, Jacob G. Adams and Peter Merlin, who offered me their valuable insights into my writing on many of the dark tales that follow. This collection would not be the same without their help, and would doubtless have remained a horrible, jumbled conglomeration of letters that would have driven even the most stoic reader mad. Thank them for your sanity.

  Introduction

  This work of horror began as a single story, "Winds of Madness," which was actually based upon a piece of fan fiction I wrote a long time ago. The story was an excuse for me to have fun with the English language, giving me the opportunity to describe outlandish scenes and a poor being's descent into madness, tossed about on indescribable winds. That initial, very short story morphed into the very first (and, in my humble opinion, the best) story of this collection.

  Following the completion of "Winds of Madness," and in the midst of me reading a large amount of H. P. Lovecraft, I came up with the idea to write a number of short stories and novellas and put them together into one collection. Mr. Lovecraft's influence is especially clear in the novella "Parallax," which bears a striking resemblance to his tale "From Beyond," which I believe strongly and unconsciously influences my own work. The two tales, while based upon a similar idea, go in very different directions, and I personally feel as if the two are complements, and variations on a theme.

  The process of writing and compiling this work has taken me about three years, and now the final product sits before you, dear reader. The tales contained in this volume are highly unusual, and the writing is often experimental in nature. I have focused, in many of the stories, on creating a nightmarish dreamscape, and the terrifying situations and places that the characters find themselves in is often more important than characters and plot in what is to follow.

  From the prose poems of "Dark Prophecy," "The Parasite," "The Playground," and "Lord of Carrion," to terrifying visions of torment in "Hell Factory" and "The Man in Amber;" from the more standard horror stories of "The Silver Door," "Singing in the Rain," and "The Horror in the Woods," to the science fiction tales of "Station Fourteen" and "The Derelict;" from the ancient Roman legend of "The Vessel" to the century-spanning "Afflatus Divine;" from the dark poems of "What Walks Under Moonlight," "The Loneliness of the Spheres," and "Dark Aeons" itself to the grotesque tale of "Sally," and from the tiny "Wolf's Key" and "Ascension," to the novella "Parallax;" this collection covers a wide range of writing styles and subjects. Every single tale contained therein, however, is bound together by the common thread of eternal horror, which plagues our dreams at night and our thoughts during the day, that always lurks at the just out of sight, and just in mind. Enjoy, and be afraid.

  Z. M. Wilmot

  Winds of Madness

  I

  He came to us on the eve of February the twenty-eighth, at precisely seven o’clock, one year ago. I remember the night well, for a terrible storm had been brewing all day, and the forecasts had promised us all a week to remember. Like most of our patients, he did not admit himself to our esteemed institute, but was brought instead by a worried mother.

  I was on duty at the door, only having been acquired a couple of years past by the Institute, and I was quite taken aback at her grand entrance. She entered the reception area behind a filthy wheelbarrow, her muscular arms tightly gripping the rotting wooden handles. Moments before, the large doors had been flung open with such force that I had feared they would fly off of their hinges, and this mad woman had burst in. I surmised that she had taken the ramp to get to the level of the door, as the stairs would have been exceedingly difficult to mount with her vehicle.

  But however she may have arrived here, she pushed her way through the doors, barely managing to keep her wheelbarrow level. Dirt and mud flaked off of the wheel and basket, falling to the polished white floor. I admit, for a moment I was rather peeved at the woman; having someone nearly break down a very expensive door and then lug an unseemly farming implement into the freshly-cleaned lobby of one of the nation’s most prestigious mental institutions was not something to warm the heart of an employee.

  Nevertheless, I did my best to put on a smile for her and stood up from behind my mahogany desk. I politely asked her what she was doing here, and if she wished to obtain treatment for herself.

  She shook her head mutely and pointed down at her wheelbarrow. Peering down over my desk, I noticed for the first time that there was a person lying inside that wheelbarrow, covered in all manner of foul-looking dirt and grass. He was curled up so that his entire person fit inside the confines of the basket, his head resting peacefully in his arms.

  At that point, I became rather alarmed, and I rushed around to the front of my desk and knelt by the wheelbarrow. “My God, woman, what have you done?” I asked, horrified at her treatment of a fellow human being.

  “I di’nt der it, yer blind fool,” she snapped at me, her voice having that drawling quality that was common amongst the peoples of the countryside. “He done gone an’ di’ it ta’ hi’self, I tell ya’.”

  I looked up at the woman unbelievingly. “So what you mean to say is that he went and got himself this filthy, and then crawled into the wheelbarrow and waited for you to push him here?”

  “Naw, I ain’t sayin’ that. What I’ma sayin’ is that he dun gone crazy, an’ he’s been scarin’ me an’ little Johnnyboy wit’ his talk of win’s an’ tings comin’ down’ from da’ sky. He dun’ and tried ta dig hisself a hole unnergroun’, tryin’ ta hide from da’ whatevers it is dat was tryin’ ta get at ‘im.”

  She leaned closer to me and whispered very loudly, “He ain’t right in ‘is mind, no he ain’t. I wan’ yer ter help him out a bit, an’ see wha’s wrong wit’ ‘im.”

  I stood up straight and faced her, my considerable height allowing me to stare down at her. She didn’t back down in the slightest. After a moment, I nodded. “Very well.” I walked back to my desk and sat down. I beckoned for her to come forward, and took out a writing pen. “What’s your name, then?” I asked her, masking whatever the disbelief and anger moving through my mind.

  “Donna Marley, goo’sir.” I nodded and wrote it down in the record-book.

  “And how exactly do you plan on paying your fees, Mrs. Marley?”

  She looked taken aback. “Fees? I wa’ told dat dey look’d at yer fer free in da city.”

  I shook my head sadly at her. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but not here. This is a private Institution. If you take him to one of the public ones…”

  She shook her head violently. “Naw, naw, naw, that won’t der ‘tall. He needs the bestest care, I say. I won’ settle fer anytin’ less, yer mark my wor’s.”

  I sighed. “I’m dreadfully sorry, Mrs. Marley, but I simply don’t have the authority to allow your son to be treated here.”

  She gave me a glare that would have raised the dead, her eyes burning like balefire, then rummaged about in her patchwork dress until she pulled out an old, wrinkled piece of paper. She held it out to me, hand quivering. I gingerly took the paper from her trembling fingers, fearing that it would crumble in my own. I brought it close to my face and peered at the scrawling script upon it. It read out to be a simple request:

  To Whomever it May Con
cern,

  It is requested that whomever is receiving this letter please listen to the words of the bearer of said letter, and carry out any requests that may be asked of you. You shall be reimbursed upon contact with me.

  Your friend,

  Donald Quersenn

  I lay the letter down upon the desk. Donald Quersenn was the late founder of this institution, having passed away just three years prior. When I informed the woman of this, she nearly burst into tears.

  “Plers, sir, ‘e an’ li’l Johnnyboy ar’ all I has left! I can’ let ‘im jus’ waste away!”

  At that moment, my superior, Doctor Fairgen, walked in through the door that led to his office. He gave the woman an odd look, then turned to me, asking me who it was that stood before me so. I replied with her name and mentioned that her son needed treatment. At the mention of her name, he took a step back, and peered at the woman with a renewed interest.

  “Donna Marley, you say?” She turned to him, seeing quite obviously that she would have more luck with him than me, and nodded. He spent another moment studying her, and then nodded, apparently satisfied. “Admit her son, Dr. Jueger. We will be paid.” I started to stammer a protest, feeling hurt that this woman had apparently beaten me, but stifled it upon the look that Fairgen shot me. Instead, I merely nodded and proceeded to take down the rest of the required information as she answered my questions.

  Name of Petitioner: Donna Marley

  Name of Patient: Darien Marley, Jr.

  Age of Patient: 12

  Reason For Treatment: Hallucinations, Irrational fear of wind, Desire to bury self under earth

  Room Assignment: 412

  Payment Methods: To be obtained at later date

  This task done, I closed the record book and phoned the fourth floor, asking them to ready room number four hundred and twelve as rapidly as they could. After writing the new patient’s name next to his room on the housekeeping sheet, we waited in awkward silence for an orderly to arrive and escort her son to his new room. The mother bade the boy, who was seemingly unconscious, a tearful goodbye, and waited for the orderly to lift the boy out from the wheelbarrow and exit the room towards the stairwell. The woman waited until her son was completely out of sight before lifting again the handles of the filth-encrusted wheelbarrow and wheeling it out the door, roughly kicking it open, again causing me to fear for the structural integrity of its hinges.

  The rest of the night passed uneventfully, aside from the pouring rain that began to fall not five minutes after Mrs. Marley left. I wondered how she was faring through the rain; it was falling harder than I had ever seen it fall in this season before. It was only later that I learned that she had, in fact, drowned in a ditch just outside of the city. I never learned what became of her “Johnnyboy.”

  II

  An incident like that is not something easily forgotten, and whenever I had the time to spare, would follow the interesting case of the young Mr. Darien Marley. He went through seven doctors in his first year, none of them able to help him in the slightest, and all of them unnerved by his queer manner of speech and his terrible imaginings. Of those seven doctors, only two still work with us today. Three of the seven resigned shortly after their time with young Darien, and two of them were killed in mysterious accidents. The young man acquired quite a reputation at the Institution, and most doctors became afraid to touch him.

  Why we kept him I shall never know. His bills were paid by an anonymous donor, presumably a relative of Mr. Quersenn, but I was discouraged from questioning it overly much. I learned to be content with reading the doctors’ reports on him for the first year of his residence with us.

  I was promoted out from my secretarial position to that of a real doctor shortly before Darien’s first year at the Institution came to a close. I had been educated at a rather prestigious Psychiatric Institute, and I had been rather unhappy when the only work offered to me was that of a secretary. Nonetheless, I had accepted the job, seeing no better opportunities available at the time. I had been working that job for nearly two and a half years before Darien Marley was wheelbarrowed through the Institution’s front doors.

  Mere minutes after I was informed of my promotion I was given my first patient, and it was to be none other than Darien Marley. In preparation for my first meeting with him the next day, I reviewed all of the files that I had read so many times, in an attempt to come up with my own diagnosis and solution to the boy’s problems. Of course, I had about as much success as Darien’s previous doctors.

  As I began to look over their reports, I realized that it would take days to go through every little detail of what they had to say about the child, so I was forced to content myself with a brief summary of each doctor’s experiences and thoughts on the child, in the form of a short paragraph on the front page of their full report.

  Dr. Henry Kuttner (Still Employed): The boy babbled about voices on the wind. He seems to believe that they are trying to steal him away, and take him to a place he calls Seeraith Bolow – or at least that is the best way I can transcribe his words. He likes to be as close to the ground as possible, so I requested for his bed to be moved down there. I think he would be better on a lower floor, but we are so full now that he cannot be moved. He is incoherent much of the time, and frequently goes into hysterics, during which he attempts to dig through the floor. On April the second, the boy attacked me, and I was re-assigned on my request by the administration.

  Dr. Daniel Bigelow (Resigned): I can’t stand the child. He unnerves me more than any other patient I have ever had, though I have been told I had more success with him than my predecessor, Dr. Kuttner. Kuttner described him as being incoherent, but to me everything he says is perfectly clear, just nonsensical – what is this Seerayth Bowlo he talks about? I cannot for the life of me surmise as to how he got the thought into his head that the winds will carry him to this place. Did he have some traumatic event in his past? If he had living relatives we might chance to figure this out, but alas, he has none. No matter what I do to help him, he remains unchanged. I have tried everything. I chose, on April the 29th, to resign from my post at the Institution and seek work somewhere that does not keep me working on hopeless cases.

  Dr. Matthias Hemmell (Dead): The boy has issues – his fear of the wind has no known source. He tells me that the voices speak to him, and sometimes show him what they want to do to him. So far he has not been able to describe what it is the winds want with him, other than to take him to some dreadful place. He also seems to have an absurd fascination with blood, and has on several occasions bitten himself until he bleeds, so that he may draw strange symbols on the floor with his own life-force. NOTE: Dr. Hemmell was killed in a car accident on March the 28th.

  Dr. Herbert Weighton (Resigned): I lasted longer than all three of my predecessors, by some miracle from above. I doubted at first their words, but I see now that they told no lies; he writes on the floor in his own blood, drawing strange symbols that I cannot hope to recreate in writing, so complex were they. He appears to believe that the symbols will protect him when the winds came to drag him off to Seerayth Bolow. I have done some research, and concluded that the name he mentions sounds vaguely Gaelic. Could it possibly be spelled Cireadh Bolough? He will not answer. Halfway through my tenure, he withdrew into total silence, and would not speak. A week later, a terrible windstorm blew through the county, and the boy kept the entire building awake with screams of terror. I was forced to stand in front of the window in order to calm him even in the slightest. I could not take it anymore, and on July the sixth, I resigned from my post, giving the Institution my advice that the child be dropped, as he is not able to benefit from our care.

  Dr. Xavier Donalos (Dead): I requested that Darien’s window be boarded shut and the walls of his room padded to be soundproof. Somehow the Institution was able to pull out funds for the former, but not for the latter. The boarded window seemed to help him greatly, though he still felt the urge to paint the wood with his own blood. My
blood wouldn’t do; I offered once to do it for him, and he violently resisted my suggestion, attacking me physically. He accused me of being in league with the winds. NOTE: Dr. Xavier Donalos was killed in a fatal fall down the stairs on September the 2nd as he went to hand in his resignation after Darien assaulted him.

  Dr. Matthew Brighton (Still Employed): The child is very seriously disturbed. I, at my own expense, did what my late predecessor tried to do, and padded the walls of his room so as to make them soundproof, in order that he not hear the wind. I swear that the boy must be getting into my mind, for I noticed that shortly after I padded his room that the winds in the area picked up frightfully. Undoubtedly it is just my nerves. The boy claims that the winds can and still will reach him, and that I have only delayed them. When I asked him why the winds wanted to take him, he responded with a physical attack. I was re-assigned immediately on December the 18th.

  Dr. Benjamin Nevai (Resigned): Young Darien has gone through quite an astonishing array of doctors. I fear what may happen to me if I stay on with him for too long; I think I shall resign before anything too terrible happens. He continues drawing sigils in blood all over his room, and tells me how the winds will rise to sweep him away, towards that Cireadh Bolough place he babbles about. I asked him what would happen to him there, and instead of assaulting me physically like I had thought he would, he told me that they would strip him of his soul and send it spiraling upwards to the stars where their light would burn it forever. I think the boy is driving me mad as well, for I too have begun to hear voices upon the wind. I have resigned from my post on the basis of my own apparent failing mental health on January the 14th.

  And so, on January the 15th, I was to pick up where Nevai had left off. I immersed myself with the writings of my predecessors, and set about devising a plan of attack. It seemed that the one fatal flaw all of the boy’s previous doctors save Nevai had possessed was an inability to gain the boy’s trust. I thought that if perhaps I pretended to see what Darien himself saw upon the winds, I might be able to present myself to him as a kindred spirit, and so gain insight into his very soul in order that I be able to reach out to him, and help drag him out of the abyss of terror that he had fallen so deeply into.

  III

  I first visited him on that morning the 15th, at precisely eight o’clock. The door to his room was closed and locked, as per standard Institute policy. In my left arm I carried a simple writing pad, and in the fingers of that hand I tightly gripped a freshly sharpened pencil. I raised my right arm and closed my fingers into a fist, drawing back my wrist to knock. I hesitated a moment, fearing that if I failed my career would be doomed – or that perhaps something far worse would happen to me.

  Pushing those thoughts aside, I gently tapped upon the door to his private room with my knuckles. For a few moments there was no response, and so I rapped upon the door again, with more force this time. At this second knocking, a timid voice reached my ears, asking me who it was. I responded by saying that I was his new friend, after a moment of hesitation as I deliberated on how to describe myself to him. The relationship that I wished to develop with Darien was not that of a patient and doctor, but rather that of a pair of close friends.

  “You mean you’re my new doctor?” The voice was slightly bolder now, and I winced at the words I heard it speak, forcing me to throw out the idea of a relationship of friends.

  “Yes, if you wish to think of me in that way. May I come in?”

  “Can I stop you?” I jotted down a note on my pad – Remarkably quick-witted.

  I chose to ignore his comment, and warned him of my imminent arrival. I removed my key-ring from my pocket and inserted the proper key into the keyhole. I gently pushed the door open, just enough for me to enter the room, and then locked it behind me. It was only then that I looked upon the room in which I stood, that I had read so much about, and yet had never seen before with my own eyes.

  The first thing to catch my eye was the window – or the space where a window should be. Like Dr. Donalos had mentioned in his reports, the window was boarded up completely by seven thick wooden boards positioned horizontally across said window, completely blocking any view of the outdoors.

  The walls of the room would have been a bright white, like the rest of the Institution, had not they been covered with light blue padding. The padding was completely bare, and devoid of any features other than the crevices indicating where one pad ended and another began. To my right, in the corner farthest from the window, was Darien’s cot. It was a standard cot; about two feet off of the ground, with uniform white sheets, pillow, and comforter atop it, all made very neatly. The edges around the rectangular outline of the cot were raised in order to prevent distraught patients from too easily falling onto the hard floor. I wondered for a moment, as Doctor Kuttner claimed to have moved the boy’s bed to the ground. Perhaps a later doctor had failed to mention the fact that they raised it again, for whatever reason. If they had, it did not appear as if Darien had slept upon it at all.

  Upon turning my attention to the floor, I must confess that my breath caught in my throat and I thought I might faint. While I had read about the strange designs that Darien drew upon the floor in his own blood, it was not until that moment that I understood what Dr. Weighton had meant when he said that he had no hopes of transcribing the symbols before him.

  It is hard now to describe them; they were a vast collection of swirls, filling up almost all of the floor-space in the room, and were most concentrated in the areas closest to the window. I could make out no other discernible patterns to them other than a relatively clear space under his bed (though it is important to note here that swirls of blood surrounded the entirety of his cot) and the door, where I now stood.

  Just like the time when I had first seen young Darien, the boy himself was the last thing I noticed. He was rather small – by this time he was thirteen years of age – and white as bone. His entire body trembled slightly, and he looked at me with an odd mixture of excitement, intelligence, and fear. He was kneeling on the floor near his bed, his hands clasped together in his lap.

  I smiled down at him, ignoring the bloodstained floor as I walked towards him, arm extended. He did not rise or extend his own arm in return, but merely stared at mine. After a moment, I withdrew my offered hand, and squatted down on the floor in front of him. “May I call you Darien?”

  He shrugged and gazed down at the floor. I repeated my question, and he shrugged again. Sighing, I marked down another note on my pad: Largely unresponsive.

  “You can call me Dr. Jueger.” Moments after pronouncing this statement, I took it back. “Or if you prefer, you may call me Jonathan.” He did not respond at all to this, not even with a shrug.

  “I’m going to ask you a few simple questions now, if that’s all right with you.” Again, he ignored me completely. Though I was rather put off, I hid my emotions and I began to question him, mostly about his past and his family. I say “began” here because I did not meet with any success at all. I asked him my first question, did his mother treat him well, dozens of times, over and over again, until it became a mantra. He did not react to me at all, and I underlined in my notes the word unresponsive.

  As time passed, Darien began to shake ever more violently, until I ventured to touch him lightly on the shoulder, and ceased my questioning to inquire as to what was the matter. The instant my fingers touched the thin fabric of the gown he was wearing, his head jerked up and he stared directly into my eyes. I found myself unable to look away, and felt as if I was drowning in those deep blue eyes of his, pulled beneath the waves by some great serpent. The instant he blinked, I seized my chance and looked away. I stood up hurriedly. His gaze followed the movements of my head, but I forced myself to not again look into his eyes.

  “Darien, what’s wrong?” I asked, trying to keep the fear from my own voice. His trembling grew more violent.

  “They don’t like you, Jonathan,” the boy said. His voice was a high-pitched vibrato,
and I sensed equal parts fear and wonder in it. “They think you’re here to take me away from them. They didn’t think any of the others would.” He slowly got to his feet and looked at me. I studiously avoided his gaze.

  “Can you hear them, Jonathan? They are howling for your blood.” I took a step back; the boy truly was disturbed. I had, of course, known that much from the reports of my predecessors, but it was rather more alarming to experience it in person. Nevertheless, I strained my ears for the boy, humouring his delusions, forgetting in my disquiet that I had planned to pretend to share his visions. I heard nothing.

  “Sorry, Darien. There’s nothing there.”

  He looked at me for a moment, and then broke out into the most hideous laughter I had ever heard in my life, somewhere between a bark, a giggle, a scream, and a chortle. “Oh, you may think that now, Jonathan, but you’ll see. They’ll come for you after they get me, and there will be no saving you then!” His laughter quieted gradually, and ended with a wracking fit of coughing. I patiently waited it out in silence, and then decided to seize this moment of lucidity to continue my questioning.

  “So, Darien, you never did answer me – did your mother treat you well?”

  He looked at me, and I was not quick enough to avoid his gaze this time. His eyes did not capture me like they had the last, however, and I was able to meet his gaze steadily.

  “I suppose she did. She never denied me or Johnny anything we wanted that she could get, and she helped me escape the winds whenever she could.” I nodded and jotted this down, again squatting down on the floor to allow myself to write upon my knee. Darien remained standing, and I looked up at him. His voice did not have that drawl that his mother’s had possessed, and sounded, much to my surprise, rather cultured. He was the very image of an Aryan, what with his pale skin, blue eyes, and blonde hair. It was a shame his hair wasn’t thicker. As it was, it appeared that he was balding rapidly in some spots.

  “And what of your father?”

  Darien shrugged. “I never knew who he was – he left my mother before I was born.” I scribbled down more notes, and decided then that I was not fond of my head being below his, and so I stood, writing on my inner arm instead of my knee.

  “And Johnny… is he younger than you or is he older?”

  “He was younger. I don’t know who his father was.” I jotted down more notes and nodded. Then a thought occurred to me; he had referred to his brother in the past tense.

  “Your brother was?” Darien nodded. “Does that mean he no longer lives?”

  “I would only assume so. Without mother, undoubtedly the winds got him.” Nodding skeptically, I wrote that down as well.

  “And about these winds…” I began, and then stopped as the look on Darien’s face turned to one of sheer terror. “What is it?” I asked him. He did not respond, and instead hid himself underneath his cot, as far away from the window as he could possibly get. I tried to reason with him, to urge him out, but he was deaf to my pleas. After an hour, I left him, simultaneously encouraged and discouraged. When I visited later in the afternoon and evening, I was to get no more out of him, as he appeared to have severed all communications with the world outside of his own head.

  IV

  My first week with young Darien proved most uneventful, and relatively little information was extracted from him. About his family, I learned that he and Johnny were half-brothers, and that his mother had cared for them all of their lives. Johnny was three years younger, but his mother apparently coddled Darien to a much greater extent than his younger brother. She had put up well with his fear of the wind, it seems – up until he had tried to bury himself under the ground to escape from it. Then she had finally given him to us.

  In terms of why he was so afraid of the wind, I got no further than my predecessors. He believed with all of his being that the winds would carry him to Cireadh Bolough, or however it is spelled, where his soul would be ripped from his body and sent up to the stars, where it would be set ablaze and burn for all eternity. “What do you think the stars are?” he asked me one day. When I replied that they were giant balls of gas and plasma floating in space, he looked at me as if I was mad. “Don’t be silly. They’re burning souls.”

  In all of my visits, which numbered three times a day (in the morning, afternoon, and evening), he said scarcely more than a hundred coherent words, though as he became more accustomed to my presence, he began to mutter to himself frequently, though I could seldom make out what he said, and what little I could understand was meaningless to me. He spent most of his time cowering under his cot, presumably hiding from the winds that hunted him. I then spent most of my time trying to get him to come out, but I was unable to accomplish anything.

  It was on the 23rd, slightly more than a week since I had first visited him as a doctor, that the nightmare began. During my evening session with him on that day, I walked in, locking the door behind me as usual, and turned around to see him kneeling on the floor in the center of the room, tracing the old lines of dried blood with his finger. As he moved his finger along the lines, I saw the lines renew themselves with the fresh blood flowing from his badly mangled pointer finger.

  I let out a cry and dropped my writing materials as I rushed towards him, wanting to put a stop to this self-destructive act of madness. I grabbed his hand and hoisted him to his feet, heedless of the blood pouring out from his finger upon the whitewashed floor. He gave me a look of sheer terror and wrested himself free from my grip, exhibiting surprising strength. He stared down at the floor, and let out a shrill shriek before collapsing again to his knees, burying his head in his blood-soaked hands. I looked down at the floor and saw blood splattered on the floor, well outside the carefully-drawn lines the boy had made.

  Darien’s hysterics led me to believe that I had done something to upset him, and I guessed that it was this splattering of blood that caused him such despair. He ignored my presence completely for several minutes, and then glared upwards at me with baleful eyes. “You have killed me, Dr. Jonathan. I have no protections against them now! They will take me!” I assured him that it was not so, and I knelt down beside him and put my hand on his shoulder, soothing him as best I could. To my astonishment, at my touch he did not attack me like I had been led to expect, but he instead buried his head in my arms. I took this all with good measure, and I soon had calmed the boy down.

  “You’re safe in here, Darien – how could the winds possibly reach you through the stone and wood?” He shook his head mutely, and soon stopped sobbing and wailing. I awkwardly patted him on the shoulder, and chanced a question.

  “What do these lines do? Why do you draw them?”

  He sniffled and looked at me, tears still in his eyes. “The winds cannot cross the threshold built with the life-force of their chosen. I built a threshold that they cannot cross…” The tears began to flow more rapidly yet again. “But now through your actions the threshold has been broken, and they will take me!” He wasn’t angry now, only pleading. “Help me, Jonathan… don’t leave.”

  I restrained a sigh and promised to stay with him the night. I told him I just had to step outside for a few minutes, and he, after several minutes of wailing, reluctantly agreed. I hurried out of the room and explained to the secretary (my replacement) what I was going to do, and got permission to do so. I then ran back up the stairs to Room 412, and back to Darien.

  When I returned and had locked the door, I found him curled up under his bed. For the first time since I had truly met him, I dared venture under the bed with him, lying next to him. After a few minutes, he shifted so that he was leaning into me.

  We lay in silence for a long while, and as the long hours dragged ever onward, I committed the single greatest error of my life: I allowed sleep to overtake me.

  V

  My dreams that night were troubled, but I cannot recall even the tiniest moment of any of them. Nor do I remember falling asleep, but I know that I must have, for I opened my eyes upon the most bizarre
scene. I swear to you that it was not a dream, that it could not have been. The sigils – the sinuous curves that Darien had so painstakingly drawn across the floor and that I had so haphazardly ruined – were glowing a bright purple. As I watched, awestruck, tendrils and ribbons of green light began to flow out of the purple, floating upwards. Then they suddenly bent to the side, all in the same direction, as if a mighty wind was blowing them. Some then changed direction, bending in the opposite manner, while others folded through space in manners that I could barely perceive, let alone describe.

  It was then that I became acutely aware of Darien next to me, screaming with all of his might – and yet the sound came to me as if through a large set of earplugs, so muffled were his cries of terror. I turned to look at him, and saw that his wide eyes were fixated upon a particular spot in front of him. I followed his gaze with my own eyes, and found him to be staring in horror at the spot where his blood had been spilt outside of the threshold. A massive dark abyss had opened in the floor there, and I sensed a force begin to slowly draw us towards it. I grabbed hold of Darien and frantically searched for something to grab onto in order to anchor ourselves to the room. There was nothing, and we, along with the cot, slowly began to slide towards the center of the room. A great howling reached my ears, and I felt a wind ruffle my hair, gently at first, then with the force of a Caribbean hurricane. My screams mingled with his as the yawning abyss before us opened wider in my vision, until I could see nothing beyond it. The surface of the world began to vanish beneath me, and I made one last desperate bid for survival. I grabbed one of the tendrils of green light with my free hand, still clutching Darien tightly with the other.

  The light flowed down my body and into Darien’s, and a horrible shrill shriek, greater than the howling of the winds and our own mortal screams, pierced my soul, causing me to nearly let go of Darien. But I held on, and I felt myself thrown from the abyss, along with my charge, and we were both smashed into the cot and the wall. My vision went black.

  I awoke sometime later. Darien was asleep in my arms, and we were both under the cot again. I was bruised and my fingers ached greatly. I lay there for a long while, just holding Darien, not knowing what to think. After a few moments of thought, I decided that the experience was in fact nothing more than an extremely vivid nightmare, and that the boy’s mutterings had somehow managed to infect my own mind.

  When Darien awoke later, he gave me an odd look that I cannot fully describe, and said nothing to me. He crawled out from under the cot and hesitantly approached the splatters of blood that had spilled beyond his threshold. He then, as I watched, painstakingly scratched off every last bit of the dried blood that had fallen outside of his carefully-drawn lines, until the threshold was once again secure. He smiled faintly at me and then crawled back into my arms and cried softly. I don’t know how long we lay there, for I had broken my watch at some point during the night, but eventually there was a knock on the door, and an orderly let herself in to ask how I was doing. Apparently no one had heard the screams the previous night, nor the howling winds or the devilish shriek, but instead had decided to check upon me because it was approaching noon. Darien gave me permission to go, and I left (I admit ashamedly that I did so gratefully) to return to my own flat several blocks away, to get some true rest.

  VI

  It was with great reluctance that I returned later that evening to the Institution and to Darien. I greeted him with what I hoped was my usual cheerful demeanor, and sat down next to him. For once, he was seated atop his cot, and not under it. “How are you feeling?” I asked him. He didn’t answer me for several minutes. I repeated the question, and he stared at me with a far-away look in his eyes.

  “They’ll try again tonight. I know they will. The threshold has been weakened; they will try to cross it. Stay with me again.” Looking into those pleading eyes, I found it hard to refuse, but I forced myself to do it, for my own sake. I couldn’t take another night like the one before. Though I told myself that my experience had just been a dream, deep inside of me I was not so sure. Darien did not react to my refusal with the wails and shrieks I expected, but he merely fell into a somber silence. I tried to draw him out of his shell, but he had returned back to his state of apathy, similar to that which I had encountered upon my first being assigned to him.

  After two hours of no progress whatsoever, I surrendered and bid him farewell. He scarcely noticed me leave, caught up as he was with his own dark thoughts and obscure mumblings.

  Later that night I awoke, at half past twelve, with a terrible feeling of dread filling my veins. Despite the two layers of warm blankets atop me, a chill seeped into my very bones and sent me shivering. I slid out of my bed and hurriedly got dressed, donning a thick coat – I had a suspicion that it was going to be rather windy out of doors.

  My suspicions were unfounded, for when I stepped outside into the street the air was completely still. It was warm as well, very much unlike the cold air typical of this time of year. I considered for a moment turning back and replacing my coat upon its hangar, but decided against it lest the air obtain more of a chill as the night progressed.

  The utter stillness of the night unnerved me greatly. The world around me was completely silent, aside from the sound of my footsteps upon the walk, which in turn echoed so loudly in my hearing that I imagined I was an ancient giant striding across the land.

  By the dim light of the streetlamps I soon made it to the Institution, and I hurried up the stairs. Trying the door, I found it to be locked, and hurriedly fumbled for my keys from the pocket in my coat (it was quite fortuitous that I did not leave it behind), and used them to unlock the door. I stepped inside, then gingerly shut and locked the door behind me. I know not what compelled me forward towards room 412, that forceful sense of impending dread that drove me from my flat back to my patient, but I wish to the gods that it had not.

  When I reached young Darien’s room I knocked loudly upon the door, and upon hearing no reply, let myself in and locked the door behind me. I frantically looked around the room, a sense of unavoidable doom pervading my very soul, and I saw Darien crouching in his usual spot under the cot, trembling violently with the most fearful look in his eyes. I rushed to his side and knelt beside him, asking him what was the matter. He simply stared past me, over my shoulder, his eyes opened more widely than I had believed was physically possible.

  I turned to follow his gaze, and to my astonishment, I saw that the boards that had blocked the window were gone, the holes in the wall left by the nails the only reminder that they had ever been present. Forgetting about my patient for an instant, I stood and walked over to the window. Darien grabbed my arm, attempting to stop me, but I shook him off, and he did not persist.

  The windowpane was badly cracked, a spider-web of fractures crossing its entire surface. I suspected that if there was any wind outside, there would be a draft in the room. As that thought crossed my mind, I noticed that there was, in fact, a draft in the room. I took a nervous step back from the window; there had been no sign of any wind on my trip to the Institution. I reasoned with myself, against my better judgment, telling myself that the wind must have just picked up since I had stepped inside. Or maybe there was only wind on this side of the Institution. What I saw next, though, dispelled any logical reasoning my mind may have come up with.

  For as I peered out of the window, I saw the wind. And no, I don’t mean to say that I saw the trees move – I saw the physical form of the wind. It was indescribable, that madness that I saw hurtling towards me at impossible speeds, that colossal form of shimmering hues and colours, that writhing mass of things that pulsated and radiated that terrible glow, like that of a dying sun as it breathed its last before collapsing back into the black nether from whence it came.

  And then the sound reached my ears, and I fell back into the room, a scream upon my lips, mingling with that awful howling shriek that echoed with the voices of the damned, a thousand souls crying out in eternal agony, screamin
g for a release that would never come, edged with a malice that no mortal soul should ever have to bear. My back hit the floor, but I felt no pain as the voices overwhelmed me. The howling of the wind came then, carrying above even those immortal voices, sounding with the thunder of a thousand hurricanes.

  I have only a dim recollection of what happened then, as my mind fled me at that instant to dwell amongst the peaceful sheep that graze in the back of my mind, heedless of the terrors and dangers of this mortal world. The winds came into the room, all of them – and there were thousands, tens of thousands, of them, and they rushed in, their terrible appendages breaking through the dimly glowing lights of Darien’s threshold, tearing asunder the barriers between them and my patient. Darien surely was screaming, but over the cacophony that assaulted my ears I could not hear him. They reached out and took him then, all of them at once, and he was gone in an instant, vanished, while the winds left me alone, shrieking and writhing upon the floor of room 412, not daring to believe what I had witnessed.

  VII

  I fell into a black slumber that night, a dreamless sleep filled with nightmares that were not dreams, but visions – I saw the damned winds as they bore my charge over the land and seas, across mountains and deserts that no earthly being has known, across the vast distances between the stars, blazing onwards through the trails of mighty comets, heedless of the heat of the supernovae they left in their terrible wake, intent upon their dreadful journey. Moons and asteroids, planets and suns, nebulae and galaxies, all flashed past as the winds carried ever onward.

  They moved like nothing ever seen on Earth, both backwards and forwards, right and left, up and down, and in strange and weird directions that our minds could not even begin to comprehend, even had we before known of their existence. Despite their erratic and utterly alien movements, I sensed beneath them a purpose, a forward direction, from which they never wavered nor faltered. Their course remained true, past entire civilizations, paying no heed to the crystalline spires and flaming towers through which they soared, flying past massive tentacled beings and cyclopean cities, past swarms of horrors and masses of dripping flesh. Worlds never meant to be glimpsed by a mere man flashed before my eyes, and I fear even now that which I glimpsed in those dark aeons as I followed those cursed winds across all of eternity.

  Everything was laid out before me, and the world became clear as I saw that I passed over what once had been Earth, and saw the planet I once called home degenerate before my eyes, from a glimmering metropolis to a smog-filled complex, threatening all life which yet depended upon it, and further then I saw the race of man fall as it turned all that it had against itself, and I saw the great industries that had destroyed it and reduced the planet to a melted husk. I saw the fey spirits that preyed upon the new and young inhabitants of the land, who defended their Earth from the Eldritch, and who even now carry my mind away with my young charge, across both space and time to that which sits at the end of it all, Cireadh Bolough, that dreaded place where the Fey lord sits upon his throne of blood, and calls to those he desires with his dread winds, summoning them to him for his eternal pleasure.

  Then I witnessed before me the sundering of a soul, as the dreadwinds converged upon young Darien, tearing out that which inhabited his frail body. The shining life that had once been a boy was removed from his mortal shell in an instant, the body cast aside to fall forever among the stars.

  And the Fey lord beckoned, causing the dreadwinds to deposit the soul of their victim upon his lap. He looked at the soul and it met with his approval, and so he tossed it into a star which floated by his left ear, causing it to soar across that damnably human, and yet utterly alien, face. I heard the scream begin then, through the shrieking and howling of the winds around me; that one, solitary scream that I knew to belong to the soul of Darien Marley, adding its own dark music to the cacophony at the end of times.

  The Fey lord looked at me then and saw into my very soul, his eyes piercing my body, burning it away and leaving me exposed and helpless. He laughed then, a laugh which came from a thousand mouths on a thousand worlds, and cast me back to the shell from whence I came.

  And then when I awoke, I found myself to be in a police cell, the visions still clear in my head. I begged for a pen and some paper, and have transcribed hence the tale which you have now read as best I could, with all that I could remember.

  But heed my words, spawn of humankind: it is hopeless to resist, for the end will come to us all; I have seen it, how we have all come to rise as the playthings of the Fey beings who have always been and always will be, and how we shall be cast aside when they are done with us, as have so many others before us. Enjoy yourself while you still can, for you have not much longer, and I even less than you, for surely they will come for me now…

  VIII

  POLICE EXAMINER’S NOTE: The inmate taken in on the morning of January the 25th, a certain Jonathan Barrymore Jueger, a doctor at the Silver Creek Institution for Mental Health, is most certainly criminally insane. He denies that he killed the boy and then disposed of his body, and instead claims that the wind took young Darien Marley away. It would certainly explain why the boy’s body has not been found – but how could the winds have carried him through the still-intact window? The doctor was found on the floor of room 412, Darien Marley’s old chamber, laughing madly to himself and rolling to and fro. It is recommended that Dr. Jueger be put as quickly as possible into a high-security Sanatorium, as he is clearly a menace to society in his current state. Attached is an account that he wrote with the paper and pen loaned to him by Officer Downey, yet further evidence of his mental decline.

  CORONER’S REPORT: On February the 18th, Doctor Jonathan Barrymore Jueger was found dead in his cell at Townshend Sanatorium. No physical evidence of death is to be found, other than a stopped heart and a lack of breath. Given the nature of his insanity and his irrational fear of winds, it is likely that he died of fear, for there was a terrible storm that night.