The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack: 25 Weird Tales of Fantasy and Horror

by Darrell Schweitzer

  VI

  I am Jon, who was a squire and gave up the sword for the harp and learned it but a little, and came to sing only one song that no one wants to hear. I have been driven from place to place, cast stones more often than bread, left to sleep in ditches rather than by warm hearths; I who am ragged and filthy and starving and no longer young, remember my adventure like a dream from which I have never awakened. I am afraid, when I lie in darkness, that the Chronophagos has already devoured the whole world, so that all our lives, all our histories and wars, are just the dreams of the Chronophagos stirring, as a child with a stick stirs mud on the bottom of a pool.

  Who can say that it is not so?

  FIGHTING THE ZEPPELIN GANG

  Daddy, Pops, Paterfamilias, Father, you managed to convince me you were nuts at a very early age. I was, how old?—ten—when you dragged the whole family, me, Mom, and baby sister Way Up North one summer for a vacation in a state park in New England where the mosquitos were the size of small birds, and when the gutsy, he-man adventurer types (unshaven, in flannel shirts, just like on the covers of those magazines you used to read) saw you driving in with a suburban stationwagon complete with small kids and baby sister’s teddybear in the window, they came to the same conclusion I did, probably with more reason.

  You said it had to do with your work. You were never clear on exactly what you did for a living. I wasn’t sure even Mom knew. This time you seemed to work for what a couple decades later we’d call an environmental agency, and it had something to do with capturing a rare insect—a butterfly I think it was—which could only be found at that particular place in that particular season.

  “We’ll all have fun,” you said to me, and to Mom you added, “Might as well combine business with pleasure.”

  She, saint of infinite patience that she was, could only agree.

  What I most remember about that trip were the industrial-strength mosquitos, not to mention the blood-sucking flies so massive they landed on you with a thump. We had to huddle within the smoke of our campfire to escape the bugs, and you had us all sing songs—and Mom, I could tell, was moving toward the consensus opinion about your sanity—and I remember watching with some fascination and a little dread as raccoons came into the smoke to stand up on their hind legs and beg like dogs.

  But none of that was the point. The point was the ascent up the Mountain, where you supposed to discover the Alleged Insect, and you volunteered me to come along “for the ride,” though there was no ride and we had to walk. Mom protested, but you got your way, and off we went, at dawn one morning while the mosquitos, having sucked us dry the previous night, now lay around like crab-apples with little wings and legs sticking out, too bloated to get off the ground and do any more damage.

  Do I exaggerate, Daddy, just a little bit? Have you always told 100% of the truth?

  I enjoyed much of the walk, in the cool morning air, and as the trail rose up out of the forest there were great vistas like nothing we’d ever seen in Jersey City, and, for all my ten-year-old self could never have articulated it and certainly would have been too stubborn to admit anything of the sort, yes, the landscape was breathtakingly beautiful, and images were to stay with me for the rest of my life. I felt as if a weight were dropping away from me—at my age, to think of such things!—and we were leaving civilization, our former lives, behind, like sinking into an ocean, deep, deep, the familiar sounds of traffic and TV fading behind us, gone.

  But that wasn’t the point, either. A ten-year-old has only so much attention span. As we started to seriously climb, it turned into hard work, and I became whiny and said, “Daddy, can’t we go back?”

  Very firmly, in a tone that almost frightened me, you said, “We cannot go back.”

  It was late afternoon by the time we reached the summit, then had to go over the summit onto a plateau. We were well above the timberline by then. The ground was covered with huge, round boulders, lichen, scrubby grass, and every once in a while a tiny tree, no more than a few inches high, a natural bonsai (as I would learn to call it much later) because the cold and the wind wouldn’t let it grow any taller. I was beginning to sympathize. I was exhausted by then. I too could crouch down between who rocks and become shrunken, twisted, and just stay there.

  I think you caught the butterfly. I don’t even remember. Even that wasn’t the point.

  The point was that it was getting late and we were not going to be able to get down before dark.

  “Mom will be worried,” I said.

  “She will not be worried.”

  In fact she was frantic, and she packed baby sister into the stationwagon and drove twenty miles to find a park ranger, by which point it was already dark and there wasn’t much he could do because this was, after all, 1970, and if you think park rangers in those days had whole fleets of helicopters and infra-red sights to go looking for crazy campers and their kids in the middle of the night, you are sadly mistaken.

  That was the point, Daddy, I understood even at the time. We might as well have been on Venus. We were alone.

  So you made a campfire and we sat down behind a low ridge which would protect us from the worst of the wind, and we put on the extra wool sweaters you had been so careful to pack. We ate our supper and sat very close together, in the cold, while you told me to look out into the night sky—it was dark and moonless, and no one could ever believe there were that many stars—and you told me how, on certain nights, like this one, the “curtains in the sky” become very thin, or “open up” entirely and “powers” come through and walk the Earth. You told me that you, and a small number of others like you, some of whom were quite famous, though they all had secret identities, had learned to speak with these “powers” and gained from them powers of a different sort, meaning abilities, which is what made each of you special, and why each of you had to keep your identities secret. You told me that there were powers for good in the sky, but also powers of evil, which also came down on such nights as this and walked to and fro in the Earth and up and down in it—you used that odd phrase—and that our job, ours, which implied that I was supposed to be a part of this—to learn to distinguish the good from the evil, and ally ourselves with the former in opposition to the latter.

  “Get it wrong, and the world will end. Pfftt! Blooey!”

  You pointed to how the stars were rippling in the sky now, like reflections in water when somebody throws a stone in. The “gates” were opening. Yes, the wind was very cold, and I think I had a dream that there were faces in the sky, and you were talking with them, and later something was all around us in the dark, after the campfire had burned low, something which touched me right at the left cheek-bone and made that mark on my face which is still there—it was so cold it burned—and I dreamed that a voice was saying, “Yes, his training must begin.”

  That was all a dream, Pappa, and you were nuts, and when we got back to the campsite the next afternoon, having somehow evaded the park rangers who were out looking for us, you merely pointed to my face and said, “He slipped and cut himself.”

  That Mamma, she of the halo and wings, did not sue for divorce on the spot was the most inexplicable thing of all. Maybe they didn’t do that in 1970.

  * * * *

  Ring, ring.

  I pick up the phone.

  “Matthew, it is time.”

  “Dad, it is not time. I don’t have time.”

  “Tonight.”

  “Dad, I am twenty-six years old. I am married. I have an infant son. I have a meeting I have to go to tomorrow. I have a life.”

  “None of that matters. What matters is that you meet me again, tonight, in the usual manner, in the usual place, in uniform.”

  * * * *

  By the time I was twelve you started telling me about the Zeppelin Gang, who spoke with the darkness the way we did, but with a different darkness, i.e. the bad guys, and how they would destroy the world in a cataclysm of nightmarish horror if given half the chance. You tended toward that sort of
phraseology, betraying a melodramatic streak, quite consistent with a functional, though raving lunatic.

  I still didn’t know what you did for a living. I thought maybe you were a writer, of books, or even comic books, but I never saw anything you’d written, for all you were often locked in your study typing “reports.” It occurred to me, too, that maybe you worked for the CIA, and when I blabbed that in school, said, “My father is a secret agent!” Bobby Parker smacked me on the side of the head with a ruler and said, “Then how come it isn’t a secret?” and I suppose he had a point.

  The Zeppelin Gang was led by somebody called the Black Scorpion, who wore a mask, whose face no one had ever seen. He was a figure of purest evil, who gathered evil men around him, all of whom travelled—or perhaps dwelt—in a fleet of pale gray zeppelins with an emblem on them, a black scorpion in circular field of white; which I thought would make them about as formidable and scary as a fleet of Goodyear Blimps done up for Halloween, but in that, you insisted, I was very much mistaken. The fleet was never visible by day, but by night it would emerge out of a fissure in the sky, from behind one of those curtains, out of another reality or universe. Sometimes it was possible to see them crossing the face of the moon. Most people would just think they were clouds, but no, on nights like that the Black Scorpion would drift over the cities of the world, standing by an open window in the gondola of the lead zeppelin, pouring out of his hands, like a farmer sowing seeds, the very essence of evil, which brought plagues and wars and death and madness—hands which few had ever seen ungloved, and which were reputed to be almost skeletal, but black and hard and spiked, like the claws of an insect.

  I admit I was caught up in the story. “But how can anyone stop him?” I asked.

  “There are ways. Secret weapons. We have our resources. Our greatest is courage, and the clarity of our purpose, but there is still something to be said for gizmos, atomic disintegration machines, that sort of thing. In time, my son, you will learn much.”

  * * * *

  Another cold night. Always on a cold, night, it seems, but there are no stars tonight. Overcast. Drizzle. It is late October. I can almost feel ice beginning to form on the sidewalk.

  But I must go, like the vampire’s victim who steals away to ecstacy and certain death, like an addict addicted to a dream which will inevitably devour him.

  My wife and child are asleep. I slip out of the house, roll the car out of the driveway without starting the engine or turning on the lights, only turning the key when I am halfway down the sloping street.

  I must go, as I have always gone.

  As I can’t stop myself from going.

  * * * *

  When I was sixteen, you took me climbing again. Of course you were already dead by then, at least officially.

  Father, that is why I have always hated you, in my heart of hearts, for what you did to me, to Mother, to Baby Sister—who wasn’t a baby anymore—to all our lives. You spent more and more time away from home. I know Mother wept at night when she was in her bedroom alone and thought I couldn’t hear her. She loved you, Dad. She would have stuck with you through anything, but you “sacrificed” her for the cause, or the greater good or something, and there were times when I wasn’t sure who was more evil, you or the Black Scorpion.

  Then you didn’t come back at all. I was told that “something had happened,” but no one, not even Mother, would tell me what. She had to raise us. I didn’t know, then, that quite large checks came regularly in the mail, from a bank in Katmandu, and that helped, but it didn’t help. Mother spent a lot of time staring out the window at the sky, I thought, as if she were waiting for something to drift across the face of the moon.

  You and I had “issues,” Father. Yes, indeed.

  * * * *

  I leave the car and switch to another, very different one, which is always left for me on these occasions. The towers of Manhattan gleam before me, across the river, though the gathering fog.

  I make a turn few people know about, down an alley, through what appears to be a solid wall, but is only a projection. I flip open the hidden control panel, and activate a field I can hardly explain, and then outside is only darkness, because the earth has swallowed me up.

  I’ll be there soon, Dad. I’m coming. But you knew that.

  * * * *

  Then one day in junior biology class, I found a note, in my textbook, which I was certain had not been there the night before when I’d done my homework. It was from you, in your handwriting, containing a set of secret instructions, signs and symbols I knew from the Zeppelin Gang mythos, and directions, which involved Jersey Transit, a PATH train, the subway, Cleopatra’s Needle, Grant’s Tomb, a long walk in the Upper West Side and a secret door beneath a Civil War monument near the River, which led to places under Manhattan that weren’t in any of the guidebooks.

  It was all I could do not to make an excuse and run out of class. I went of course. I skipped my last class, and a date with my then girlfriend, and went, without bothering to phone home first. We are alike, you and I, equally inconsiderate. Would Mother worry? Did I care?

  I hung around, waiting till dark, as you had instructed. I waited until the Moon rose behind the Manhattan skyline. (Did something drift across its face?) I slid my fingers, just so, as you had described, into a niche in the monument, and found the key you told me would be there.

  I opened the secret door, descended the long, winding staircase, into the cavern, groping my way among stalactites into the very Bowels of the Earth, as the phrase would have it, though it felt more like a mouth. I was something very small crawling between the teeth of something very large. Sometimes, the very stone seemed to ripple and I felt a cold wind blowing through a very thin curtain that separated our universe from something else.

  In the darkness, you spoke to me, Father. You brought me to a dimly-lit grotto, where I saw you for the first time in years, only I didn’t really see you, because you were wearing a mask, and some kind of costume that had wings on it, which made you look like a huge, hunched-over bird.

  There was a costume for me, too. You commanded me to put it on. It was featureless, all black, like a scuba-diver’s wet suit, only it didn’t feel like that against my skin. It became part of me. I felt amazing strength, and I had never been a big or muscular kid, but now I had become something else entirely. You told me to put on the mask and gloves and boots, and I put them on, and it had to have been a dream as we two climbed up through the earth, passing through solid stone as if through mist or through a curtain. Is that what we did? Up, we climbed, up, out into the glaring, but muted light of the night-time city in the fog. Up, and somehow the fibers of my fingertips and of my boots extended into stone and marble and steel, and I could feel the textures of these things as if they were my own flesh, and somehow the power flowing from them, into my body gave me my very great strength, so that I could climb as I did, and hang onto a ledge fifty storeys above the street with one hand and not be afraid.

  “Dad, this is amazing,” I said.

  “Yes,” you replied. “It is.”

  It was only when the moon broke through the clouds at last—I had the image of a spiderweb being torn away from the face of a lantern—that I realized where we were.

  We were on a ledge, halfway up the Empire State Building, sitting next to an Art Deco gargoyle.

  “Dad,” I said. “This is so incredible. What does it mean?”

  “You mean you haven’t figured it out yet, son?”

  “Not entirely.”

  You sighed, and I could sense the disappointment in your tone, as if to say to the gods, I had hoped for a smarter kid, but never mind, I’ll make do somehow.

  “I am the Night Hawk. The foe of the Black Scorpion. We two have been battling over the fate of the world and the future of mankind for a long, long time.”

  And you stood up on the ledge, and spread your wings.

  I wanted to say to you, then and there, that this was all crazy, that you were a cer
tified raving, gibbering, probably bug-eating lunatic, that you belonged not in a winged suit but in a straitjacket, but there I was with you, in a similar, albeit wingless suit, on a ledge on the Empire State Building something like a quarter of a mile above Manhattan, and so I couldn’t quite bring myself to raise those objections.

  You folded your wings and sat down beside me. You put your hand gently on my arm. I felt a tingling through the suit, as if power somehow passed from you to me, just then.

  “There are others like us,” you said, “who are better known. They keep their daily identities secret, of course, but their personae are known, even famous, even the subject of treatments in various media. But they are mere distractions, a kind of smokescreen. We, who remain much less known, do all the serious work.”

  And I saw my whole life falling away as surely as if I’d suddenly taken a flying, albeit wingless leap.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You want me to be your sidekick.”

  “More of a boy wonder, if you will excuse the phrase,” you whispered into my ear, laughing.

  When I got home the next morning, Mother looked pale, ill. She had been up all night. “You’re not into drugs, are you?”

  I assured her I was not.

  She wept softly. I think she knew what was going on. I think she had always known. I think she began to die that night.

  * * * *

  Onward and upward, into the cave, into the secret laboratory, some of which I understand, some of which I have been denied access to, despite my many “training missions” over the years. I suit up. All this has been my secret, my thrill, my delusion. I cannot remember all that we have done, even in my dreams. Most of it is just tales, things you have done on your own, and reported back to me, because I am not ready yet for the “real thing.”

  Up, climbing through the earth as if through smoke. Up the side of smooth stone and glass, like an insect. Into the street, moving swiftly in the shadows. Up again.

  The Empire State Building. The ledge, where we have met so many times before, next to the gargoyle we have nicknamed “Bruce.”