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

by Darrell Schweitzer

  There. You are waiting.

  For once we climb even further, to the very top, onto the highest observation platform at the base of the radio antenna.

  The city spreads before us, the world in light and fog, the faint sounds of traffic and ship horns from the river like a whispering of a tide.

  “This is the last time, Matthew,” you say. “From now on you must go it alone. No more sidekick.”

  “What are you saying, Father?”

  Again I can sense that faint exasperation in your voice. You explain what you’d hoped would be obvious.

  “It is time for you to take over. You must become the Night Hawk.”

  “No,” I say softly. “I can’t.”

  “I didn’t raise you to be a coward, son. I raised you to be a hero. Maybe you’re not the most heroic hero to ever come down the pike, but dammit, you’re going to have to do. You’re all I got.”

  “There was Baby Sister,” I say bitterly, “and Mom.”

  “Your mother is dead. I regret that very much. As for your sister, Gwendolyn—”

  “I’ll tell you what happened to my sister, Gwendolyn. I don’t think you know about this, because it just happened, just two days ago, and besides, you were away all the time and never gave a bug’s ass about her, did you—?”

  “Son, you know I have other preoccupations—”

  “Well Gwen grew up—is growing up, she is only nineteen—rather confused, and, lacking any guidance, even from me because I too was preoccupied, she fell in with some very bad company indeed, Father, and I must confess to you that with some of the tricks you’ve taught me I found out all about it, every last sordid detail, like the party where she got herself so shot up with junk that she didn’t know what was going on even when she got gangbanged by an entire fraternity. You know what I did? After hours, when the party had thinned out a bit, I went in and cleaned things up, not wearing any magic suit, not using any super-powers, with my face covered with a knit ski-mask and armed with a baseball bat. I smashed a couple guys up pretty badly, Father. I could have killed them. Easily. And, you know, I wanted to. I felt entirely justified in doing so. I might even have enjoyed it.

  “But somehow I didn’t, not quite. I carried Gwen back to her dorm and told her it was all a bad dream, and I felt so dirty telling such lies, having done such things and thought such thoughts, that I know, Father, I am not the stuff that Night Hawks are made of.”

  For the last time, you put your hand on my shoulder gently, and I feel a tingling, of some mystical energy passing from father to son, and you say, “On the contrary, you’ve finished your training. You are ready. You have learned to act decisively, to draw on the darkness within yourself, to harness even that for the greater cause—”

  “No, Father. I came here tonight to tell you that I quit. I’ve concluded you are a fucking lunatic after all, that none of this is real, that both of us are fucking lunatics, that we should both turn ourselves in to the police and hope they put us away in a rubber room where we won’t hurt anybody—”

  You shake your head sadly. “I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but it has. I had wanted to grow old as your curmudgeonly mentor, maybe playing the outward role as a faithful butler or something, all part of the secret identity stuff, but the reason I called you here tonight, son, on this night, for the last time, is to tell you that there are shortcomings to this line of work, and sometimes bad things happen, and it so happens that I am dying, son, of an incurable disease, which I must have acquired dodging too many death rays, or from the Black Scorpion’s poisons. It couldn’t have come at a worse time. I know the Enemy is planning a new assault, and must be stopped at all costs. Therefore you must take over the family concern, now, tonight.”

  “Why you crazy—”

  But before I can say anymore, you press something into my hand, and climb back over the metal fence that is supposed to prevent the observer, so high up, from yielding to perverse and terrible impulses. But you scale it with ease, as might an insect—no, that’s not right—as might a huge, black bird.

  You stand up and spread your wings.

  “Matthew, become the Night Hawk now. Fulfill your destiny.”

  “Father, no!”

  It was only then, in a moment of sheer, helpless terror, that I truly understand that those wings, whatever enhanced powers your suit might have given you, are for decoration, or psychological effect only, as in not functional.

  You fall away into the darkness.

  * * * *

  It is only much later, as I cling to the iron fence, sobbing, and I hear sirens in the street below, that I realize that what you pressed into my hand is an envelope. Final instructions, of course. And a key, which will not only give me access to every part of the laboratory, but also open a certain locker in which hangs another suit, like yours, with wings.

  I am ready to put that suit on now. I am not ready to try to fly with it. Not yet.

  The Moon comes out. Something, not clouds, drifts across its face.

  I hear engines thundering in the night.

  THE MESSENGER

  He had come a long way and he was very tired, both in body and mind, and covered with the ash of burning cities. Behind him, all along the horizon, black columns of smoke smudged the sunset like malignant growths; but when he crossed a ridge-line and directed his horse down into a valley, he seemed to have entered another world entirely. Here was an eternal and timeless place of cultivated fields, white towns, and rivers stretching like silver bands revealed gleaming in the moonlight.

  Somewhere, far away, bells rang softly.

  He came upon his goal suddenly, for, as he had read in the classics—and in the long years without war he’d had the time for such things as reading—one discovers the capital thus, however one approaches it.

  Indeed, appeared as more an apparition than a solid thing. The landscape rippled into little hills, then dropped into a lower valley, and he turned a corner around an outcropping, where the path twisted sharply to his right, and suddenly there spread out before him the city and palace and fortress of the Great King of Glory, the Emperor of All Eternity, who had more titles than even one who took the time to read about such things could remember.

  The capital seemed more than a building or a series of buildings, with its thousand spires and its lighted windows as countless as the stars. It was more as if a great sea, golden and white, had raced frothing over the world, then frozen there in place beneath the moon. Or it might have been an enormous, divine spider-thing of infinite complexity, a creature of a million gleaming legs now standing perfectly still; or perhaps a kind of forest; or a cloud, taken solid shape.

  His mind could not grasp all this. It sufficed that he felt a kind of ecstasy at the apprehension that mankind, or even the gods, could have achieved such greatness, that from this place radiated the serene power which held all the world in its place, and that he, in some small way served that power.

  This was more than the stuff of legends; it was the stuff of dreams.

  Yet he could only think of his mission. He was suffering from hunger and thirst and many wounds. His mount was nearly dead beneath him. Still he could not rest, for he bore a message from the Captain of the Farthest Frontier to the Emperor, beseeching the Lord Above All Lords to take up once again the Sword of Empire which he had received from the hand of Heaven long ago and come forth as his ancestors had done; for now, as had been darkly and obscurely prophesied, the walls of the frontiers were broken, and barbarians of inhuman ferocity were pouring in.

  Now the distant cities burned.

  When his horse dropped to its knees and could go no further, he paused a moment, tossing aside bridle and saddle to let the beast fare as it would, and continued his journey on foot.

  It took the whole of another night and a day. Once, dreaming as he walked, he thought fires burned all around him. He could remember such things. Past and present were as one for him now. A weeping, screaming woman ran alongside him, ho
lding out her child to him, begging him to bear it to safer place. But he saw at once that the child was blue-faced and dead, and, in the dream, the woman too was dead, and yet she spoke his name in a kind of prophecy that filled him with great fear.

  And he awoke from that dream or fell unto a further one. Still he staggered on toward the gate before him, which rose high as any bank of clouds on the horizon. The sun had set again, and in the darkness, the countless windows filled with light, like all the stars in the heavens come out at once; and it was in the darkness that he finally reached the gate. He pounded his fist against it, crying out that he bore an urgent message for the Emperor.

  But he heard only the wind blowing among the battlements, and the cries of night birds, and, very far away, another sound, which might have been the beating of a drum, or a bell.

  The gates felt smooth to his touch, cold and hard like marble, and, as he ran his hands over them from left to right and right to left, he understood that carven here were countless figures, tens of thousands; and the walls, too, were covered with images of men and demons and gods, of burning cities and monsters, of ships crossing great oceans. Here, at the center of the world and the Hub of Eternity (for so he had read, but when he’d had leisure) were recorded all lives that ever were, or are, or are to come. Thus was it declared that the Holy Empire over which the Emperor ruled was for all time and could not end.

  Yet the messenger, who stank of sweat and ash, knew it to be a tapestry already on fire around the edges, burning toward the center. He could not comprehend, but he knew.

  He shouted. If anyone patrolled the top of the walls, they did not answer.

  He could sit there before the gate. He could lie down and rest, sleep, dream, perhaps die; but he was sworn to uphold his duty, and therefore he marched, for at least when he was moving it felt like he was doing something.

  He followed the circumference of the wall, running his right hand over the carven figures; and again he dreamed while yet on his feet, in his exhaustion, and it seemed that he saw amid the carvings a figure very much like himself; and this figure moved with him, wriggling between the other figures like a fish swimming in a rippling stream. And it seemed, further, that by some transition too subtle to follow he moved amid the carvings. He saw before himself towers and forests of stone, and he walked among people and beasts of living stone like himself. He reached out to touch, with his left hand, the fingertips of a flesh-man in the outer darkness who faded away from him and was gone.

  Then he awoke into blinding light. He sat up, to his astonishment, in a green meadow beneath a blue sky.

  He crawled to the edge of a stream and drank, and saw his own haggard face reflected in the water. He washed his face, and saw, around him, reflected likewise, men and women clad in white, regarding him with some concern but no fear.

  He turned and demanded of them where he was and how he had come there.

  They could only reply that he was within the wall.

  He explained that he had a message for the Emperor.

  An old man smiled and shook his head. “We worship the Emperor as a god, and our philosophers debate whether there ever was such a physical being, or if he represents an abstract concept; but no one, I assure you, has ever actually seen him, much less ventured into his presence—”

  The messenger raged that they must all be insane, because he must venture into the Emperor’s presence most urgently, for the cities were burning, hordes pounding over the landscape, the sky filled with dragons, the dead rising from their graves at the behest of barbarian sorcerers to devour the living—

  He fell down faint again. He was vaguely aware that the people bore him up in a cloak as if in a litter. There were gaps in his memory after that. He lay by a stream, being bathed, his wounds cleansed. He lay in a cottage, in a soft bed. A maiden played upon a harp and sang a song so exquisite that it seemed time had stopped and eternity was now, like a firefly encased in amber, its light too captured for all eternity.

  Yet he was arguing. He was trying to spread the alarm. But no one understood. Perhaps they thought him delirious. Perhaps he was delirious.

  He was given wine to drink and good food. Again his wounds were tended to and anointed with sweet-smelling oil. He lay in a soft bed for a time he could not measure. His clothing was taken from him, cleaned and returned. His benefactors handled his mail-shirt and his steel cap and his sword and his bow with wonder, as if they had never before seen the accoutrements of war.

  He got up and spoke of urgency.

  The maiden said that she did not understand such things, that he should dwell with her and they would be wed.

  He put on his clothing and his mail-shirt and his cap and took up his weapons. He slung over his shoulder the pouch in which he carried the message for the Emperor, and set forth.

  An old man, the wisest among the people, followed him for most of a day, trying to explain to him that the Emperor had dreamed all things and all possibilities into existence, or perhaps he had caused them all to be illuminated into an infinite book (there were competing schools of thought; most present philosophers favored the dreaming theory); but in any case it was universally agreed that there was nothing else, that the world the messenger described could only be a delusion, and therefore any attempt to depart to another place was also ipso facto, q.e.d., also a delusion and futile in its very essence.

  The philosopher was still debating (more or less with himself) when they came to a golden ladder that stretched down from a circular point in the sky.

  The messenger put his hand on a rung.

  “Oh yes, that,” said the philosopher, “we haven’t quite worked out an explanation for that. The prevailing speculation is that Our Lord the Emperor put it here to humble our pride.”

  The messenger began to climb. The philosopher shouted after him. After a while the messenger couldn’t hear the shouting.

  * * * *

  For a thousand thousand thousand years had the Holy Empire of the Ancient Word spread across all the Earth and subdued it, and a thousand thousand thousand emperors whispered from father to son that single word which was given to the first of them by the gods on the day of creation; and from the reiteration of that Word a thousand thousand thousand times arose all things that were and are and shall be, made as one in the dreams of Our Lord the Emperor of the Ancient Word…

  So the messenger had read in a book once. So he recited to himself now, in his mind, as he climbed, so high that the ground below him seemed as cloud, and the circular spot above him which was his goal appeared no closer.

  But he took more comfort in memory of the passage which told how the Emperor of the Word and Lord of Eternity took up his Sword and drove back all the darkness, all the fears which besieged mankind, making the world pleasant and obedient to his will…

  Weariness came over him again, and he was tempted, as if a voice whispered in his ear, to let go of the ladder and lie back upon the air, and rest upon it, assured that it was such a great distance to the ground that he would die of old age before he ever fell that far.

  But, resolute in his duty, the messenger continued, until he hit his head against a hard ceiling, and reached up to push open a circular hatchway. With a heave, he emerged into darkness, a darkness that became absolute when the hatchway fell shut with a heavy thud and the light from below was blocked out.

  He found that he had crawled onto a damp, cold stone floor, gritty to the touch, as if covered with wet sand.

  He stood up, his shoes scraping.

  Very slowly, his eyes adjusted, and what he thought were specks of light drifting before his eyes resolved into other sets of eyes that he did not like at all, cold and harsh like the eyes of predatory birds, and he discerned, very faintly, hunched, dark shapes towering over him, and long white, folded claws before each figure.

  “What is this that has trespassed among us?” came a whisper like the wind through a stone ruin.

  He drew his own sword, which was not magical or ha
nded down from Heaven, but just a piece of wrought metal. Yet it was all he had, and it gave him courage, and clutching the sword and the satchel in which he bore the message, he made his way forward, and the dark things before him parted, as insubstantial as shadows.

  He passed through a tall, pointed archway and then into twilight, into what he first took to be a forest, but then saw to be a forest of stone pillars beneath a vaulted ceiling. High above, windows of colored glass shone as if from a sunset. Between the pillars, stone kings, tall as mountains, knelt in homage, their bowed heads and crowns pointing the way he should go.

  Yet beyond this place was a garden under the full light of day, with neatly planted trees and enormous rows of blood-red flowers as tall as men; and moving to and fro among these, tending the garden were persons clad in gowns the same color as the flowers, most of them thin and soft-faced, all of them beardless. He might have taken them for boys but that some of them were gray, stooped and lined. When they spoke, among themselves, startled at his coming, they murmured softly, like pigeons. He understood that these creatures were not men but eunuchs, and he knew that it was the custom for such to serve the Emperor, made by their strangeness utterly dependent upon him, since they could have no concerns in the world.

  But at least, he thought, they served him.

  At least, he hoped, they might know where he was.

  Yet when he questioned them, they only fluttered in confusion, as if the words he spoke were not words at all, just unfamiliar noises.

  Finally the chief of them said, “Sir, what you ask is most improper. Your presence here is most improper. If Our Lord The Emperor in all His Majesty should glorify this place with his presence—for He would shine like the rising sun and fill our humble garden with light—if that happened, I say unto you, it would not be proper for there to be even a blade of grass out of order, or anything disturbed, much less the likes of you, untidy—”

  The messenger grabbed the fellow by the arm and shook him hard.