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

by Darrell Schweitzer

  Therefore he rose, and dead men whispered in his ears, ghosts gathered around him, thick as smoke, screaming ever so softly how they too had risen and fought and suffered and died for the weaving of the Witch of the World’s End, how she gave them strength when it pleased her to, and all of them, too, had performed great deeds for her, even miracles.

  Antharic rose, and though he had no skill at arms, he somehow fought. The battle went on for hours in the darkness, across the frozen field, into the forest, amid the heaps of the slain; for thus the Witch of the World’s End wove the tale of Antharic. He bore the fallen knight’s shield, which was marked with an hourglass and a horn. His foeman’s shield was that of the Lord of Vengeance, but Vengeance drove Antharic now. He lusted after it, hating and sorrowing as he did; his mind filled with remorse and joy together, with a sense of loss and of dawning glory.

  This was what it meant to become a knight. Sparks flew. Metal clanged. The bull-man charged again and again, but Antharic turned him away with blows and with his stolen shield. Sometimes it seemed that the two of them fought amid vast armies, that some greater conflict rushed around them like a swollen stream around two rocks. But always they found one another again, cutting their way through the armies like reapers through wheat.

  “What are you?” asked the bull-headed knight, gasping, as he paused to rest on his shield.

  “I am Antharic, a knight of great worship and renown. Isn’t that obvious?”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes!”

  Their swords contended.

  The Witch of the World’s End wove and sang at her weaving.

  From far, far away, came the voice of the holy anchorite, mourning for the boy Antharic who had been lost.

  “And what are you?” Antharic asked of his foe.

  The other, raising his visor, revealed only flames, as if he had opened the door of a furnace. “Don’t you recognize me?”

  At that instant, the sun rose; and the flames beneath the visor burst out and became the blinding face of the sun. Antharic fell to his knees, covering his face, and he heard his enemy’s battle-shout of triumph. But Antharic leapt to his feet again, blind as he was, and thrust upward with his sword.

  The foeman’s battle-shout became a death-cry.

  When his sight returned, Antharic stood alone amid frozen corpses on the battlefield. It was dawn. The ruined castle smoldered. Crows perched on helms, pecking for difficult meat. A heap of empty, charred armor lay at Antharic’s feet. He knelt down, painfully, and exchanged his own shield for the one emblazoned with the sign of the charging bull.

  Now came the most terrible part of that dream which was the boy Antharic’s life.

  (The Witch of the World’s End wove, hands like fluttering moths.)

  He galloped on a mighty steed, through many lands, through many wars, contending with giants, with many knights, all of whom he overthrew and slew without mercy, until the hideous glory of his name spread before him and all men fled at his approach. He rode past crows pecking at corpses. Towns and castles smoldered, ravaged. Deeper, deeper, into the darkness, into forests he plunged; and metal-clad things with the faces of wolves swarmed from beneath the trees, calling him to battle; and he fought with them, and slew them all.

  He never paused to rest within this dream, this dream within another dream; but sometimes he didn’t seem to be a knight at all, only the boy Antharic who lay in a ditch, cold, and muddy and weeping. That boy, lying there, dreamed impossible fantasies of vengeance, and his mind was filled with monsters and battles and fiery knights with heads like bulls.

  He thought he heard the anchorite calling out once, but could not find him.

  (And the Witch of the World’s End wove, her needle leaping like a fish.)

  He rode. Fires roared around him. Ghosts screamed amid the burning, and all the pain of the world was his, to cause and to suffer, and he was filled to overflowing with it as he crossed into Hell itself and the damned cursed the Witch of the World’s End; and Satan loomed high amid swirling, blood-red clouds, like a dark mountain, impassive, silent, brooding.

  Once more, even there, Antharic heard the voice of the anchorite, calling out to him.

  “Turn from this path.”

  “But where?”

  “Merely turn away.”

  “Am I not glorious?”

  The anchorite cried out in despair, and was gone.

  Devils raced alongside Antharic, and he conversed long with bull-headed Vengeance, and he came to understand that the Witch of the World’s End wove mankind’s sorrows into her tapestry merely to amuse herself, as a child might arrange a course for ants to follow, then smash them all when tired of the game.

  Therefore Antharic swore a quest against the Witch of the World’s End, in the name of Vengeance.

  (And she wove. She sang. Her needle leapt.)

  He rose from out of the low plains of Hell, out of fire and swirling ash, up, across a dead sea’s bottom filled with dust, up, through a forest of white bone, where harpies with needle-claws tried to tear out his eyes. But his sword swept them aside, and the shield of Vengeance protected him.

  He galloped toward the purple evening, and saw the Moon emerge from the window of a glass tower; and he knew he had come at last to the Earth’s very rim, where the Witch of the World’s End had always waited for him.

  He heard her song in his mind, and he saw her needle flickering in his fevered, waking dreams.

  She spoke to him, inside his mind.

  “Do you remember Antharic, who was a tangled knot in my weaving?”

  “I am Antharic.”

  “I think Antharic died long ago. Maybe he froze in a ditch. Behold, I have woven the shape of someone else entirely.”

  He shouted his war-cry, screaming his hatred, lusting for glory, as he thundered onto the witch’s drawbridge. The glass bridge shattered, but his steed leapt clear across, trailing gleaming shards, landing with an explosion of sparks in the her courtyard. Still mounted, he forced his way into the tower. Stone automatons opposed him, but he broke them to pieces with his sword. Up and up, around and around, spiraling along a glass staircase that splintered as he passed; up, as metal birds came against him in a shrieking mass, but the shield of Vengeance brushed them aside; up he climbed on horseback.

  A serpent with a woman’s head wriggled out of a side chamber and called out to him, beseeching him to merely stop, and lie with her forever, for the sake of pleasure.

  He shouted and cut the serpent in twain with a single stroke of his sword.

  At the top, he paused in just an instant of silence. Already the tower was beginning to crumble, bits of glass tinkling down like ice rattling out of trees in a sudden winter wind.

  He dismounted and stood before the witch as she worked at her weaving, very still, his drawn sword like a motionless thunderbolt, waiting.

  And he saw that she had come to the end of her tapestry, that there was very little thread left. He noticed the colors of her weaving: black and grey, darkness and smoke; the white of bones; the brown of earth; red for blood and for fire; the silver of swords; and many others. There were only a few golden threads, which stood for hope and happiness; indeed they were the scarcest of all.

  “Why didn’t you make it otherwise?” said Antharic in a voice, like the stilled thunderbolt, trembling with barely restrained violence.

  The witch merely held up a fold of the cloth, and there was the figure of the monk in his cell, outlined in gold amid the dark colors.

  In his rage, Antharic smashed her loom with his sword, tearing the tapestry into a million drifting motes.

  Far below, at the base of the tower, a monster shrieked. Glass poured down, rattling. The floor shifted beneath Antharic’s feet.

  “You are a vile thing,” he said. “Now has vengeance come.”

  The witch held up a handful of loose thread. “I can’t finish. Look what you’ve done.”

  She held black strands and red strands, but also, even yet, a
single golden one.

  Antharic raised his sword to strike once more.

  “Monster,” he said.

  “You are the dreamer and I am the dream,” she said, “and yet I have seen you in my own dreams and I knew what I must do. Each of us is the mirror held up to the other, and by the other are we defined. You needed me. How else could you have become a hero at the completion of a fantastic quest…so why are you angry at me, at this very last? Ask yourself. Does it make any sense?”

  Antharic struck off her head, cursing, weeping, unable to make any sense of it at all, out of his dreams, out of the memories of the boy who lay shivering in a ditch raving of impossible revenge.

  The Witch of the World’s End disintegrated like her own tapestry, into something like smoke dispersed by a sudden wind.

  He couldn’t—

  Nothing—

  He leapt for a golden strand that floated on the air like spider’s silk—

  And in the end he found himself falling forever amid the stars beyond the World’s rim, beyond even the reach of dreams, for there was no one left to dream him. He had lived for this purpose only: to uncreate himself.

  He hadn’t entirely succeeded.

  It was a cessation of pain, at least.

  * * * *

  Later, another hero came to seek the Witch of the World’s End, a plain, broad-shouldered man armed only with a staff. He found her as he had expected her from his dreams, a bent crone stirring her cauldron on the edge of a cliff, while behind her dragons rose up out of the abyss like dark, threatening clouds.

  HOWLING IN THE DARK

  He sits there in the dark, silent, a hard, lean man of truly indeterminate age, like a creature of living stone. If his eyes seem glowing, that is my imagination. No, they are not.

  He wants me to tell this story, so that I may slough it off.

  * * * *

  I wasn’t afraid of the dark as a child. No, in fact, I enjoyed it. Where my older sister Ann used to huddle at the edge of her bed with her face as close to the nightlight as possible until she got to sleep, I would, whenever I could, listen to her breathing and wait until she was clearly asleep, and then reach over and remove the nightlight from the wall.

  The dark contained things that the lighted bedroom did not. I knew that even then. I could feel presences. Hard to define more than that. Not ghosts, because they were not remnants of former living people, or human at all. Not guardian angels, because they are not angelic, nor were they in any sense my guardians. But something. There. All around me. Passing to and fro and up and down in the darkness on their own, incomprehensible business, in their own way beckoning me to follow them into spaces far beyond the walls and ceiling of the tiny bedroom.

  Then, inevitably, my sister would wake up screaming.

  When we were old enough to have separate bedrooms, that solved the immediate problem, but it was not enough. My mother would all too often come in and put her arms around me and ask Why are you sitting here in the dark? What are you afraid of? and I could not answer her. Not truthfully, anyway. Because I did not know the answer. But I wasn’t afraid.

  Sometimes I would drop silently out the window onto the lawn very late at night, into the darkness when the Moon was down. I’d stand there in the darkness, under the eaves of the house, as if the roof provided me with a little extra shadow; in my pajamas or just in shorts, barefoot, and if it was cold that was all the better because I wanted the dark to touch me, to embrace me and take me away into the remote reaches of itself, and if I shivered or my toes burned from the cold, that was a good thing. It was an answer. It was the dark acknowledging that I was there.

  I’d look up at the stars, and imagine myself swimming among them, into some greater darkness, to the rim of some black whirlpool that would carry me down, down and away from even their faint light.

  “Are you crazy? You’ll catch your death of cold!” was what my mother inevitably said when I got caught. There would be a scolding, followed by hot chocolate, being bundled up in an oversized robe, and eventually being led back to bed.

  Yet I could provide no explanation for my behavior. Mom began to talk about doctors and psychiatrists.

  * * * *

  There are no words, the man in the dark tells me, the ageless man whose eyes are not glowing. No explanations that can be put into words. Never.

  * * * *

  There was a particularly inexplicable incident when I was thirteen and was discovered early one morning by a ranger in Valley Forge Park, twenty miles from where I lived, in the middle of a low-lying area that was half woods and half swamp. It was November and the half-frozen ground crunched underfoot. Here I was wearing only a particularly ragged pair of denim cut-offs, soaked, muddy, exhausted from hypothermia, and covered with bruises.

  I couldn’t remember very much. There were a lot of questions, from the police, from doctors; and yet another round of bundling the poor little darling up nice and warm and giving him a hot chocolate. What I did know was more about how I had touched the presences in the darkness and how they had borne me up into the night sky on vast and flapping wings. But they carried me only for a moment, either because I was afraid, or I because was not ready, or I because was not worthy.

  So they let go, and I tumbled into the woods, crashing through the branches, which was how I’d gotten the bruises.

  Nobody wants to hear about that. I refused to tell.

  It was only after a particularly tearful display on my mother’s part that I was allowed to go home at all.

  Oh, I knew what my interrogators wanted me to say. Things were not going well at home, it was true. My father and mother screamed at one another. There were fights, violent ones. Things got smashed up. My sister Ann had bloated up into a 300-pound, terminally depressed monstrosity, who was ceaselessly excoriated by the kids at school as a retard, a whore, and a smelly bag of shit. I got a lot of that too, as the kid brother of same. Ann used to sit up long nights in the bright glare of lights cutting herself all over with a razor, carving intricate hieroglyphs into her too, too voluminous flesh, so that the pain would reassure her that she was somehow still alive.

  She had her little ways. I had mine.

  I was beaten regularly too, usually by my father, with fists or a belt or whatever happened to be handy, but no, it wasn’t like what the police or the doctors or my teachers were trying to get me to blurt out. No one had the slightest lustful interest in my nubile young body. I was just the weird and silent kid at the back of the class who had a secret he didn’t want to share, who would never make it as a poster boy for child abuse.

  * * * *

  Such preconceptions must be cast aside. Humanity must be cast aside. Sloughed off.

  * * * *

  I met the living stone man whose eyes do not really glow on the night that my mother and sister both committed suicide. We will not go into details. Those things must be cast aside. Lives end. My mother, who had been a teacher, and my sister, who wanted to be a singer, terminated themselves. My father, who worked as an electrician when he managed to work, would drink himself to death within the year.

  It is the way of things, which are to be sloughed off, discarded and forgotten.

  That night, relishing both the cold and the danger—it was winter; there was snow on the ground—I went out into the back yard, completely naked. I understood by then that if you are to surrender yourself utterly to the darkness, you must achieve total vulnerability, which is why virgin sacrifices are always naked.

  The stone man, whom I had known only in dreams before that night, was waiting for me. He took me by the hand. His touch was indeed as hard and fleshless as living stone, and yet somehow lighter in a way my senses could not define, as if he were only partially made of material substance at all.

  He led me into the further dark, heedless of my nakedness, because the human body is just one more thing to be sloughed off in the darkness, and of no interest to him. If we are to achieve our place in the whirling darkness beyon
d the stars, he explained to me, inside my head without words, we must become nihil, nothing.

  He didn’t have a name. Childishly, I made up a whole series of names for him, Mr. Graveshadow, Mr. Midnightman, Mr. Deathwalker, but names, too, are to be sloughed off.

  I remember opening the back gate, but beyond that I do not think we walked through familiar places at all, certainly not across suburban back yards and streets, beneath the widely-spaced streetlights, the strange, dark man and the naked, pale boy, who surely would have caused some consternation when caught in the headlights of the occasional passing car.

  I wonder if we even left footprints in the snow. I am certain only that we came to a high, dark place beneath brilliant stars, and perched at the edge of a precarious precipice, so that with the slightest tumble, not to mention an intentional leap, we could have hurled ourselves off into the black sea of infinity forever.

  The presences gathered all around us. I could feel their wings brushing against my bare back and shoulders like the wind.

  That was when the man who had waited for me all this time, who had brought me here to this place, first taught me how to speak the speech of the dark spaces. Maybe he began with a series of syllables that went something like whao-ao-ao—but it was a howl, high and shrill like nothing I had ever imagined a human throat could produce, a screaming beacon which could reach across interstellar spaces, beyond the universe itself, into the great, black whirlpool at the core of Being. It was so loud. It filled everything, obliterated everything. Did my eardrums burst? Was there blood oozing out of my ears? The body is to be discarded, and for a moment it seemed it was, as in a kind of vision my companion bore me up, surrounded by howling, dark angels and we hurled through infinities without number until we came at last to a flat and frozen plain, beneath two black suns, and we knelt down and abased ourselves, and shrieked that impossible shriek before a miles-high eidolon that might have had the form of a man, but never was a man. And this thing opened its stone jaws to join us in our song. It spoke, without words, the secret name of the primal chaos that turns in the heart of the black whirlpool, that unnameable name which no human tongue can ever form, nor can any human ear—with or without broken eardrums—ever hear.