while the black stars burn

by kucy a snyder

  “Your blood is thick from living up north and your system isn’t accustomed to the heat and humidity,” the physician replied smoothly. “You just need to take it easy and not exert yourself.”

  Bessie came into the room with a bamboo bed tray. Her face was a neutral mask, and she seemed to avoid making eye contact with anyone in the room.

  “Drink some tea and eat some pudding,” the physician said as Bessie set the tray across her lap.

  She ate a few spoonfuls of the overly sweet rice pudding from a glass custard bowl and drank the tepid, bitterly herbal tea from its dainty bone china cup. Soon, her head began to swim, and no matter how hard she tried, her eyelids wouldn’t stay open.

  “There, that’s it, a young girl needs her rest,” Penny heard Morinda say just before she passed out.

  Penny’s dreams took her through the gallery of monstrosities she’d read about in the Arab’s book. She tumbled through the cold void of outer space as huge malign creatures lurking in the shadows twixt the burning stars eyed her as a scientist might gaze upon the tiniest itching mite. One brushed her with an enormous icy pseudopod and suddenly she was plummeting down, down through time and space, striking cold misted water and plunging to a crushing depth where she lay trapped in sucking mud, thinking she would drown there alone when the enormous clammy bulk of something dragged itself from a chasm nearby and reached out toward her with slimy suckered tentacles—

  —she jerked awake in her bed, her nightgown sodden with sweat, heart thudding in her chest, her throat aching as though she had been screaming. She was alone, the room silent, and in that moment she wished she were back home where her mother would always hold her and rock her back to sleep after a nightmare.

  And then she remembered her mother was gone, nothing left of her but an urn of ashes buried out in Greenlawn Cemetery, and Penny’s heart broke for the hundredth time that month. Why would the universe let someone so beautiful and kind as her mother die so senselessly? The girl wept into her pillow for what felt like an eternity, and still no one came to comfort her.

  Finally, she wiped her tears from her eyes, and stumbled into the bathroom to wash her face and brush the sour fuzz from her teeth. She dried herself and stared at her red-eyed reflection. Babies lay in bed and cried, and she wasn’t a baby, was she? Sherlock Holmes never cried. Her mother was gone, burned to almost nothing, and what now? What would Nancy Drew do? Why, she’d pick herself up and get on with solving the mystery, wouldn’t she?

  She inhaled, trying to clear her foggy head, trying to push away the horrible images from her dreams, trying to stop remembering the smell of the funeral home. The Haughtons were not the kind of people who did something out of the goodness of their hearts. They’d brought Penny to their house for a reason. Why? And what was really going on in the third floor? Was the Reverend really a sleep-sickened invalid, or were the physician and Morinda keeping him there against his will?

  Suddenly Penny felt completely awake, her heart beating quickly again. Her whole body shivered with dread and the desire to go upstairs and see for herself. She put on her robe and slippers, and quietly slipped from her room.

  *

  Penny pressed her eye to the bedroom’s keyhole. There was an unmoving lump in the bed, barely visible in the moonlight coming through the window. A sleeping man, or just mounded bedclothes? The itch to know was unbearable.

  She turned the knob, expecting it to be locked, but the mechanism clicked open and the door swung inward, silent on oiled hinges. She took a cautious step forward into the room, dreading a squeaky floorboard, and then another.

  “Child....” the voice was deep and oratorical.

  She froze like a deer and turned her head. A gaunt figure sat in the shadowed chair in the corner of the room. It stood and came forward, entering the moonlight, and what she beheld would be burned into her memory forever.

  The Reverend was tall and so thin she could see the lumps in his sternum beneath his taut skin. Her eye traveled down his naked torso to his belly, where...her mind reeled at what she saw. The skin of his abdomen had eroded away, and instead of intestines and other vitals, a vile, crab-armed creature crouched in the basket of his hipbones. A gleaming black head on a long, snaky neck pushed past the tattered curtain of skin and craned toward her. Five eyes faceted like a fly’s beheld her with cold curiosity. It chittered at her, a weird cricket chirp that felt like cold fingers scratching up her spine.

  “Has your mind been opened to the stars, child?” The Revered intoned, and she realized the vile thing in his belly was controlling him as though he were some Mechanical Turk. “Do you bleed?”

  Penny had seen more than enough. She bolted from the room, raced back down the hall and half ran, half tumbled down the stairs. The huge front doors were locked, and she became so focused on undoing the bolts and latches that she did not realize that someone had come up behind her until the ether-soaked rag was pressed tight to her face.

  “Now, child,” Morinda admonished as Penny tried to fight free. “Be a good girl and this will all be over soon....”

  *

  Penny awoke some time later; her head pounded and she felt sicker than when she’d caught stomach flu. She staggered from the bed into the bathroom and dry-heaved into the toilet. The daylight streaming through the window made her eyes ache. She drank water from the tap, washed her face, and tottered back into the bedroom. At least someone had thought to pull all the drapes closed, so the room was comfortably dim. She tried the bedroom door; it was locked from the outside.

  A sudden squeak and beam of light at her feet made her look down. Someone had pulled open the little hatch in the bottom of the door.

  “Miss Penny, are you awake?” asked Bessie. “I brought you some food.”

  Penny dropped to her knees, trying to peer out the hatch. All she could see was a tray bearing a teacup and a bowl of porridge and, beyond it, Bessie’s scuffed brown Mary Janes.

  “Please help me,” Penny whispered. “I need to get out of here.”

  “I...I can’t.”

  “Please! Please, just...call my stepfather and let him know what happened? I can give you the number.”

  “There ain’t no phones here. And if someone was to come looking for you or if you was to go missing, they’d know I had a hand in it. And then it’d be more than a broken arm for me and Mama, you understand? They might burn Bucktown.”

  Penny was silent. She wanted to weep, but her eyes felt dry as sand.

  “I wish I could help you, I really do,” Bessie continued. “You seem like a real nice girl. I wish we could have played cards sometime. I’m sorry this is happenin’, I really am. But I caint stop it.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Drink the tea. It’ll help you sleep. Mama made it real strong.”

  “Will I die?” Penny whispered.

  “We all gonna die. Just a matter of when.”

  *

  As Bessie promised, the tea was strong, and quickly took Penny back into her cosmic nightmares. They were so compelling and so vivid that, when Penny awoke to find that she had been bound to a wooden cross and men in white robes with pointed white hoods were carrying her amid torchlight toward an old stone church, she at first thought she was surely still dreaming.

  But the smoke from the torches made her eyes water, and the leather manacles and straps bit into her wrists, armpits, and ankles; she realized she never felt that sort of mundane physical discomfort in her phantasms. The Klansmen’s procession solemnly bore her up the front steps and into the church, which was full of more white-hooded figures standing on bleachers from the floor to rafters along the walls. Flickering torches and wrought iron candelabras cast strange shadows throughout the whole room. The Reverend Haughton stood beside a stone altar in front of a large, round stained glass window depicting the same weird symbols she’d seen on the Arab’s book, which lay upon the altar in front of him. He wore deep-purple satin robes with a dragon embroidered on the chest. The legs of his oper
ator moved beneath the fabric at his belly.

  “Brothers, place her beneath the stars!” the Reverend ordered.

  They tilted the cross and slid the post into a slanted hole in the stone floor. She found herself staring up through an open skylight into the cloudless night, the stars a profusion of cold sparks. One of the masked men pulled out another strap and secured her head to the cross so that she could look nowhere else.

  “Brothers and sisters of the Invisible Empire!” The Reverend’s voice was like that of a god. “We gather here tonight to witness a new chapter for our world. Tonight ends this age of debasement and decadence, this age in which we have seen the sickly fruits of miscegenation and a society threatened by the mud peoples. Communist Orientals, cunning Jews, savage Redskins and brutish Negroes—after tonight, the world will be purified, purged of their stink and disease!”

  The crowd of Klansmen and women roared their approval.

  “I offer my own dearest flesh and blood, my own granddaughter, as an offering to the Great One. If she is deemed to be the example of exemplary young womanhood we know she is, she shall be the instrument of our salvation from a world of depravity!”

  “Halleluja!” she heard Morinda shout from a nearby row.

  Granddaughter? Penny wondered. The relationship calculation was simple enough, but it made her feel ill just the same.

  She didn’t have long to dwell on it, for she heard the ancient book creak open, and the Reverend began to read aloud some abominable incantation that was never meant for human ears. Her mind reeled in terror, and the merciless stars bored down into her eyes.

  Penny felt her consciousness travel up, up into darkness as it did in her nightmares, only it was all real now, and she felt the vast consciousness of the eternal entity known to humans as Yog-Sothoth turn to notice her.

  How many miserable souls live upon your petty world? Its voice was a blowtorch upon the wax of her sanity, but the hardened bits of her mind summoned up the figure from her nearly-forgotten geography class.

  “Three billion, two hundred sixty-three million,” she whispered.

  A pittance. Not worth leaving my lair. Yog-Sothoth turned away from her and went back to observing the collapse of a nearby nebula.

  Behind the ancient Old One, Penny sensed a throng of its dark minions clamoring to taste what their master scorned as unripe fruit. She turned and beheld her own planet as they did: an insignificant backwater world populated by craven, base gangs of over-proud apes...and none, perhaps, quite so abominable as the hooded figures who surrounded her body in the church.

  In the back of her mind, she could hear the Reverend’s incantation intensify, and she felt the power of the stars themselves flood into her soul, her mind. Penny realized that she was the goddess of all who existed or who would ever exist on planet Earth, the ultimate Angel of Death for a species that seemed as eternally doomed and insignificant as a nest of ants in some forgotten desert. She could end all the pointless struggle and war and striving with a single thought, and the human race would become fuel for the beings who were by far their cosmic superiors.

  The cosmic energy flowing into her was enough to open a portal in the stained glass window and allow the hungry minions to swarm across the countryside, first toward Bucktown, and then the rest of the world.

  Dost thou wish it? Asked the minions.

  The human animal in her—the part of her that wanted to jump when she found herself at great heights, the part that delighted when misfortune befell the bullies at her school—that part wanted to tell them “yes” and open the portal.

  Why should they survive when Mother is dust? it asked her.

  But another part, the part that was capable of performing demanding music and the coldest of equations, the part that would not gibber in terror no matter what horrors the old gods showed her, had a better idea.

  “I do not wish it.”

  The minions turned away, indifferent, Penny instantly forgotten.

  Penny closed her eyes against the stars and let the power of the Reverend’s spell explode out of her every pore. Her body became a temporary sun. She heard the Reverend’s keeper shriek a moment before it was incinerated along with its puppet. The Klan members had no time to scream before they burst into ash along with the wood and rock of the church.

  When Penny opened her eyes, she found herself lying on her back at the bottom of a blasted, scorched crater, her cosmic energies spent. Nothing but she had survived.

  The Girl With the Star-Stained Soul

  Dazed, Penny stumbled through the gray ash and blasted debris. Charred human fat stained the fractured rocks of the old stone church. Blackened bones jumbled with the splintered charcoal of the pine roof beams. Most all the men of Fensmere, Mississippi lay dead around her, and many of its womenfolk, too. She spied a bit of wrought iron candelabra here, a burned scrap of a Klansman’s hood there.

  She looked up at the broken wall where the skylight had been, and the Reverend Haughton’s order reverberated in her mind: “Brothers, place her beneath the stars!”

  The girl shuddered and hugged herself as she remembered the cold touch of the old gods probing her mind, examining the Earth through her memory and dismissing her world as unripe fruit. But their thronging dark minions had clamored to devour the planet, and Penny had seen through the old gods’ eyes what terrible, craven, worthless creatures humankind was, and the darkest power of the cosmos had flowed into her, and she could have opened the doorway to let the minions in to end it all.

  And for a moment, she’d considered it. It’s what the Reverend—her own grandfather—had brought her here to do. Exactly a month after Penny’s mother’s death, the Reverend’s sister brought her to the family mansion for the summer under the guise of a family reunion. Instead, the Haughtons wrenched her mind open with the mad Arab’s book, drugged her and kept her penned like a sacrificial calf until the night that the stars were right.

  And she’d almost done it. She’d almost opened the door and let in creatures that would almost certainly end humanity. In those moments, she’d been the most powerful person on the planet, a living goddess, and yet still nothing more than a child trying to decide whether to open the latch for the stranger on her parents’ porch.

  Instead, she’d chosen to use the cosmic power surging through her to turn her body into a momentary sun. And with the coldest blood, she blasted the Invisible Empire cultists gathered around her to ashes.

  Penny couldn’t stop shivering. Her own mind had been overlaid with a new dark consciousness, a terrible inhuman logic. Was she a puppet now? A servant of one of the old gods that had briefly gazed upon her as a man might gaze upon a mote of dust? No, she finally decided. Her mind had been left to its own devices. But the cosmic fires had forged her soul into something new, and she was a stranger to herself.

  And in that moment of realization, two things occurred to her simultaneously.

  The first was that the Haughtons had almost certainly engineered her mother’s fatal automobile crash. It could be no accident that the one adult in her life who’d kept her safe had been removed right when Penny was old enough for the ritual. They had the money and resources to make it happen, and it had been done. Her cold new overmind shone a light on her past, and Penny realized they’d probably arranged to have her father murdered, too.

  The second thing Penny realized was that, had her nuclear physicist father lived, and had her mother not remarried a Christian man when Penny was just a toddler, she might be having her bat mitzvah this summer instead. Her parents would have thrown her a big party with cake and Peach Melba and all the friends Penny didn’t have in her current life would have come to celebrate her becoming a daughter of the commandment under Jewish tradition. And her father would have given thanks that he could no longer be punished for her sins.

  “I’m responsible now,” she said to the dead who lay scattered around her, and she threw back her head and laughed, spinning in circles with her arms outstretched in the c
old moonlight. “I’m responsible for everything!”

  She spun and laughed and laughed and spun amongst the dust and bones and soon she was wailing, weeping to the stars that hung deaf and mute and harsh.

  “Miss Penny!” a woman exclaimed.

  The girl stopped spinning, blinking in bright headlights, and wiped at the muddy tracks her tears had made in the ashes on her cheeks.

  “Who’s there?” she called back.

  Three figures stepped out of an old Hudson sedan, and when they came into the light she recognized Georgia and her daughter Bessie, both servants at the Haughton’s mansion. The third was a strong-looking man a few years younger than Georgia, and they looked enough alike in face and build that Penny guessed they were kin. Penny knew Georgia and Bessie couldn’t afford a car, so she guessed the truck belonged to him.

  “Who are you?” she asked him.

  “Name’s Jay. I’m—I’m Georgia’s brother.” He was staring at his battered work boot, clearly averting his gaze. It was only then that Penny realized that her dress had been burned off in the blast.

  The Klan would lynch any Negroes found in Fensmere after dark, so Georgia and her family had taken a terrible risk coming to the old stone church...unless they’d been pretty sure the Klansmen were all dead. Penny guessed that blowing up the church made a bit of noise.

  “Miss Penny, oh my goodness, where are your clothes?” Georgia fussed. “Bessie, go get the blanket!”

  “Yes’m.”

  “But naked’s better than dead, isn’t that right?” Penny asked, fixing Georgia in a pointed stare, remembering the cups of drugged tea that Bessie had slipped through the food slot during her imprisonment in the mansion. “You knew damned well they meant for me to die here. And you didn’t do anything to stop them.”

  “Miss Penny, I know you’re angry.” Georgia’s voice shook. “But understand, we did as much as we could. Morinda can’t be bothered to do nothin’ on her own—she had me brew up the tea and I changed the recipe so your mind would be able to stand everything they put you through. I know we still put you in harm’s way...but if we’d done more they’d have found out and lynched me and Bessie and probably burned a few houses in Bucktown as a warning.”