The Call of Distant Shores
By David Niall Wilson
First Digital Edition Published by Crossroad Press
Copyright 2011 by David Niall Wilson
Cover Design by David Dodd
Cover art by Bob Eggleton
LICENSE NOTES:
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OTHER CROSSROAD TITLES BY DAVID NIALL WILSON:
NOVELS:
Ancient Eyes
Deep Blue
Sins of the Flash
The Orffyreus Wheel
Darkness Falling
The Mote in Andrea's Eye
On the Third Day
Heart of a Dragon – Book I of the DeChance Chronicles
Vintage Soul – Book II of The DeChance Chronicles
Hallowed Ground – With Steven Savile
SGA-15 – Brimstone – With Patricia Lee Macomber
The Second Veil – Book II in the Tales of the Scattered Earth
NOVELLAS:
Roll Them Bones
The Preacher's Marsh
The Not Quite Right Reverend Cletus J. Diggs & The Currently Accepted Habits of Nature
'Scuse Me, While I Kiss the Sky
COLLECTIONS:
The Fall of the House of Escher & Other Illusions
Defining Moments
A Taste of Blood & Roses
Spinning Webs & Telling Lies
The Whirling Man& Other Tales of Pain, Blood, and Madness
Joined at the Muse
UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:
Roll Them Bones / Deep Blue / The Orffyreus Wheel / The Not Quite Right Reverend Cletus J. Diggs & The Currently Accepted Habits of Nature / Heart of a Dragon / This is My Blood
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Contents
Author's Introduction
Glenn, and the Tart of Mortar Psycho Maine Tenants
The Milk of Paradise
Are You Lookin' For Herb?
Cockroach Suckers
Darkness, and the Light
Death, and His Brother Sleep
Death Did Not Become Him – with Patricia Lee Macomber
From My Reflection, Darkly
The Lost Wisdom of Instinct
Rending the Veil
The Hall of Captured Gods
Anomaly
The Call of Distant Shores
Author's Introduction
A lot of authors of dark fantasy and horror will cite H. P. Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, Hugh Cave, and Manly Wade Wellman as influences on their writing. Clark Ashton Smith is another name you'll hear, and in this volume, you'll find my tribute to that great talent, as well as a number of others that dip into the wells of darkness and magic – a world I'm familiar with from endless hours of reading, dreaming, and spilling my own words onto the page.
I have never considered myself a huge fan of Lovecraft. Pulp writing, in general, appealed to me when I was much younger, and in the middle years of my writing career, I pushed it aside. I was, of course, deluding myself. When someone pointed out to me that I actually had a body of work loosely fitting this sub-genre of horror / dark fantasy that was probably enough for a book, I laughed. Then I looked. Then I stopped laughing. What I found was that these writers – these storytellers I grew up with and believed I'd left behind me – were responsible for a huge chunk of my output as a writer. There are elder gods, ancient evils, and everything that attends them walking the corridors of my creative consciousness, and that reader was correct. There was more than enough to make a book.
I also note that, of all my works, most of my favorites, and some that have garnered critical notice, are among the stories you are about to read. "The Call of Distant Shores," the title piece of this collection, is one of my most popular stories to date, and Cockroach Suckers, which is more recent and set near my current home town in the fictional Old Mill, North Carolina, could not be more Lovecraftian without being set in New England.
Anyway…there are a lot of words ahead – a lot of images – a lot of nightmares. I hope you'll enjoy them, and I dedicate them to those authors who have gone before, paving the way for an ever-widening realm of new worlds and deep-rooted fears.
Welcome to my nightmares.
-David Niall Wilson
4/9/2011
Glen and the Tart of Mortar Psycho Maine Tenants
One of the only perks of being Building Superintendent is setting my own schedule, so when the doorbell screeched at the ungodly hour of 8:00 AM on Saturday; I rolled straight off the wrong side of the bed. Rubbing sleep from bleary eyes, I staggered to the door or my room, only remembering halfway there that I was naked. I turned back, snagged my jeans off the floor and hopped into them as I made my way down the hall. The doorbell sounded again, and I cursed.
There are only about two things that are worth getting up early for on a Saturday; when I opened the door, one of them smiled at me and held out the round handle of a water valve on the end of her finger. She was tall and freckled with wavy auburn hair and bright eyes that were either sparkling, or just reflecting more sunlight than I was used to seeing on a weekend. I knew her name was Linda, and that it was customary among our people to say “Hi,” or “Good morning,” but all I could manage was a confused mumble and a lop-sided return grin that probably made me look like the drooling idiot I was.
She laughed and twirled the handle on her fingernail. In the recesses of my depraved mind, I saw the tip of that finger crook and beckon me closer, but I shook my head. Too much time spent in depraved recesses is never good.
“Um,” I managed, finally waxing eloquent, “can I help you?”
“I sure hope so,” she said. Her voice was as bright as her eyes, and I was so fascinated by it that the words themselves took their sweet time sinking in. Her accent was odd, Boston, I thought, or somewhere in New England. She went on as if I were coherent.
“Daddy was trying to turn on the hose this morning, and this came right off. We’re in the middle of some important work and…”
She stared pointedly at the handle on her finger.
That woke me up. This was a real problem, and one that I could handle. At that moment, handling things was foremost on my mind, and I knew that if I bobbled the hand-off of the faucet handle, all other handling was out of the question. I took it gingerly off her finger.
“Let me get my tools,” I said. “I’ll be right over.”
She smiled, and I swear when I said the word tools she glanced about three inches south of my belt. Whether she did or not, my mental image of her did, down in those aforementioned depraved recesses, and I blushed hard. I stumbled in a half circle and staggered back into my apartment. She laughed softly, and called out to me from the doorway.
“I hope you can fix it. There’s a lot of work to be done today, and if we don’t get some more water out there, everything is going to set wrong and crumble. When things crumble – it can be very bad.”
I vaguely recalled that her father made some sort of statues out in back of the building. I never go there except to t
ake out my trash, because I really hate rats and the smell of dumpsters, and because that area is rented, along with suite 1A, to one of the tenants. These tenants.
I found a clean t-shirt and socks, laced on my Doc Martens and grabbed the canvas tool bag I kept just inside the door to my bedroom. I learned early on that if pipes burst, or the roof leaked, or someone’s doorknob came off in their hand at three o’clock in the morning it was best to have the tool bag where I was likely to fall over it. It saved me hours of bleary-eyed searching and helped me keep my job. At the moment all I wanted was to get back to the front door before my Miss New England wet dream disappeared back into her apartment and left me outside playing in the water with daddy.
When I reached the back yard, I stopped short of actually entering it to stare. I’ve seen a lot of very odd things in my time in building maintenance. I haven’t lived a sheltered or particularly sedate life. In retrospect, I suppose nothing could really have prepared me.
In the center of the lawn, placed in a spiral that ran from what I guessed was dead center in the lot outward toward the fence, statues had been lined up like dominoes. Most of them seemed to be renditions of something that resembled a lobster, though the head and eyes were far too large, and the claws…I think they were claws…had protuberances similar to opposable thumbs jutting out beneath. The very center statue was small, maybe half a foot tall. Each successive creature was a little bit taller. From where I stood at the back door, I could see the center, shrinking in like the guts of a gigantic Nautilus shell. As I stepped closer, staring openly with the tool bag dangling at my side, the center became obscured, and all I saw was the outer ring of taller statues. The last few were darker than the others, and I realized with a start that they were still wet – drying in the sun.
Not far to one side, a large vat of some viscous white paste rested with a hose dangling over the edge. The white paste was slowly setting. Beside it, a sorrowful expression on his face, stood the girl’s father. He was a small mountain of a man. His shoulders were too broad, and he stood there in a grungy wife-beater t-shirt and jeans – at least I think they were jeans. They were stained dark and puddled over his feet so it seemed they melted into the dark earth. I felt dizzy, and would probably have turned and staggered back into my apartment if Linda hadn’t dropped her hand on my shoulder at just that moment.
I turned and cried out, nearly tumbling us both to the ground, but she caught me. She was stronger than she looked, and I found the transition from staring at her father and his lobstrocities (thank you Stephen King) to her smiling face a genuine pleasure.
“What…what are those things?” I managed to ask. “Jesus, they look like some sort of mutant crawdads.”
Her smile didn’t falter, but I saw from her expression that the reference was lost on her.
“They’re Daddy’s creations,” she said. “They aren’t finished.”
I glanced at the spiral of statues and shook my head.
“Most of them seem finished,” I said.
“They all must be finished,” she said. “Every one. They aren’t separate works, it’s a single creation.”
I followed the inward spiral as far as I could. Somehow, as strange as her words seemed, they also rang true. I couldn’t imagine one of the creatures standing alone, or a pair of them on the two sides of someone’s front walk. They fit together, and there was an eerie symmetry to it - except that something wasn’t quite right. I followed the line back to the near end, the unfinished end. The father still stared at me. His expression hadn’t changed. He held the limp end of the hose in one hand, and my mind returned to the moment.
“We have to hurry,” Linda said. “If the mortar dries, it will be too late. There’s no time to mix another batch.
I lifted the faucet handle, flashed on why I was there, and nodded, starting toward the back wall of the building. It didn’t matter why they needed to finish the statues. What mattered was they paid for the use of the water, and the hose and it was my job to get it back into commission. Luckily, it was a simple job – a single screw to tighten, and they’d be back in business. If all went well, and Daddy was happy, I thought maybe Linda might take me up on an offer of lunch, or drinks…or more. Except, the closer I got to the faucet, the harder it was not to glance over my shoulder at that growing army of statues. I felt the weight of their cold, collective, lifeless gaze weighing on my shoulders. I told myself if we did go to lunch or dinner, Red Lobster was definitely out.
Linda trailed along beside me, not close enough for my taste. If my eyes strayed back toward her father, they met her tanned, muscled thighs, and snapped back to the business at hand.
Just as I reached the wall and dropped my tool bag in the dirt, there was an agonized moan from behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. Linda tried to step up and block my view, but she was too late. I stood and stared.
The largest of the statues had shifted. Where the wet mortar trailed off at the end of a long, misshapen claw, the color had changed. Powder dribbled from the tip, like sand falling through an hourglass. Linda’s father stood, staring at it in mute horror. He moved to the trough and tried to dip out a glop of the unused mortar, but it was too thick and grainy. When he applied it to the tip of the claw it clung, and then fell away like gobs of wet rice.
“What…” I said.
“The faucet!” Linda said. She gripped my shoulders and turned me toward the wall. As I spun, I’m certain I saw the end of that claw vibrate. It was like it was trying to shake off the mortar.
Sweat broke out on my forehead. I wished I’d had less to drink the night before and more sleep. I fumbled with the zipper on the top of the bag and jammed my hand inside. I needed a Phillips head screwdriver. Suddenly, what had seemed a quick fix was looking like a major undertaking. The sun was rising toward noon, but I felt clammy. I wanted to look back at those statues.
Linda’s hands dropped to my shoulders, and she began to knead the tight knots out of them. I started to tell her to stop, and then wondered what the hell I was thinking and bit my tongue. She wasn’t making the job any easier, but I suddenly didn’t care quite so much about what might be happening behind me. Probably her intention.
“Just fix the faucet,” she said softly. Her lips were so close to my ear her breath tickled over my skin. She smelled wonderful, some mix of spice and vanilla. I felt my erection press into my jeans and nearly dropped the faucet handle.
“Christ,” I muttered.
I slid the round handle over the square tip of the faucet. It slipped on so easily that I stopped, and for the first time looked closely at the faucet, and the handle. The end of the faucet valve was a square post that protruded about an inch from the valve itself. The handle had a square hole in the center, and this slipped over the protrusion, held in place by a single screw. That’s how it was supposed to work.
I don’t know how I missed it up until that point, but the handle was broken. One side of the inner square was broken away – or melted? One of the adjacent sides was only partially there. I gripped it and turned. It tried to catch, but there wasn’t enough of the square left to grip the edges of the valve, and it slipped.
“What in the hell happened to this thing?” I asked.
I turned and held it up to Linda, not really angry, but very confused. It was a mistake. Over her shoulder, I had a clear view of the spiraling statues. The first two or three, the largest, had shifted. They were no longer in the same position they’d been carved in, and I was not quite able to believe – in that moment – that they’d actually been carved. One claw had opened, and it was raised over Linda’s father. Those farther down the line had begun to drip powder, as the larger ones had moments before. The damage rippled in toward the center.
“Please,” she said.
I glanced at the handle again, then tossed it aside and dove for the tool bag. I cursed myself inwardly because – even though I knew I had vice grips, I didn’t know whether I’d put them back in the bag. I dragged out a hamm
er, a tape measure, a set of drill bits and a handful of assorted nails and bolts. There were pliers, and I briefly considered giving them a try. Then my mind filled with the image of that monstrous claw with its impossible extra appendage. I waited, expecting to hear a scream as I dug into the bag again.
I found the vice grips at the very bottom of the canvas bag. I turned to the faucet and snapped them shut over the valve, but they were set too wide. I heard Linda moan, and I wanted more than anything to look back at those statues. I also wanted to turn and run, screaming, into the street….but Linda still leaned in close behind me, her perfume confusing my senses. What was that scent? It made me think of the beach, and the sand, though I knew that was crazy. The beach only got bottled as a scent on Seinfeld.
Behind me I heard a sound like something soft and wet sliding over a rough surface. I heard a barked scream and something clattered to the ground. Sweat dripped into my eyes, and I closed them tightly. I fumbled with the vice grips, found the wheel that loosened and tightened the grip and started spinning it. I forced my eyes open with a gasp – I wasn’t sure in my panic if I was loosening or tightening it.
“Hurry,” Linda hissed. “Oh please…Daddy…”
I stared at the vice grips and almost laughed. Somehow I’d gotten it right. I leaned in too quickly, smacked my head on the wall, nearly toppled over and felt her hands on my shoulders, steadying me. I saw the valve and I reached for it. My knuckle smacked into the concrete wall and I cursed, but I dragged it down and found the metal rod, clinging to it dizzily. I wrapped the vice grips around the end of the valve, gripped the handle, and heard the loud CLICK as they locked in place.
Blood joined the sweat trickling down my face, oozing from a cut where my scalp hit the wall, but I blinked and focused. I’d gotten lucky the first time, but once again I found my mind blanking. Which way should I turn the valve. The stupid rhyme my father had taught me years before tried to surface, but my head pounded.
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