Black Wings IV

by Edited by S. T. Joshi

  “I’m not sure when I’ll be back. It might be a while.”

  He understood what that meant—that he would never see his eldest son again. But then, he would never see his first wife again, whom he could hardly remember, because she was dead, or his second wife, Jane, who was dead, or several of his children, who were dead, so it made very little difference to add one more to that list, and after tonight, he knew, nothing much mattered. He wouldn’t be seeing Katherine again either. Something about ever-moving spheres of Heaven, and voices that were not the voices of angels.

  “This has been a very pleasant dream, and I am grateful for it,” he said, as he got up from the table.

  Suddenly the room was dark again, and he felt that darkness somehow draw away from him, as if from a small room in a wood and plaster house he had now stepped into a vast cavern without seeing that he did so.

  Then the lights came up and he was in a place he knew, in the palace at Whitehall, and Her Majesty the Queen (whom he knew to be dead) sat before him in all her glory, and she said to him, “Doctor Dee, will you scrye for me?”

  Indeed, all his instruments had been placed on a table before the throne, and there was a chair provided, and he sat, and he began to work his art, peering into his black Aztec mirror until he saw there the faces of his dead wives and children, and he saw many others he had known, who were dead, including that rogue and scoundrel, Edward Kelley, who had so cruelly used him and robbed him of gold, honor, reputation, and even for a time his Jane’s favors…but that was all fading now, and he spoke to the queen of what he saw with the aid of his magic stones and mirror and crystal ball…and it must not have pleased her when he described monsters lying deep within the earth, made of the very stone, yet still alive and dreaming. He told, too, of black worlds rolling in the infinite darkness inhabited by winged demons made of living fungus (but no angels), and of depths deeper still, wherein lurk such powers as have no concern for mankind or mankind’s doing’s or mankind’s imaginings.

  “And what of God, then?” demanded the queen.

  “I do not see him here, Majesty. With regret…”

  There was a sharp tone in her voice, a rising displeasure, and he imagined that she frowned, but he could not see it because her face was like the mask of a porcelain doll. He knew she painted makeup onto makeup as she assumed her seemingly timeless, regal state, and wore at least an inch of it, so that indeed the pale mask through which her angry eyes blazed seemed to float in a room otherwise filled with black, swirling mist.

  In time he rose, and bowed as gracefully as the infirmities of his age allowed, and, without permission, he left the queen’s presence, saying only, “This has been a pleasant dream and I am grateful for it.”

  He only dared do that because as he turned from her he took the hand of the figure in the yellow mask, which led him into the darkness once more. Slowly, painfully, he climbed a cramped, twisting stair and found himself again in his own study, in the upper story of his house, where the candles had burned low and the light had lost all color, fading into a dull gray, like the color of a foggy evening, as the night closed in.

  He saw that the stack of Englished pages was substantially higher than it had been, and he watched the delicate pages of the Greek text of the Necronomicon turn themselves slowly. It seemed that in some remote dream, or other existence, he still sat at that desk and did the work, but his eyes only beheld the pages increasing themselves, and the Greek text turning, and the hand-writing appearing on pages of blank paper, like some secret message in invisible ink, revealed by the heat of candle-flame (however colorless).

  Said the other, quoting the old play again, “That time may cease, and midnight never come.”

  “But midnight has already come, and is past,” said John Dee.

  “Are you afraid?”

  Dee looked around the room one last time, noting what remained of his beloved accumulation of books, and his instruments, after pillage and poverty had thinned the collection considerably.

  “My life has been a pleasant dream, and I am grateful for it.”

  “Then come.”

  The last thing he saw was that the stack of translated pages had ceased growing. The Greek text had closed itself. The work was done. It would go on now, of its own volition, through the years, finding its own readership, transforming (or corrupting) souls.

  Somehow he had the memory of having done although not of doing, as if some other self, in another dream had wrought and labored, and read the matter that was accumulated there, writing all this into his own memory like a postscript.

  He stepped forward, hand in hand with the one in the yellow mask, the one whose name and legend he knew, that Crawling Chaos which came down from the stars in ancient times and took the form of a man, and moved among men in secret, to subvert and to mock.

  All this streamed and focused through his mind, like light through a prism, though it was more an anti-light, not any mere absence of light, but something more active than mere darkness. In this darkness then, he tumbled, as the other held him firmly by the hand. He fell among the stars of heaven, splashing among them as among glowing foam. Then there was more darkness again, and he saw shapes rising up around him, and he beheld their faces, serene and primal and utterly indifferent to him and his life and to his queen and his country and to all the strivings of mankind; beings which were both alive and dead, to whom humanity was not even a comedy to be laughed at, but nothing at all, and he knew the truth of what the book told him, that these were the masters of the earth and of the heavens, not Jehovah, not Jesus, not angels, that there wasn’t even a Satan in that dark abyss to work his damnation.

  He thought one last time of that old play, and how the sorcerer screamed “Ugly Hell, gape not!” and prayed that his soul be changed into droplets of water and hidden in the ocean; but here, in the sequel, after he had been carried off, there was no Inferno to torment him. No devils waiting. Yes, he saw the fires that burned at the core of creation. Yes, he saw how the earth and the moon and the sun were all but infinitesimal specks in the chaos of the universe. He saw how spheres undreamed of by philosophers turned in spaces no words or mathematics could describe, and how when those spheres were aligned just so, the Great Ones would one day return and the earth, its trivialities, empires and kingdoms, lords and philosophers, learned treatises and absurd plays by some drunk who got killed in a brawl, theology, geography, mathematics, poetry, would all be reduced to the same measureless, unaccountable dust.

  And in the end, after he had sojourned for a time upon some black planet beyond the reach of light and there absorbed vast wisdom from the whispers of beings that were like living stones, whose voices were like slow winds whispering over mountaintops, the one in the yellow mask, whose name, among others, was Nyarlathotep, came to him at last and bade him take the final step, to complete their journey to the dark chamber in the center of the universe where Azathoth howls blindly.

  So they traveled, descending through a tunnel made of swirling worlds and stars and dust, and they heard the demon drumming, and the pipers, and the howling, and before the sound became deafening, the other spoke to him again.

  “Have you any regrets?”

  “All these dreams have been a pleasing diversion. I do not regret them.”

  And they two bowed down before the dark throne and made their obeisance.

  And even after that there was a kind of survival, a kind of duration, and he understood that the ultimate message of the Necronomicon had traveled through the prism of his own mind, through space to the end of space, and through time to the end of time, and now he could discern it at least dimly, in the very fabric of the cosmos (if that too were not also a dream).

  And to his companion he said, “Everything to this point has been a lie, but I would have the truth.”

  “The truth?”

  “Yes, that.”

  And before even those quicksilver hand could respond to stop him, he reached out and snatched away the
yellow mask.

  He felt an intense cold. Perhaps he heard a scream, or a whisper in the language of angels.

  Perhaps he knew everything now. Perhaps he knew nothing. Perhaps there was nothing to know.

  NIGHT OF THE PIPER

  Ann K. Schwader

  Ann K. Schwader’s fiction and poetry have recently appeared in Searchers After Horror (Fedogan & Bremer, 2014), Dark Fusions (PS Publishing, 2013), Deepest, Darkest Eden (Miskatonic River Press, 2013) The Book of Cthulhu II (Night Shade Books, 2012), Fungi (Innsmouth Free Press, 2012), A Season in Carcosa (Miskatonic River Press, 2012), The Book of Cthulhu (Night Shade Books, 2011), Twisted in Dream (Hippocampus Press 2011), and elsewhere. She is a 2010 Bram Stoker Award finalist.

  THE NIGHT WAS THE SNOW WAS THE WIND, and all of it howled. Barefoot and shivering, she stood alone under a broken moon whose face was not the clean silver she remembered, but a festering wound. Only desolation met her gaze: no huddled cattle here. No snow fences or barbed wire.

  Only the wind’s madness, and something worse twisting through it.

  At first, it resembled the wail of an ancient flute…but voiced by nothing human. Nothing her mind could bear. Clutching both arms tightly about herself, she dug her teeth into her lip as a shadow coalesced from the night and the snow. It was a malformed thing, skinny and hunchbacked, and it capered as it played upon its instrument.

  More shadows appeared in the distance. Slinking along the ground, whimpering and fawning, they crept toward the piper—and her—with gathering fire in their yellow eyes—

  Whuff!

  A gust of Rottweiler breath tore Cassie Barrett out of the dream. Gasping, she reached out with both hands and hugged two black-and-tan heads close. Jupe and Juno, still whuffling anxiously, began to lick her face.

  Not again. Digging her fingers into fur, she held on tightly. Oh, damn, not again.

  The gray light of a late November afternoon slanted across her kitchen table. Glancing down at the pile of mail—mostly holiday catalogs—her ranch foreman had just brought in, Cassie noticed a brightly colored flier. More junk. Frowning, she pulled it free and turned for the wastebasket—

  Then stopped, her grip creasing its glossy paper.

  There on the cover, in Santa Fe orange and turquoise, danced a creature far too reminiscent of last night’s terrors. PIPER WITH A PURPOSE, the copy read. Authentic Ancient Designs for a Stronger Community.

  Cassie flipped the paper over. To her relief, she found no more art, only details. A charity workshop project founded several years ago in the Four Corners area, PIPER WITH A PURPOSE offered job skills training, housing assistance, substance abuse counseling, and other services. Native Americans seemed to be its primary focus, but anyone in need was welcome.

  COMING FOR CHRISTMAS! the copy promised. Now opening in SHERIDAN, WYOMING!

  Cassie’s stomach knotted. Sheridan was where she bought groceries and ran errands for Twenty Mile.

  Her foreman glanced up from his own mail. “Something wrong?”

  “Just junk.”

  Of all the people she’d rather not explain bad dreams to, Frank Yellowtail topped the list. Not that Frank wouldn’t believe her.

  The grandson of a Crow Batce Baxbe, a “man of power,” he had no trouble drawing correlations between the dreaming and waking worlds. Or between this world and other phenomena. The Outside.

  In her three years here at Twenty Mile, Cassie had had her fill of the Outside.

  Frank continued to look puzzled. Reluctantly, she handed the flier over. She did not want to admit to nightmares about Kokopelli, for Gawdsakes—

  “You too?”

  Cassie stared. Either Frank could read minds—which she couldn’t quite believe, Batce Baxbe grandson or not—or he was confessing to bad dreams himself. Bad dreams about a tacky Southwestern icon.

  Either way, it couldn’t hurt to nod.

  Her ranch foreman looked both embarrassed and relieved. “Not sure why, but I’ve had the same nightmare two or three times lately. The thing in them doesn’t exactly look like this”—he tapped the flier—“but it’s close. Same flute, same hunchback.”

  Cassie looked at the gaudy Kokopelli again. Did it even have a hunchback? At first glance, no. This was the smooth, cute, sanitized version from every tourist trap in Taos…then, a few seconds later, it definitely wasn’t.

  Blink. Blink. Shift.

  She glanced away from the flier in Frank’s hand. “Sorry.” A hopeful thought struck her. “Maybe they’ve already got a billboard or something. We might have both seen it on the way into town.”

  Frank shook his head. “There’s no billboard.” He hesitated. “Maybe these dreams are what Grandfather used to call ‘frost-bite.’ It happened to him a lot.”

  “Frostbite?”

  “You get frostbite once, cold bothers you more for the rest of your life. You get close to the Outside—”

  Cassie nodded, feeling queasy.

  “Question is, what’s a Kokopelli shop doing this far north? I thought he was strictly a Southwestern thing. Or at least, I hoped he was.”

  Frank shrugged, shoulder blades prominent under his denim jacket. Then he handed Cassie the flier and turned to leave. He still had horses to feed.

  Or maybe he didn’t like this conversation any more than she did.

  After he was gone, Cassie poured herself coffee and sat down with the flier, Kokopelli side up. Blink. Blink. Shift—

  Cursing, she flipped the image over quickly. She’d always found Kokopelli a little creepy, but the rock art image had never actually frightened her before.

  Maybe anything Anasazi could spook her after last year’s field school at Zia House.

  Taking a big glug of coffee to banish memories, Cassie started reading. This PIPER WITH A PURPOSE was only the latest in a series of workshops, including one in the Santa Fe/Taos area. Frank’s niece Julie Valdez, still working on her anthro grad degree from the U. of New Mexico, might know something. If PWP was peddling “authentic ancient designs,” it could be looking for academic inspiration. An e-mail was definitely in order.

  Reading further, she found that PWP also welcomed what every other charity outfit did: cash and volunteers. Cash especially, of course, but extra hands for the holiday season were also needed.

  Nothing like on-site research while giving back to the community.

  By the time she finished, the windows were dark and both Rotts had joined her, looking for dinner. Cassie laid the flier aside with relief. Protective, intelligent, and uncomplicated, Jupe and his sister Juno deserved all the attention she could give. In her limited experience, dogs and the Outside did not get along—which had probably saved her life at least once.

  After their meal, though, she’d fix herself a sandwich and hit the Internet. If she ever hoped to understand why Kokopelli haunted her dreams, she needed to know a lot more about him.

  Hours later, she had all the facts anybody could want (and then some) about fluteplayer images in Southwestern rock art. Kokopelli was not one mythic figure, but several: Chu’lu’laneh at Zuni, sometimes; Ghanaskidi for some Navajo; Nepokwa’i for certain Hopi and Tewa. The sleek, genderless gift shop version came from Hohokam ceramics. Otherwise, Kokopelli was very male—with petroglyphs to prove it—when he wasn’t shape-shifting into a locust.

  Kokopelli was associated with rain, hunting, mist, snakes…and, big surprise, fertility. He was a shaman and a trickster, like Raven or Coyote. His image showed up all over the Anasazi regions of the Four Corners area, wherever people had lived.

  Nobody seemed to know how old Kokopelli was. Some sources attributed him to the Anasazi or older tribal groups. Others linked him to Mesoamerica, possibly the Mayans.

  And not one gave her a clue about her nightmares.

  Staring down at the useless pile of notes on her desk, Cassie rubbed her stinging eyes and shut off her computer. If she wanted real answers, there was only one place left to look: at the bottom of her closet, in a box she’d rather
forget about entirely.

  Tossing boots, an old jacket, and an even older quilt aside, she felt her hands shaking as she hauled it out. According to its logo, the battered container had once held beer. Now it held the legacy of Daniel McAllister, caretaker of Zia House—and former professor of Southwestern archaeology, contributor to the Chaco Project.

  Former living human being. Or at least, she profoundly hoped he wasn’t still alive.

  Cassie had met McAllister a year ago last August, when Julie Valdez (and her uncle Frank) had convinced her to sign up for a field school in need of extra paying participants. Cassie had had enough anthro coursework at the U. of Wyoming to qualify— and a fascination with the Zia House specialty, Chaco Canyon.

  Frank Yellowtail mistrusted the school. Due to a couple of missing students the year before—and the director’s inability to account for them—Zia House had lost its accreditation months ago. Unfortunately, this hadn’t happened until after Julie’s advisor had signed her up, and the university didn’t give refunds. The more her uncle learned about the disappearances, the less he liked the idea of Julie being down there alone.

  Even then, Cassie suspected, he’d caught a whiff of the Outside.

  She had caught the same scent at that year’s work site—which was also the site of last year’s troubles. Just a small cave in the side of a wash a few miles from Chaco, but the school’s director called it a “new paradigm” in Chacoan outliers.

  Within the next few days, that paradigm had claimed two lives: another student, and Daniel McAllister.

  She had found McAllister’s box in the back of her Jeep while unpacking back at Twenty Mile. C. BARRETT PLEASE OPEN, it read on all four sides in black marker. Taped to the top was an envelope, also with her name on it.