A hand-made sign with the healer’s name and the slogans from the leaflet stood in a gap between two buildings. Steve felt his heart in his mouth as he listened to the tyres crunch across the piece of waste ground that acted as a car park. The man that he’d met in the cafe stood at the end of the open space, directing people towards a set of dilapidated steps at the side of one building.
Ann clung to his arm as they made their way up the steps into the old building, then up a set of wooden stairs and through some double doors.
The room was laid out with rows of rickety-looking chairs, and there was a low stage at the front. Steve imagined that someone must have been burning incense, as the air was filled with a sickly sweet aroma. Probably to hide the smell of the damp, he thought sourly.
They walked cautiously towards the front and sat in the third row. The room was filling up, but nobody seemed to be talking, not even to the companions they’d arrived with. Steve turned to Ann and asked “Are you all right?” She smiled and nodded, but he could tell she didn’t mean it. Once more, he felt helpless.
Suddenly an echo of the night surrounded him. It was as if Ann was lit by the light from the black star once more. Vivid blooms of decay and morbidity showed through her skin. He’d dismissed it as a vision or a dream before, but now it was happening in a room crowded with people. He shut his eyes tightly and turned away for a few seconds. When he looked back, everything had returned to normal.
After a few more minutes, the long-faced man walked to the front of the room and stepped up on to the stage. “Good evening, everyone. Thank you for coming. I am sure that none of you will be disappointed and that you will all find what you seek here tonight.”
Then he introduced the ‘healer’, and Steve discovered that his name was as hard on the ear as it was on the eye. He couldn’t have repeated it if his life had depended on it.
From a door at the side of the stage, a tall man in dark clothes entered. No one clapped or moved a muscle.
Like the long-faced man, his skin was pale and his head was crowned with slick black hair. The man’s eyes were the most striking thing about him. They were an unusually pale green, and gave the impression of being lit internally.
Behind the man was a large black screen. But when Steve turned his head away slightly, it appeared to be a hole. He squinted and peered at it for a few seconds. It appeared to drink in the light around it, although the dimness of the room made it difficult to judge. He gave up wondering after a few seconds of eye strain, and waited for the ‘show’ to begin.
The ‘healer’ walked to the front of the stage and looked as if he was ready to speak. In an alarming trick of perspective, he seemed to grow taller as he took each step.
The man simply cast his gaze around the room, scanning everyone’s faces with his peculiar eyes. When it came to Steve’s turn, he dropped his gaze, refusing to play the game.
Then the man stepped back from the edge of the stage and began to say something. Steve concentrated for a few seconds before he realised it wasn’t speech at all. Rather than imparting any information, the ‘healer’ seemed to be chanting in a buzzing, droning voice. Steve groaned; this was precisely the sort of pseudo-religious crap he’d expected.
And there was something happening behind the man. It was coming from the screen. Or was it? Maybe it was inside the screen. Steve felt confused.
A mantle of what looked like flies settled on the healer’s shoulders and, within seconds, chitinous petals of disease bloomed on his skin. Behind him, there was a change, an opening up, an enormous blossoming in the blackness.
The man’s droning voice continued. It was cutting through his head and Steve wanted to stop him, once and for all. He knew now that there was danger here.
He turned to those sitting nearest him and tried to speak, but he could see straight through them, their vileness now visible in repellent clarity. A terrible coldness seeped into him.
Looking down at his hands he was appalled that he could see straight through them, the bones and veins and ligaments clearly visible to him. As he watched, the flesh took on a silvery translucence.
In panic he looked up at those nearest him, seeking help. But they too had begun to change, blossoming and unravelling in great fronds of gellid flesh. Silvery filaments extruded from their bodies, seeking out similar growths from those next to them.
In shock, he saw tendrils from his own body snake out and entwine themselves with those weaving their way towards him. He was joining them and his mind revolted against it, desperately seeking a way to escape, even if that escape was death.
The preacher’s voice still filled his head with an inexpressible agony, cutting his mind into pieces. Suddenly something else flooded his mind, crowding out all doubt, revealing a new truth to him. It felt hard and cold but perfect, too. And now he could hear it.
The healer’s voice was not alone but merely one voice of a wonderful chorus. But now he could understand what was said: “The stars are right’”. He knew it was true and that he too would become free and powerful and renewed.
Feeling compelled to affirm his belief in what they said, he added his own voice to theirs, even though he no longer had a mouth.
Mark Howard Jones lives in Cardiff, the capital of Wales, and has had dozens of stories published on both sides of the Atlantic. His novella ‘The Garden Of Doubt On The Island Of Shadows’ drew praise from Ray Bradbury among others. His collection ‘Songs From Spider Street’ is now available from Screamingdreams.com. Visit Mark’s website here.
Illustration by Dana Wright.
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The Fire of Zon Mezzamalech
by Randall D. Larson
FIRST CAME THE DREAM. Then came the nightmare.
The dream came to Jason Tregardis as the fulfillment of childhood fantasies, of hero worship, of a thirst for danger in extremis. He found this fulfillment in his career as a firefighter, a vocation he won, after months of applications and testing and demanding training, some half dozen years ago. He entered into his new assignment as the rookie on a veteran crew of hardened firefighters in downtown San Francisco, enduring the predictable amount of trials and hazings and reservations undertaken against any outside novice attempting to gain access into a circle of established kinsmen. But finally, over weeks and months of hard learning and gaining of on-the-job experience, he had proven himself capable and dependable enough to become one of the crew.
The dream encompassed all of his youthful longings; all that he had revered as a child about the fire service, about conviction and duty and integrity and courage, about being in the midst of calamity and doing something to help, he was now able to experience on a daily basis. The reality, however, was that of course most of those days were filled with an unending stream of the routine – mundane medical or service calls, insignificant fires burning in trash dumpsters, stove tops, automobiles, or in the urban patches of vegetation that grew sporadically around the city.
But the nice things about the fire service was that at any moment the routine could burst apart by moments of sheer exhilaration – when the mundane became the massive. Huge warehouse fires, cliffside rescues of careless adventurers, the rare medicals when Jason recognized the spark of life glinting back into the eyes of a flatliner after intense minutes of CPR. These were the moments he lived for – when Jason Tregardis, firefighter, truly made a difference. Those are the moments he could call his own, that allowed him to go home proud and fulfilled and confident. He loved the fact that when he went to work, absolutely anything could happen. He wouldn’t want it any other way.
But that was before the nightmare. It had landed on him hard during the most recent interruption of the mundane by the massive. Two nights ago there was a terrific fire in a row of shops and apartments that went horribly, awfully wrong, and the nightmare had seized Jason Tregardis the same way the smoke and flames from that fire had gripped his partner, firefighter Devan Farnsworth, and burned the life out of him in an i
mmense inferno of heat and flames.
Jason had barely escaped himself, his sense of direction stifled by the blinding smoke and the unusual maze-like confines of the curio shop in which he and Devan had been waging an unsuccessful interior attack against an inferno of far greater malevolency than they or their Captain had at first realized. Jason had witnessed Devan being swallowed up by a sudden, massive eruption of thick, undulating smoke and soul-piercing heat, and then, as that same oscillating mass of roiling smoke and licking flame had come after him, Jason had found a window and dove through it, barely escaping the exploding flames as they launched after him. Together with his Captain and their engineer, Jason attempted to regain access to the interior to rescue Devan but each time that roiling, blistering black and orange cacophony of raging combustion had driven them back. Jason remembered thinking, for a moment, that it looked almost alive.
By the time they and five additional crews had finally controlled and quenched the blaze and they could get back in to retrieve their fellow, all hope had gone, and so was the life of his partner and friend, the once irascible Devan Farnsworth, firefighter.
They called it a Line of Duty Death. Somehow, that placed a higher regard upon it, even though Devan was as dead as he would have been if he’d simply been run over by a city bus on his day off. But, because it was the fire that had taken him instead of some careless transit coach, Devan had crossed over into a unique pantheon of heroes, shared only by firefighters, law enforcement officers, and emergency medical personnel. His life had been lost in the performance of duty on behalf of the citizens of San Francisco, and he would be honored for paying that price. But with that expense, all of Jason’s dreams had crashed in upon themselves, sucked into the same smoky vortex that had inhaled the life of Devan Farnsworth, as all of the rewards of a longed-for career of saving lives faded into ashes in the guilt of losing one, and all of Jason’s motivation became incarcerated by the nightmare.
The memories that floated through that nightmare were tangible only in fragile wisps, moments in time passing through his mind but given little regard in reflection. The moment he and the others carried Devan’s body out of the smoking shop, the moment he noticed the scent of burnt wood – so often a sensation that filled Jason with wonder and pride – had mixed with the unpleasant odor of smoldering flesh, and had nauseated him. The terrible moment of meeting Devan’s wife at the morgue, helplessly trying to comfort her racking sobs until the department Chaplain arrived to assume that thankless duty. And two days off of vague existence, sitting in his lonely apartment and reliving those final moments in the curio shop, its distorted aisleways walled by towering shelves once filled with misshapen objects of uncertain origin and esoteric appeal.
Now it was all ashes. Ashes and guilt. A terrible, suffering guilt that Jason couldn’t shake, and which had finally driven him to return to the deserted ruins of that curio shop. He was standing before it on the sidewalk, staring at the twisted, blackened shapes of bend and broken wooden timbers, crumbling, half-standing brickwork, and a thick carpet of soggy ash spilling across the floor.
The front door was burned off and Jason ducked beneath the yellow safety tape and went into the shop. He stepped slowly through the ash-filled, smoke and water drenched vestiges that once were shelves and counters and Objects d’Art. What he could make out of them seemed more like Objects d’Bizarre. He hadn’t noticed them in the fury of the firefight two nights ago, but now they stood, silent and clear event in the dimming twilight. Strange, stone figurines of lumpy, winged creatures, melted ornamentation oozing over squat, stone-carven bodies. Even without the damage from the fire, they looked… wrong.
The shop was one of four or five shops crowned by overhead apartments that had been destroyed in the blaze. The fire investigators had pinpointed the fire’s origin to this shop but had been unable to specifically determine what sparked the fire. But that didn’t matter to Jason Tregardis at the moment, as his off-duty tennis shoes sloshed through the wet piles of ash and charred wood that littered the floor. He gazed about the place, uncertain what he was looking for or even why he was here. He was absorbed by the crushing burden of his own guilt, the wretched desolation that had brought him back here; as if he were somehow responsible for his fellow firefighter’s death, if for no other reason than he had survived while Devan had not.
He bore grief not only for Devan but also for the demise of his own job satisfaction, suddenly immersed in the suffocating crush of failure. And that, indeed, was the bottom line. Failure. He had failed. By his very job description, Jason as a firefighter was supposed to save lives, and here he had failed. He couldn’t save Devan, and the weight of that failure against his convictions filled his heart with more grief than he could bear.
He tottered against the side of a bookshelf, his shoulder fracturing its brittle, burnt braces, causing several old and large books, black as the ashes into which they fell, to drop onto the floor. Jason glanced at them, then squatted onto the floor and buried his head in his hands, sobbing uncontrollably.
There is a joy in grief, in the simple ability of humankind to express grief through the pure physical act of crying. While it does not remove the pain, it inaugurates the healing process by exorcizing some of those tortured emotions, shedding them through tears and verbalized anguish and the physical outpouring of desperate sorrow.
Jason allowed himself to grieve in that manner for several minutes until he was spent. He spat the tears out of his mouth, took a deep breath, and stood up, blinking the water out of his eyes. The shop was gloomy, the daytime having passed away, acquiescing to the emergence of dusk. The ceiling of the shop and all of the apartment above had been burnt away except for several pair of charred cross-timbers, but the cloudy sky and growing darkness let little light into the shop with its haphazard array of tall shelves and cornucopia of counters.
Something caught Jason’s eye. Something shiny that contrasted with the predominant dull ashy black of the ruined shop. There was a small pedestal standing in one of the shelves across the way, and on top of the pedestal something was… gleaming. But not the bright gleam of reflected sunlight, since the shop was now entirely dark, but rather a dull, throbbing gleam as if the object were creating its own internal glow.
Jason stepped over to have a closer look. It was a dark, milky crystalline stone, a glimmering orb of unremarkable shape but hypnotizing translucency. About the size of a small orange, it was slightly flattened at each end, and it rested solidly upon the small, black wooden pedestal. It was not transparent even though it shimmered with a crystalline depth, but it radiated an intermittent glow that seemed to emanate from within its own cloudy and changeable structure.
Jason was as amazed with the peculiarities of the crystal as he was with the fact that it had not burned, in fact showed no signs of soot or ash or scorching of any kind, even though the ebony pedestal on which it was fixed had been clearly charred and still captured a residue of black ash. The crystal had somehow, miraculously survived the conflagration.
He picked it up and gazed into it, as if his eyes could somehow penetrate its crystalline microcosm. As his gaze bore into the translucent stone, it almost appeared as if its colors, its hues, the very depth of its mass were changing, shifting, growing deeper, thicker, as if he could gaze into endless fathoms existing in the confines of the fistful of marble of rock resting before him. He set it back down on its little plinth, and continued to watch it.
As he stared into the undulating shape in the crystal, he felt himself being drawn inward as the ash-covered remnants of the curio shop and its charred walls and roof-timbers passed away, all of Jason’s sensibilities being drawn into the murky depths of that misty orb. He lost awareness of his surroundings, all consideration of his environment and point in time faded into a sensation of rapid movement, of an increasing forward descent of his senses, as if he were sinking into the endless leagues of some cosmic sea, except it was the crystalline ebony into which he plummeted, body and soul, a
s the elliptical sphere began to sparkle and glimmer with sourceless reflections and precious oscillations of its own manufacture.
Uncertain moments later his vision and senses cleared, and he became aware of new surroundings. Gone was the ruined curio shop. Gone were the sounds of the urban night. Gone was any semblance of what he knew to be San Francisco. He was standing in a darkened chamber of some wooden structure than smelled of antiquated chemistry. Eerily quiet, only distant echoes of indiscernible sounds came to his ears like the distant moans of seagoing vessels. It was a thoroughly new environment to him, yet even as he apprehended that notion, Jason Tregardis had that foggy sensation again, and suddenly he became aware of a familiarity of this place. He certainly could have never been here before, because this was surely an environment of some previous era. But somehow he knew this place. He recognized its sculpted panels of mammoth ivory and tables of thick, dark wood into which grotesque ciphers had been carved, and he knew he was in the antechamber of Zon Mezzamalech, a student of ancient lore and a sorcerer of Lanamir in Mhu Thulan in ancient Hyperborea, that ancient land that predated times immemorial.
And he understood, also, that it was Zon Mezzamalech who had acquired the stone into which Jason’s gaze had brought him this distance and given him the understanding of where he was. He also understood that the Hyperborean sorcerer had acquired the orb through dubious means from some boundlessly ancient and distant place; acquired it for purposes of sinister intent as he sought to gain forbidden knowledge of elder times.
For a moment Jason feared that he had become the ancient sorcerer, had been somehow sorcerously transmutated into the wizard’s own antiquated self through some mystical magic embodied in the face of the crystal. But as he looked about the great chamber he realized he hadn’t, for he could see, aided by the dimming light that seeped in from a high window above an alcove in the stone wall, the figure of Zon Mezzamalech seated at the large, graven table, staring into a murky, grey crystal that was recognizably the same one that had led Jason on his journey to this place. Jason initially assumed he was only visualizing all of this in his mind, some unbidden out-of-body experience facilitated by the strange glassy orb, until he took a step and his footfall echoed through Zon Mezzamalech’s chamber. Jason Tregardis was physically present in this primordial place.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2012 Page 15
