“That’s nuts,” Jeb retorted, when he’d finished reading it. “The old man was going off his head when he was writing this stuff. Look at this here, where he speculates about the extra-terrestrial origin of the statue, of the unknown metal it is supposed to be made of. He calls it a conduit for outside influences – whatever that’s supposed to be! It’s nuts.”
Mike agreed, folding the papers and stuffing them inside his jacket. “Let’s take a look at the rest of this place while we’re here.”
They did not go far. In the living room, that also led off from the hallway, they found the source of the newer smell: the battered and torn body of an elderly woman, laid face down in a pool of blood, dried now. Like all the others murdered in this area she looked as if she had been mauled by a wild animal, though they knew better now.
“Mrs Collins?” Jeb speculated, still not used to the sight of such violence. “Do you think the old man did this before going to St. Mottram?”
Sickened at what they had found, they returned to the car and drove into Bridgetown to report it to Pete Volk at the sheriff’s office.
Volk looked dazed by it all. Adding to his problems was the growing lobby of pressmen and TV camera crews milling about outside.
“What have you done with the statue?” Mike asked, after returning the rifles they’d been issued with.
Volk nodded across the road to the Town Hall. “It’s stored in there for the time being. There’re supposed to be some eggheads from Brown University coming in the next few days to look at it. Though whether what they can tell me about that thing would go any way towards explaining what happened in St. Mottram, Lord knows.”
Mike handed him the papers they had found in the professor’s house.
“I don’t suppose these’ll be much help either,” he said.
Volk shrugged, non-committed. “I’ll leave that for the experts. There’s a whole bunch of Federal agents coming here. They’ll need to interview you, so you’ll have to stay here overnight. I suggest you book in the hotel down the street. It’s plain, but decent.”
That night, as Mike slept fitfully in his hotel bedroom, the nightmares began.
As fog swept along the streets.
David A. Riley‘s first professional sale was in 1970 to the 11th Pan Book of Horror Stories with a story that was recently reprinted in Cemetery Dance’s Century’s Best Horror Fiction, edited by John Pelan, The Lurkers in the Abyss. Since then I have had numerous stories published in anthologies and magazines in Britain, the US, Spain, Italy, Germany and Russia by Sphere Books, Doubleday, Tor, Corgi, Robinsons, Prime Books, etc. I have a collection of my earlier short stories due from Noose & Gibbet Press in a limited edition hard back in the UK next year, The Lurkers in the Abyss & Others. I also have a Lovecraftian horror novel due from Blood Bound Books in the US next year called The Return.
Story illustration by Ronnie Tucker.
Return to the table of contents
Fade to Black
by Robert Borski
“I bet over the years, Dr. Engel, you’ve seen some pretty interesting body art,” said my first patient of the afternoon, as he began that ritual process all those who come seeking my help must undertake, unveiling himself before me like some half-drunk nursing student back in my long ago residency days.
“That I have,” I said, looking away, glancing down at the name on top of the chart. Today’s two o’ clock appointment was one Nathan Scuyler and from his bowtie and tweed jacket it would not have surprised me to learn he was an academic from one of the Bay Area universities. “And believe me, I’ve often chided myself for not taking pictures or video of the more spectacular. Not only for promotional purposes — I once removed an elaborate full-body dragon that would probably generate a million hits on YouTube, as well as considerable business — but also because somewhere down the line, after I retire, it would have been interesting to look back upon everything and reminisce. Then again, people don’t come to me because I’m a preservationist. Just the opposite, in fact. So pictures or any kind of digital record always seemed antithetical.”
By now, of course, with the last of his shirt buttons unbuttoned, Nathan Scuyler stood waiting for me to cast my eye upon him, then in a flash quickly completed the process. From the waist up, in his plain white t-shirt, he looked a study in contrasts: half pristine and pure, like the belly of a cloud; half grubby and stained, like a bathroom graffito.
“Ta-da,” he proclaimed, lifting up his arms. “Pretty cool, huh, Doc? Around campus I’m known as Davey Jones’s Little Brother. You know, from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies?”
Conjuring up the cinematic image, I shuddered. But then blinking away Bill Nighy’s prosthetic face, I replaced it with the figure in my examining room, who at least was squid only from his shoulders down to his hands, along the underside of which, and ranging from larger to smaller, two rows of intricate blue-black suckers pocked his arms like barnacles of ink, while on top, a more uniform imbricated green dominated its entire length, ending with three claw-like appendages, one each to his ring, middle, and forefingers. Its renderer had also done an uncanny job of grafting the tattoo to the natural swell and curve of his musculature, such that when he finally lowered his arms a few seconds later, the motion was so fluid I might almost have been looking at real tentacles.
“Interesting,” I admitted, feeling the hair on the back of my neck rise. And then because I knew how much money work of this nature commanded and the hours of pain he must have endured under the needle: “Now tell me why you’ve come to Invisible Ink.”
“Probably the oldest story in the book,” Nathan Scuyler began, even as I bent closer to see what I could glean about the very work of art he would have me soon eradicate, “at least in terms of tattoo regrets. Simply put, the new love in my life — and soon to be fiancée, I hope, if your magic beams of light can do the trick — hates them. Says they totally creep her out. Me, in terms of popular culture, I see squid, I think Spongebob Squarepants’s neighbor, Quincy Tentacles. But Sonya, who grew up in Japan, thanks to her father’s military command post, thinks shokushu goukan – this weird sort of Japanese erotica I doubt you’ve ever heard of. Basically, it’s a form of horror cartoon involving tentacles and, um, how shall I put this, deep groping?”
“I’ve removed my share of anime-based tats over the years,” I said, pressing down on his forearm to gauge the depth, quantity, and age of the ink, “so while I’m not an expert, I’m semi-familiar.”
“Great. Great,” he said, his face considerably more flushed and acne-scared than the waters of his forearm, where, reaching for an invisible fish, the tattooed sea-coil rolled and roiled. Generally, when you were this unpigmented, laser treatments were more successful. “At any rate,” he continued, “Sonya had an older brother who was really into the stuff and apparently he and a friend attempted some sort of fantasy reenactment that went terribly awry and was so traumatic she still refuses to talk about it. At least that’s what she claims. It’s also why she’s pretty much insisted I have my, er, dermal equivalencies removed. Provided I comply, everything will be good again.”
“I seem to detect a note of skepticism here, Mr. Scuyler,” I said, peering closer, trying to get a better fix on the tattoo’s chromatics. Was that a tinge of indigo beneath the blue-black? Some vermillion behind the scales? “You suspect she has a truer motivation for disliking your tats, perhaps?”
“Look, Doc,” said Nathan Scuyler, sighing as I continued to inspect the tattoo’s ebb and flow, tracing the Laocoön-like sleeve of each arm all the way up to his shoulders. “I teach marine biology at Stanford. My graduate and Ph. D. work was done on Mesonychoteuthis, which in case you didn’t know is the giant squid’s even bigger brother and largest invertebrate on the planet. Eyeballs the size of cantaloupes and a penis you can skip rope with. You want factoids, I have a million of them. Because the plain simple truth of the matter is, ever since I was a kid in Massachusetts and hunted squid by moonlight, I’ve been t
otally entranced by cephalopods. You put me in the company of anyone who’ll listen, let alone a biologist, sailor or fisherman, and I totally geek out. Fortunately, part of me was able to diffuse this by acquiring the unique artwork you see before you. Cost me a pretty penny at the time, too. But I was also lucky enough to write a well-received book that quite a few libraries, both university and public, wanted for their stacks. In fact, it’s book club money that’s paying for the laser treatments. So you’d think I’d mastered my obsession or at least had partial control over it. But even now, and knowing better, there’ll be times I’m with Sonya when suddenly I’ll start rhapsodizing about some aspect of octopi or squid-dom and she’ll give me this withering look like she just caught me sneaking a look at another woman’s ass.”
“Ah, then,” I said, finished with my preliminary exam. “The green-eyed monster rearing its head methinks. Or in this case, the siren jealous of Scylla.”
“Exactly,” Nathan Scuyler agreed, reaching for his shirt, abandoning like all those long ago nurses any notion of seduction. “But it’s the former I intend to marry. And I really do love her. So what’s the verdict, Doc? Can you help me or not? Are me and my tats good candidates for photothermolysis? Or should I stop saving for an engagement ring? Give it to me straight.”
And so I did, at least with all the straightness and coherence of form my Q-switched laser could muster one week later (actually, only God himself could wield a tighter beam, although I do not know if He, like me, would use His punishing left hand to administer the correction). Overhead, a monitor was situated so that even patients lying on their bellies could look up and see the progress of my work, and I had just begun with a preliminary patch of skin on the topside of his wrist, where his sensitivity to pain was likely to be reduced.
With the cryofan supplying coolth in one hand, and the laser’s ruby nib in the other, I watched subdermal ink, but nothing else, absorb the energy from the tuned light, turning puffy white like a contrail against the pink sky of his flesh.
“You feel any discomfort when I do that?” I asked. Lying under the sheet, but tethered to a drip, Professor Scuyler remained alert, but still, and I was hoping I would not have to increase the level of anesthetic.
“I’m feeling nothing, Doc,” he told me. “At least not now. Although from the pamphlet your receptionist gave me, I’m sure tomorrow will be a whole ‘nother story.”
“You can expect some post-thermolytic blistering I can pretty much guarantee,” I said, strafing another cluster of black, hearing again the distinctive fluttering of the laser, the percussiveness of which sounded like helicopters in the distance. “But it won’t be much more painful than what you underwent when you got your original tattoo.”
Another series of pulses, and three more suckers underwent the transformation to ghostly areolae.
“At twice the price, I should hope not. Which reminds me. I brought you a copy of my book, King Kraken. It’s a bit dense in places, I’m told by lay readers. But if nothing else, I think you’ll enjoy the pictures.”
Not what most iconoclasts do, I thought to myself, restoring another 2.5 centimeter square of his skin to its original integrity. Then again, perhaps it was something I could browse during my next bout of insomnia.
Buoyantly, from below then, his blue eyes nictitating: “Is the pigment breaking up like you hoped?”
“Well, as I told you before, we won’t really know for sure until your immune system has had a few days to remove the smaller particles from your body. But it does appear to be debonding. And you’re almost certainly going to need a follow-up session or two. But from everything else I’m seeing, it looks good. It is, however,progressing slowly. And it’ll probably take me another hour or so just to finish this arm. Are you still sure you want to do both of these bad boys today?”
“Let me put it to you as if you were a colleague, Doc,” said Nathan Scuyler, suppressing a yawn. “Does a squid love doing the backstroke?”
Above on the monitor, I watched myself blaze the dermal equivalent of Nazca lines with pulses of light in the 694 nanometer wavelength. Below, starting to squirm at times (I’d shut off the EMLA drip by now), Professor Scuyler kept up a steady stream of chatter, as if to help diffuse what I felt was some nervousness.
“You know,” he explained, laying his right ear down on the operating table, as if listening to some sea conch for the ocean’s swell, “most of your smaller cephalopods will rise to the surface whenever the moon is full, although we’re still not sure why. Some of us believe they’re simply following the fish and plankton that form the main bulk of their diet and which are similarly driven, while others like myself believe it’s a more atavistic, hard-wired impulse. At any rate, to draw them to your boat on cloudy or moonless nights — something I did endless times as a boy — all you have to do is shine a reasonable facsimile, like a searchlight, or if the night is really dark or shoreline dim, a good lantern. And up they’ll come in droves, squiggling, like some sort of hive intelligence summoned by a queen. But what you’re doing, with your little device there–”
As I progressed, more and more of his left arm was looking tufted and wispy, like the sloughed-off skin of a lace python.
“–is configured more like infinitesimal star-bursts, or mini-novae. And it is eating me, the squid wannabe.”
“A nice bit of irony, I suppose.”
As I shut off and cradled the laser, I heard his grunt of assent. “Your word to the Deity’s ear, Doc. And then some. We done for now?”
The rest of the afternoon transpired routinely enough. I met with a number of patients in various stages of post-removal recovery, all but one of which were resolving quite nicely and needed no further treatments. The lone exception: a former NBA star whose dark skin, as I’d cautioned him all along, was scarring in huge keloid bundles. (“‘Think before you ink,’” he said mournfully, “Why didn’t I listen to my friends?”) He asked if I thought cortisone injections would help flatten the keloids, and I said yes, but also told him I wanted to try topical imiquimod first, to see if we would get better results. On the Dermatology Network, I then partook in a fascinating telelink conference that concerned a young woman with a rare case of telangiectasia, all of her birthmarks looking like bruises. Unfortunately, even with the latest technology, it appeared they were no more blanchable than original sin; whereupon it being six o’ clock, I went to my usual Wednesday evening choir practice, where we began preliminary rehearsals for next month’s Easter pageant.
Not much later, at home, tired, but not sleepy, I remembered Nathan Scuyler’s book, King Kraken. I’d never heard of the small university press that had published it before; perhaps, given its location, it appealed to Scuyler’s sense of home or he’d been employed there before he moved to Palo Alto. As he’d mentioned, it did contain a number of fascinating picture galleries. Certainly, when it came to outré and bizarre forms, if not at the same time outright beautiful, God had outdone Himself with the multi-limbed denizens of Pod Nation. Whether it was the diaphanous glass marrow of the ghost squid, the umbrella-mouthed vampire squid, squid that looked like piglets, chandeliers, or lava lamps, or even the mysterious and semi-cryptozoic mud squid of Appalachia (its lone snapshot clearly photoshopped in my opinion), it was not hard to figure out why Nathan Schuyler had been so beguiled by the beasts. But perhaps the two pictures that haunted me the most and which I kept turning back to over and over again were Katshushika Hokusai’s early depiction of two octopi and a naked woman for “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” and a news wire photo of Nathan Scuyler standing aboard a Japanese fishing vessel alongside the netted, if disintegrating, remains of a giant squid — only a single huge tentacle of which had survived, along with a great mass of unidentifiable gray goo (imagine an elephant hit by a train traveling 200 mph and you will come close to picturing the result). Both so intrigued me I barely heard my ringtone several minutes later; apparently two calls had come in since my cell had finished recharging.
; According to the ID tag, the first call originated from Hopkins Marine Station and was who I thought it likely to be:
“Hey, Doc, it’s me, Nate Scuyler,” said the familiar voice from this afternoon. “Sorry to bother you at home, but I have a question I’m hoping you can answer for me real quick. Is it part of the healing process for the tats to turn darker after treatment? And thicker? Because that’s what’s happened once the puffiness went down. Seriously, Doc, it’s freaking me out. Please call me back as soon as you can. And I’m most definitely gonna want to see you soon as you open up shop tomorrow.”
So not good, I told myself, troubleshooting several corrective procedures in my mind. But before I rang the good professor back, I wanted to see who the second call was from, having no idea who or what the IDed Ogdoad was.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2012 Page 43
