Black Wings III - New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror

by Jonathan Thomas

  The “vultures” who took the trouble to press their suit with Rachel as well as with me were three in number. Their names were Patterway, Crisson, and Dove. Patterway was a professor of natural aciences at Miskatonic University. Crisson was, like Tillinghast, an amateur—the scion of a family enriched in the distant past by the slave trade and in the nearer past by shrewd capitalist dabbling—who had elected to devoted himself to a passion for electrical science, probably moved by the inspiration of the Wizard of Menlo Park. Dove was…well, I have to confess that I never have found out exactly what Dove considers himself to be. I know that he will not accept the label “psychic researcher,” or that of “parapsychologist,” any more than he will condescend to describe himself as a “medium.” I have always had the impression that he was a failed literary man before interesting himself in the mysteries of the plenum, as so many lifestyle fantasists are, but such evidence as he has provided has always been suggestive and indirect, and no one any longer expects clarity from him.

  My immediate response to the inquiries of the vultures had been negative, not merely in the trivial sense of flatly denying that I had any of Tillinghast’s papers in my possession but also in the more assertive sense of telling them that I had no wish to see any of them, or speak or write to them about what I had experienced, or anything else. I stopped short of telling them to go to hell in so many words, although I was tempted.

  Rachel’s appeal was, however, a different matter. She was Tillinghast’s widow—Tillinghast’s relict, as the jargon has it.

  Tillinghast had been my closest friend for many years, and our friendship had deep roots; it could not have been sustained otherwise, given that we had drifted apart intellectually to such an extent as no longer to have anything much in common in our ideas and interests by the time he died. We had known each other as boys, however, when we had been inseparable, and it had seemed both natural and inevitable to maintain our friendship at college in spite of the divergence of our academic interests. Even then, our fellow students thought Tillinghast eccentric and ill-tempered, and felt slightly uneasy in his company, but I knew him better than they did. Perhaps he was eccentric, and he did occasionally lack self-control, but he was also brilliant and steadfastly loyal. I knew that the trust he had in me was as indissoluble as his love for Rachel, even if it did not arise from the passionate element of his character—and he knew that he could always depend on me, even though others thought me cold and indifferent to everything.

  When Tillinghast and Rachel had separated in the seventh year of their marriage, casual acquaintances suggested that it was because his love of science was greater than his love for her, and that she had been wounded by neglect as well as intimidated by occasional outbursts of wrath, but that was not so. It was simply that he found it far easier to express his love of science than his love for Rachel in the conventional ways expected—demanded—by New England society. It was not the depth of his passion that was at fault but its mask, and it was not neglect that wounded her but an intensity of feeling that seemed to her too awkwardly formed, even when it was expressed very differently than in wrath, to be easily bearable. They lived apart for more years than they had lived together, but neither ever sued for divorce or sought solace elsewhere.

  I knew Rachel, of course, as my friend’s wife, but we never had any relationship outside my friendship with him. It was through science that he met her—she was a laboratory technician at the college where he and I were students—and it always seemed to me that the bond between them was somehow located on the opposite side of his personality to the bond that linked him to me. Ours was a linear rather than a triangular community, and Tillinghast loomed so large between myself and Rachel that she often seemed invisible to me: a significant presence in my life as well as his, while they were together, but always in shadow. Even so, I could not hesitate over my response to an appeal from her. Whatever she wanted of me she had a right to ask, and I had a duty to provide.

  I wrote to say that she was very welcome to visit me in the suburbs of Providence, or that I would be equally glad to visit her in the coastal village where she had taken up residence, not far from New Bedford, but she replied that, as the sole heir to Tillinghast’s estate, she would need to spend at least a week in the house of which she was now the owner, in order to take inventory of its contents and decide what was to be done with both the movable and immovable property. She asked me to come and see her there on the evening following her arrival, and to stay long enough to lend her what assistance I could in her sad task. I could not refuse, no matter how intimidated I was by the prospect.

  Because time was short, I telephoned in order to agree to her proposal. “There’s a small hotel where the by-road that leads to Tillinghast’s house joins the highway,” I told her. “It’s only a mile away. I’ll reserve a room there.”

  “Pease don’t, David,” she said. “To be honest, I’d much rather have you stay in the house. I’ll bring my chauffeur and my maid-of-all-work with me, so we won’t have to fend for ourselves. Besides which, you might have difficulty booking a room. It’s only a small hotel, and they’ll be there.”

  “Who?” I asked, a trifle stupidly.

  “The unholy trinity: Patterway, Crisson, and Dove. They’re all exceedingly keen to acquire the wreckage of Crawford’s machine, and all his other equipment—not to mention his papers. Only Crisson has so far put in a cash bid, but Patterway is insistent that everything ought to go to Miskatonic, in order that it might be properly preserved and evaluated, and I suspect that I could stage an interesting auction—or perhaps start a war—if I assembled them all in the same room, with the wreckage of the machine and any papers I can find in the house. Before I let any of them in, though, I feel that I need some moral and intellectual support—support that only you, in all probability, could meaningfully provide. Will you be my knight in shining armor, to defend my confusion and poor Crawford’s honor?”

  What could I say? While feeling that things were going from bad to worse—that not only would I have to confront that damnable haunted house again, but that I would have to do so in the presence of avid carrion-birds—I could not possibly turn down an appeal so phrased. There is a code of behavior imposed on anyone summoned to play the knight, which forbids any refusal to enter the lists, even against dragons, giants and ogres. There is no specific mention of migraines in medieval romance, but plenty of vaguer references to illness, and to visions of all sorts; knights are supposed to suffer such things bravely, and conquer them—or die trying.

  “I shall be delighted,” I assured her, more politely than sincerely. Delighted or not, though, I was determined.

  I was very well aware of the time required to complete a journey between my home and Tillinghast’s, so it was not miscalculation that led me to arrive a full two hours early, some thirty minutes ahead of the estimate that Rachel had given me of the time of her own arrival. Given that I had to go, and to go in the capacity of a lady’s champion, I wanted to check the place out in advance—or, rather, I wanted to check myself out in proximity to the house, to make sure that I could tolerate the environment. For that reason, I took care to reach the house while the sun had not yet begun to turn crimson as it sank into the wilderness of the west, but was still blazing benignly yellow in a clear blue sky.

  I did not take a motorized cab, having always felt more comfortable in horse-drawn transport, but I regretted that slightly, for the final section of the road that led to Tillinghast’s house was even more replete with ruts and potholes than I remembered it, and I felt certain that I would not have been jolted nearly as much by a vehicle with pneumatic tires as I was in the two-wheeled trap. In the past, I had ridden out the jolts with casual disdain, but now, I was frightened that they might start my head aching, with the henceforth-inevitable accompaniment of spots before my eyes. The driver, too, seemed direly resentful of the road’s condition—for which he naturally blamed me personally—and set off on the return journey sulkily, wi
th a pained expression on his face, as if fearful that his frail vehicle might disintegrate under the stress.

  I carried my bags to the front porch and set them down beside the door. Then I began a circumnavigation of the house. I could have gone inside immediately—I knew where Tillinghast had hid his spare key and was sure that no one would have removed it—but it did not seem polite to anticipate Rachel in that respect, and I was confident that I could make an initial assessment of my own state of mind as easily by peering in through the windows as by going inside.

  I ambled around the house and its annexes. I peered through the windows, which seemed to have attracted an unusual amount of grime since they had been washed. I tested the kitchen door to make sure that it was locked. I sat down briefly in the back garden. I even looked up, once or twice, at the windows on the first floor and the eaves—but not at the ridge of the roof or the weathervane—and I kept my hat on while I did so, so that the slightest adjustment of my head would bring its censorious brim into play.

  I did not see anything untoward. I could hear the weathervane, though; there was an unsteady breeze blowing, sometimes from the east and sometimes from the southeast, from the not-so-distant sea. The vane—whose ornament, I knew from memory, was shaped like a fish rather than the conventional cockerel—creaked as it swayed, obedient to the atmospheric indecision.

  I knew that the sound of the weathervane was perfectly natural, but there was something else, perhaps beyond hearing as well as beyond sight, that did not seem quite right. I remembered that Tillinghast’s machine had somehow retained a visible glow even when its electricity supply was switched off, once his experiments had begun. Tillinghast had suggested that it was ultraviolet light somehow made visible, but that made no sense, and I had realized at the time that the interpretation was a symptom of his mental derangement—but however nonsensical his suggested explanation might have been, the glow had been real. The machine had been affected by its experimental use. Perhaps, I thought, the house had been affected too, in a subtler but nevertheless substantial way—and the weathervane most of all, given its metal constitution and its proximity to the machine.

  Then I told myself not be silly, and that it was all in my mind—that even the glow in the machine had been in my mind, the first symptom of hallucination. When I returned to the front of the house again, after twelve or fifteen minutes, a little more confident in my sanity, there was a man on the porch, looking down pensively at my luggage. There was no horse or vehicle outside the gate; he must have walked—although I did not remember passing any pedestrians as I was following my own jolting course along the road.

  We looked one another up and down. He was tall and bony, perhaps forty years of age, with a tanned leathery complexion and eyes as dark as his near-black hair. He had the advantage of me. Of the three vultures who had contacted me, the only one I had ever met in the flesh was Patterway; this was not him. Given that he was staying in the same hotel as his two rivals, he presumably knew that I was neither of them, and that allowed him to jump to the correct conclusion.

  “Mr. Dearden, I presume,” he said.

  I almost hazarded a guess when he paused, but he saved me the trouble. “Lyman Dove,” he supplied. “I wrote to you, if you recall.”

  “I recall,” I said, curtly. “Mrs. Tillinghast isn’t here yet—didn’t she give you an appointment?”

  “Oh yes,” she said, “but I wanted I take a look at the place in advance—to soak up a little of the atmosphere, as it were. Mrs. Tillinghast mentioned that you would be here, but I didn’t know that you would be coming in advance. I apologize if I’ve inconvenienced you in any way.”

  I did not accept the apology—nor did I offer him one, although I suspected that my presence might be inconveniencing him more than his was inconveniencing me.

  “The breeze is always welcome at this time of year,” I observed, although I knew perfectly well that the “atmosphere” in which he was interested was no mere matter of molecules of air. “Cooling, without bringing the odor of fish from the coastal canneries.”

  “Do you still find that noticeable nowadays?” he asked. “Since the cod began to shun the cape that bears their name, I rarely catch a whiff. I’m almost nostalgic for it, on occasion—although I ought to be grateful for anything that helps to keep my sensory channels clear. How are you coping with your migraines, Mr. Dearden?”

  The immediate temptation was to reply “What migraines?”—but to do so would have seemed like an admission of weakness, conceding the tempo of the contest to him. I did not jump to the conclusion that he had been investigating me, although I was aware that a private detective had been asking questions, presumably having been hired to discover whether I had any of Tillinghast’s papers. Indeed, I was more inclined to believe that he was taking a guess based on something else he knew—or thought he knew. Two could play at that game.

  “Under control,” I lied. “How are yours?”

  “Too controlled, alas,” he replied, serenely. “Consciousness is such a traitor, at times. We think of it as the vehicle of the will, but that is too narrow a view. Such will-power as we have is, for the most part, channeled through it, but its principal role is to function as a protective wall. Patterway, of course, thinks that was erected to filter experience wisely rather than simply to imprison us, but he’s an exceptionally narrow-minded man. Do you know James Patterway?”

  “We’ve met,” I confirmed.

  “Then you know what I mean; he wears his narrowness as a badge of pride. To be expected in a university man, I suppose, though less so at Miskatonic than elsewhere. Have you met Robert Crisson too?”

  “No,” I said, not wanting to stretch insincerity to the point of blatant irony by saying that I hadn’t had the pleasure.

  “He’s open-minded, as befits a dilettante condemned to unorthodoxy—but I fear that he’s one of those in which openness sometimes tends to vacancy. He’s the real adversary, of course, if we’re in competition—or rather, his money is. Patterway has his professorial status, though, and you have…the appeal of friendship, I suppose.”

  Dove seemed to be assuming that I was there for the same reason as everyone else—to try to take possession of Tillinghast’s work, or part of it—but I didn’t bother to correct his misapprehension, or rise to his bait, if he was merely attempting a ploy.

  “And what do you have, Mr. Dove?” I asked.

  “Only my charm,” he said, smiling as if it were a joke. He must have read in my face, however, that I’d taken the remark the wrong way. “Oh, I’ve no intention of behaving toward Mrs. Tillinghast in any way unbefitting a gentleman. What I hope to do is to seduce all five of us into an amicable and fruitful collaboration. Crisson’s not malicious or jealous by nature; it’s only the possession of his money tempts him to play the monopolist. He can be persuaded. Patterway’s more of an intellectual hoarder, but he’s not unreasonable; he’ll bend if necessary. How about you, Mr. Dearden? Are you a team player or a one-man band?”

  I was saved from the necessity of answering that particular impertinence by the sight and sound of Rachel Tillinghast’s Ford powering along the roadway, lurching from side to side as it hit the potholes. I hoped that the pneumatic tires and the suspension-springs were cushioning Rachel and her maid from any substantial bruising.

  Dove and I watched the automobile draw to a halt. I was quicker off the mark in racing to help the widow with her luggage—although, in truth, the chauffeur did not need much help. I left Dove to introduce himself, rather hoping that Rachel might tell him to go away and come back at the agreed time—but she seemed a trifle flustered and evidently wanted to give further instructions to the chauffeur, presumably to do with laying in supplies. While she was outside the house doing that and I was carrying various bags upstairs, the front door remained open, and Dove was inside before anyone could devise a stratagem for keeping him out.

  Rachel settled for ignoring him and concentrating all her attention on me when I came down
again. She didn’t tell me that I hadn’t aged a bit since the last time she had seen me, because it would have been too evidently untrue. I might have paid her the equivalent compliment, but it didn’t seem necessary. She had not put on much weight—remarkable in a woman who had been a trifle stout even in her twenties—and her angular face was still relatively wrinkle-free, but her hair had begun to go gray and she had not condescended to begin dyeing it. Her best feature was still her frank blue-green eyes.

  She thanked me profusely for coming and insisted a trifle too lavishly on her regret at not having seen me for so long and her gratitude to me for keeping my friendship with her husband so firm. “When the police told me that you had been arrested, I was outraged,” she said. “If you had fired a gun, I told them, it was certainly not at my husband. That was unthinkable. You might very well, I said, have been defending him—but attacking him, never.”

  “The error was of short duration,” I assured her. “The lack of a bullet-hole in the body told that story for me—although it took a little longer for the medical examiner to determine the true cause of death.”

  “Crawford was always a victim of his unreliable capacity for passion,” she said. “His explosive excitability was bound to expose any flaw in his make-up eventually—and the brain is such a delicate organ, so prone to sudden hemorrhages.”

  “He had been working too hard, I fear,” I told her. “Science benefits from commitment—one might almost say obsession—in a purely methodological sense, but there is often a human cost to be paid for such long hours and deep commitment. I urged him to take more rest and more exercise, but he felt that he was reaching a climax in his achievement and could not be persuaded.” I had to be a trifle diplomatic; I did not know whether she had seen his body before its cremation, and whether she knew the extent to which he had changed.