Black Wings of Cthulhu 2

by S. T. Joshi

  “Field…” Lenore said, the word rolling off her tongue tentatively, “research.”

  Walt didn’t know what to say. But he found the machine a moment later.

  * * *

  IT TOOK SOME TIME TO GET THE DICTAPHONE WORKING. Walt appropriated some copper wiring from a dead filmstrip projector and put Lenore to work wrapping it in insulating tape. She frowned when Walt cracked the still sleek black case to get at the innards of the Dictaphone.

  “This is totally steampunk,” Lenore said. “They don’t make equipment like this anymore. Everything’s so sleek and sterile these days.”

  “If you like vintage, you came to the right friggin’ college, that’s for sure,” Walt said. It was true. Miskatonic felt lived in. Every stone on the quad was worn. The lights flickered during the frequent winter storms. Monocles, sideburns, and grandfather’s suit jacket, moth-bitten and frayed were perennial student affectations. Corned beef hash and liver had regular rotations in the cafeterias. There wasn’t even a single vending machine on campus.

  “Why does anyone come here?”

  “Pfft, you know,” Walt said. “You have the rich idiots who couldn’t get into any of the real Ivy League schools; ninth-generation inbred legacy College Republicans; locals from across the river the College Fathers give full rides to just so nobody swims across and burns the whole place down; Californians who want to be close to skiing, and…”

  “And?” Lenore asked, her voice lilting as she stretched the word. She liked this.

  “People like us. You know, people with reasons to come here.”

  “So you’ll do it.” Lenore didn’t have a car. Walt did.

  “I’ll plug this thing in now and give it a whirl.” Walt tried putting it in backwards first, by mistake. Lenore had her notes with Akeley’s transcript of the recording—or at least the transcript Wilmarth claimed to have received from Akeley—spread out under her palms. Walt touched the sapphire point to the cylinder. The recording was tinny and distant, more crackle than voice. Was that a Boston Brahman chanting “…abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!” or a toothless old Vermonter putting on airs?

  “Akeley himself, running a scam of some sort?” Walt said, but Lenore shushed him harshly. Then that inhuman buzz of a voice, near-chanting, “And He shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides…” What a voice! Like auto-tune, a nail on a chalkboard. Walt didn’t hear it so much as feel it. But then Lenore was skeptical. “What if he recorded this on another Dictaphone, then played it back… wouldn’t it sound all hissy and strange?” They played the cylinder again, then a third time. Lenore had a pocket watch, yet another Miskatonic fad, with a second hand and took notes with each pass.

  “This is some wild shit,” Walt said after the fourth round. “But is it telling us anything? Are we debunkers now? Skeptics all of a sudden?”

  “Get one of the blanks. Let’s try it,” Lenore said. She recorded herself—“the waxen mask and the robe that hides”—then played it back, recording that on her cell phone’s voicemail, then re-recorded the playback of her voicemail onto the wax cylinder. “You’re a freakin’ genius, Walt,” she said, “getting this thing working.” Walt thought himself thinking that Lenore wasn’t too shabby herself. He wanted the experiment to fail, so they could do that field research, so that he could spend more time with her. And it did fail. A tiny little Lenore voice, with a trace of a microchip accent, spilled out of the Dictaphone’s old speaker. No vibrato, no buzz of the sort that made Walt’s molars cringe in his mouth. “Ah well,” Lenore said.

  “Maybe… the cave’s acoustics made it easier to fake such a voice?” Walt said.

  “Why would Akeley bother telling the truth about the cave if he was running a hoax?”

  “You said that there were things on the cylinder not on the mp3s, that you heard them on the old records and tapes.”

  “There is.” She slid the transcript over to Walt and reloaded the Wilmarth cylinder. “Listen closely. Listen past the words.” Walt and Lenore shared a look—Walt confused, Lenore confused by his confusion. “At the recording artifacts, you know,” she said. “With the copies, they’ve either been digitally erased or just degenerated beyond hearing from the process of copying.”

  Walt got up and turned off the lights in the little office. “The fluorescents, you know,” he explained. “Buzzing.” He even turned off his computer and threw his wristwatch—yes, he still wore one as a Miskatonic affectation of his own—into a desk drawer. Lenore had a keychain flashlight with which to illuminate the transcript, and a purple-painted finger to follow along. And there was something there, in the opening sounds of the recording. Ii eh lu uh uh wu. Then, after the hysterical and uncanny buzz of “a thousand young!” Ah ih ah ca t’pa. Just a little hint of And it has come to pass, but not in that Boston accent.

  “The ‘Bostonian’ is being fed his lines?” Walt asked.

  “Sounds like it.”

  “By Akeley.”

  “Or by whoever actually made the recording. Or by someone standing next to him.”

  “Or maybe it’s just an echo of some sort. In the cave.”

  “Again with the cave!” Lenore said, but she laughed. She was a pale girl, nearly aglow in the darkened room. “…but maybe,” she conceded.

  “So the original recording has a third speaker. That’s great, Lenore. Senior thesis stuff maybe, if you feed it into the right program and manage to extract it, but it’s not literature, it’s not a determination about Shubby and the black goat.” Lenore snorted at shubby.

  “One more time,” she said, and reset the point on the cylinder. This time, just thanks to expectations, Walt heard the other human speaker, and he heard something else. Some of the hisses and crackles themselves seemed to be phonemes now—stage-whispered prompts or at least preliminary throat-clearings from beings beyond the stars. “Ahem ahem,” Walt said. “Did these things, if there were any, even have throats?”

  “Here is my proposal!” Lenore said. She shot up from her seat and reached for the light switch herself. “There were other speakers! Let’s assume that, just for now. At least one other human speaker, be it Akeley himself or a confederate, or who knows. Many people have tried to determine who ‘the Bostonian’ was, but maybe he’s not important. Maybe he was just an actor who was just fed lines by someone else? I say we head to Vermont and find that person, or traces of the same. Field research,” she said.

  “And then just ask him if Shub-Niggurath is the Black Goat of the Woods with its thousand young?” Walt asked.

  “Of course not. But we have already expanded the number of people who knew what was going on from two to three. That means that there may have been more, there still may be more. So, come on.”

  “You know I’ll say yes,” Walt said. He was always being tapped for favors by non-drivers, but mostly just to the local packie for party supplies. “But what were you going to do if I said no?”

  Lenore shrugged. “Like you said, I knew you’d say yes. And if you didn’t, Peter Pan to Boston, then Amtrak to Vermont I guess…” She glanced away from him.

  Walt spun in his chair and typed something on his keyboard. “I’ll take tomorrow off… thank you, EZLabor, now check Google Calendar… okay, I’m free. We can go—”

  “Now,” Lenore said.

  Walt laughed. “The stars are right?”

  “You know it, kiddo,” she said.

  * * *

  IT WAS A TEDIOUS TWO-HOUR TRIP ACROSS THE TOP OF Massachusetts to southern Vermont. At night the trees are black and the highway stuffed with tractor-trailers. Walt idly wondered if Lenore planned on killing him in Brattleboro, but decided against. She wanted a ride, after all. How would she get rid of the car, get back to campus? And the great mess they’d left from burrowing through the supply hut of old A/V equipment would be a great clue in itself. Fingerprints everywhere in the dust, the friggin’ Dictaphone, half-gutted and left
on the workbench. He had nothing to worry about, he decided, this time. In general, though, for students like Walt and Lenore, those few who came to Miskatonic for reasons, a bit of curricular violence was never far from their minds.

  “Do you have to pee?”

  “I’ll pee in Vermont,” Lenore said. “I’ve never peed in Vermont.”

  “It’s good to have dreams, and to accomplish them,” Walt said. “We’re going to run out of shitty mill towns to turn off onto in a few minutes though, so if you wanted to pee—”

  “Do you want to pee?” Lenore asked. “Or did you just want to visualize my vagina somehow, and let me know you were doing so?”

  Walt laughed. “You have a mouth, woman!”

  Lenore arranged her Emily the Strange purse on her lap for the millionth time.

  Right outside Brattleboro they stopped at a motel and spent the night tiptoeing around one another, in their separate beds, around the door of the tiny bathroom. Neither had brought a change of clothes, but Brattleboro was full of used bookstores and people who shopped at the food co-op and places like Save the Corporations from Themselves—“hemp clothing for ugly girls,” Lenore declared as they walked up Main Street the next morning—so they weren’t out of place, not Lenore in her lace or Walt in his oversized sweatshirt and low-riding jeans.

  “Think the town’s changed much?” Lenore asked. Then she nodded at a news rack. “The Reformer is still publishing.”

  “I saw a building dedicated to milk cows, and there was that truck full of lumber rattling down High Street,” Walt said. “But yeah, this place is fucked up. One-third hick, one-third yuppie, one-third dirty hippie. So anyway, what’s the deal, Missus Peel?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your plan. Field research, remember? We didn’t drive two hours to have smoothies for lunch and go back home.” Walt pulled out his phone and tried to call up a map of the environs, but didn’t get any service. “What the—? No bars.”

  “Verizon only ’round here!” some too-helpful old timer in coveralls called out as he passed by. “Happens all the time to the casual trade.”

  Lenore turned on her heel and walked after him. “Excuse me,” she called out. “Where might someone new to town find… goats?”

  “For what?” the man said, his vowels flat. Now he was suspicious. He looked past the purple porcupine spikes of Lenore’s haircut to take in Walt. “Not a good idea to go around upsetting livestock, especially other people’s.”

  “It’s for an art project,” Lenore said. She made a little gesture at her own clothing.

  “Just pictures,” Walt said. To Lenore he added, “We’ll have to find a drugstore and get a map. And a disposable film camera too.”

  The old timer recommended the Price Chopper—Choppah!—he said it, and then beyond that there was indeed a goat farm. Then he nodded and continued his walk.

  “Weird,” Walt said.

  “Why’s that weird?”

  “It’s weird because it’s not weird, if you know what I mean,” Walt said.

  “Well,” Lenore said, “remember, the whole thing with Wilmarth could have been a hoax. There’s almost too much evidence—the cylinder, the newspaper articles, letters. If all the stuff happened here, why isn’t it mainstream science or literature? So maybe this isn’t weird because there’s nothing to be weird about.”

  Walt just gawked openly now as they walked back to the car, looking, looking for something. And he found it in the public parking lot behind the shops of Main Street, on the side of a Dumpster: Goodenough Rubbish Removal.

  * * *

  THE PRICE CHOPPER WAS EASY ENOUGH TO FIND, and maps were plentiful there. There was even a phone book available at the customer service desk, but it wasn’t necessary because the answer was right there—Goodenough Road. “As in Akeley’s son, George Goodenough Akeley,” Lenore said.

  “Well, they’ve been breeding, I suppose,” Walt said. It was a sunny day, and Goodenough was sufficiently winding to be interesting, lined with tangles of trees. “Where are we going, for real?”

  “Yeah,” Lenore said. “Maybe we should stop and buy a gun. There are no gun control laws in Vermont. We can go in strapped!”

  Walt glanced over sidelong. “Ever fire a gun?”

  “I’ve never been motivated to even touch one before. It’s just… you know.” Again with the lip, her teeth clicking. She was eager for something.

  “Right. It’s a road, on a map, mentioned in the documents. We could end up at a goat farm at the end of a long line of Japanese tourists and fat gamers looking for something real.”

  “Exactly. Where we’re headed there’s either nothing important at all, or something so horrific that…” She gulped. “Nobody! Has! Ever! Returned!” Lenore rolled her eyes at herself.

  “Does this look like a farm?” Walt nodded out the window. “Hey, a cow.”

  Lenore glanced over. “City boy. That’s a friggin’ horse.”

  “In the city, garbage hauling firms are all Mafia. Maybe that’s why anyone else who ever had the idea to check out Goodenough never came back.”

  “Hey, a goat,” Lenore said.

  * * *

  THE FENCE STRETCHED ON ENDLESSLY, SOMEHOW, AND the mud of spring was thick under Walt’s feet. Tired of looking for a gate or door, he made a brace with his hands and boosted Lenore over, then popped up atop the gate and with some struggling managed to swing his heavy legs over.

  “Now we’re breaking and entering for the sake of scholarship and hijinks,” she said. “It’s so sunny today; I just feel like nothing can go wrong. The air isn’t like this by the Miskatonic River.”

  “Yeah, I guess no cotton mill spent eighty years dumping poison into the local water table,” Walt said. “Anyway, about the cylinder…”

  “Mm-hmm?” She was already striding toward the far off end of the field, kicking up those knees.

  “How did you get it? Where did you find it?”

  Lenore turned to look over her shoulder. “Jealous? Or suspicious?”

  “Incredulous,” Walt said. “It’s weird.”

  “I was looking for something else, and came across it in the library,” Lenore said. “Let’s play pretend. You’re Wilmarth.”

  “Okay, I’m Wilmarth.”

  “Akeley… goes missing, but you’ve just talked to him. You rush home and write up a monograph. You even make a note of having retained your flashlight and revolver and suitcase.”

  “And so how come I didn’t snatch up a little canister with the word AKELEY written on the side too? You know, have something to show later, to prove my claims.”

  “Right. And the talking machine. Clearly, on a literary level, it was just Wilmarth taking a look at a Dictaphone and a wax cylinder and thinking, ‘What if this office equipment was crazy alien technology? What would that look like? How would it end up on Earth and what would it do?’ So, assume that. What’s Shub-Niggurath and the black goat of the woods? One thing, or maybe two things. Maybe he gets some students from the theater department together, feeds them lines as he’s recording, just for kicks or for some kind of literary immersion—to create a faux ‘document’ that gives his story more authenticity, more verisimilitude.”

  “Like an ARG?” Walt said.

  “Aaargh,” Lenore repeated. She was only half-joking; one of her boots had sunk into the sod.

  “An alternate reality game. Internet games that bleed over into real life, with phone numbers that really work, things you can find in real life, actual people to talk to who give you clues as to the next step. They’re huge,” Walt said. “They usually just tie into some movie or TV show, but really, people are playing ARGs all around us.”

  “Sure, maybe it’s just like an ARG. Or maybe we’ll just go into that farmhouse and some kind old lady will offer us lemonade and tell us about the pet black goat her mother had as a little girl.” Lenore shook the mud from her boot and trotted, bored of Walt now. Trotting up to the farmhouse and its adjacent greenery, she even mut
tered shrub nigger—could that be the secret within the old Akeley farmhouse?

  No, it was a man with a shotgun leveled at her on the other side of the screen, and when the fat kid pounded up the three steps of the porch to give Lenore a piece of his mind, the old man covered Walt with the gun too.

  * * *

  SO, HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED. I FOUND THE SAME Dictaphone cylinder Lenore did, back in 1977. It was really something. Like I said before, some kids attend Miskatonic for reasons, and I was one of them. I wanted to know what was going on behind the veil, as it were—I was just a mass of pimples and stringy hair named Marie Anne, and not into anything girls were supposed to be into, and even Women’s Liberation didn’t change that. The boys in my classes were all so competitive, and as sexist as anything. So when I found the cylinder I listened to it till I’d memorized every audio element, every exhalation and smack of the Bostonian’s lips. I even figured out how to do the Mi-Go voice. It’s easy enough; just a paper and comb kazoo. Practice enough with it and you can “sing” dialogue that sounds uncannily like some sort of vaguely insectoid alien. But I didn’t want anyone else to find the cylinder, and I couldn’t bring myself to destroy such an artifact, so when I returned it to the campus library, I did so unofficially by placing it on a random shelf in the stacks.

  It’s easy enough to find the Akeley farm. Wilmarth, who was still alive and teaching a course every semester when I was a student, practically appended directions to his syllabus at the beginning of every semester. He’d made an agreement, you see, with the Mi-Go. They’re from Tyche, a great gas giant in the Oort Cloud. A cold and slushy minor planet like Pluto could never support intelligent life, but in the lower depths of a Jupiter-like planet, atmospheric conditions are right for life. Think of jellyfish hundreds of times the size of blue whales, floating in the hot clouds for thousands of years, riding storms older than human civilization. And inside those huge gasbag beings is another kind of ecosystem, one in which smaller, harder creatures evolved. They were born, and died, in the hundreds of generations in the bellies of these city-sized jellyfish, and then they finally pierced the membrane of their host organism and were exposed to the elements of Tyche… they were torn to shreds by the winds.