Black Wings of Cthulhu 2

by S. T. Joshi

  —Tycho Johansen, I Was Rod Serling’s Bodyguard

  (North Hollywood Books, 1983)

  * * *

  The Clockwork King, the Queen of Glass, and the Man with the Hundred Knives

  DARRELL SCHWEITZER

  Darrell Schweitzer has been writing fantasy and horror since the early 1970s. His credits include Whispers, Twilight Zone, Cemetery Dance, Interzone, Postscripts, and numerous anthologies. He is the author of three novels, The Shattered Goddess (Donning, 1982), The White Isle (Owlswick Press, 1989), and The Mask of the Sorcerer (New English Library, 1995), and the novella Living with the Dead (PS Publishing, 2008). He is a poet, critic, and interviewer, and has published books about Lord Dunsany and H. P. Lovecraft. He was coeditor of Weird Tales for nineteen years. He is a four-time World Fantasy Award nominee and one-time winner.

  * * *

  MUCH OF THIS STORY WILL HAVE TO REMAIN suppositional, because a good deal of it is speculative and significant parts of it are untrue. I did not witness. I was not there.

  I will admit that I met Reginald Graham in college, a few weeks into my freshman year. He was two years older than me and, yes, I looked up to him awfully, and yes, I suppose I really did, as campus wits snickered at the time, follow him around like a puppy dog, but no, we were not lovers, not queer; it wasn’t like that at all. I hate it the way people think only in such clichés rather than stretch their pea-sized brains just a little. When a boy gets into a relationship like that with someone older it may be more that he’s Wagner looking for Faustus, applying for the position of genuine, certified sorcerer’s apprentice, mad scientist’s assistant, sidekick junior grade. You don’t even have to be a hunchback to get the part. What he hungers for is wisdom, guidance, a path through life, and he will cling desperately to someone he thinks has got it. Maybe this does indicate a certain weakness of character, or simple immaturity. Did you ever wonder what happened to poor Wagner after it all? No one cares. Go look it up.

  You know the main bit:

  Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough.

  Et cetera, et cetera.

  So maybe I was indeed somebody with no backbone, looking for a combination of a guru and father figure, but I wasn’t his bum-boy, so you can just forget about that.

  How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I tell you the whole story.

  I followed Reggie Graham around because I thought he was a genius. At that point he was working on being a poetic genius, the next T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, and if his words often didn’t seem to make sense that was because they were deep. They had to be, from the passionate conviction with which he declaimed them. Oh, yes, some of the impression he made was biological chance—he was a big, broad-shouldered guy with brilliant red hair, a thick beard, and a booming voice—and some of it was stagecraft, complete with a fake British accent that he could put on when he wanted to; but his voice somehow sounded right. It commanded authority, like a prophet’s. And he was a genius.

  It was during this period that he gave me my first real clue to what a far more frivolous writer later called life, the universe, and everything. We were driving late at night, way out in the country, coming back from I don’t remember what, and on a lonely road, far enough away from anywhere that there was no city glow even on the horizon, he pointed to the darkened fields on either side of the road, and said, “Have you ever really thought about it, Henry? The darkness. As soon as you get away from the road and the occasional farmhouse, just a few hundred yards out into one of those fields, you might as well be on another planet. Anything could be happening out there, out of sight, out of earshot. If somebody were being raped or murdered or”—here he laughed and dropped into a sinister, particularly good Boris Karloff impression—“eaten by cannibals, those lights, the world, civilization, the possibility of rescue would seem as hopelessly far away as the stars, and no one would ever know.”

  “They’d find the bodies in the morning. There’d be buzzards.”

  “But the world of the morning light is not the world of the darkness, Henry, no, not at all. By day, that’s a familiar field. You’re trespassing on some farmer’s property, all mud and cornstalks. But at night, in the darkness, it’s as remote as the bottom of the sea.”

  “And what do you find there?” I asked.

  “Something terrible,” he said, “Or something beautiful. Or both at the same time.”

  Now I may suppose that Reggie had already started his nocturnal perambulations in farmers’ fields by then, but I did not know—I do not know—because what he did right after that was drop out of school. His genius led him to actually getting one of his verse plays put on by an avant-garde company in Philadelphia. I attended the first performance, which was staged in a long corridor with a huge plastic bag stretched the length of it, and the audience sitting on the floor on one side, with the actors on the other. Most of it consisted of shrieked, half-comprehensible lines, cacophony on musical instruments, and silhouetted violence. The costumes suggested chess pieces. It was all, in the parlance of the period, “heavy,” and that and twenty-five cents, as some campus critic quipped, would get you a cup of coffee. What it got Reggie Graham was the termination of his college career, because his parents insisted he major in business or accounting so he could get an actual job afterwards, and while such a romantic rebellion is eminently suitable for one of such genius, certain practicalities set in when funds are cut off.

  * * *

  THE DARKNESS. WE SPECULATE THEN THAT IN THIS POST-collegiate period Reginald Graham found his way into the darkness. Maybe he drove out to that very same country road one night, pulled over to the side, and just started walking, off into nowhere. Maybe he found where he was going. Maybe the shadows and hints of shapes became solid for him. Maybe he stepped through some kind of gateway.

  * * *

  HOW, THEN, AM I MAD?

  Let me tell you what happens to Wagner without Faustus. He drifts. The boy grows up, kind of. He lives with his mom for a while. He gets a series of meaningless, low-level jobs.

  Then, five years later, when I was twenty-six, Reggie called me up suddenly, in the middle of the night. The connection was poor. I could have in retrospect imagined that he was out in the dark, standing in a muddy field, surrounded by ineffable mystery, but that was impossible at the time because cell phones had not been invented yet.

  We will speculate that he called to tell me of his findings, to draw me back in to whatever adventure his life had set him out on, because maybe he needed a sorcerer’s apprentice again, sidekick, junior associate mad scientist’s assistant (no deformities required), but not, I emphasize, not an ephebe.

  He told me about another place, which existed only in the darkness, which was invisible to the light; and for a moment the connection was very clear and he said, “You were expecting maybe malevolent, tentacled monstrosities from beyond the rim of the cosmos, but no, it is not like that at all,” and then there was a lot of static, and I could only make out bits, about a mountain range of black glass, and a kingdom, dragons, a castle, a king who was mostly clockwork and his queen who was made of living glass, and roads that twisted into angles that didn’t make sense, and there was a long bit about monsters, and a singing forest with razor-sharp leaves.

  “Reggie, is this some new play you’re working on?”

  “No,” he said abruptly. The connection broke.

  * * *

  HOW, THEN—?”

  * * *

  WAGNER, DRIFTING, EVENTUALLY GETS NUDGED OUT OF the nest by Mom, goes back to school, and finishes an advanced degree, and after a bit more dithering ends up as a teacher of English literature at a private middle school trying to hook fourteen-year-olds on the thrills and beauties of The Tragickal History of Doctor Faustus, alternating every other semester with Romeo and Juliet. Every once in a while he slips them some Poe. (“How, then, am I mad? Hearken—!”) He even becomes a Minor Poet himself, joini
ng the elite of American poets with an actual, non-subsidized book in print, entitled, modestly, Poems, which has sales very, very closely approaching three figures.

  If he doesn’t have a house in the suburbs, an ideal wife out of a 1950s sitcom, and the statistically average 2.5 children, well, at least he has made a start at the American dream. We live in a possibly imaginary, imperfect world.

  * * *

  THE NEXT TIME REGGIE GRAHAM BURST INTO MY LIFE we were both approaching forty. It was as if college—and the strange phone call—were only yesterday and there was no break in the continuity whatever. He grabbed hold of my arm as I walked along a Philly street and hauled me into a bar, and before I could even protest I realized that this craggy, almost white-haired stranger actually was my old master—yes, that was what he was; Wagner has a master in Faustus, not a chum, not a buddy, not an equal of any sort—and I was as affixed by his intense gaze as a desert mouse is allegedly hypnotized by the gaze of a rattlesnake; but it wasn’t like that between us, no, not ever.

  I wasn’t much for drinking. I had rarely ever been inside a bar in my life. I wasn’t really sociable, to tell the truth. So I sat there, fluttering and stammering while he ordered drinks for us and insisted I take a good stiff jolt of whatever it was, and then, in the darkness of that place, all the noises and lights of the outside faded away, and I saw only his face drifting before me like a risen moon, and I felt but did not see that he pressed something into my hand. It was a ring, cold to the touch.

  “I need you to keep this safe,” he said. “Be careful with it. It can break. It is made of glass. But it must not break and it must be kept from the enemies of the Queen of Glass, who would use it to destroy her, destroy everything, Henry, not only her world, but yours, ours, the whole kablooie.”

  Now you would think that the reaction that any sensible person would have at this point would be to break away, say, “Reggie, are you nuts?” and just leave, or, if one happened to be braver, more concerned, heroic even, one might even try to work one’s way through the obviously deranged, utterly schizophrenic fantasy to find the inner, true core of my friend’s soul—if he really was my friend and not my master and I his willing slave—or at least steer him to the nearest funny farm, a.k.a. psychiatric clinic, and leave these matters to the professionals. But no, I was Wagner, remember, who was there to help when Faustus sold his soul to the devil for a handful of party tricks and a night in bed (we hope) with Helen of Troy. I was the puppy dog, the apprentice, the mad scientist’s sidekick (hunchback optional, no assembly required), so that is not what happened at all.

  Reggie took me by the hand—no, it wasn’t like that between us at all, not ever—and he led me away, not out onto the familiar city street, no, but elsewhere. I admit that because this is largely a work of supposition and fiction and speculation, and, being at best a Minor Poet (“My ninety-nine readers can beat up your ninety-nine readers!”), I am not very good at this, not the person who even should be telling this story—but I alone survived to tell thee, to coin a phrase—I admit, I say, that from here on to the end the continuity becomes hard to follow, there are lacunae in the narrative, and at times even I (most of all I) have no idea what is going on or why, even as I was more than a little disconcerted when we stepped, not out of the bar and onto the street, but into a dark place, and it was cold there—I mean, wasn’t this a sunny Saturday afternoon in July? I wasn’t dressed for work, but was wearing flip-flop sandals, blue jeans, and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. Yes, it was suddenly nighttime, and winter. I could see my breath. My feet and arms burned with the cold. Reggie wrapped a blanket and sat me down by a pot-bellied, wood stove beneath the glare of a single light bulb, and it seemed as if we had been there for a long time, as if we’d been together for months, and he had become—and I somehow already knew this, as if I had been attending his exhibitions and shows—not a famous poet or a playwright but, to spite his now dead parents, neither a chartered accountant nor a Kmart manager, but instead a notably eccentric painter, whose brilliance was known to a select few, who honored me by inviting me out to his remote studio, a barely converted, unheated barn way, way out in the country, in the darkness, well beyond the glow of city lights. Here I had been for a long time sitting for a portrait that was to be his masterpiece, that was to reveal every bit of his passion and dark wisdom to the unsuspecting and largely undeserving world.

  My eyes adjusted. I could make out the weathered, wooden walls, the high rafters, and the precarious-looking floor with dark gaps in it. Reggie sat on a high stool with an easel and canvas turned sideways to me, so he could catch some of the light. As he painted, he spoke, as if continuing a long-running conversation that I remembered from a dream out of which I had only half awakened. He said that the crisis in the Kingdom of Black Glass was coming to a climax. An evil force had gathered in the Forest of Razored Leaves, a terrible foe to the lord he, Reggie Graham, faithfully served, the Clockwork King and the king’s consort, the Glass Queen. This enemy, called The Man with the Hundred Knives, would soon lead his armies out of the forest, overwhelm the Palace of Black Glass, smash everything, and send its shards scattering in some fearful and immensely destructive way to pierce the infinite number of worlds that existed everywhere in the darkness.

  It was the worlds of light, I was to understand, the worlds that contained things like college campuses and private middle-schools and bars and Kmarts that were illusion, that didn’t matter, that were merely dreams, from which now, as I sat for this portrait, I had only partially awakened.

  As he spoke I got up and came over to look at the portrait. There I was, in the lower right, huddled in a small area of light by the wood stove. Reggie had painted himself into the picture, a portrait of himself seated at his easel painting the picture. I couldn’t help but notice, as I looked from the painting to his face, to the painting again, that he did look shockingly aged, but not withered, not feeble; no, more like one of those timeless heroes in popular fantasy, who have battled wizards or demons for centuries, and have become hardened, gnarled, immensely potent, like a cross between Gandalf and Strider with just a touch of Gaiman’s Sandman. The image of me, by contrast, made me look younger and skinnier than I actually was, and very vulnerable, with the emphasis on the unruly mop of brown hair and the exaggerated, round glasses, the thin, pointed chin, pale forehead, and wide eyes. I could not have, I realize in retrospect, asked him, “Is that me or Harry Potter?” because this was a while ago and the Harry Potter books hadn’t been published yet.

  I didn’t ask him anything, but just stood there and watched as he worked in the wide space in the upper left, painting dark upon dark, shaping images I could just barely make out, of a king whose face was a faintly luminous clock, the hands set at just a minute before midnight, and beside him the Queen of Glass, all black and gleaming, tiny points of light on the tips of her crown like stars; while behind them and a little below, in the upper middle part of the painting, the sinister Man with the Hundred Knives (who wore them strapped across his body on two long belts, like a pair of bandoliers) gathered his forces in the Forest of Razored Leaves.

  There was so much more in this picture that I cannot explain or describe. There was a whole world there, much more real to me then than the half-remembered dream of city streets, schools, bars, department stores, and the like.

  I understood fully and completely, to the very depths of my heart, that Reggie Graham had always been the sort of genius who would awaken us into the true world and the true kingdom, and that, because he had done so, nothing else mattered or would ever matter again.

  * * *

  SO I WOULD LIKE TO BELIEVE. BUT REMEMBER: THIS IS A tissue of speculation and lies.

  How, then, am I mad? Maybe I’m mad because I didn’t say, “Whoa, wait a minute Reggie, you are the one who has abandoned all pretense of sanity. You’ve drawn me into this—Drawn? Painted, like in the painting, painting me into the painting—that’s a joke, get it?—into your private psychotic fantasy world.�
�� While there might be other worlds and other dimensions, how could he expect me to believe that they’re inhabited by glass people and filled with magic kingdoms and razor-blade forests and creatures that look like animate chess pieces, sort of a cross between Alice in Wonderland and The Lord of the Rings on acid, with, as I was soon to discover, a substantial sadomasochistic element added?

  No, I just stood there, while Reggie explained everything and explained and explained, so thrillingly, so compellingly, that I felt as if I too had lived in the Black Glass world for a thousand years, as he had, only occasionally assuming mundane guise and venturing into the world of light to recruit a new, not necessarily hunchbacked assistant (batteries not included).

  * * *

  BUT WHO IS TO SAY THAT AN UTTER AND ABSOLUTE genius cannot also be utterly and absolutely mad?

  I don’t believe that. I don’t believe any of this.

  It is therefore mere supposition that as Reggie was telling me all this, as he stopped painting for a minute and showed me a black glass dagger—like one of those obsidian knives Aztec priests used to rip hearts out with—and explained that the Man with the Hundred Knives is not complete or all-powerful as long as he’s missing this one and only has ninety-nine, I suddenly heard a loud crash and a thump behind me, in the dark recesses of the barn and something grabbed me from behind and whirled me around, and I found myself face to face with what looked half like an enormous insect, half like a naked man whose red skin gleamed like animate, baked brick. Its many limbs flashed and flickered like whips, too fast to follow, and I was hurt, I was falling, I was cut to pieces, while I heard Reggie Graham shouting, “It wants the ring! Don’t give it the ring!” But I had no chance to think about any ring, and could only curl into a ball, my back to it, to make it work a little while longer as it slashed through my clothing and my flesh and my bones to get to my vitals.