Black Wings of Cthulhu 2

by S. T. Joshi

  Then there was another crash, and the pain did not stop, but now I sat with my back against an upright beam in a spreading pool of my own blood, with broken bits of reddish glass or clay all around me, and Reggie standing over me, hefting a sledgehammer in his hands and looking rather pleased with himself.

  “I knew this would come in handy one day,” he said.

  “What the fuck was that thing?” I managed to gasp, gurgling on blood.

  “A scorpion man. A servitor of the enemy. There are, I am afraid, a lot more where that one came from, in the Forest of Razored Leaves.”

  “I think I’m bleeding to death,” I said.

  “Very likely,” he said. “Henry, I didn’t intend for this to happen. I am afraid things are beyond my control now. Times are desperate indeed. I must return to my native country, to do my duty for my lord and my lady, and, if necessary, to die for them. I am sorry.”

  This was the “Reggie Graham, you are out of your fucking mind!” moment, but I could not bring myself to say that, to defy him, and all I managed to say, rather pathetically was, “So you’re just going to leave me then?”

  But he said to me gently, binding my wounds as best he could with shreds of my own clothing, then helping me to my feet, “No, no, of course not.”

  With the obsidian knife he cut a hole in the air, parting the darkness as if he’d made a long, vertical slash in the side of a tent, and he pushed me through.

  That was how I came to be sprawled face-down in the mud and the snow in the middle of a field in rural Lancaster County. I rolled onto my back. I looked up at the familiar stars, and rested for a while, reassured that I was home, in my own world, out of Reggie Graham’s fantasy. But I also had just enough rationality left to realize that I would very likely die out here, either bleeding to death or from freezing, and in the morning, when the darkness gave way to the familiar and mundane, vultures or maybe a dog would find my body. If I was going to avoid that, I was going to have to get help, and yes, out there in the darkness, in the middle of the field, so impossibly far from any farmhouse or from the highway, I might as well have been on another planet, or at the bottom of the sea. It took all my strength, strength I didn’t know I had, impossible strength, magic which must have come from the glass ring that was still in my pocket, for me to crawl so very far toward a distant light, and pound weakly on a door until a very startled farmer and his wife discovered me.

  * * *

  HOW, THEN, AM I MAD? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS:

  I had a lot of explaining to do. I tried not to explain. The police were called in, of course, to the hospital where I was taken, and of course nothing made sense. That was to be expected. But the detectives, then the psychiatrists began to lose patience with me when I wouldn’t tell them what they wanted to hear. After my injuries had healed, more or less, though I was heavily scarred and one of the tendons in my lower right leg was damaged and I could only walk with a cane, there was some question of whether or not, and where, I should be held. I refused to file a criminal complaint against anyone. I was not obviously suicidal, and the injuries I had suffered were of such a nature that they could not have been self-inflicted. I think the head detective secretly thought I was some kind of pervert who had gotten into a really wild s&m party. The doctors didn’t know what to think. Somehow the news leaked out and reporters from tabloids wanted to talk to me. I was the latest thing in UFO abductions. I had made alien anal probes passé.

  In the end, there was nothing they could do but send me home, inasmuch as I had any home to go to. My apartment had been closed for non-payment of rent. All my things were gone, except for what my sister Maureen somehow rescued, a few of my books and papers and things the landlord didn’t want.

  When I left the hospital, I insisted they give me whatever had been in my pockets when I had been admitted. Somehow—for all my clothing had been as shredded as I—my pockets had held together. I was handed my wallet, my keys, and a Ziploc plastic bag containing the Glass Queen’s ring, which miraculously wasn’t broken.

  My widowed big sister took me in, and for over ten years I lived with her in rural, upstate New York. I was terrified of the dark, and of open spaces. I very much would have preferred a city with its bright lights, but I had no other resources. I lived with her quietly, a semi-invalid, pursuing my career as a non-subsidized Minor Poet, whose total sales, after several more increasingly strange volumes, actually did rise well into three figures. I was even nominated for the Totally Obscure Award, twice.

  Then Maureen got sick and died, and I found myself at sixty-three alone in her house, surrounded on all sides by the dark, open fields and the empty distances.

  When I looked in the mirror I saw a soft, graying face that might indeed have looked like Harry Potter if he’d missed his calling and were now tottering on the edge of senility. I thought to myself that here was someone whose life had passed him by, who had never managed to accomplish very much in this world because it was like a dream to him, only half-remembered in those rare moments when he actually awakened into the darker, real world where the endlessly brave, endlessly brilliant Reggie Graham battled the monstrous minions of The Man with the Hundred Knives (or actually ninety-nine, since Reggie had one of them) in defense of his lord the Clockwork King and his lady the Queen of Glass.

  But I was interrupted as I stood before the bathroom mirror in the midst of these reflections, because, behind me, the air itself was suddenly slit open as if someone had made a long, vertical slash in the side of a tent and hurled something through.

  There was a loud bang. Something heavy fell into the bathtub. With astonishment, then with sorrow and resignation, I saw that it was the very familiar sledgehammer, the one with which Reggie Graham had destroyed the scorpion man to save my life.

  * * *

  NOW I SHALL TELL YOU A SERIES OF LIES:

  The rip in “reality” remained there, the edges flapping in a cold breeze. The bathroom, then the whole house filled with cold, damp air, with the smell of winter ice and mud from the fields outside. I knew what I had to do. I understood something Reggie had explained to me once, that time does not move at the same speed in the dark world as it does in the world of light. What had been for me over twenty years might have been for him only a few hours.

  I was growing old slowly and quietly. He was still in the thick of his fight.

  I would like to think that I fulfilled my duty, that I put on heavy boots and the toughest denim jeans I owned (not having armor, these would have to do) and a heavy coat and gloves, then stepped through that gap into the other world, where I fought long and hard, with more strength than I’d ever known I had, alongside Reggie Graham. He had another name there, and was a renowned master of dark lore, a distant, forbidding, yet heroic figure, who had compromised his own soul for the sake of higher loyalties, who was both Siegfried and Faust at the same time; and I, I, his loyal and faithful companion, though hobbled with an old wound, came limping to his side.

  I wielded that sledgehammer like Thor, but it was not enough, for the citadel was overwhelmed by the scorpion men in the end, and the Clockwork King and the Queen of Glass were both smashed, he to mechanical bits, she to shards. I last saw Reggie Graham on a narrow bridge over an abyss, locked in deadly combat, his one knife against his enemy’s ninety-nine.

  I had to flee. I left him there. He wanted me to. He knew and I knew that the only hope lay with the ring, which must remain unbroken and out of the hands of the enemy until one day a rightful prince should wear it.

  So I fled back through that rent in reality, battling scorpion men all the way, until I fell, terribly wounded, in my upstairs bathroom, and that was how the police discovered me, a few days later, when the mailman and the neighbors became alarmed that my mail was accumulating in the box and my newspapers were piling up in the driveway.

  I had quite a bit of explaining to do, yet again.

  That is the best version of the story’s ending, the most pleasing lie.

&nb
sp; * * *

  HOW, THEN?

  The other version is that I proved a coward and stepped through into the beleaguered citadel, sledgehammer in hand, to confront Reggie Graham and shriek, at last, at the top of my lungs, “You are out of your fucking mind! None of this is real! You’re not real! I think this is all a dream one of us is having while lying in a straitjacket in a padded cell somewhere!” Then I ran back into the real world, sledgehammer in hand, abandoning him to his fate; only the scorpion men didn’t let me off that easily, which is how I was so terribly wounded yet again.

  But the main problem with this version, which the police deftly omitted from their report, is that the gap in the fabric between the worlds remained wide open like a torn curtain flapping in a cold breeze, even as I escaped into the bathroom, and the scorpion men tried to follow me, and I fought them, there, in the cramped bathroom.

  I am at a loss to explain what happened to the sledgehammer. It wasn’t found in the bathroom.

  I can’t explain. But the aftermath was like the surrealist light bulb joke. You know: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? Two, one to hold the giraffe, one to fill the bathtub with glowing machine parts. The only difference was there was no giraffe, and my bathtub was filled with reddish bits of scorpion men, some of them still twitching. The police left that out of their report too.

  * * *

  REGGIE WARNED ME THAT THE ENEMY WOULD USE EVERY trick of guile and illusion at his command to get the ring away from me.

  Therefore, what I most emphatically deny is any scenario in which none of the above happened, but instead, Reggie was suddenly pounding at my door in the middle of the night and screaming that he’d got it all wrong, that there was no heroic quest in the dark world, but only madness and utter horror, and I, for fear of confronting that ultimate truth, did not open the door, but let him die right there on my doorstep, after he had crawled for such a painful and impossible distance out of the dark. There was one last scream, more piercing than the rest, and a loud thump of something thrown against the door, then only skittering and scratching, and what flowed suddenly under the door was not blood, but blackness, an animate, almost material darkness. I retreated from it up the front stairs, and watched in dread-filled fascination as it groped this way and that, like an enormous tongue, and finally withdrew.

  I waited until morning before I opened the front door. There was nothing there. No body. No blood. The door was not even scratched.

  I have no idea what became of Reggie Graham, whether he is living or dead or where he might be. Villains, dissemblers! Go ahead and tear up the floorboards if you want. You won’t find anything.

  I will ask you to explain, though, why the floor between the front door and the stairs is devoid of all varnish, as if something very powerful and very abrasive licked it clean.

  * * *

  SO, WHAT DO YOU THINK? I KNOW WHAT I THINK. I THINK I have unraveled the riddle at last. Yes, it is all a tissue of lies, a tangle of illusion. I think the truth is that I am not Wagner, the weak-willed but loyal, slightly pathetic sidekick. I think that I am Faust and that Reggie Graham—or what seemed to be Reggie Graham—was Mephistophilis, sent to trick me out of my soul—out of the ring.

  I’ve still got it. I admit that much. I’ve hidden it well. You shall not get it from me. No torture can extract it from me. I shall hold it until the true prince comes, and all your world of evil and illusion is shattered forever, like glass hit with a sledgehammer.

  How, then, am I mad?

  * * *

  The Other Man

  NICHOLAS ROYLE

  Nicholas Royle is the author of six novels, two novellas, and one short story collection, Mortality (Serpent’s Tail, 2006), with another, London Labyrinth, forthcoming from No Exit Press. He has edited fifteen anthologies, including Darklands (Egerton Press, 1991), The Best British Short Stories 2011 (Salt, 2011), and Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories about Birds (Two Ravens Press, 2011). A senior lecturer in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, he also runs Nightjar Press, publishing limited-edition chapbooks.

  * * *

  EVERY MORNING THE SAME ROUTINE. GRAEME’S WIFE would stir first and he would wake while she was getting out of bed to go to the bathroom. While she was performing her ablutions, he would lever himself into a sitting position and swivel around, slipping his feet into a pair of Chinese slippers. Slowly, with effort that seemed to increase week by week, he would stand up and walk to the bedroom door, where he would take his dressing gown from the hook and put it on. He would climb the stairs to the second floor, the ease or difficulty with which he performed this act tending to depend on the time he had gone to bed the night before. He would clean his teeth and use the toilet and then walk back down to the first floor, where the light from under the bathroom door would indicate that his wife was still within, and he would continue downstairs, where he would switch the alarm off and go into the kitchen and make them both a cup of tea. He would take the tea upstairs, and usually by this stage his wife would be out of the bathroom and he would hand one of the cups to her and she would say thank you as she took it from him and started to get dressed.

  One particular day, while his wife, Sarah, was in the bathroom, he arranged his pillow and one of Sarah’s pillows and a couple of cushions under the duvet on his side of the bed and crept up the stairs to the second floor. But he got his timing wrong and came back down just as Sarah was emerging from the bathroom, so he snuck back into the bedroom and remade the bed.

  The next day, he arranged the pillows and cushions under the duvet again and went up to the top floor, taking care lest the stairs should creak. When Graeme came back down, Sarah had finished in the bathroom and he could hear her voice in the bedroom. He peeped through the crack of the door. She was sitting on the edge of the bed towelling the ends of her hair. She had stopped speaking for a moment, as if waiting for a response from beneath the duvet.

  With care, he retreated from the door and walked downstairs. He quickly disarmed the alarm and then shut the kitchen door behind him so that she would not hear him boiling the kettle. He stood and looked out of the window while waiting. The same damp lawn, bare trees, grey sky as the day before and the day before that. The kettle clicked off.

  He climbed the stairs quietly and paused outside the bedroom door, hearing voices. It did sound like there was more than one.

  There was a bookcase on the landing. Graeme deposited the cups of tea on top of it and placed his eye at the crack of the door. He couldn’t see Sarah, who had perhaps moved to the right of the doorway. She would be leaning over the chest of drawers where she kept her makeup and jewellery, studying her face in the mirror. But on his side of the bed, the duvet had been pulled back and a shape like a pillow standing on its end appeared to have been somehow propped up on the edge of the mattress. The shape moved forwards slightly and then started to twist around to one side, and something caught in Graeme’s throat.

  He backed away from the door. What his brain told him his eyes had seen he couldn’t have. A mask, perched on top of the pillow: line and shade, the suggestion of a face.

  He moved back to the door. Sarah’s voice could be heard from inside the bedroom.

  “Right, well, some of us have got to go to work.”

  He registered the businesslike jangle of her charm bracelet.

  The shape that had been sitting on his side of the bed stood up and stretched rudimentary arms, its back to the room. It was the size—and more or less the shape—of a man. It turned around, and Graeme heard a voice that wasn’t Sarah’s.

  “Have a nice day, darling.”

  It was what he would normally say, but to him the words sounded badly pitched. There was a mouthlike slit in the mask, which even as Graeme watched was resolving into something more like a human face. Could Sarah not see, though, that the figure stood before her was not him, was not Graeme, was not even actually human? Its movements were all wrong, its dimensions slightly
off. But only slightly. And as he watched, the amount by which they were off seemed to get smaller, and the movements became more natural. The eyes looked less like buttons. As the figure walked around the end of the bed, Graeme had to concede it was like looking in the mirror. The figure passed out of view, and Graeme heard Sarah’s bracelet jingle. He imagined them embracing; he heard them kiss. Then he made out the rustle of Sarah turning to move towards the door, and he backed off and ran, as carefully as he could, up the stairs to the next floor.

  He watched through the spindles as his wife and this other man walked out of the bedroom together. The man was dressed, in his clothes.

  “See you later,” Sarah shouted as she reached the ground floor.

  “See you later,” Graeme muttered quietly at the same time as he heard the other man say the same words, more loudly, loudly enough to be heard by Sarah as she opened the front door and left the house.

  Graeme remained crouched by the banisters at the top of the house.

  Nothing happened. The other man had gone downstairs and Graeme couldn’t hear anything. He crept back down to the first floor and slipped into the bedroom. He dressed quickly, moving with more confidence. He went downstairs; he didn’t walk on tiptoe, but nor did he proceed in quite the normal way. Stopping at the bottom of the stairs, he listened. The other man was in the kitchen. Graeme could hear him emptying breakfast cereal into a bowl, returning the box to the cupboard, getting the milk from the fridge and a spoon from the drawer. Graeme heard a chair being pulled back as the other man sat down at the table. Graeme listened to the sound of him eating. He remembered his sister once telling him about the noise he made eating corn flakes. He had taken offence, but had henceforth made more of an effort with his table manners. From what Graeme could hear, the other man was eating nicely with his mouth closed. From time to time, his spoon dinked against the side of the bowl. There was a final clarion of cutlery against pottery and what might have been a faint slurp before Graeme heard the chair legs scrape backwards on the wooden floor. He ducked sideways across the hall into the front room as he heard the bowl being lodged in the dishwasher and the other man’s footsteps approaching the kitchen door. Graeme held his breath, but the next sound he heard was the creak of the stairs. When the other man would have reached the top of the stairs, or at least gone beyond the half-landing, Graeme stepped back into the hall and then into the kitchen. He opened the dishwasher; there was the other man’s dirty bowl on the top shelf, and he had put his spoon in the lower section just as Graeme would have done. Graeme closed the dishwasher and went to get the corn flakes, but as he stood with the box in his hands he realised he wasn’t hungry. Everyone has to eat, but he had no appetite, so he put the box back.