Black Wings Of Cthulhu: Volume Two Part 12

"What are they?"

"Embryos." The surface of his cheek shifted.

"I don't understand."

"Over here." He turned to his left and crossed to another row of depressions. Beside the closest was a small red and white container-a cooler, its top slid open. To either side, the depressions were attended by thermoses, lunchboxes, larger coolers, even a small refrigerator. Rick's father knelt at a dip and reached his hand down into the mud, working his fingers in a circle around whatever lay half-buried in it. Once it was freed, he raised it, using his free hand to brush the worst of the mud from it. "This," he said, holding out to Connie a copy of the thing she and Rick had found on the Thruway. Its surface was darker than the s.p.a.ces between the stars overhead.

"That's an embryo?" she said.

"Closest word." Bending to the open cooler, he gently deposited the thing inside it. His hands free, he clicked the cooler's lid shut. "Someone will be by for this, shortly," he said, raising his fingers to his tongue.

"I don't-" Connie started, and there was an explosion of wings, or what might have been wings, a fury of black flapping. She put up her hands to defend herself, and the wings were gone, the cooler with them. "What...?"

"You have to prepare the ground, first," Rick's father said, "fertilize it, you could say. A little more time would have been nice, but Tunguska was long enough ago. To tell the truth, if we'd had to proceed earlier, it wouldn't have mattered." He stepped to the next hole and its attendant thermos and repeated his excavation. As he was jiggling the thing into the thermos, Connie said, "But-why?"

"Oh, that's..." Rick's father gestured at the thermos's side, where the strange cross with the slender join and rounded arms was stenciled. "You know."

"No, I don't."

Gary Wilson shrugged. His face slid with the movement, up, then down, the flesh riding on the bone. The hairs on Connie's neck, her arms, stood rigid. She did not want to accompany him as he turned left again and headed for a deep slice in the mud, but she could not think what else to do. Behind her, there was a chaos of flapping, and silence.

The fissure in the mud ran in both directions as far as she could see. It was probably narrow enough for her to jump across. She was less sure of its depth, rendered uncertain by dimness. At or near the bottom, something rose, not high enough for her to distinguish it, but sufficiently near for her to register a great ma.s.s. "Too cold out here," Rick's father said. "Makes them sluggish. Inhibits their"-he waved his hands-"development. Confines it."

There were more of whatever-it-was down there. Some quality of their movement made Connie grateful she couldn't see any more of them.

"Funny," Rick's father said. "They need this place for infancy, your place for maturity. Never known another breed with such extreme requirements."

"What are they?"

"I guess you would call them... G.o.ds? Is that right? Orchidaceae deus? They bloom."

"What?"

"Bloom."

THERE WAS A SMALL DECK AT THE BACK OF THE HOUSE, little more than a half-dozen planks of unfinished wood raised on as many thick posts, bordered by an unsteady railing, at the top of a flight of uneven stairs. A door led from the deck into the house's laundry room, whose location on the second floor had impressed Connie as one of the reasons to rent the place two years ago, when her promotion to manager had allowed sufficient money to leave their bas.e.m.e.nt apartment and its buffet of molds behind. On mornings when she didn't have to open the store, and Rick hadn't worked too late the night before, they would carry their mugs of coffee out here. She liked to stand straight, her mug cradled in her hands, while Rick preferred to take his chances leaning on the rail. Sometimes they spoke, but mostly they were quiet, listening to the birds performing their various morning songs, watching the squirrels chase one another across the high branches of the trees whose roots knitted together the small rise behind the house.

A freak early frost had whited the deck and stairs. Once the sun was streaming through the trunks of the oaks and maples stationed on the rise, the frost would steam off, but at the moment dawn was a red hint amidst the dark trees. Red sky at morning, Connie thought.

She was seated at the top of the deck stairs, wrapped in the green and white knitted blanket she'd grabbed when she'd left the laundry room hours ago. The bottle of Stolichnaya cradled in her arms was almost empty, despite which, she felt as sober as she ever had. More than sober-her senses were operating past peak capacity. The grooves in the bark of the oaks on the rise were deep gullies flanked by vertical ridges. The air eddying over her skin was dense with moisture. The odor of the soil in which the trees clutched their roots was the brittle-paper smell of dead leaves crumbling mixed with the damp thickness of dirt. It was as if she were under a brilliant white light, one that allowed her no refuge, but that also permitted her to view her surroundings with unprecedented clarity.

She had emerged from her dream of Rick's father to silence, to a stillness so profound the sound of her breathing thundered in her ears. Rick's side of the bed was still cold. Except for a second strange dream on the same night, there had been no reason for Connie to do anything other than return to sleep. Her dream, however, had seemed sufficient cause for her to rouse herself and (once more) set out downstairs in search of Rick. In the quiet that had draped the house, the creaks of the stairs under her feet had been horror-movie loud.

She had not been sure what she would find downstairs, and had walked past the front parlor before her brain had caught up to what it had noticed from the corner of her eye and sent her several steps back. The small room they called the front parlor, whose bay window overlooked the front porch, had been dark. Not just nighttime dark (which, with the streetlight outside, wasn't really that dark), but complete and utter blackness. This hadn't been the lack of light so much as the overwhelming presence of its opposite, a dense inkiness that had filled the room like water in a tank. Connie had reached out her hand to touch it, only to stop with her fingers a hair's-breadth away from it, when the prospect of touching it had struck her as a less than good idea. Lowering her hand, she had retreated along the hall to the dining room.

Before the dining room, though, she had paused at the bas.e.m.e.nt door, open wide and allowing a thick, briny stench up from its depths. The smell of seaweed and a.s.sorted sea-life baking on the beach, the odor had been oddly familiar, despite her inability to place it. She had reached around the doorway for the light switch, flipped it on, and poked her head through the doorway. Around the foot of the stairs, she had seen something she could not immediately identify. There had been no way she was venturing all the way into the bas.e.m.e.nt; already, the night had taken too strange a turn for her to want to put herself into so ominous, if cliched, a location. But she had been curious enough to descend the first couple of stairs and crouch to look through the railings.

When she had, Connie had seen a profusion of flowers, orchids, their petals eggplant and rose. They had covered the concrete floor so completely she could not see it. A few feet closer to them, the tidal smell was stronger, almost a taste. The orchids were motionless, yet she had had the impression that she had caught them on the verge of movement. She had wanted to think, I'm dreaming; this is part of that last dream, but the reek of salt and rot had been too real. She had stood and backed upstairs.

Mercifully, the dining room had been unchanged, its table, chairs, and china cabinet highlighted by the streetlight's orange glow. Unchanged, that is, except for the absence of the cooler from the table, and why had she been so certain that, wherever the container was, its lid was open, its contents gone? Rick's father's laptop had remained where her husband had set it up, its screen dark. Connie had pressed the power b.u.t.ton, and the rectangle had brightened with the image of one of the T-shaped stone monuments, its transverse section carved with what appeared to be three birds processing down from upper left to lower right, their path taking them over the p.r.o.ne form of what might have been a man-though if it was, the head was missing. The upright block was carved with a boar, its tusks disproportionately large.

Thinking Rick might have decided to sleep in the guest room, she had crossed to the doorway to the long room along the back of the house, the large s.p.a.ce for which they had yet to arrive at a use. To the right, the room had wavered, as if she had been looking at it through running water. One moment, it had bulged toward her; the next, it had telescoped away. In the midst of that uncertainty, she had seen... she couldn't say what. It was as if that part of the house had been a screen against which something enormous had been pushing and pulling, its form visible only through the distortions it caused in the screen. The sight had hurt her eyes, her brain, to behold; she had been not so much frightened as sickened, nauseated. No doubt, she should have fled the house, taken the car keys from the hook at the front door and driven as far from here as the gas in the tank would take her.

Rick, though: she couldn't leave him here with all this. Dropping her gaze to her feet, she had stepped into the back room, flattening herself against the wall to her left. A glance had showed nothing between her and the door to the guest room, and she had slid along the wall to it as quickly as her legs would carry her. A heavy lump of dread, for Rick, alone down here as whatever this was had happened, had weighed deep below her stomach. At the threshold to the guest room, she had tried to speak, found her voice caught in her throat. She had coughed, said, "Rick? Honey?" the words striking the silence in the air like a mallet clanging off a gong; she had flinched at their loudness.

Connie had not been expecting Rick to step out of the guest room as if he had been waiting there for her. With a shriek, she had leapt back. He had raised his hands, no doubt to rea.s.sure her, but even in the dim light she could see they were discolored, streaked with what looked like tar, as was his mouth, his jaw. He had stepped toward her, and Connie had retreated another step. "Honey," he had said, but the endearment had sounded wrong, warped, as if his tongue had forgotten how to shape his words.

"Rick," she had said, "what-what happened?"

His lips had peeled back, but whatever he had wanted to say, it would not come out.

"The house-you're-"

"It's... okay. He showed me... Dad."

"Your father? What did he show you?"

Rick had not lowered his hands; he gestured with them to his mouth.

"Oh, Christ. You-you didn't."

Yes, he did, Rick had nodded.

"Are you insane? Do you have any idea what-? You don't know what that thing was! You probably poisoned yourself..."

"Fine," Rick had said. "I'm... fine. Better. More."

"What?"

"Dad showed me."

Whatever the cooler's contents, she had been afraid the effects of consuming it were already in full swing, the damage already done. Yet despite the compromise in his speech, Rick's eyes had burned with intelligence. Sweeping his hands around him, he had said, "All... the same. Part of-" He had uttered a guttural sound she could not decipher, but that had hurt her ears to hear.

"Rick," she had said, "we have to leave-we have to get you to a doctor. Come on." She had started toward the doorway to the dining room, wondering whether Wiltwyck would be equipped for whatever toxin he had ingested. The other stuff, the darkness, the orchids, the corner, could wait until Rick had been seen by a doctor.

"No." The force of his refusal had halted Connie where she was. "See."

"What-" She had turned to him and seen... she could not say what. Hours later, her nerves calmed if not soothed by the vodka that had washed down her throat, she could not make sense of the sight that had greeted her. When she tried to replay it, she saw Rick, then saw his face, his chest, burst open, pushed aside by the orchids thrusting their eggplant and rose petals out of him. The orchids, Rick, wavered, as if she were looking at them through a waterfall, and then erupted into a cloud of darkness that coalesced into Rick's outline. Connie had the sense that that was only an approximation of what she actually had witnessed, and not an especially accurate one, at that. As well say she had seen all four things simultaneously, like a photograph overexposed multiple times, or that she had seen the cross from the top of the cooler, hanging in the air.

She had responded with a headlong flight that had carried her upstairs to the laundry room. Of course, it had been a stupid destination, one she was not sure why she had chosen, except perhaps that the side and front doors had lain too close to one of the zones of weirdness that had overtaken the house. The bottle of Stolichnaya had been waiting next to the door to the deck, no doubt a refugee from their most recent party. She could not think of a reason not to open it and gulp a fiery mouthful of its contents; although she couldn't think of much of anything. She had been, call it aware of the quiet, the silence pervading the house, which had settled against her skin and become intolerable, until she had grabbed a blanket from the cupboard and let herself out onto the deck. There, she had wrapped herself in the blanket and seated herself at the top of the deck stairs.

Tempting to say she had been in shock, but shock wasn't close: shock was a small town she had left in the rearview mirror a thousand miles ago. This was the big city, metropolis of a sensation like awe or ecstasy, a wrenching of the self that rendered such questions as how she was going to help Rick, how they were going to escape from this, immaterial. From where she was sitting, she could look down on their Subaru, parked maybe fifteen feet from the foot of the stairs. There was an emergency key under an overturned flowerpot in the garage. These facts were neighborhoods separated by hundreds of blocks, connected by a route too byzantine for her understanding to take in. She had stayed where she was as the constellations wheeled above her, the sky lightened from blue-bordering-on-black to dark blue. Her breath plumed from her lips; she pulled the blanket tighter and nursed the vodka as, through a process too subtle for her to observe, frost spread over the deck, the stairs.

When the eastern sky was a blue so pale it was almost white, she had noticed a figure standing at the bottom of the stairs. For a moment, she had mistaken it for Rick, had half stood at the prospect, and then she had recognized Rick's father. He'd been dressed in the same tuxedo he'd worn in her second dream of him, the knees of his trousers and the cuffs of his shirt and jacket crusted with red mud. His presence prompted her to speech. "You," she had said, resuming her seat. "Are you Rick's Dad, or what?"

"Yes."

"Great. Can you tell me what's happened to my husband?"

"He's taken the seed into himself."

"The thing from the cooler."

"He blooms."

"I don't-" She'd shaken her head. "Why... why? Why him? Why this?"

Rick's father had shrugged, and she had done her best not to notice if his face had shifted with the movement.

She had sighed. "What now?"

"He will want a consort."

"He what?"

"His consort."

She would not have judged herself capable of the laughter that had burst from her. "You have got to be f.u.c.king kidding me."

"The process is underway."

"I don't think so."

"Look at your bottle."

"This?" She had held up the vodka. "It's alcohol."

"Yes. He thought that might help."

"What do you-" Something, some glint of streetlight refracting on the bottle's gla.s.s, had caused her to bring it to her eyes, tilting it so that the liquor sloshed up one side. In the orange light shimmering in it, Connie had seen tiny black flakes floating, dozens, hundreds of them. "Oh, no. No way. No."

"It will take longer this way, but he thought you would need the time."

"'He'? You mean Rick? Rick did this?"

"To bring you to him, to what he is."

"Bring me-"

"To bloom."

"This is-No. No." She had wanted to hurl the bottle at Rick's father, but had been unable to release her grip on it. "Not Rick. No."

He had not argued the point; instead, before the last denial had left her mouth, the s.p.a.ce where he'd stood had been empty.

That had been... not that long ago, she thought. Time enough for the horizon to flush, for her to feel herself departing the city of awe to which the night's sights had brought her for somewhere else, a great grey ocean swelling with storm. She had squinted at the bottle of Stolichnaya, at the black dots drifting in what remained of its contents. Rick had done this? So she could be his consort? Given what she'd witnessed this night, it seemed silly to declare one detail of it more outrageous than the rest, but this... She could understand, well, imagine how an appearance by his father might have convinced her husband that eating the thing in the cooler was a good idea. But to leap from that to thinking that he needed to bring Connie along for the ride-that was something else.

The thing was, it was entirely typical of the way Rick acted, had acted, the length of their relationship. He plunged into decisions like a bungee-jumper abandoning the trestle of a bridge, confident that the cord to which he'd tethered himself, i.e. her, would pull him back from the jagged rocks below. He dropped out of grad school even though it meant he would lose the deferment for the sixty thousand dollars in student loans he had no job to help him repay. He registered for expensive training courses for professions in which he lost interest halfway through the cla.s.s. He overdrew their joint account for take-out dinners when there was a refrigerator's worth of food waiting at home. And now, the same tendencies that had led to them having so much difficulty securing a mortgage-that had left the f.u.c.king cell phone's battery depleted-had caused him to... she wasn't even sure she knew the word for it.

The sky between the trees on the rise was filling with color, pale rose deepening to rich crimson, the trunks and branches against it an extravagant calligraphy she could not read. The light ruddied her skin, shone redly on the bottle, glowed h.e.l.lishly on the frosted steps, deck. She stared through the trees at it, let it saturate her vision.

The photons cascaded against her leaves, stirring them to life.

(What?) She convoluted, moving at right angles to herself, the sunlight fracturing.

(Oh) Blackness.

(G.o.d.) She lurched to her feet.

Roots tingled, blackness, unfolding, frost underfoot. Connie gripped the liquor bottle by the neck and swung it against the porch railing. Smashing it took three tries. The last of the vodka splashed onto the deck planks. She pictured hundreds of tiny black-what had Rick's father called them?-embryos shrieking, realized she was seeing them, hearing them.

Blackness her stalk inturning gla.s.s on skin. Connie inspected the bottle's jagged top. As improvised weapons went, she supposed it wasn't bad, but she had the feeling she was bringing a rock to a nuclear war.

The dawn air was full of the sound of flapping, of leathery wings snapping. She could almost see the things that were swirling around the house, could feel the s.p.a.ces they were twisting. She released the blanket, let it slide to the deck. She crossed to the door to the laundry room, still unlocked. Had she thought it wouldn't be? Connie adjusted her grip on her gla.s.s knife, opened the door, and stepped into the house.

For Fiona *

And the Sea Gave Up the Dead JASON C. ECKHARDT.

Jason C. Eckhardt is a freelance ill.u.s.trator who writes on occasion, relishing the added dimension of time in the written medium. His stories and articles have appeared in the Weird Fiction Review, Lovecraft Studies, Studies in Weird Fiction, and other journals. For his own reading he enjoys the works of Lovecraft, Dunsany, Bierce, Robert E. Howard, Loren Estleman, and various histories. He lives in Ma.s.sachusetts with his wife, stepdaughters, and cats.

IN 2004 HISTORIANS AND NATURALISTS ALIKE WERE galvanized by the news of the discovery of the sea-journals of British naturalist Margate Townshend. The small, sharkskin-bound octavo volumes came to light during an auction of an anonymous lot at the London auction house of Berkley and Dighton that year and were subsequently purchased by representatives of the Miskatonic University School of Natural History. As a first-hand account of Captain James Cook's second great voyage of exploration (177275), by an aide to the ship's official "natural historians," Johann Reinhold Forster and his son George, the value of this doc.u.ment is unquestioned. The wealth of data on the flora, fauna, and native customs of the Pacific will be of inestimable worth to future scholars of history, anthropology, and biology.

But the journal's importance transcends even these great boons. Specifically, it may settle for once and for all the long debate as to why Cook, retreating from the Antarctic pack in January 1774, abruptly came about in Lat.i.tude 47 degrees south to make his famous run to 71 degrees, 10 minutes south, "as far as I think it possible for man to go."

The period in question in Townshend's journals is January 511, 1774. Scholars will be struck immediately with the many discrepancies between Townshend's account and those of other diarists aboard the Resolution (the redoubtable Cook among them). But certain internal evidences in Townshend's text, coupled with its virtual agreement with other shipboard chronicles on all other aspects of the voyage, have led many to the conclusion that Townshend's account is the more reliable; and, conversely, that there was a conspiracy of silence among the rest of the explorers over what they found during those lost days. The reasons for this will become obvious upon reading. It is with the intention of inspiring further debate and intellectual inquiry that the following text is now published and submitted to the public for the first time, through a grant from the Francis Wayland Thurston Research Fund.

1774 JAN'RY 5.

THIS MORN THE WIND CALM, THE SKY CLEAR-A Blessing to be free of the wicked Cold and Ice-mountains of the extreme South. Quant.i.ties of Sea-Birds encounterd, incl. Albatross, Sheerwaters, the Puffinus of Linnaeus, &c. Flying Fisshe too, flockes of them such that the Deck was littered all about with them, shining like Bars of Silver. They flew head on into our Ship as if driven by a Blast. Later encounter'd Several of Squidd of unknown species, swimming S.S.W. These we saw off and on until the Duske descended, after which Time these fishe were visible by the bright Maculations of Colour upon their long and many Armes.

1774 JAN'RY 6.

CLEAR AND THE WIND CONTINUES ASTERN, WARMER every Day, tho' while the weather stays amenable the Crewmen appear restless. One or two complain of the Squid, which Creture we have seen in increasing Shoals of hundreds, nay, thousands. Their Peculiarity evaded me untill one of the seamen caught one up with his fizgig [i.e., harpoon]. He landed the Squid upon the deck for our Inspection. It proved a large (15 feet) variant of Teuthis Linn[aeus], but in place of the usual Finns imployed in moving them thro' the water these have large Wings of a membraneous Aspect much like to Bats wings. A set of segmented Fingers sprout from either side of the Squids head and it is upon these that the Wings are spread as Sails are set upon Spars. I made bold to christen it my self, calling it Teuthis megaptera after its great Wings (pace Linnaeus).

Beyond this, tho', we did not have time sufficient thoroughly to examine this Specimin, for the Sailors did not like the look of its Eyes, saying It gives us the Evill Eye. Forster, eager to dissect the animal, attempted to a.s.suage their Fears, reminding them that onlie a Man can possess a Soul & a Consciousness & Will. But they are a superst.i.tious Lot and to ease them we threw the Thing back into the Sea.

1774 JAN'RY 7.