Black Wings Of Cthulhu: Volume Two Part 15

"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 f.u.c.king 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, rea.s.sured 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 gla.s.s 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 a.n.a.l probes pa.s.se.

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 Gla.s.s 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 s.p.a.ces. 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 pa.s.sed 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 Gla.s.s.

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 Gla.s.s 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 acc.u.mulating 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.

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 f.u.c.king 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 gla.s.s. .h.i.t 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 b.u.t.tons. As the figure walked around the end of the bed, Graeme had to concede it was like looking in the mirror. The figure pa.s.sed 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 d.i.n.ked 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 sc.r.a.pe 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 appet.i.te, so he put the box back.

He stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked up. He could hear the other man's footsteps travel across the hall ceiling as their owner walked towards the bathroom. But then Graeme became aware of another set of footsteps-outside. The letter box clanged and a single envelope landed on the hall floor. In three quick strides, Graeme reached the front door, picked up the letter, noticing it bore his name, and stuffed it in his back pocket, then returned to the foot of the stairs. He climbed them quickly and quietly, becoming aware as he did so of the sound of the other man using the toilet. Graeme reached the top of the stairs, stepped on to the landing and looked into the bathroom. The other man had left the door open, which Graeme might also have done, but only if alone in the house. He-the other man-was standing in front of the toilet urinating and looking out of the window towards the backs of the houses beyond the rear garden. His stream diminished to a trickle, stopped, returned briefly, then stopped altogether. For a moment, the other man's legs bent forward slightly at the knee. Graeme moved towards the stairs that would take him up to the second floor. He managed to get out of sight before the other man had finished washing his hands.

Graeme risked a look back around the banisters. There was something lying on the carpet in the middle of the landing. He felt his back pocket. The letter wasn't there, and now the other man was coming out of the bathroom. Graeme watched as the other man started to cross the landing and then stopped, his eye drawn to the letter on the carpet. The other man bent down and picked up the letter. He read the front and then turned the envelope over and tore it open. He withdrew the contents, which comprised a single sheet of paper folded into three. He unfolded it, read it, folded it again, and returned it to the envelope, and then he went back into the bedroom. Graeme listened to him moving around, opening and closing drawers. After a minute or two, the other man came out and went downstairs. Graeme heard a couple of doors being closed-the doors to the living room and kitchen-and then the other man put the alarm on and left the house, double-locking the front door.

Graeme waited a minute and then went downstairs. The alarm started beeping quietly, so he keyed in the code and it fell silent. In the kitchen, Graeme's keys were gone from their normal place. He helped himself to a spare pair and closed the kitchen door after him. Taking a jacket from the coat rack, he keyed in the alarm code and approached the front door. He turned the key in the lock and opened the door, stepping out into the fresh spring air.

There was no one at the bus stop, so Graeme sat and waited. The bus came and Graeme got on. He looked out of the window as the bus crawled through the student district and then entered an area dominated by Asian restaurants. When the bus reached the outskirts of the city centre Graeme got up and pressed the bell. The driver brought the bus to a halt, and Graeme thanked him as he disembarked. He walked a short distance and entered the building where he worked. He crossed the atrium and climbed the spiral staircase. On the second floor he stepped inside the photocopy room and checked his pigeonhole, which was empty. He then proceeded along the corridor to his office.

Closing his fingers around the handle, he looked through the gla.s.s panel in the door. The other man was sitting at Graeme's desk running his finger under the flap of a self-sealed envelope. He turned to look towards the door, and Graeme shrank back. He pressed his spine against the corridor wall, and his knees gave a little. He allowed his back to slide down the wall, but then he heard the door to his office being opened from the inside. He immediately got to his feet, turned, and walked away down the corridor. He had no way of knowing if the person opening the door was the other man or one of the colleagues with whom Graeme shared his office. He pushed open the double doors at the end of the corridor, and once he reached the stairs he took them at a run.

Reaching the ground floor, Graeme crossed the atrium and left the building via the revolving door. He stopped immediately he was outside to recover his breath, but finding himself in the middle of a crowd of smokers he moved on.

Graeme started walking home. His route took him past Sarah's place of work. He went up to the sliding doors, which opened automatically, but then he backed away again and walked up and down on the pavement for two minutes. He took his mobile phone out of his pocket and looked at it. He found Sarah's number in the address book and his finger hovered over the call b.u.t.ton, but then he cancelled it instead and put the phone away.

He walked home, and when he got there he stood outside the house looking up at it. He checked his watch, waited a moment, and then walked on. He walked beyond the shops, through the housing estate and past the rugby club and the allotments until he reached the river. It had not rained for a few days and the river was low. He walked on the path that followed the meander of the river. His watch told him it was lunchtime, but he was not hungry, even though he had had no breakfast.

Later in the afternoon, he returned home. He entered the house, switched off the alarm, and went straight upstairs. He waited in the spare bedroom, from where he had a good view of the street. He watched one of his neighbours come out of her house and put a compostable bag of food waste in her green bin. She then picked up a confectionery wrapper from her front path and placed that in the regular dustbin before going back inside and closing the front door.

The other man walked up the road and approached the house. Graeme stepped back from the window and paced slowly across the floor. As he heard the front door being opened, he suddenly stopped and became aware of the exaggerated sound of his own breathing. He had not put the alarm on before coming upstairs. He stood absolutely still and listened. He heard the other man enter the kitchen and then move around the ground floor from room to room.

Graeme sat down, leaning against the wall. When he heard the front door again, he stood up.

"h.e.l.lo-oo," Sarah called as her heels struck the wooden boards of the hall floor.

Graeme heard the other man respond and guessed he would be offering to make her a cup of tea. Taking care to minimise any noise, Graeme walked down to the first-floor landing and sat on the top step of the stairs that went down to the ground floor. Because of the half-landing and the one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, there was no way they could see him. He listened to them swap stories about their respective days. It sounded mechanical, listless, routine. He listened while they prepared food, poured wine, switched on the news.

When he heard Sarah coming upstairs he retreated to the next flight up before she reached the half-landing. Peering around the newel post he watched her enter the bathroom and listened to her using the toilet. She came out and stood for a moment on the landing. She looked tired. Maybe she was trying to remember if she had come upstairs for anything other than to go to the bathroom. Her face wore a strained expression. After a moment her facial muscles relaxed and she moved towards the stairs. Graeme gave it a few seconds before getting to his feet and taking an initial step to follow her, but then he stopped, staring at the spot on the landing where Sarah had been standing a moment earlier, and he raised his hands and ran them over his shaved head. He turned around and climbed the stairs back up to the top floor. He went into the spare bedroom and curled up on the bed.

GRAEME AWOKE AND LOOKED AROUND THE UNFAMILIAR room. At some point in the night he had got under the duvet, but he had not got undressed. His clothes were a bit rumpled, but they were not damp with sweat. He could hear noises from one floor down: one person in the bathroom, another moving around. He lay on his back and listened.

He became aware of footsteps leaving the bedroom, moving on to the landing, starting to climb the stairs. As quickly and quietly as he could, he got out of bed and stood by the door, eyes wide, senses alert. The approaching footsteps were light enough to be Sarah's, but it was hard to be sure. He looked around. The guest bedroom contained no hiding places. The footsteps stopped outside the door to the room. He held his breath.

The door opened slowly.

Sarah stood in the doorway.

From downstairs came the sound of the other man's voice.

"Have a nice day, darling."

Graeme looked at Sarah.

He could hear footsteps on the main stairs going down, a bracelet jangling, and then a voice-he would have said Sarah's voice-called from downstairs: "See you later."

The other man shouted back, "See you later."

Graeme took a step towards Sarah and looked into her eyes. He saw himself reflected in her pupils. But otherwise they looked empty.

Waiting at the Crossroads Motel STEVE RASNIC TEM.

Steve Rasnic Tem's newest novel is Deadfall Hotel, published in 2012 by Solaris Books. New Pulp Press brought out a collection of his dark noir stories, Ugly Behavior, in August of 2012.