Black Wings Of Cthulhu: Volume Two Part 7

Walt laughed. "The stars are right?"

"You know it, kiddo," she said.

IT WAS A TEDIOUS TWO-HOUR TRIP ACROSS THE TOP OF Ma.s.sachusetts 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 s.h.i.tty 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 v.a.g.i.n.a 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 f.u.c.ked 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 pa.s.sed 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 doc.u.ments. We could end up at a goat farm at the end of a long line of j.a.panese 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. "n.o.body! 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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, a.s.sume 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 'doc.u.ment' 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 muttered shrub n.i.g.g.e.r-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 ma.s.s 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 cla.s.ses were all so compet.i.tive, and as s.e.xist 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.

Gas giants are mostly hydrogen, of course. But life will out, and so will intelligence. The harder creatures, the fungal-crustacean Mi-Go, learned to communicate with one another across long distances, over the roar of the endless storms of Tyche, with a form of hypersonic communication that bordered on telepathy. The mind was elevated to the center of Mi-Go civilization. But they were a lonely race. The only other form of life on the planet was the gasbag jellyfish in which they lived, like Escherichia coli in the hot guts of an Earth mammal. People used to think the Earth was alive and called her Gaia, worshipping her in mud-soaked and blood-drenched pagan rites. But imagine knowing that the thing in which you lived was alive, and without any form of intelligence. How lonely would you be, if you couldn't even pretend that you were anything other than a speck in a blob floating along on the chaotic and deadly winds of a planet hidden a quarter of a light-year from its sun? Lonely enough, indeed. So the Mi-Go reached out to find new life, new minds. And they've been collecting us for quite a while. Such a long while.

Lenore and Walt found out what they wanted to know, just as I did back in '77. Of course, there's no such thing as a "brain canister"-someone was probably eating too much expired pork brains from rusty cans when he came up with such a ludicrous idea. The mind is nothing but a system of electrochemical responses embedded in a network of cells and gaps. Easy to copy, to record onto a new medium. Like the medium of a gasbag membrane. And that's where we are now. I'm here. Lenore is here, and so is Walt. In our new "body" we're immortal and the constant focus of the attentions of the Mi-Go. It took me such a long time to learn to communicate with them, but they're patient. Long-lived anyway, though I've had a dozen generations die, and absorbed them. They spirited me away from my human body; it's only fair that I gain my sustenance from breaking down their corpses, from eating them. The Mi-Go have even picked up the idea of religion from the human minds they study-death is a quaint ritual now. They tear their dead apart and smear their innards against my inner membrane to encourage decomposition and ingestion. And they sing when they do it. The Mi-Go also go to war. Gasbag against gasbag.

In fact, I killed Walt and Lenore just now. Now is a relative term, I admit. Time's very different out here, with our 6000-year solar revolutions and endless, changeless lives. Of course we go to war. We're human, and we have nothing else to do but fight over the only commodity we have-our lives, our selves, our memories. And the Mi-Go live to please. I liked Walt and Lenore. They were like me. h.o.m.o sapiens sapiens, Anglophones, Americans. They drove cars and drank tonic, as I did. Walked across the Miskatonic University quad on crisp winter nights, the snow like mounds of sparkling diamonds on either side of the cobblestone paths. It's been such a long time since I'd "met" someone so much like me. I barely recognize most of the "humans" encoded upon the medium of a gasbag's membrane I come across these days. It's been three million years. The Green Mountains of Vermont have long since fallen to dust, but there's still a little something on the spot of the Akeley Farm, a few feet above sea level, that attracts the tiny, hairless, and half-witted daughter species as different from my human life as Australopithecus afarensis is. It was so good to encounter the gasbags encoded with Walt and Lenore, to have my Mi-Go tear into them, to drink their memories and for a moment remember what it was like to have limbs, to breathe air, to say words I know with a human jaw.

I hope I find some more like them soon. Soon is a relative term. But I'm patient, and old.

The Abject RICHARD GAVIN.

Richard Gavin is one of Canada's most critically acclaimed horror writers. His books include Omens (Mythos Books, 2007), The Darkly Splendid Realm (Dark Regions Press, 2009), and Charnel Wine: Memento Mori Edition (Dark Regions Press, 2010). His nonfiction writings have appeared in Rue Morgue, Dead Reckonings, Starfire Journal, and on his blog, "At Fear's Altar" (www.richardgavin.net). Gavin lives in Ontario with his beloved wife and their brood.

EARTH'S END WAS ONLY MOMENTS AWAY, YET SHE STILL had nothing to say to him.

As the jeep negotiated the rugged mountain road, Petra caught herself meshing her hands across her middle in a protective gesture. When she remembered this was unnecessary she crumpled inside and allowed her arms to drop.

"Jee-zus!" Tad blurted as they bounced over a pernicious pothole. After the next hairpin turn the steepness of the incline forced Tad to fumblingly jerk the gearshift into second, first. He thudded his foot down on the accelerator. "Do me a favour, call Charlie and ask how much farther it is. I'm afraid this thing's going to fall apart around us if we don't get there soon."

Petra reached for her purse and began the quest for her cell phone.

Charlie's h.e.l.lo was a peep beneath the rumble of engines and the roar of the open jeep windows.

"Hey," Petra cried. "How much farther is this place? Tad's getting a bit nervous." She pressed the phone hard against her ear. "Charlie says you should chill out." She hoped her tone was not too gleeful; just enough to jab at Tad's already ornery mood. "He also said to tell you the End is nigh."

As she snapped the phone shut, Petra heard Tad mutter something she was sure was an insult.

"First a flight from Providence to Vancouver"-as he ranted, Tad moved his hand in prima donna sweeps-"now a four-hour drive up this mountain range. Your friends really know how to show their guests a good time."

A dozen retorts, ranging from witty to outright caustic, swam through Petra's mind. Certain that whatever reply she chose would be the wrong one, she opted to look silently out at the sycamores and yews, which were reduced to grey-green smears as the vehicle rattled past them.

"WHAT DO YOU KNOW? YOU MADE IT!" CHARLIE WAS dragging a plastic cooler out of his jeep while Douglas stood fidgeting with the clasps of a large backpack.

"No thanks to your lead," Tad called as he exited the second jeep, "or this deathtrap you stuck us with."

"Hey, go easy on her," Charlie replied. "That jeep took a h.e.l.l of a beating when Doug and I drove through the Badlands a few years ago. Besides, what's to complain about? It got you here, didn't it?"

"Barely."

Gravel crunched beneath the soles of Petra's runners as she crossed the tiny roadside inlet where the vehicles were parked. Charlie's description of their destination as "breathtaking" and "out of this world" had clearly been hyperbole, for as she surveyed the tall, pervasive hemlock trees, Petra saw only common woodlands. The boughs all seemed to mesh, forming a spider's skein, or perhaps a shroud, above her.

Craning her head back, shielding her eyes, Petra discovered that the sky was only visible in shards. She felt foolish lugging the small amateur's telescope along in its cheap plastic case.

"So this is it, huh?" Tad's hands gripped his hips, and his mouth was bent in a sneer of dissatisfaction.

Douglas shook his head. "No, this isn't it. This is just the entrance to the Crawls.p.a.ce. We won't reach Earth's End for another hour, maybe two."

"Two hours!" Tad cried.

"Maybe less. It depends on how fast you can walk."

"Why don't we just drive up there?"

"Because we'd need a road to do that," Douglas explained. He grinned and added, "The mouth of the Crawls.p.a.ce here is as close to Earth's End as you can get by vehicle."

Douglas stepped over a corroded iron chain that drooped across a thin footpath. A battered sign warned NO TRESPa.s.sING. NATURAL REGENERATION IN PROGRESS. DEPT. OF AGROFORESTRY, but the faintness of the text rendered the warning inconsequential.

TWO YEARS AGO PETRA HAD BEEN SINGLE AND HAD sacrificed her days for slave's wages at an independent book and magazine shop in Providence. Tad had been one of her regular customers. The store sat kitty-corner to the financial planning firm where he was employed, and three or four times a week Tad would escape his desk in order to pay a lunch-hour visit to Petra's store, usually for a newspaper but occasionally a paperback potboiler. His shyness was mild enough to be endearing.

Four months of lingering and small talk elapsed before they had their first date. It was Petra who'd done the asking.

They went to a screening of Picnic at Hanging Rock at the Columbus Theater and then for coffee at a quaint diner that had art deco fixtures and a live jazz trio every Thursday. By Christmas that year they were living together.

But their pantomime of married life began to erode all too quickly, and Petra did not even have wedding day memories to cling to as the watershed of their happiness.

A promotion resulted in an almost exponential increase in Tad's hours at the office. With her meagre financial contributions rendered unnecessary, Petra quit her job. Tad bought a house for her to rattle around in and stew over her fear that day by tedious day she was becoming her mother; someone whose life had always seemed to Petra to be little more than a thirty-yearlong stifled scream.

Her only salvation came in the form of lazy daydreaming on the living room sofa. She would fantasize about fashioning one of the upper bedrooms with a crib, a brightly coloured rocking chair, a herd of cartoon zoo animals dangling from a ceiling mobile.

After sharing her fantasies with Tad during afterglow one night, he'd told her they would talk about kids when the timing was better. Timing had always been of great importance to Tad, always.