Black Wings Of Cthulhu: Volume Two Part 9

She looked up and she saw.

TAD HAD KEPT HIS INTENTIONS OF RETURNING TO British Columbia to himself. He had no friends to share these plans with, of course, but even when he booked off the last week of August he told his supervisor it was to catch up on some renovations around the house; a plausible excuse as his home had fallen into disrepair since Petra's demise. Tad had never realized how warm and full the house had felt when they had shared it. But now it was cold and dirty and hollow, like an old warehouse, an excavated tomb.

The weather during the flight was pacific, as though nature was speeding him along to face that which he'd previously been unwilling to face.

He spent the first night holed up in a motel, trying not to think about the close proximity of Earth's End, of the Abject, of Petra's watery grave.

The following morning was dull and dim and rainy. Tad partially hoped that his rental car would skid out on the mountain road. He was actually nourished by morbid visions of himself being impaled on a tree. But, after several wrong turns, he ultimately arrived at the neglected entrance to the Crawls.p.a.ce. He'd been dreading the possibility of finding Douglas's jeep parked along the side of the road. Perhaps he and Charlie had thought of marking the tragic anniversary in the same manner. But the area was as vacant as it had been last summer, perhaps the way it had always been.

It was late afternoon, but the sky was so heaped with grey that it felt like evening. Tad remained slumped behind the wheel, watching the raindrops splatter into amoebalike shapes on the windshield. At last he reached over and dragged the .38 from the glove compartment. Tucking it into the front of his jeans, he exited the car and disobeyed the NO TRESPa.s.sING sign for the second time in his life.

The Crawls.p.a.ce went past in a green blur. Every so often Tad thought he saw Petra just ahead of him, racing once more toward her death under an eclipsed moon.

The ocean roared and crashed in great tumults at the base of Earth's End. The atmosphere was hazed with mist. The Abject was little more than an onyx pin swathed in fog.

Tad's gaze went downward, his mind raced backward.

He hadn't wanted to relive the night, and certainly not with such vivid, lacerating clarity, but the interred memories began to claw their way back to the surface.

Tad imagined himself once again standing under the occulted moon. The white wine and beer had made him feel that the cliff he stood upon was on a pitch, for he swayed to and fro, listening to the two queers yammering and t.i.ttering like schoolgirls. Petra was standing aloof, shining her flashlight ahead of her, into the darkness. She'd been leaning forward, had been shielding her eyes with her hand as if this action would somehow enable her to see.

What had she seen?

The question had been gnawing at Tad for a full year. On those rare nights where he was able to s.n.a.t.c.h some REM sleep, that image would bloom in the grey haze of sleep, wrenching him into a panting, twitchy wakefulness. He would see Petra taking that lone fatal step over the edge, would see her being instantly subsumed by the night.

Had it been he who'd inspired Petra to jump? What had driven her to drop so casually, so easily?

Tad pulled the revolver from under his belt and examined it. He began to sob. It was the first time he had cried over Petra.

He'd been downright stoic through the long investigation that came once that rare darkness ebbed and the moon returned, and later the sun. He had stood wrapped in a fibrous grey blanket that one of the emergency workers had given him. Douglas had been given a sedative to calm him. Charlie had wept and snivelled while he'd insisted over and over that he'd had no clue as to how Petra had fallen.

The boats had bobbed across the ocean for three full days afterwards. They'd dragged the same area again and again but turned up nothing. Tad had been warned that the chances of recovering Petra's body in these waters were slim.

PERHAPS THERE WAS SOME CORNER OF TAD'S SOUL THAT was sanctimonious after all, for despite many repeated attempts at placing the .38's nub against his temple, he was unable to squeeze the trigger. So he remained seated, his legs dangling over the edge of Earth's End, his body shivering from the cold shower that continued to fall upon him. He looked out at the Abject, and in a weird way he felt it was he who was being looked at, watched.

The rain eventually lightened, but by then the sky had grown dark.

"Petra..."

He spoke her name quietly, almost sibilantly. He was exhausted in every sense of the word, too drained to speak in anything above a whimper.

It must have been this destroyed state of mind that caused the optical illusion of the fog swirling into a great funnel; the chute that afforded Tad a clear view of the Abject.

There was a fire in the great cave, or so it looked to Tad. He scrabbled back from the ledge and rose to his feet. He could see plump sparks of light glowing like flung embers against the ancient dark. These flint-sparks enabled Tad to see that the rim of the cave was eroding, quickly. Its stone edges were peeling back to reveal...

Teeth.

And then the cave was no longer a cave, but a crooked grin.

The face that pulled up and out of the rock was immense, with a glacier-pale complexion and eyes like stagnant tarns.

Tad's vision blurred, wavered. The cliff felt like pudding beneath him. He glared dumbly as the Abject sprouted an arm, another. And as the vast thing shook off the crust of its deosil hibernation, it fanned its limitless wings, eclipsing the gibbous moon behind a veil of black plumage and dangling tufts of rot. Each heave of the thing's scaly chest choked the air with stench and embers.

Its howl shook Earth's End and dropped Tad to his knees.

The Watcher turned its dead gaze to the cliff. It reached, as though it could grasp the escarpment with ease. Tad's mouth worked frantically, forming silent pleas.

'She saw this...'

And then Tad saw Petra.

She was walking on night air, or so Tad thought until he looked down and discovered that the hideous thing from within the rock had stretched one of its wings across the water, forging a bridge between its Outer realm and the world of men. There were other figures perched on various ridges of the Abject, human in size if not altogether in shape; just as the Abject itself had been mountainous in scope, but not in composition.

Petra, looking feral, black-stained, yet regal in her madness, trod upon the feathery arch. Most of her body looked positively ossified, save for the belly, which was swollen with fledgling life.

She held something in her spindly, filthy arms.

Something that shifted and mewled.

Something that she freed.

Something that came lurching at a great speed toward Earth's End.

Tad saw the thing pushing itself along on unnumbered flabby claws. Its eyes were like the suckers on a deep sea creature's tentacle. Its mouth was nothing but tongue.

Tad prayed he'd have time enough to fire once.

Dahlias MELANIE TEM.

Melanie Tem's work has received the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards and a nomination for the Shirley Jackson Award. She has published numerous short stories, eleven solo novels, two collaborative novels with Nancy Holder, and two with her husband, Steve Rasnic Tem. She is also a published poet, an oral storyteller, and a playwright. Her stories have recently appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and the anthologies Supernatural Noir, Shivers VI, Portents, Blood and Other Cravings, and Werewolves and Shapeshifters. The Tems live in Denver. They have four children and four granddaughters.

IN ROSEMARY FARBER'S DREAM OR waking dream or hallucination or vision, that sunny July afternoon on the couch in the house she'd lived in since her marriage just after the second world war, on the dead-end street in the little town near the foothills of the Colorado Rockies that had officially slid into suburbia but retained much of its insular small-houses-and-big-trees feel-something was coming. She was no more or less its object or prey than were the rabbit brush or the fox, but it would get her, which she thought not entirely a bad thing.

In Nina Scherer's multi-tasking rush-on her cell setting up an appointment with a client for later that afternoon, juggling the red and yellow dinner-plate dahlias from her yard and the chicken ca.s.serole and chocolate chip cookies she'd stayed up late last night getting ready to bring today, checking her Daytimer for when and where she needed to have her son at band and her daughter at karate, trying to remember if there was enough milk at home for breakfast-in the midst of all this getting-through-the-day and keeping-things-running, something seemed vaguely odd to her about the meadow between her grandmother's house and the river. Something out of the corner of her eye about the tall summer gra.s.s, about its color or its motion in the breeze. This impression didn't really register with her until she was already on the porch, and it was too much ha.s.sle to back out and look again.

When Nina called and pushed open the door, Grandma Rosemary was under an afghan on the couch. She spent most of her time there now, looking tired and ninety-one years old but not alarmed, not in pain, not otherwise distressed. In fact, looking calmer than Nina herself ever felt.

"Hi, Grandma." Nina set the dahlias on the coffee table and the food on the counter. She bent to kiss the old woman, so dear to her for so long, still Grandma Rosemary but going away from her a little every day, as if pulled down some slope into a place or a placelessness where Nina couldn't follow, wouldn't want to follow, would never want to follow. Although a little rest would be nice.

Rosemary turned her head. "Those are lovely."

"It's been so dry. Our water bills are sky-high, and the garden is still struggling."

"They're so big and bright."

"They grew that way just for you." Nina smiled past a sudden lump in her throat.

"Well, not really. We're in the same world at the same time, is all, the dahlias and me. Nothing personal. I expect I'm a lot more interested in them than they are in me." She chuckled.

Nina's phone vibrated and Caller ID displayed a name of someone who, she decided rather grudgingly, could wait. In the seconds it took for the call to go to voicemail, the worry that not answering it had been a big mistake lodged in her mind where it would cause persistent low-level distress, for in her business there was a commonplace though inaccurate adage that a missed call equaled missed opportunity. In fact the call, and the follow-up text message and e-mail she wouldn't find until much later, were about something that really didn't matter very much, though the client was convinced it did.

One of the cats glided from the couch onto the table and, with that lovely and utterly inhuman pink-tongue flickering, lapped delicately from the water in the vase. Hoping nothing in dahlias was toxic to cats, Nina inquired of her grandmother as she put her cell phone away, "How are you?"

Rosemary said, "Something's moving in and it will take me. I don't have much longer."

When Rosemary was like this, being in a hurry didn't work. But Nina had only about forty-five minutes, fifty at the most, before she had to be back at the office for the team meeting. She knew she'd regret it if she missed this conversation. Really, it was the least she could do, and Grandma Rosemary had always been fun to listen to, with her family stories from as far back as the Civil War, her on-the-spot composition of rhymed and free verse, the sense that she was always engaged with more than one world at a time. Childhood summers spent in this house had affected Nina in ways she wasn't completely aware of, showing her-though she hadn't learned it very well-how not to take herself too seriously in the larger scheme of things and, at the same time, fostering her m.o. of staying busy, filling time to overflowing, by sheer perpetual motion declaring her own significance.

She should have paid attention to Rosemary that afternoon, borne witness and learned something. It wouldn't have made any difference in what happened, but still she should have listened. Instead, "Oh, Grandma," she remonstrated, smoothing her palm across the thin white hair, "don't talk like that."

Rosemary smiled indulgently. "All right, then, what shall we talk about? What's new with you?"

The rocker tipped forward and stayed that way when Nina sat on the edge of the seat. She never knew quite what to say to that question. "Nothing much new, I guess. Same old, same old. You know?"

"How are the children? How's Ken?"

"Good. They're all good. Busy."

"Give them my love."

"I will. They said to say hi." They hadn't, but she told herself they would have if they'd thought of it, which actually wasn't likely.

Anything beyond small talk ran the risk of a longer and deeper conversation than either of them wanted that day. Yet they were both restless, dissatisfied with the chitchat, neither knowing why. Rosemary thought her peevishness was because of her profound, unremitting fatigue. Nina thought hers was from having so much to do.

Outside, the meadow gra.s.s undulated, a swath glistening in the high strong sun and bending under the living weight that was moving up from the river, closer and closer to the house though neither the house nor anything else was its particular target. Rosemary knew it was coming. Nina didn't quite yet.

"Are you hungry?" Nina tried.

"I'm never really hungry anymore."

"You have to eat."

This exchange they had almost every time Nina visited. But usually Rosemary didn't say so directly, "Why? Why do I have to eat?"

"What do you mean, why? You have to eat to live." Nina didn't have time for this. Rosemary didn't have much time, either, but the time she had wasn't spoken for anymore.

She did eat a little, a few spoonsful of the ca.s.serole, half a cookie, a swallow or two of milk. Nothing tasted good, more a function of her diminished gustatory, olfactory, and tactile senses than of the intrinsic merits of food. Nina ate quickly and quite a lot, sampling, mostly to check on the quality of her own cooking, which she found somewhat lacking. Rosemary said it was good, and it was, because of the companionship and forethought, and also because of the abundance of chips in the cookies, in some places the dough embedded in a melted ma.s.s of chocolate rather than the other way around.

They talked-Nina talked-about things that once had aroused her grandmother's interest, often pa.s.sion: the kids, the economy, the war, religion, politics, family stories. Rosemary reminisced about this neighborhood as it used to be, when at weekly coffeeklatches the women got mending and fancy work done and chatted about mostly inconsequential things made to seem consequential by the sharing. She always pointed out that it hadn't all been placid, there'd been things hidden and not-so-hidden-child abuse, infidelity, illnesses and accidents, a kidnapping. This time how she put it was, "We weren't really friends. But we were friendly. Those get-togethers were like solid ground. Everybody's gone now. Some moved away and didn't keep in touch. Some died. Francine Pollack went to a nursing home last month. So now I'm the only one still left on the street from those days. I'm an island in a rising sea."

"I'm sorry, Grandma. That must be a terrible feeling."

"It's the way of the world."

"Well, we don't have to like it."

"Doesn't matter if we like it or not."

Rosemary saw no point in saying any more right then about what regularly swept through the neighborhood like a viscous transparent tide. It had brought the great love of her life as well as his early death, the Klingmans' house fire and also their glorious roses, Mark Abernathy going MIA in Vietnam and Cheryl Raines becoming a doctor in sub-Saharan Africa, hand-built houses bulldozed for a strip mall and a lovely new creekside park replacing dilapidated and dangerous apartments, both Francine Pollack's deterioration and her good long life-bringing or causing or revealing, Rosemary didn't know, but all of it with the utter indifference she found terrible and rea.s.suring. "I'd like to take a little walk," she announced, and began the laborious process of getting to her feet.

Startled, Nina took refuge in glancing at her watch. "Oh, Grandma, I don't think-There's not enough time-Are you sure you can-?" But she hastened to support the unsteady walker that her grandmother was using to pull herself up.

They made their way out the back door. It was a dry hot summer, and petunias were languishing in their pots. "Do you suppose it would help," Rosemary asked, breathlessness and strain altering her sardonic intent, "if we prayed for rain?"

Nina was praying that Rosemary wouldn't fall, that she would make the meeting, that she had enough gas in the car for all the running around she had to do yet today. Whether she really believed in the efficacy of pet.i.tionary prayer or it was only a ritual like a jump-rope chant, it gave her the illusion of calm while actually adding to her tension. Uncomfortable in the heat and her two-inch heels, aware that her cell was beeping with missed calls, she could manage only, "Maybe."

"G.o.d," Rosemary panted, "whatever that means, most likely cares not a whit about my dried-out petunias or your drooping dahlias."

"So G.o.d hates us? Or the universe or whatever?" Nina couldn't tell whether she should take her grandmother's soft elbow or put an arm around her or not.

"I think we're of no interest to him. It."

"Gee, Grandma, that's cheery."

"Not cheery." Rosemary teetered and Nina grabbed her. "But not not cheery, either. Neutral. It just is."

"You're going to fall. It's hot out here. Let's not do this."

Rosemary saw or felt or tasted or in some other way took in the gloss moving up over the meadow. Nina probably didn't yet, or didn't know she did. It had oozed around the apple tree now and under the ancient swing set. The tree would live quite a few more years to bear hard little fruit for the crows and squirrels, but the swing set would finally rust through that fall. Nina, realizing her attempt to be helpful was actually contributing to the old woman's unsteadiness, let go of her and just stayed close.

Nina had been having episodes of vertigo and pounding headaches, once or twice with blurred vision, and every now and then two fingers of her right hand went numb. Stress, she was sure. She didn't have time to do anything more than be sure the Ibuprofen bottle in her purse was always full. Right now she was having some trouble with her left foot. She didn't mention this to Rosemary or anyone else, didn't give it much thought, her thoughts being busied with many other things, at the moment her grandmother's slow but somehow headlong momentum. "Where are we going?"

"Just down the meadow a little ways," Rosemary said. She was in its path. Everybody was in its path. It was time. Might as well go meet it, see what would happen next. She thought to a.s.sure her granddaughter, "It won't take very long," which was true, but what she couldn't know was that it would take the rest of Nina's life.

Frail as she was, Rosemary managed to guide the two of them across the patio and down into the back yard. This meant navigating three steps and the sliding patio door that stuck, requiring Nina to pull hard enough to compromise the balance of them both, individually and together. Clouds were moving in from over the mountains, where weather almost always came from. "It couldn't have stayed pretty just a few more minutes for us," Nina grumbled. The air was humid now, full, as if threatening rain, but it wasn't threatening anything, even if it did rain. And in this case there would be no precipitation all that week, though yards and gardens and the meadow itself could have used drenching.

The meadow looked wet to Rosemary. To Nina, meaning to concentrate on her grandmother but mostly worrying about the time and all the obligations waiting to consume her at work and at home, it just looked big. Maybe it rippled a bit, if that wasn't one of those occasional visual distortions that would turn out to have been harbingers. "Grandma," she said, "we can't go all the way down to the river."

Quietly Rosemary said, "No need." Nina didn't ask what she meant. What Rosemary meant was something like, "It doesn't matter whether we go all the way to the river or stay where we are or go back inside the house and lock all the doors. There's no need to do anything." But even if Nina had asked, Rosemary wouldn't have been aware of all that.

From years of use-horseshoes, baseball, barbecues, dogs, gardens planted and then left to grow over and then dug up again-the ground back here was uneven. When Nina fell, she thought her heel had caught in a hole or on a hillock. In fact, a blood vessel in her brain, weak and bulging for some time without the knowledge of its host, had just burst. Nina might have been aware of pain, thunder inside her head, panic about all the things she was leaving undone, sorrow and guilt about Ken and the kids, the sentient substance that spread over her without any intent at all. But, really, there wasn't much chance for her to be aware of anything.

Rosemary, though, watched it happen. Watched the slime flood the long meadow, claim her granddaughter, and keep right on moving. With great effort and risk, she bent to hold Nina's hand, feel for her pulse, touch her wet cheek. In what for her was haste, she went back to the house, walker rattling, body barely carrying out her desperate orders, after much struggle got the patio door open and found the phone where she'd left it on the coffee table beside the gorgeous, indifferent dahlias and the flicker-tongued alien-tongued cat oblivious to her as it drank from their vase.