Black Wings III - New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror Page 13

  She tried to scream, but was muted by horror and disgust. Mr. Trinity pulled the weird apparatus to his face, which for the first time illuminated his features—

  And she found the scream buried deep in her chest.

  His appearance was little more than a pale, gaunt, expressionless mask, the lips peeled away from the outsized, crooked dentition in an approximation of a rictus. The five deeply sunken eyes formed a perfect inverted triangle in the stretched skin of the face, wetly reflecting the strange, dim glow of the living instrument gripped in his gnarled, arthritic fists. His skeletal proboscis twitched excitedly on his enormous earless head as Mr. Trinity inched closer and closer, the single massive, blood-colored horn at last visible curling asymmetrically from the top of his denuded cranium.

  The din from the screaming choir in the other room seemed to crescendo, then fade from her dying mind; as she backed away from the creature in front of her, she was horrified to comprehend all the terrible lies, delusions, and mistakes in her life that she would never get a chance to undo or correct. Instead of working to improve herself, instead of making the best of her reality, she had coveted and envied; she had marginalized and belittled, and arrogantly claimed to know better. In the end, she had searched for something that was better left unknown, undiscovered. Unfortunately, she had found it. Am I to become a part of his instrument? Will he collect me now for his endless permutations, his ceaseless practice?

  In the seconds left to her, she thought she heard Tom’s voice in the distant screams, blended with the swelling melodies of madness, the pitiful harmonies of Hell that her shattered mind could no longer fully assimilate. She understood now that this was not her heaven or hell, but her eternal limbo. Much as her life had been unlived, so too would her death be unresolved; she would persist in this place, with this being, this creature, this nephilim. She had been found, too, it seems.

  Then, with a strange resolve and an unexpected grace, the man with the horn—who always was, and who always would be—raised the pulsating instrument to his mouth…

  And the infinite was ignited.

  Hotel Del Lago

  Mollie L. Burleson

  Mollie L. Burleson’s fiction and poetry has appeared in such magazines as Lore, Crypt of Cthulhu, and Midnight Echo, and numerous anthologies, including 100 Vicious Little Vampire Stories, 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories, Horror for the Holidays, Black Wings, and Horrors! 365 Scary Stories. Her literary criticism has appeared in Lovecraft Studies and Studies in Weird Fiction. She lives in Roswell, New Mexico, with her writer husband Don and five cats.

  Joe Hull was driving in southeastern New Mexico and was growing very tired, as mile after mile of black ribbon roads stretched out before him. He had gotten off the main drag somehow, and he was nowhere on the map as far as he could tell. That’ll teach you to pay more attention, he said to himself.

  Up ahead he saw a sign proclaiming the town of Ambrose. Might be a place there to stay for the night. Just a few hours’ sleep would enable him to drive on at first light. He entered the town. A few structures, the hotel, and a gas station. Population 68, very small. He didn’t see a soul on the streets. It’s not all that late, he thought.

  A big building rose on his right: Hotel del Lago. Strange-looking place, squat and oddly cubic in structure with something approximating a smokestack sticking out of the roof, or more nearly like an upturned funnel. Weird, Joe thought. The hotel and the few buildings surrounding it reminded him of a desert landscape, cacti poking their spines out of the sand. What a peculiar name for a hotel, a building lying like a squashed beetle on the ground in this arid wilderness of rocks and mesquite.

  He parked on the semicircle driveway, got out, and approached the building. He could find no door at first and circled the place, searching for an entry. He peered into a window: a room dimly lit and spartan, but neat and orderly. He made another circuit, and as he passed a glass-fronted door it automatically whooshed open.

  He entered what he guessed to be the lobby. A large check-in desk, some uncomfortable-looking chairs and sofas, and a black and silent television. The furniture was placed precisely and immovable, uninviting. He walked upon the cold, uncongenial tile floor, his footsteps echoing hollowly.

  He hated those stereotypical motels, where kids ran around screaming, TVs blared, everything was plastic, and an occasional drunk reeled by. A dog would bark and sleep was usually broken. But this was no usual motel. The place seemed quiet. Good.

  “May I help you?”

  Joe turned and looked upon a woman with a pale, pasty face. Her mouth twitched in what could have been taken for a smile.

  “Yes,” he answered. “I’d like a room for the night. I’m tired and it’s too late to go further.”

  “We happen to have quite a few vacancies,” she responded. Her voice was oddly raspy and liquid-sounding. Her colorless hair, scrunched up in a bun, loosened with her movements, and a few damp strands fell on her wan, unhealthy-looking cheeks. Her eyes bulged in a pop-eyed, questioning glance. Not the greatest looker, thought Joe.

  “That’s great. I’m exhausted. Have a long way to drive tomorrow.”

  He wondered how old she was. She looked youngish, but her neck was wrinkled and crepey. Probably hasn’t heard about facelifts or special treatments for it in this hick town, he observed.

  “Anything much to do around here on a Saturday night?”

  “Oh, we find things to do here at times.” She smiled.

  “Well, I guess I’m not really looking for things to do. Too tired.”

  “As you wish. If you’re as tired as you say, you’ll enjoy it here. A very quiet place. No noise to disturb you. At least none that would bother you. Sign here.” She indicated the ledger. “Credit card or cash?”

  “Cash.” Joe signed the register and took the key she proffered. Room 101. Close by.

  As he left the lobby he glimpsed two men standing by the front door in quiet conversation. As Joe passed, they turned toward him and their dark looks tended to give him the creeps. Further along the hallway he thought he saw a few women in long dresses walking by outside; one of them bore a marked resemblance to the desk clerk. So there were other guests? Well, what had he expected? It was a hotel, after all.

  He opened the door to his room and passed into a long L-shaped chamber. His first thought was how dreary it was—high-ceilinged, dim, and again, like the lobby, the furniture uninviting.

  He sat on one of the chairs and tried to relax before sleep. Nope, it wasn’t working. Wait a minute, hadn’t he seen a bar on the way to the room? Just what he needed to relax, a nice, cool whiskey and soda. Or maybe just a beer.

  He left his room and headed for what he thought might be the bar. It was. Dark and dank, smelling of beer and something else. There was a lone customer sitting on a stool, and Joe decided to sit down next to the old man. A bartender hovered just out of the glow of the one neon light in the bar and asked him what he wanted.

  “Beer.”

  The old man turned to Joe and nodded. He seemed to be having a mixed drink.

  “Hi,” Joe said, nodding in like manner. “You live around here?”

  The man nodded and mumbled, “I wasn’t born here, though.”

  “So this is the local watering hole, I gather?”

  “Nothing much to do here except have a drink once in a while,” the old man said. “Passes the time.”

  He looked to be in his sixties, heavyset with grizzled gray hair and the look of a lush about him. Joe took a swig of beer. Although the man didn’t seem to want to talk much, Joe drew him out and asked about the town.

  “Why did they name this place after a lake? No lake around here that I can see. Strange.”

  The old man inched his shoulders up and down.

  “Well,” Joe added, “if you live here you would know.”

  The man didn’t reply and kept his face buried in his drink. They sat in silence for a while and then the man croaked in his
gin-soaked voice, “It’s more than the name is strange.”

  “What do you mean? The town? The people? What?”

  “Look around. You’ll see.”

  The old man leaned toward Joe and started to speak further, but a sound came from a back room and the man sucked up the last of his drink, slumped off the stool and limped out the door, looking back at Joe one last time.

  Joe returned to his room, undressed, and got into bed. The sheets were clean and the mattress not too hard, but, tired as he was, he couldn’t seem to fall asleep. Though the ceilings were high, he felt claustrophobic and had a vague sense of repulsion. Nothing he could put his finger on, but something wasn’t quite right.

  Time passed. He looked at the bedside clock. 2:30 a.m. Did I sleep? Growing even more restless he arose and went to the window. What the old man said or half hinted at was disturbing him and he couldn’t quite figure out why.

  He lifted up a corner of the curtain and peered out. Dark, very dark, yet a gibbous moon imparted a wan light to the scene. In the distance he thought he saw movement, and he peered even more closely. It was movement, of a sort. The town’s villagers? The ones he saw by the door or out on the path, perhaps? But why the gathering? Surely not one of those religious cults?

  He hurriedly dressed, slipped out of the room quietly, and headed for the back exit. He hoped no alarm would sound as he pushed open the door. No—it was quiet. Good. He walked down a gravel path and headed for what he thought he’d seen from his room. There were a couple of shacks behind the hotel, and it was toward there that he guided his footsteps. He reached one of the buildings and pressed himself tightly against the wall and peered around the edge. He couldn’t believe his eyes. A body of water lay nearby and before it stood vague forms, swaying and moving their hands in prayer-like supplication. The townspeople? For what purpose?

  The water was black, and he thought he saw ripples upon its surface. But there was no wind. Odd. The movements increased rapidly and the waves in the water grew larger. Something was headed for the shore. Good Lord, what was happening? A strange chant rose from the tossing figures, weird sounds oddly like the word ruyeh. What did it all mean?

  Then, a woman—could it be the clerk?—threw something into the roiling waters, something that gleamed from the wan light of the moon.

  The thing in the water neared the shore and headed for the object.

  It was then that Joe dashed away from the shack and fled in blind terror to the hotel. He ran into his room, grabbed his suitcase and car keys, and rushed out the front door, never looking back. He tossed his things onto the front seat, turned the key in the ignition, and without one backward glance sped away from the horrid place.

  He drove like a soul possessed and didn’t stop until he could see the sky in the east turn a lighter shade of gray. Seeing a sign for a town up ahead, he pulled off the road and drove around until he found a state police barracks. He banged through the doors and went up to the desk.

  The sergeant looked up. “Hey mister, you look all shook up? What’s the matter?”

  “It’s that damn town up the road, you know, Ambrose.”

  “Ambrose? You mean that place about fifty miles north of here?”

  “Yeah, the town with the lake.”

  “Lake? There’s no lake anywhere near here. It’s the desert, ya know.”

  “That’s what I thought too. But I stayed at the Hotel del Lago last night and saw weird goings on”

  “Boy, I’m glad I didn’t stay there. Nothin’ there but old ramshackle buildings and mesquite and tumbleweeds and rattlesnakes. What in hell are you saying?”

  “But I did stay there. I did see people dancing by the lake. And some thing crawling out of it.”

  “Mister, what were you drinking?”

  “I wasn’t drinking!”

  “Then you’re nuts!”

  Joe and the sergeant kept on arguing back and forth until Joe finally admitted that maybe he had been seeing things. He figured that since the sergeant was so sure, maybe they’d put him in the lockup overnight if he kept on arguing.

  The day was well established when Joe said goodbye to the officer got into his car and headed north, back to Ambrose.

  In a short while he neared the town. He stopped the car and got out. Hotel del Lago was gone. All that remained were bricks and wood and sand. He walked back to where he remembered the shacks, but they no longer existed. Crumbled to debris.

  And the lake? Dry as a bone out there. Not even damp soil. Nothing.

  Nothing except for one thing. At what he had thought had been the shore, one footprint remained, and—something else.

  Something bright and shiny and golden. Inscribed on its surface were rune-like characters, with an image of some creature also etched upon it. The creature from the lake. It had been there, had been swimming in that black water, for not only the object lay on the stones, but the thing’s impression was there, too, fossil-like in the sand. It was long and bloated and rugose, and it had no place in this world.

  Waller

  Donald Tyson

  Donald Tyson is a Canadian writer who lives in an old farmhouse in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, with his wife, Jenny, an American bulldog named Ares, and a white Siamese cat named Hermes. Best known for his many nonfiction books on various aspects of the Western esoteric tradition, Tyson is the author of Alhazred (Llewellyn, 2006), a novel about the life of the writer of the Necronomicon, and more recently of The Ravener and Others (Avalonia, 2011), a collection of horror stories featuring the doings of Elizabethan mage Dr. John Dee and his friend, the alchemist and necromancer Edward Kelly.

  1

  Lou O’Brian cupped his hands around the wooden match and waited for it to flare through the head to the wood, then applied the flickering flame to the tip of his cigarette. He drew the smoke into his lungs and held it for a moment with his eyes closed, dropped the match, and leaned his shoulders against the brick wall of the hospital. Dr. Goldman’s words were still in his head, like the lyrics of a song he couldn’t forget.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. O’Brian, there’s no easy way to tell you this, but the test was positive. That means you have a cancerous tumor on your liver. There’s more bad news, I’m afraid. The cancer has spread throughout the rest of your body and is inoperable. It’s terminal.”

  The doctor’s brown eyes were filled with compassion when he said it. O’Brian just sat there, numb.

  “By terminal you mean I’m going to die.”

  “I’m afraid so, yes.”

  “How much time do I have?”

  The doctor gave an apologetic shrug.

  “If you want my best guess, I’d say about three months. The cancer is aggressive.”

  “There’s nothing you can do?”

  “I’m afraid not. Any therapy we might give you would be ineffective and would only make you feel much worse over the weeks you have left.”

  “Months,” O’Brian reminded him. “You said months.”

  “Of course, months. But you realize that toward the end, your quality of life will decline dramatically.”

  “How many good weeks do I have?” O’Brian asked, his throat dry.

  Goldman would not give him a number. He said that was a subjective judgment. However, O’Brian should waste no time in getting his financial affairs in order. Goldman folded his hands on the top of his desk.

  “There are treatments we can give you that will make you more comfortable, but they won’t change the outcome.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you want me to break the news to your wife?”

  O’Brian thought about it.

  “Thanks, no, I’ll tell her. Thank you.”

  Now here he was, a walking dead man. Thirty-seven years old, a chartered accountant, with a wife who liked to shop, an eleven-year-old daughter in need of new braces, a dog with a skin condition, and a house in the suburbs that wasn’t paid for. His life insurance policy should just about cover the medical bills, pay for the
funeral, and pay off the mortgage. Cindy would have to get a job. Maybe he could help her find something before he got too sick.

  He flicked the butt of his cigarette onto the asphalt of the hospital entrance and pushed away from the wall. The wind was cold, the sky a featureless silver-gray. The perfect day to be told he was going to die.

  Well, what of it? Everyone dies. Death was the great equalizer that made a president or a king no better than a homeless bum. The only difference between him and those other gray-faced wage slaves who hurried along the sidewalk was that he knew approximately when it was coming.

  A drop of rain cut an icy slash across his cheek. He turned up the collar of his topcoat and looked reflexively at his watch.

  I should go home and tell Cindy the bad news, he thought.

  Instead, he started to walk along the sidewalk, following three college girls who chattered and laughed as one of them tried to open her umbrella against the wind. They were dressed in bright colors, the only spot of brightness in the blurring grays and browns of the city. He was acutely aware of how drab and impersonal the office buildings looked as he passed them, and of the defensive hostility in the faces of most of the men and women walking in the opposite direction.

  He found himself in an unfamiliar bar, getting mildly drunk on Scotch. No one tried to talk to him. The other patrons seemed to sense that he had received bad news. A few people cast him sympathetic looks, but nobody spoke. He sat on the bar stool in his private bubble of bleak despair.

  A few sentences, and his entire life was ended. Just like that. He would join the swelling ranks of those who had died from cancer. There seemed to be more of them every year. It was almost as though cancer was trying to crowd out all the other forms of death and take their place. For a while he wondered who would get his job. Then he spent some time wondering who would get his wife.