Black Wings III - New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror Read online

  The mild drunk he had going made him sentimental. When at last he made his way back into the street, tears of self-pity welled up in his clear blue eyes. Full night had fallen. It was raining, but not hard. The rain drove most pedestrians off the sidewalks. The few who remained hurried past him, anxious to get into their cars and taxis, or into their doorways. He felt the same sense of being separate and apart from the human race that he had experienced in the bar.

  His mind void and gently spinning from the Scotch, he crossed the street and entered an alley. All he wanted was a moment or two of privacy so that he could gather his strength and stop his pointless tears.

  There is nothing in this dreary world more useless than tears, he thought. Yet we all cry.

  The empty alley looked surprisingly clean. At its end was a closed loading bay for the trucks that must back into it during business hours. On one brick wall some budding graffiti artist had used spray paint to draw what resembled a black tree, only the branches of the tree were tentacles that writhed out on all directions. Wrapped in the ends of some of the tentacles were little stick figures of human beings that appeared to be shrunken in on themselves and sucked dry of life. O’Brian realized that the tree was feeding on them. Creepy, he thought.

  He pressed closer to the opposite wall so that the overhang would protect him from the rain, and drew out his pack of cigarettes. Taking a wooden match from his pocket, he struck it on the bricks and lit the cigarette, then leaned back against the wall to enjoy it.

  He fell through the wall.

  2

  There was a kind of disconnect. For a few seconds he could not tell how much time had passed, or where he was. He rolled to a sitting position and realized he was sitting on a street. It had rained recently—the bricks of the street were still wet. They were set in a herringbone pattern and were larger than regular bricks and made of a kind of blue stone.

  He looked around in confusion. This wasn’t the alley. That had been paved with asphalt. This street was narrow and sloped, and bent to the side around some odd-looking cigar store. The street lights were dim and yellow. As he stared at one of them, it flickered.

  He reached up and felt the back of his head. To his relief, there was no bump and no blood.

  It must be the cancer, he thought. It’s already starting to fuck with my life.

  He pushed himself to his feet and stood swaying. The Scotch was still with him, so he could not have been out for long. He wandered over and touched the cast-iron lamppost. It was old-fashioned. The whole street looked old-fashioned, he realized, like something out of an old black-and-white movie. Holding the iron post for balance, he looked up at the lamp. It flickered as he watched. He could hear a faint hiss coming from it.

  Gas. It was a gas light.

  When had the city started using gas streetlights? And why was it so quiet? He realized that he must have wandered in an unconscious condition to some other part of the city—maybe down by the waterfront, where they were restoring some of the streets to the way they had looked a century ago, in the hope of drawing the tourist trade. Sure, that must be it. What other explanation could there be? The cancer had made him black out. He’s better get his ass home, Cindy would be looking for him.

  He started to walk down the hill, only because it was easier than walking uphill. The street was dirty. In fact, it was the dirtiest street he had ever seen. A kind of black soot clung to the walls and coated the bricks beneath his feet. Scattered here and there were small heaps of what looked like horseshit. In the gutters at the edges of the sidewalks torn pages from old newspapers and ragged bits of brown bags fluttered in the breeze.

  A stench arose from a pile of crumpled papers when he nudged it with the toe of his shoe, and he stepped back with his hand over his mouth and nose. A dead dog lay near a storm drain grate, its face and belly eaten by rats. The white skull of the little animal showed at the edges of its ragged fur. Maggots crawled over its intestines. From inside the grate he heard the angry squeaks of the vermin, annoyed that he had disturbed their meal.

  As he approached a corner, some of the tension left his shoulders. The street that crossed the one he was on was wider and busier. He heard the voices of pedestrians. From some open doorway, piano music floated on the night air. A horse and carriage was drawn up at the curb near the corner.

  He turned the corner and saw a group of young men and woman at the same moment they saw him. They stopped talking amongst themselves and paused to stare at him. He had only a moment to register that the two women were wearing long dresses that brushed the bricks of the sidewalk, and that the three men had on bowler hats and white spats covering the tops of their shoes.

  “It’s a Waller!” one of the men yelled.

  He looked excitedly around and took a step into the street, still pointing his finger.

  “Waller!” he shouted.

  One of the women squealed with excitement. The man beside her drew something from his pocket and opened it. The gas light above them glinted along its edge. O’Brian realized that it was a folding pocketknife.

  All five of them rushed toward him. From the other side of the street he heard a woman cry out.

  “Waller! It’s a Waller!”

  Some instinct for survival took over. O’Brian didn’t try to talk. He didn’t even think. He just turned and ran.

  Ahead of him, he saw several pedestrians moving to cut him off and darted down the nearest side street. In spite of his cancer he was in good physical condition. He had worked out at the company gym five days a week during his lunch hours. He was able to put some distance between himself and the growing mob that pursued him.

  He realized that he was close to the river. The buildings took on a more rundown look. Some of them even appeared abandoned, but the doors he tested were all locked shut. He turned a corner and ran along a boardwalk that edged a kind of foul-smelling boat canal with decaying buildings along either side.

  An old woman in a green knitted shawl stood on a doorstep hunched over a corn broom, which she used to sweep dust out the open door and onto the boardwalk. Like everything else since he had come back to his senses, she seemed wrong in almost indefinable ways. Her long dress looked at least a century out of fashion and her gray hair was piled up in a tight bun on the top of her head.

  She stared at him over her broom as he stood looking at her, and her wrinkled eyes widened. The one on the left was milky-white. She extended her hand and beckoned him to her with urgent little waves of her fingers.

  “Quickly, my son, we’ve got to get you out of sight.”

  Her voice had an accent to it that O’Brian had never heard in his life. It sounded a bit like Scottish or Irish, but was neither one of them.

  From behind on the street he had just left, the shrill cries of the mob drew closer. He hesitated for no more than a moment, then hurried forward. She put her gnarled hand on his shoulder and pushed him through her doorway, then shut the door behind them and turned an iron latch to lock it. The old woman guided him around the corner of an archway into a narrow hall.

  “Wait here. If they try to come in, you slip yourself out the rear door, and then later on you can come back to me.”

  O’Brian nodded and withdrew himself further into the shadow of the unlit hall. The front room held a single oil lamp burning on a table. She went to it and turned down the wick, but did not put it out.

  Within seconds the feet of the mob thundered past on the boardwalk. O’Brian made out exclamations of frustration and several curses before they went out of hearing. The old woman sat in a tapestry-covered armchair beside an iron woodstove, which was not burning at present, and took up knitting from a basket. She did not even turn her head to look toward him.

  Five or six minutes passed. Then there came the sound of heavy footsteps outside the door. A fist pounded on the doorframe.

  “Old woman! Are you in there?”

  O’Brian glanced toward the far end of the hall, but it lay in total darkness. Now was not
the time to be feeling his way down a strange hall.

  “What do you trouble me for?” the woman said in a querulous tone. “Go away.”

  “We’re running down a Waller,” the voice said.

  “What’s that to me?” she demanded from her chair.

  “Did you see a man run past your door about five minutes ago, or didn’t you?”

  “I did not,” she said emphatically. “Now piss off.”

  “You crazy old witch,” the voice said.

  O’Brian heard him stomp away in anger from the doorstep and along the boardwalk.

  The old woman let another ten minutes go by, then set down her knitting in the basket and, with a grimace of effort, pressed herself to her feet using the arms of the chair. Glancing suspiciously at her front window, she went through the archway to the hall, where she could not be seen by anyone who might happen to peer through the crack in the curtains.

  “We’ll let them have time to give up the chase, and then I will fix you something hot to eat,” she told him.

  “Whoever you are, thank you.”

  “My name’s Maggie Spry,” she said. “Everyone calls me Maggie.”

  O’Brian told her his name.

  “Why are those people chasing me? Are they all crazy?”

  She studied at him keenly from her good eye, which was light gray in color. He tried not to stare at the milky cataract covering the other one.

  “Did you attend to what they called you?”

  At first O’Brian didn’t understand what she was talking about.

  “You mean that word they used? Waller?”

  “It means nothing?”

  He shook his head slowly. She put her hand on his shoulder.

  “Come to the kitchen. I see that I have much to tell you.”

  3

  I will tell you what the priests say to us on Monday morning.”

  O’Brian looked up from his bowl of split-pea soup.

  “Monday? Don’t you mean Sunday?”

  Maggie chuckled.

  “The things in our world are not like the things in your world.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Then listen,” she said, patting the air with her hand to silence him.

  He took another spoonful of the hot soup. By this time the Scotch had left his system, and he felt chilled and exhausted.

  “The priests say there are two worlds, side by side, like this.” She clenched her fists and held her forearms up so that they touched along their edges, then parted her arms and looked through them at him solemnly. “One of them is the real world that has always been, and the other is a world that was made by the gods. You came from the other world, the world that isn’t real.”

  He blinked at her, wondering if she might be insane.

  “My world seemed real enough.”

  She nodded.

  “The gods made it that way, to deceive all of you who dwell there. You think it is real, and you know nothing of this world, the real world.”

  If he contradicted the old woman, she might become angry. He decided to humor her.

  “Why did the gods make my world?”

  “For the bean that grows on your liver,” she said.

  A chill tingled up O’Brian spine and settled at the base of his neck.

  “Excuse me?”

  “They say the gods made your world to be the plantation for their life seed. It won’t grow here, so they made a special place where it would grow.”

  “Life seed,” he repeated numbly.

  “That’s what they call the little thing growing out of your liver.” She peered at him keenly through her good eye. “You know about it, don’t you?”

  He thought of his tumor and nodded.

  She opened a drawer in the kitchen table and took out a clay pipe with a long stem. He watched her fill it with tobacco and light it by inverting it over the glass oil lamp. When she had puffed a series of blue balls of smoke across the table, she continued.

  “The gods sow the life seeds throughout your world, but even though they take root in many of your kind, they only grows true in a precious few of you.”

  “This life seed? Do you mean cancer?”

  “I don’t know that word.”

  “You don’t know what the word cancer means?”

  She shook her head, puffing on the stem of the pipe.

  “There is no cancer in this world?” he asked again in incomprehension.

  She shrugged her shoulders beneath her knitted shawl.

  “What happens, then, when the seed grows true?” he prompted her. It was some kind of warped fairy tale, but she appeared serious.

  “When the seed ripens, you fall into our world, and we catch you and cut the life seed off your liver, and sell it to the priests.”

  “You cut it off,” he repeated, unable to believe what he was hearing. Then he remembered the knife in the hand of one of the men chasing him.

  “You are a Waller, and what you have inside your body is the most precious thing in this world. A single seed is enough to keep an entire family in luxury for the rest of their days.”

  “Why do you call me a Waller?”

  Her laughter was disturbingly close to a cackle.

  “You fall through the wall between our two worlds.”

  “I’m called a Waller, because I fall through the wall?”

  She nodded, puffing contentedly on her pipe.

  “It’s the only way the life seeds can get from your false world to our true world. The priests cannot go into your world to harvest them. Not even the gods can enter the Plantation.”

  “Plantation?”

  “That’s what the priests sometimes call the false world. Because it grows the life seeds.”

  O’Brian realized his soup had gone cold, and he set down his spoon in the bowl. He shook his head, trying to comprehend what the old woman had told him. It was the ravings of a maniac.

  “How could this go on, yet no one in my world know anything about it?”

  She smiled around the stem of the pipe.

  “Are you so sure nobody in your world knows?”

  He remembered the strange image of the black tree on the alley wall, and of the shrivelled bodies that lay in the coils of its tentacles. Why was he thinking of it? With a twinge of anger, he pushed it our of his mind.

  “If people were just falling through the wall between worlds, it would get noticed.”

  “Don’t people ever disappear in your world?”

  O’Brian stared at her, thinking of all the milk cartons with all the tiny faces.

  “These Wallers—are they ever children?”

  She nodded.

  “Wallers come in any age, though now that you mention it, when I was a girl, not too many were children, but it seems that more children fall through every year.”

  The enormity of her words crept upon him like a lengthening shadow.

  “You mean the people who vanish from my world without a trace, and are never heard from again, are all Wallers?”

  She shrugged.

  “I don’t know about all of them, but some of them, maybe most of them. They fall through, just as you did, and we harvest their life seeds.”

  He swallowed, his throat dry. The old woman grunted and got up from the table. Going to the sink, she worked a hand pump and caught the spurt of water that came from it in a tin cup, then brought the cup back to the table and sat down once again.

  “Drink. It’s good water, drink it.”

  He gulped half the water from the cup.

  “What do the gods do with the seeds?”

  “Nobody knows. The priests pretend that they know, but they are all liars. The priests pay in gold for freshly harvested seeds—the fresher they are, the better they pay.”

  And now for the big question, he thought.

  “Why are you helping me?”

  She pursed out her lower lip with a stubborn expression.

  “Why should I kill for the priests? I
don’t need money. What good does money do an old woman? Anyway, I had a son once. You look like him around the eyes.”

  O’Brian wondered if he should leave this talkative madwoman and risk his luck on the streets. It must be after midnight, and most of the mob would have gone home. She seemed to read his thoughts.

  “You wouldn’t get two blocks. It’s your strange clothes that give you away. Anyone who sees you will know you for a Waller.”

  “Then I need new clothes.”

  She got stiffly to her feet.

  “First things first. You need sleep. You can use my son’s bed. Tomorrow morning I’ll find you some of my son’s old clothes. They should fit you. I’ve even got a pair of his best Monday shoes.”

  O’Brian stood. His legs trembled with fatigue. He had not realized until then how exhausted he was. If he didn’t sleep, he would fall over where he stood.

  “How can I thank you?”

  “No need, no need.”

  He followed her up the stairs. In the first bedroom there was a neatly made poster bed and a double bureau, both of pine, along with a tall wardrobe of walnut.

  “I’ll leave the lamp with you,” Maggie said, setting the oil lamp on the bureau. “I don’t need it. I know this house blindfolded.”

  She closed the door behind her when she left. He went quickly to it and was relieved to find that it had no lock. He did not want to be locked in, no matter how charitable the old woman might be.

  4

  The darkness was almost absolute. A faint sky glow found its way between the lace-edged curtains, which he had neglected to draw shut before going to bed. He lay staring at the unseen ceiling, his body strangely tense. He realized he was holding his breath and let it out with a long sigh.

  Was there something beside the bed? He squinted through the darkness, but the shadow, if it was really there, refused to resolve itself. He remembered the strange words of the old woman and shook his head on the pillow with a rueful smile. Whatever had happened to him, he was not in another world. That was impossible. The cancer must be affecting his mind. When it got light he would get out of this place without waking the old woman and find his way back to the hospital. Maybe Dr. Goldman could give him something to prevent him from passing out and seeing things.