Black Wings III - New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror Read online

  “The gods made the other world for our use, child. It has no other purpose but to grow the life seeds that we harvest for the gods. It is the Plantation, they are the masters, and we are the reapers.”

  He turned on his seat and pointed at the round stained-glass window.

  “Are those the gods?”

  “Those are but the earthly trinity of the gods. No man or woman has seen the gods, who maintain their places in the divine world as we maintain our places in the real world.”

  “So it is only the Wallers who cross from one world to another.”

  “That is correct,” she said, nodding. “The gods do not pass through the walls. They have no need.”

  “Do the gods themselves plant the cancers in the people of the other world?”

  “Cancers?” she repeated. “What are cancers?”

  “The seeds that grow on the livers of the Wallers.”

  “Ah, the life seeds. The gods make the false world and the people who dwell there in such a way that the seeds grow inside them. Most of them grow wrong, or too slowly, or in the wrong part of the body, but when the seeds grow right, those who bear them become Wallers and come to us for the harvest.”

  “What of all the other seeds?”

  The woman shrugged her rounded shoulders.

  “They return to the dust along with the hosts who bear them.”

  “You mean they kill the hosts,” O’Brian corrected, his voice tight.

  She looked at his face for several moments with a strange expression.

  “You speech is odd. Are you from some other province?”

  He realized that he had forgotten to maintain his accent. Careless, he told himself, don’t get careless.

  “I’m from a province far to the south,” he said quickly. “Tell me, Mother, has it ever happened that the Wallers who fall into this world fall back out of it?”

  She drew away from him on the wooden seat of the pew.

  “That is quite impossible,” she said more sharply. “Your questions are very curious. Every child of nine knows these things.”

  “Humor me, please. Pretend I know nothing of these matters. Tell me this: Has a Waller ever fallen into this world and avoided detection?”

  She wrinkled her small nose in distaste.

  “Such things happen, but not for very long. Sooner or later, the hounds smell them out.”

  He wanted to ask what the hounds were but realized it would be something he would be expected to know. It was dangerous enough, asking questions on points of theology. He wondered why she was humoring him. Maybe she thought he was mentally impaired.

  “Wouldn’t the cancers—I mean the life seeds—kill the Wallers if they stayed hidden in our world?”

  “The seeds of life cease to grow when Wallers fall out of the Plantation. They begin to wither and shrink. That is why they must be harvested while they are fresh.”

  That was worth knowing, O’Brian thought. Maybe if he could avoid detection in this world, he wouldn’t die of cancer after all. These people didn’t even know what the word cancer meant. Maybe none of them had cancer, because it would not grow here.

  There was a rattle from the back of the church. O’Brian turned in his seat. The middle set of doors opened to admit a tall young man dressed in white robes similar to those of Mother Theodora, and a shorter man who was older wearing a tall black hat, a leather vest over a checked flannel shirt and leather trousers. But it was the thing on the end of the leash in the older man’s hand that fixed O’Brian’s attention.

  It came sniffing up the aisle, its wedge-shaped head questing from side to side as it sampled the scents of the wine-colored carpet. Its body was all black, the deepest black O’Brian had ever seen with no highlights, and its limbs and torso were incredibly thin. In profile it resembled an emaciated greyhound. Around the head of the beast was a black ruff, somewhat like a lion’s mane, except that the hairs were thick and moved independently of each other.

  O’Brian realized that this creature must be one of the hounds the Mother had mentioned. It was following a scent trail. His trail.

  “There he is,” the short man muttered in a low voice, pointing at O’Brian.

  The hound lifted its head and opened its long snout to reveal an array of triangular white teeth. It howled with an unearthly sound, like the hopeless cry of a damned soul.

  Mother Theodora stood and moved away from him.

  “Waller,” she hissed in accusation.

  From a pocket of her robe appeared a folding knife with a white pearl handle. She flicked its long blade open expertly with one hand.

  O’Brian leapt to his feet and stared around. He realized he was boxed in. The hound and the two men blocked the main entrance, and the priestess barred the side door. He thought about pushing past her, but the familiar way she held her knife cautioned him against it.

  The man in the leather vest released the hound from its leash. It made a bound toward O’Brian. Without thinking, he scrambled up onto the top of the triangular altar.

  “Sacrilege!” the priestess cried.

  They all paused, even the black hound. He realized that none of them would break the taboo of touching the altar. They could not reach him with their knives. They spaced themselves on the three sides of the altar and glared at him with fanatical purpose, each with an open knife in hand. The hound sat by its master and howled damnation.

  “I saw him first. The offering is mine,” Mother Theodora said in a possessive tone.

  “But I identified him first,” the short man in the black hat said.

  “We will share in the blessing,” the priest told them both.

  “Just let me go, that’s all I’m asking,” O’Brian said.

  They ignored his words.

  He felt a kind of pulling sensation in his right side that gradually became more insistent. It began to hurt. He grunted and pressed his hand over the place. Why was the air around him becoming brighter? It sparkled above his head like dust motes caught in a beam of sunlight.

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  The hound howled once, and he found himself alone in darkness.

  7

  The place was vast, to judge by the distant echoes that re-turned faintly when he spoke.

  “Where am I?”

  He straightened up. The pain in his side was gone. He felt his body gingerly and was relieved to discover no gaping wound. Whatever was growing from his liver must still be there. He turned a full circle and found only uniform darkness on all sides. It felt as though he stood in some gigantic cavern beneath the earth, but that was due only to the sense of vaulted space above him and the total silence.

  When he tilted back his head to look directly upward, his heart froze for an instant, then thudded painfully.

  The thing was enormous. Its central mass was larger than the body of a blue whale, and from it radiated innumerable slender tentacles that floated on the darkness like the stingers of a jellyfish in water. Tiny flecks of light covered its entire complex, convoluted surface. This was the only reason he could see the thing, since its body was as black as the darkness that surrounded it like a womb.

  “Where am I?” he repeated, louder this time.

  The fine black tendrils of the monster darted down and surrounded him. He screamed and fought against them as they wrapped themselves around his arms and legs, holding him helpless and immobile. Realizing that it was futile to struggle, he finally relaxed.

  An image formed in his mind. He saw a kind of complex diagram of three spheres, one above the other. They were joined by a central conduit that reminded O’Brian of an umbilical cord. This channel ran through the centers of all three spheres. In some wordless way he understood that he was presently in the highest of the spheres.

  “This is the divine world,” he said.

  He felt a wave of affirmation.

  “Are you one of the three gods?”

  Amusement rippled through his body. It was mingled with the bitterne
ss of contempt.

  “Why do you poison my world with cancer?” he demanded.

  Fear had left him. His very helplessness in the grasp of the monster gave him a kind of fatalistic courage.

  The thought-sensation that came in response was too complex for him to absorb. He caught a hint of mingled yearning and hunger, and with them a sense of ownership. The overall impression was that the god, if god it was, needed his world and would do whatever it wished with its inhabitants.

  “Why don’t you kill me.” It was more a request than a question.

  Amusement tickled through his body, mingled with a sense of delight and attainment. This thing on the ceiling had been waiting for him, or for one like him, for a very, very long time. He felt the tingle of demand. It was ordering him to obey.

  “You’re a god, I’m just a man. What can I do that you can’t?”

  In his mind he saw an image of himself falling backward through a wall. This was repeated over and over, but each time the wall was different, sometimes brick, sometimes plaster, sometimes wood. At last he shook his head.

  “Stop! I get it. You can’t pass through the wall between worlds, but I can.”

  The black tentacles caressed his skin. He shivered with revulsion. It was like being touched everywhere by slender writhing eels. An image came into his mind. It showed him swallowing a black pill, and then falling backwards through the wall. He recognized the streets of the city in which he lived and worked. In the next scene he saw himself lying in a hospital bed, his body eaten up by cancer. Then he saw a scene of a closed coffin being lowered into an open grave. Beside the grave, dressed in black and weeping into a handkerchief, stood his wife, Cindy. At her side stood their daughter, Anne, a bewildered expression on her young face.

  A single sparkling tentacle descended slowly from the undulating mass of black flesh on the ceiling of the cavern. Its end wavered through the air before his face, and he realized that it held something wrapped in its slender tip—a black bean about the size and shape of a small unshelled peanut.

  The image filled his mind of him taking the bean between his fingers and swallowing it. Then he saw himself released from the tentacles, and saw himself falling backward through the darkness to his own world.

  “If I do this, what will happen?”

  He waited. No image came into his mind.

  “I won’t do it until I know what will happen. Why do you want this?”

  Suddenly his body was wracked with excruciating agony. He would have collapsed into a fetal position had not the web of tentacles held him up. The agony stopped as quickly as it had begun. He shuddered and gasped for breath, his body bathed in a sweat of pain.

  “Now we both know you can hurt me,” he said through gritted teeth. “Tell me why you want me to swallow this black seed.”

  He felt a sense of reluctance, and then saw an image of a black shoot growing out of the center of his chest. He somehow knew he was dead and beneath the ground. The shoot pushed itself above the surface and quickly grew into a black tree with writhing tentacles in place of branches. O’Brian recognized it as the tree he had seen drawn on the wall of the alley, when he had fallen through from his own world. It seemed so long ago, but had only been yesterday.

  “You can’t make me do this, can you? You can only hurt me.”

  A sense of untold ages of agonies rolled through his flesh. The god was telling him that it could make him suffer for a million years, for eternity if needed.

  “But you can’t force me,” he repeated, knowing somehow that he was correct. It might be able to make him swallow the seed, but it could not send him through the wall between worlds. Otherwise, it would not have needed him to carry the seed.

  Another wave of agony racked his body, stronger than the first. It felt as though every nerve were being scraped by the edge of a knife blade. He endured it without screaming, but it left him weeping silent tears of relief when it finally ended.

  “The black tree is a death sentence for my world, isn’t it?”

  He received a complex sense of renewal and saw a moving image of a farmer tilling his field with a plough, the rich black soil turning over on the shining steel blade.

  “You are replanting,” he said as he suddenly understood. “Your crop of life seed is almost played out so you’re going to grow another crop.”

  Affirmation.

  “I won’t—”

  The pain was a hundred, no, a thousand times more intense than before. It became his world. He forgot who he was, where he was. He lost all sense of the passage of time. How long he hung in a mindless, screaming state he had no way to estimate, but at last he became aware that the pain had stopped.

  The sense passed through his body that what he had felt thus far was only the smallest part of the torments he would endure unless he obeyed.

  “Very well, I agree,” he shrilled, his throat raw from scream-ing.

  No tricks, the thing on the ceiling conveyed to him with a sense of playful warning. The merest tickle of pain passed through him and made him shriek in terror.

  “No tricks,” he said.

  His body was released from the enfolding black tentacles, which withdrew upward like hairs, all but the one that held the black seed. He took it into his hand. It felt unnaturally cold and heavy. Without hesitating, he placed it in his mouth and swallowed. It took a while to work its way down his esophagus, since he had no water to ease its way. At last he felt it reach his stomach.

  “That’s done,” he said tonelessly. “Now how do I fall back into my own world?”

  The tentacle that had held the black seed touched and caressed him on the forehead almost with tenderness. He had a sense of knowing what to do. It was absurdly simple. He had been trying too hard before, in the alley. It was just a matter of relaxing the mind and letting it slip backwards.

  At the last possible instant, he filled his thoughts with an image of the interior of the church and its triangular altar.

  Just before he fell through the wall, he caught an explosion of fury from the black god on the ceiling, and he smiled.

  8

  The inside of the church was dark. Night had fallen.

  Whether it was the same night he had vanished into the divine world, or some later night, he had no way of guessing. It had seemed like an eternity in the black place, but perhaps it has been no more than a few hours.

  As he had hoped, the church was deserted. He had returned to the altar because it was the one place in the real world where he was certain he could pass through the wall. He would have visualized some other, less conspicuous part of the city to fall into, but he was not sure the trick worked that way and had not dared risk the chance of failure.

  He climbed off the altar and made his way to the side door of the church, which he found unlocked. The priesthood was uncommonly trusting, he thought. Perhaps there was no one in this accursed place who would dare to rob them.

  The door opened on a walled burial ground. From the star-shot sky clear moonlight bathed the headstones. The moon hung high above the trees, a little more than half full. Wandering across the grass between the stones, he found a grave newly dug and waiting for its occupant. Here, he dropped to his knees.

  His stomach felt strangely full. It rolled and undulated with unease. Without hesitation, O’Brian leaned forward and forced himself to vomit. It was not difficult. The thought of that black seed within him revolted him on a primal level of his being. Something caught in his gaping throat and gagged him, then slid forth and landed in the bottom of the hole. He blinked and peered down. It was black and soft, about the size of a large slug, which it resembled. Its slowly undulating sides glistened in the moonlight. He wondered in horror how it had managed to grow so greatly in size during the few short minutes it lay within his stomach.

  Grimacing with determination, he crawled to the side of the grave where the soft earth was heaped and began to push it into the hole with his hands until the black thing was covered with grave soi
l. With a final gasp, he sat back on his heels. He thought of the frustration of the writhing god on the ceiling of the vault in the divine world, and smiled to himself. Whatever happened to him, the black tree would never grow in the world occupied by his wife and daughter.

  After resting for the space of a quarter hour, he pushed himself up and left the burying ground by a gate in the wall. In spite of the late hour, the streets were not deserted. He heard voices in the distance shouting back and forth, and every so often the despairing howl of one of the black hounds. Mother Theodora had raised the alarm. Men were still searching for him. If one of those accursed hounds crossed his trail, it would run him down quickly. The black thing in his stomach had left him drained of energy, too weak to walk far.

  He decided to try to make his way back to the canal and the house of the old woman. If her corpse had not been discovered during the day, he could sleep there in safety until morning. There was food and water, and a change of clothing. Besides which, I need a cigarette, he thought. His pack of cigarettes, still more than half full, was sitting in the inner vest pocket of his suit jacket. He could see it when he closed his eyes, could smell the tobacco and feel the texture of the filter end on the tip of his tongue.

  One of the mobs caught him on a back street before he had gone half the distance to the old woman’s house. They had a hound and it picked up his trail and led them unerringly to where he fled, a small and dirty little courtyard with only one way in or out. All the doors that opened on the courtyard were locked for the night. O’Brian found himself trapped. When they came pouring through the gateway with their wicked little knives drawn and open, he faced them and merely spread wide his arms.

  “Here I am, you crazy murdering bastards,” he said. “Do your worst.”

  The leader of the mob, a big man with a bald crown, who was the first hatless man O’Brian had seen apart from the priest, turned and held back the others until he was able to restore some sanity to their blood-crazed eyes. The black creature they called a hound continued to howl and bay at him by turns until the man who held its leash cuffed it to silence with his hand. Much to O’Brian’s surprise, they put away their knives and took firm hold of his arms on either side.