Black Wings III - New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror Read online

  “Aren’t you going to cut me open?”

  “I only wish I had the pleasure,” the bald man said. “Mother Theodora has commanded that you be brought back to the church unharmed.”

  “What do the priests want with me?”

  No one bothered to respond. They dragged him along the brick streets, muttering with dissatisfaction among themselves. They were not accustomed to running down a Waller without taking his life seed, and it vexed all of them.

  As they neared the church, the ground began to shake and a low rumble filled the night air.

  “Earthquake,” one of the men said.

  “No, look!” another cried out.

  Beneath the bright light of the moon, a black stalk rose behind the church and curled around its bell tower. Its trunk was as thick as a subway car and grew thicker even as they watched. Branching shoots extended outward from the main stem, writhing like black serpents, and curved down to touch the street, where they burrowed into the paving stones, breaking them up with ease and penetrating deep into the ground beneath. Within seconds new shoots arose from the places these branching tentacles entered the earth.

  The speed with which the black tree propagated itself was both astonishing and terrifying. It froze the mob into place. They could not move, even when two of the questing black tendrils of the tree caught up a man and the hound and lifted them high into the night air. The hound wailed piteously a single time. O’Brian heard its spine break as the tendril tightened its grip. The man was not so fortunate. His screams continued for the space of half a minute while his vitality was sucked from his body, leaving a shrivelled and blackened corpse.

  O’Brian recovered his wits before the others. He twisted free from the grasp of those who held his arms and ran away from the church even as the questing tendrils sank themselves into the ground beneath the street all around him.

  The leader of the mob noticed him flee and screamed an order to the rest to go after him. Three of them obeyed and ran at his heels after O’Brian. The others scattered in different directions, trying to avoid the questing black tendrils that sought to wrap around them. All this, while the ground never ceased to quake and rumble.

  What have I planted in this world? O’Brian wondered as he ran.

  He felt satisfaction, not regret. Contact with the moist black soil of the open grave must have activated it. The tree would continue to grow whatever happened to him. If ever a world deserved to be destroyed, it was this one. Maybe the world that replaced it would be remade into something less pitiless and grim. In any event, his own world was safe, at least for now.

  A thought almost stopped him in his tracks. He stumbled and kept running. What would happen to the other Wallers who fell through into this world? They would be caught up by the black tree and killed the instant they came here. He had to get back to his world to warn them. The entire human race had to be told what was going on when people suddenly disappeared without leaving a trace. Parents had to know what happened to children whose faces ended up on cartons of milk. Maybe the liver cancers could be treated if they were caught in time. Even if nobody believed his story, he had to tell them, to try to warn them.

  But how can I get back home? he wondered. I was only able to fall from the divine world to this world with the guidance of the god. I tried before and couldn’t do it alone.

  He stumbled, dropped to his hands and knees, and spat out the bloody taste that welled in his throat. This was more running than he had done in twenty years. He wasn’t in condition for it in spite of his workouts at the gym. Staggering up again, he looked behind and saw that his pursuers had dwindled to only the bald leader of the mob. His companions had all deserted him. The bald man jogged grimly toward him, puffing like a bellows with the effort. Behind him, a nightmare of black and writhing stems that looked like the tentacles of giant squids rose high above the roofs of the buildings and seemed to cover half the city skyline.

  O’Brian faced his pursuer. The bald man stopped a dozen feet away and stood gasping for air. He face dripped with sweat and his clothes were soaked with it. I probably don’t look any better to him, O’Brian thought.

  “I’m not going back with you.”

  “You will do what the church tells you to do,” the bald man barked.

  O’Brian pointed over his shoulder.

  “What church?”

  The other man stared at him with a strange expression, then turned slowly. He stood frozen to the spot, looking at the nightmare scene while the earth continued to shake and heave beneath their feet. The shaking was strong enough to make bricks and cornice stones fall from nearby buildings. One of the cast-iron light poles tipped over and clanged to its side on the street.

  O’Brian left the bald man and continued to walk in the other direction until he came to an alley. He entered its mouth and stopped midway along its length. Concentrating to shut out the rumble of the ground and the distant screams, he closed his eyes and leaned his shoulders back against the brick wall.

  If I can only remember what the god showed me, he thought. It was the opposite of force. It was a kind of mental ju-jitsu, a misdirection whereby the power was turned inward against itself.

  Something slammed hard against the street at the mouth of the alley. He opened his eyes and saw that a huge black shoot had sprouted up through the bricks and was sending out numerous questing side tendrils in search of nourishment. Two of them felt their way blindly into the mouth of the alley. He closed his eyes again and thought of his wife and daughter, holding their images in his mind. A sense of peace rolled over him like a soothing wave.

  His belly twisted in on itself and he fell backward.

  The Megalith Plague

  Don Webb

  Don Webb is well known in Lovecraftian circles, but he is also known for his mystery series and his collections of avant-garde prose. A native Texan, he lives in Austin, Texas, where he teaches high school English. Webb’s first professional sale was to Interzone in 1986. He lives with his wife and two beautiful tuxedo cats.

  There had been a little controversy when my great-grandfather died shortly after the Civil War. He had asked that two large stones be set at his feet and his head in the “manner of the Druids.” Because of his medical service to the community of Flapjack, Texas, and (ironically) his preeminence in the local Masonic Lodge, this heathen custom had been observed. Last night they drug them off for another model Stonehenge.

  According to the Flapjack Recipe there are now four hundred and fifty-seven models of Stonehenge in this county.

  For me it began with the cockroaches.

  Flapjack, Texas, is on the road between Austin and Dallas. Stagecoaches used to stop here for food and water for man and beast. Hence its high-carb name. With the coming of Mr. Ford’s affordable device, Flapjack and its sister communities of Comesee and Doublesign were doomed not to grow very large. If you live in central Texas you have driven through these towns hundreds of times, probably never even noticing them as separate entries in the blur outside your window. By the time I practiced medicine in Flapjack, there wasn’t even a place to buy—well, you know.

  But there were cockroaches. Not your little-bitty German cockroaches, not your more urban African cockroaches. There were huge cockroaches. Locals call them “palmetto bugs.” Periplaneta americana. These suckers were three inches long.

  They could fly. Sometimes you had to step on them twice to kill them. They weren’t scared of light, so they didn’t even have the good taste to scurry away when you pulled the string dangling from your kitchen light at two in the morning, after delivering a baby at some godforsaken farm. Sometimes they would fly right on you and make you wish that you weren’t such a lousy doctor that you had to practice in a region where nobody thought about suing their doctors for incompetence.

  I didn’t practice here because great-granddad did. I practiced here because they would have me. I was staring thirty-five in the face, knew I had to leave Las Vegas before lawsuits caught up with me
.

  I bought the two-bedroom stucco house with the thousand coats of white paint and fifty thousand cockroaches. No one would know that I graduated last in my class. They would know me as a descendant of a healer. They were glad I didn’t have an accent.

  At night they ran over me. Not the Flapjackers, the cockroaches. The palmetto bugs. They loved my ears and nose, no doubt thinking of them as sexual organs of an even bigger member of their species. My return to the ancestral homeland had not prepared me for the notion of an insect copulating with my nostril, so I went to the Home Depot in Doublesign and purchased four times the recommended amount of insect fogger. In the checkout line I met Richard Scott.

  A short man, I would guess five foot two, his gray beetle brows and the lines of grime across his forehead were not inviting. His bloodshot slate blue eyes were a little too wet. He smelled of welding, but he was buying thirty or so precut 2x4s. He glared at me, clearly angry. Was he a friend of the roaches?

  “So you are the new Doc,” he said.

  “I took over Dr. Hawthorne’s practice. My great-grandfather,” I began.

  “Is dead,” he finished. “I need some meds. I have to renew.”

  “What do you need?”

  He rattled off a list of anti-psychotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers, anti-depressants, typical and atypical neurolyptics—and frankly some stuff I had never heard of.

  “I’ll need you to come by my office. Perhaps tomorrow morning,” I said.

  “Good; then you can see I’m crazy, and you’ll leave me the fuck alone. I am, you know. Crazy. Bugfuck crazy. Ask anyone about Scott.”

  I saw no reason to doubt his statement.

  I intended to set off my foggers the next morning and drive the mile or so to my office. I would look over Dr. Hawthorne’s records and check on Mr. Scott’s bugfuck status. However, the invitation to ask anyone was a strong one. I had not made friends with anyone in Flapjack, and perhaps giving them a chance to tell me about their village idiot would endear me to their bosom. I dined that night at the Cobra, which offered a free meal after you had dined there eleven times. Such bounty, I thought, was to be patronized. So while enjoying my chicken fried steak I asked the waitress if she knew a Mr. Scott.

  “Why, he’s just crazy, hon. But I, well, don’t you…I’m sure he’ll give you a lot of business.”

  It seemed that Mr. Scott had committed three sorts of offenses. The first is that he was the unmarried son of a very wealthy family, which was a severe offense. The waitress looked at me strangely while giving me that news. I wondered if she thought I was gay. His second crime was sculpting. He produced an ugly sort of high modernist sculptures out of I-beams and T-beams, the sort of sculptures that banks display to prove that they are cultured. These two social crimes, however, did not condemn Mr. Richard Scott. They merely made him odd. He also beat people with wrenches and burnt them with acetylene torches. His violence broke out every few years. His trust fund covered it pretty well, and heck, most people knew enough to get away from him, and when things got bad old Doc Hawthorne would add a new anti-convulsant or a new anti-psychotic. Scott would calm down for a spell.

  I heard all this over sweet coconut meringue pie and bitter black coffee.

  The stars at night were big and bright, as I drove home and the moon a full cantaloupe. The moon even put to rest my cynicism, which shows how powerful the central Texas moon can be.

  The next day I pushed down the little green plastic notch on the bug foggers and muttered my vengeance as I set them out. I was putting down the last fogger in my living room when I tripped. I went down, the fogger went up and in a freak moment passed before my open eyes, giving them one hell of a blast of bug spray. I thunked my head good on the floor and passed out with the fogger blowing into my bloodied nose. As their hissing filled my ears everything seemed to light up orange and the floor seemed to turn to slime; if you ever huffed ether in college or glue in middle school you’d know the feeling. I wondered if the cockroaches felt this way as they died. Maybe some cockroach made it once, survived, and went back to the roach club to talk about heaven.

  When I came to, I was restrained. I couldn’t open my eyes because of the bandages, and I could not lift my hands because they were tied to the bed, so that I wouldn’t tear off my bandages, but I did not understand my situation. So I jerked strongly against the bed and gave a muffled cry, which my insecticide-soaked nose, mouth, and throat meant as a scream of terror.

  Scott answered me. “Don’t I know it, Doc. You know I’ve been in that very bed. It’ll pass, just tell yourself it will pass.”

  “Where am I?”

  “You are in the Doublesign Minor Emergency Clinic, although I am sure you feel that you had yourself a major emergency. Currently you are tied to the bed, which in my vast experience means they feel you will do harm to yourself or others. Will you do harm to yourself or others, Doc?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Doc, you tried to get high on bug juice. I saved you before you flung your consciousness out into the void. I decided that would be a waste, and I might not get my scripts refilled.”

  “Scott, I wasn’t trying to get high. Now get me a doctor.”

  “I don’t take orders, now if you would like to make a request.”

  Before I said anything I listened. I was hoping to hear some sound that told me I was in the tiny six-bed hospital in Doublesign. I wanted to hear an IV machine beep or a soda drop out of the soda machine, or Dr. Fresno making his rounds. I didn’t hear anything, and I realized that I could be anywhere. I couldn’t smell anything; my nose was just a mass of burning pain. In fact, I could almost hear its throbs. The pain must have been what woke me. Why didn’t they have me on a morphine drip?

  Then the blackness behind my eyes got darker, and I was gone for a while.

  When I came to again I called out for a nurse, and one answered. Her guitar-twangy voice soothed my soul; I was indeed in a hospital. Dr. Fresno came in soon after. I found out that I would be here for another two to three weeks. He would take my patients in the meantime. They told me that Scott had rescued me. Impatiently waiting to be my patient, he had walked over to my home after an hour. He kicked open my front door, and he called the ambulance from Doublesign. He claimed to be a distant cousin.

  This proved true. My great-granddad’s second daughter had married into the Scott line. Scott pointed this out to me the next time he visited me.

  “Didja ever wonder, Doc, why you’ve got no friends here? It’s ‘cause you and I are kin. I probably shouldn’t have you as my doctor.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have the same great-grandfather. My only blood relative would stand to gain a lot of money if I died. It doesn’t exactly motivate you hippocratically speaking. Maybe you and I should write out wills to each other. Be more fair-like. I had been intending to leave my wad to the Sloane Art Museum in Doublesign as they have a couple of my sculptures.”

  “Scott, I’m not interested in your money.”

  “Now that’s a lie, Doc. I may be crazy, but I ain’t stupid. In fact, Doc, you would be surprised at the depth of my art education.”

  He spoke truly. I wanted the damn money and spent many blindfolded hours thinking about what drugs that would kill him off. When I returned to light, I would no doubt think differently, but you think odd thoughts in the dark.

  The next day, or later that night, Scott woke me.

  “This is choice, Doc, really choice. You know Fenster?”

  “Yes,” I said, having no idea who Fenster was.

  “Well, he found something on his land. He was putting a well where an old church was and he found a little metal box. Inside was a small book called How to Worship God Correctly. Seems like we’ve all been doing it wrong for years. He drove to the Kinko’s and ran off a few copies and gave them out at the Dairy Queen. Now there’s going to be a town meeting.”

  “Did you get a copy?”

  “Of course I did. I
get me a double-dipped chocolate cone every day about three. I think that soft serve custard is the one of the two best parts of civilization.”

  “What the other one?”

  “Oxy-acetylene welding.”

  By this time the bandages were really starting to itch. My hands had been freed days before. It was hard to keep track of the pace of days. Scott came often. As the hospital’s major donor, he could come anytime. For all I knew, this conversation took place at six in the evening or four in the morning or noon.

  “So how are we supposed to worship God?”

  “With megalithic stone circles. Mankind apparently hit the mark with Stonehenge, Nabta Playa, Bagnold’s circle, or Sentinel Hill in Massachusetts That’s what God wants.”

  “I bet that went over big with the Baptists.”

  “You’d think not, but everyone seemed pretty positive about it.”

  I didn’t know what to make to this remark. I had never heard of Nabta Playa or Bagnold’s Circle. I wondered if he had taken his meds today. I had asked Dr. Fresno to keep him out of my room, but Fresno said he slipped past the guard. I doubted that anyone would say no to him. I didn’t like being quiet for too long so I said, “So what do you make of it?”

  “I don’t know, Doc. I have never been the religious type. Seems to me God has already made enough calendars with the moon and the sun.”

  The twilight came when Dr. Fresno cut away my bandages. The room was dim, and I kept expecting some Twilight Zone moment when they would look at me and see me as a monster. Instead, for a moment I was the one horrified. Something seemed wrong with the angles of the room, as though everything lunged toward me. I put my hands, and then I felt stupid. Dr. Fresno smiled his half-senile smile. I could see Scott waiting for me in the hall.

  Dr. Fresno said, “Richard agreed to drive you home, you can drive tomorrow, but let’s remember our sunglasses, Dr. Huff. Your eyes are fine, and you’ll soon be over any respiratory distress.”