Black Wings III - New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror Page 18

  The moon was dark. It had only been two weeks since I had scalded my eyes, fried my brain, and cooked the insides of my lungs. It felt as if months or years had gone by. Scott drove me home, and as his old white Chevy pickup turned at the town square I saw my first Stonehenge. The stones stood six or seven feet tall. I asked him to stop. He shrugged and did so. I realized that people were walking around in the middle of the circle. I yelled out to them, but they didn’t yell back.

  “They ain’t always friendly, Doc. Just simple country folk.” He laughed all the way to my house. I didn’t get the joke. I was glad to see my SUV in the driveway; maybe I should just drive away tomorrow.

  The next day I saw four circles in progress. Two stone. One made of old TVs, which I frankly thought was pretty cool, and one made of cement parking slabs, which I thought was a little tacky. None of my patients had anything to say about the circles and looked at me with raw hatred when I asked. So I let the matter drop. When I drove home I saw six circles.

  The next day eight.

  Richard Scott dropped by my office. I was glad to see him. Any fantasy I had of doing him in had vanished. I was trying to make my mind to stay or leave or just call CNN. He just wanted me to reauthorize his twelve prescriptions.

  I asked him, “What happened while I was blind up in Doublesign?”

  “The Flapjack Recipe ran the complete text of How to Worship God Correctly. In my opinion it caught on.”

  “For the love of God, are they all crazy?”

  “You’re asking me? I left grad school because I thought my clay was talking to me. Weeks before this they were all worshipping a dead carpenter. I think the movement toward sculpture is healthy.”

  “Did you read the Recipe?”

  “Sure. I read it every day. That and the Wall Street Journal.”

  “And it didn’t fill you with the need to go build Stonehenge a thousand times?”

  “I take drugs so that I don’t get messages. See this one and this one and this one.” He pointed at his list of drugs. “They also keep me from thinking that Mr. TV is telling me something important. I could get you the issues of the Recipe they all went crazy reading, if you would like to see it.”

  Part of me wanted to read that article more than anything; it’s the same part that makes me wonder what goes through a suicide’s mind as he hurtles toward the pavement. But the part of me that manages to brake a car at a red light stopped me. My breathing was rough. I don’t care what Dr. Fresno said, I think I had had lung trauma.

  Scott laughed. “You had to struggle with that one, didja? I can feel you, Doc, I can feel you.”

  “But these people have jobs.”

  “Like what, Doc? Selling crafts to rich Austinites on Market Mondays, farming, drawing SSD? Their jobs can wait a spell if they want to worship the stone circle god.”

  “People will see as they drive by.”

  “Doc, you can’t see a circle one from the highway, and if you could I don’t think there is a nary a word in Texas law against stone circles.”

  “Why are they doing this?”

  “Dotting ‘i’s’ and crossing ‘t’s.”

  I saw my last patient about three-thirty. I looked up Mr. Fenster in the phone book and I drove out to his farm.

  There was a big circle in the back. Big Edwards limestone slabs, almost twelve feet high. They didn’t stand too straight. A tall thin bald man wandered among them, fretting. He wore a short sleeve blue shirt and blue jeans. He looked worried.

  Before I could speak he asked me, “Are you good with math? I don’t know if I set this up right.”

  “I’m good at solid geometry,” I said. I had no idea why I said this, but like all humans I want to fit in; it is a hard-wired circuit in our amygdale, it makes baboons groom each other.

  “What about astronomy?”

  “Nope, no good there.”

  He looked at the daytime sky as though he could spot something. I tried to figure out how he had set the stones up. This wasn’t down with a simple tractor, and the damage to the ground seemed pretty small. I faintly remembered the guy’s wife. She had been in to see me for rheumatoid arthritis a month ago. I started to tell him that recent findings had shown that Stonehenge wasn’t a calendar, but a gravesite for elite pre-Celts. I decided the phrase “elite pre-Celts” didn’t get said much in rural Texas.

  “How’s Mrs. Fenster?” I asked.

  “Mildred? She’s gone. Doesn’t hold with this.” He made a vague hand gesture that I took to mean the standing stones.

  “You were the one that found the book, weren’t you?”

  “Yes. That was my honor. You’d think I’d do a better job.”

  “Why does God want so many calendars?”

  He snapped out of his daze and gave me the same hateful look I’d seen in my patients’ eyes. “I don’t rightly think it’s our job to question God. Besides, it’s not about calendars. They’re windows like me, you know, Fenster. It’s about salt and ground glass. I’m no good at explaining it, I’m just a cog in the machine.” He pursed his lips and blew out a long sigh. There seemed to be a struggle inside him; I’ve seen it in patients that want to tell me something but are embarrassed or afraid. He had no more to say to me.

  That I didn’t leave Flapjack that night is a sign that the wrong part of me was winning. I might not risk the damnation of reading the Recipe, but for the moment I couldn’t leave the scene.

  Next morning Scott banged on my door at first light.

  “Come out, Doc, you gotta see this.”

  My SUV, sans tires, was up on cinderblocks.

  Scott said, “Somebody wants you to stay. Ever see The Wicker Man, you know where that cop gets sacrificed Druid-style?” He laughed his hick butt off and then offered to drive me to my office tomorrow.

  “I need out of here. Drive me to Dallas,” I said. I shivered because I heard my own fear.

  “No can do, Doc, these are my people. I’ve got to live here.”

  “Don’t you see they’re all crazy?”

  In his best Norman Bates voice he said, “We all go a little mad sometimes.” He continued, “Look, they’re not any crazier than before. Look at your neighbor Jim Cusson across the street there. He used to spend ten hours a day making birdhouses for tourists to buy once a month on Market Mondays. So now he’s put a circle of them for his own self up in his yard. Now I expect his purple martins aren’t into archaeo-astronomy, but hell I don’t know that tourists were that into his carving.”

  On the way to work I saw twelve circles. My office was full of patients. Bunged-up thumbs, sprained backs, carpal tunnel. Heavy construction taking its toll. I had never had as many patients. I worked through lunch and even into the night. It was my best day as a doctor ever. There was no guesswork, no subtle readings of signs. Maybe I had left my home city for great-grandfather’s village for a reason. Maybe they needed me. Scott drove me home.

  Sleep cleared my mind some. When Scott drove me to work, I asked him to drive me out of here. He just said, “I’m sure that Mildred Fenster asked for the same thing. So just pipe down.”

  At my office the phone was dead and the injured were many. I kept my mouth shut; even when they told me they had pulled down great-granddad’s stones. I would leave tonight and tell the authorities. I tried not to watch the clock all day. I tried not to glare at the endless stream of patients that crossed my door. I tried to act calm. I wanted to tell Scott as he drove me home, but all I could think of was the number of medicines he took. His personality was a leaky sieve, a dribble-glass of self.

  My SUV was no longer on blocks. It had been incorporated into a carhenge down the street. I saw the Cusson kid’s red CRF230 Honda leaned against his pink stucco house. That little street bike looked prettier to me than Pamela Anderson. I could hotwire it and make it to Dallas. I made my move at midnight. I ran across the pavement and up on the lawn feeling as though the nearly full moon was a spotlight aimed directly at me. Then I marveled at something as mira
culous as Mona Lisa’s smile—keys. People don’t always take their keys in villages the size of Flapjack. I pushed the rice rocket away from the concrete porch, hit the juice, and off I went. Two roads later I would be on the highway.

  The moon seemed to get brighter and brighter as I sped away. Liberty does things to moonlight, just as moonlight does things to liberty. I saw stones everywhere, and stumps, and trashcans, and PVC pipe, and bones. Something seemed to flash in the sky above me, and I looked up. A small stone hit me. I had crashed through a tiny Stonehenge in the middle of the highway; it was made out of pebbles and orange lane markers.

  The tiny circle launched me into space. I seemed to be heading toward an oranging sky and then my belly scraped the ground, and I heard people yelling.

  They dragged me to the center of town, to the middle of the largest circle, where Scott was their king. He wore a crown made of stainless steel knives and forks that he had welded together in a strange fashion.

  They reflected the orange light from the sky where the moon had begun to melt, and the stars had become prismatic ovals.

  The villagers sat me in a camp chair. I was expecting Scott to leer and act like a movie villain. Instead, he was sad. I was the dull pupil that couldn’t quite do the lesson.

  “Do you know what your problem is, Dr. Huff? You don’t ask the right questions.”

  His country bumpkin accent was gone.

  “What questions should I have asked?” I asked.

  “Well, cousin of mine, you should have asked how a mentally ill guy in central Texas sells his art to famous places. You think I’m a Ray Johnson?”

  This seemed to be a rather random thread to pursue while the moon melted, but I asked anyway.

  “I did great work on my MFA. Hell, I didn’t even go crazy until my doctorate. I had a Question. All great Quests start with a Question. You know what my question was?”

  “Stone circles?” I asked.

  “Oh, thank God for that. I was beginning to think there were no smart genes in your part of the family. Yes. Between four thousand and two thousand B.C. mankind couldn’t make enough of these things. Fred Flintstone should be calling Barney Rubble and saying, ‘Hey, Barn, want to come over and make a whopping big stone calendar this weekend?’ ‘Gee, Fred, sounds great, I’ll bring Bam-Bam.’ I asked why—why the obsession with time.”

  “Can we talk about the sky instead?”

  “You’ll have a long time to talk about the sky. At least I think so. As the comic villain in this post-Shakespearian tragedy, I am allowed one monologue.”

  The air had begun to shake as though a thousand fans had been turned on. Some of them were inside my lungs. A few of the Flapjackers began to cough and sneeze. My mad cousin continued.

  “So why the obsession with time?”

  I answered, “Crops. It was the big breakthrough.”

  “I thought so at first, but then my art history professor directed me to certain older books. Pre-human books actually. Mankind wasn’t the first species interested in the big calendars. There were things that had begun big stone works on Earth millions of years before. Time is a dimension that life oozes through like a slug on a dew-wet leaf.”

  The chair had begun to squirm under me. I started to stand, but something had wrapped itself around my wrist; for a crazy moment I thought I was back in the hospital bed. That my wrists were still bound but that my bandages were coming off and I was really going to see the world. Everything lunged at me, then relaxed back into its normal spatial relationships.

  “You see, the calendars form a bigger shape. A series of angles that directs things. Imagine the things you call dimensions—length, width, time, and so forth—were not as interesting as life, senses, consciousness. Imagine all that bio-stuff as a sort one big slug. You make one path of ground glass and salt and one path of wet slime and slug food; where does sluggy go?”

  I could feel things sprouting at the base of my spine. My teeth had begun to move independently. I felt emotions that were analogues of lust and fear and the part of you that waits to plummet go down on the roller coaster. It felt like the rush of smoking salvia divinorum or whipping roach killer. I am still in my house dying, none of this is happening. But for once in my life, denial didn’t work.

  “I got the big picture, cousin. I saw all the angles. I saw every angle from Yr to Nhhngr. I could control the path of all that bio-stuff. I could use God’s technology. I’m not rightly sure what god—here is where it gets tricky. I don’t know if I am delivering cows to the slaughterhouse door or helping beautiful butterflies out of their cocoon. That was when I lost it. I just had to find out, so I made the little box for Fenster to find. I mixed an old Baptist hymnal with the Typhonian Tablets with simple diagrams showing all the angles. Humans picked up where they had stopped four thousand years ago. Now little sluggy is almost there.”

  “So you are giving me the Scooby Doo speech and now the monster comes along and eats me? That’s my life?” I asked.

  “You are very stupid. This is not about you being a little sacrificial lamb, cousin. It is about a new world. For one instant as an artist I saw I could sculpt the whole world, so I did. I used family money and a little Texas town, and then fate threw me you as the first person to visit my gallery. Well, not fate, really. When our great-granddad James Scott began playing with weird notions about Druids, someone in England sent him the Typhonian Tablets. Some poor soul had translated them for certain English Rosicrucians, then hanged himself. Dr. James couldn’t read them very well, but he didn’t have my advantage of being crazy. You will be changed to be able to view my art. It is what I sold my soul for, so to speak, I am making you into the perfect audience.”

  With his left hand he pointed to the sky, which shone pure, orange, and smelled of burning wax; with his right hand he pointed down at the earth, which was weeping greenish mercury. “So tell me, cousin, what hath God wrought? Slaughterhouse or paradise? Did our ancestors’ ancestors stop making the stone circles because they were unworthy, or because they were afraid? What do you see and smell and hear that a little crazy human like me can’t? Do you worship my sculpture of space and time, mind and soul? Or should I worship you?” He fell to his knees before me, and as he bowed his head, the weird crown of flatware fell from his head.

  I could feel what all the angles were doing to me, my perception shattered and then reformed in more dimensions than before. Good-bye 3D.

  And the air smelled sweet like souls separating into their separate parts, and I could hear the gentle pops of the eyes of the mealy little humans around me, and the hairs on my arms began to move independently and I began to see into time, just shallow pools at first, and there was great-granddad getting his package from England, and his chestnut mare rearing in fear of the book and there was the One who would Come in Its polychromatic polychronic ploy-gendered terror-beauty.

  I stood free from the chair, my feet sinking a few inches into the mercury-like liquid. I breathed in the new heaven through my hollow teeth and I sucked in the newly charred earth through my roots and I called out to my Beloved who lures me into a thousand painful deaths of ecstasy, now at the end of Time.

  Down Black Staircases

  Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. is the author of the novel The Orphan Palace (Chomu Press, 2011) and three collections from Hippocampus Press, Blood Will Have Its Season (2009), SIN & ashes (2010), and Portraits of Ruin (2012). His work has appeared in such venues as Phantamagorium, Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, and The Book of Cthulhu.

  Shadows. Sameness with no soon

  and silence

  Sky without time…

  Hand, trembling, hoping to be free of this gravity of impossible, wishing for magic carpet or a fifth of blurred and near numb.

  Outside the window, Kingsport.

  They say this is America. New England. They swear it’s true. Hell, they’ll show you the map. Don’t you believe it. People lie. Governments lie. The world th
at bent your mind with its sharp moments last week, that’s a lie.

  It’s all a lie.

  Bit into my first one, swallowed it whole. Should have spit it out. Should have run.

  I’m not supposed to be here. I had a flag. Had things. Places. I had a future, my friends and parents thought it was gold-plated and never worried or raised any concerns. And I didn’t mess up. Walked straight. Followed the rules. All of them. I didn’t even own a pair of jeans. See? I was good. Another genial VP—part paid planner, part paid worrier, sprinkle in a little bastard if and when needed—overseeing the right accounts, a few of which required more bastard, rising at the right pace. Work late, smile when you shake hands. Nice suits. Good restaurants. Drinks with significant people. Normal.

  I was on my way to Boston. On my way to see her. Clea. Little white dress and that ass. You only saw women like that on TV, or in Hollywood, in the movies. Never had a woman like that say those things to me. Never had a woman dressed like that, built like that, offer me everything. Said she was all mine, said it while her breasts were pressed against my arm. Never knew they could be that soft. Never been that close. Never. Never imagined things like really happening. Not in my world.

  Going?

  I sure was. Hell and a hundred sulphur-drenched demons couldn’t stop me, and jacked-up on pure lust I didn’t stop to consider anything but the “100%-pure, ,i>honeysweet pussy” the avalanche of my go-ahead loaded on the back of my eyelids.

  Friday. Ready to permit delirium into my world, burning with insistent. Checked my reservation with the hotel in Boston. Tried to leave the office early. Something bad put a stop to it. Three hours to remove the glitch from the deal.

  Opened the door on night.

  All the bragging they do about a Beamer’s relish, that’s true. I pushed my impatience into en route.

  A weekend in Boston. Nights in her bed, or in my hotel room, or on the floor, who knew what and where and how many times, or in how many different ways? Ways like in those movies. Grape or whatever she wanted to drink. Painted toes. Dancing, vibrating. A real woman with her fingers playing with my tie. Shaved—she said so. Came right out and told me. Green eyes blessing my fever. The Devil tattoo—couldn’t believe something that small could be so loud. Drowning in velvet wild things. Drove like a madman, careful wasn’t on my speedometer and it wasn’t on the map in my glove box.