Black Wings III - New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror Read online

  There were shadows everywhere. All those places I walked or drove by and never noticed, or simply felt were beneath me. Black stretching. Evil. Wasn’t just lighting, wasn’t a question of urban decay. Something was in the places where the sun don’t shine.

  Neas.

  Waiting.

  Spider. Touching the threads of his web to see if this ant or that moth was ready to unlace. Spider, unknowable hunger accelerating. The coupling—no adrift, no drowned, wound my gravity with the fever-weather of its cold river, suck and rake my shivering.

  Watching. Orbiting, leaning at me.

  They’re all watching me.

  Bathroom mirror shares awful. Week’s stubble. Mustard stain on my shirt. I was beginning to resemble the riffraff. My apartment same. Pizza boxes. Dust. Coffee mugs in every room, some with an inch of cold left in them. Dirty and unfolded in the kitchen and the bedroom.

  Down

  Headaches. Mad, revolting thoughts spinning. I don’t have any memories in my head-first

  Down

  No safer. No decision or course, full-throated or silent, leads away from the scalding

  DOWN

  Not a spiral, slow descent. Terror took one piece at a time…

  Came out of a grubby little mom-and-pop-mart I would never have entered four months ago. Saw her. Not someone like her.

  HER

  HATE scars you like that you don’t forget.

  She was across the street in the mouth of an alley—like a rat, hungry black eyes, filled with violating operations jagged and noisy as fractured modern music, a rat scabbed by some obscene philosophy. Hand came up, grabbed a fistful of skin under her chin. Slid her skin-face down—OFF, and leveled that predatory smile.

  Almost dropped the two bags of canned supplies I was holding.

  RAN

  Lock up tight! Check lock and latch and check again. Drawn curtains to blind the probing sight of wild. A hundred times I’ve thought to buy a gun…

  My hermitry is forced. Fuck, I’m trapped. Lavish and its prospects have succumbed to bane and illness. No atoning or miracle will resurrect future.

  My Providence is no longer a kingdom—comfortable and gold-plated no longer laugh or declare platforms of glory, God’s mercy is a puppet’s illusion, it’s a terrace of twilight. Barrington River is a sewer. Sky, cobbles and windows are streaked with other rhythms now. I hear things clomp and chitter in the shadows.

  I sleep by necessity. Kaleidoscopic nightmares shred me with strange visions. Awake finds me fragile, banished from easy body functions.

  My eyes live at my window, chewing cloud and street, a butcher’s knife clutched in my grip. Watch. Go out—yes, I carry my knife under my coat, when everything, every crumb, is gone and my hunger drives me to it. There are shadows everywhere, even when the sun burns with noon. I fear corners, fear I’ll be opened and absorbed at every turn.

  She follows me.

  I see his hag.

  Cold-hearted bitch-thing makes sure I do.

  One day. Soon? When? When—”FUCK!” Neas will come—

  Black wings—that foaming net, hunger mouth, will open, swallow.

  My phone rings. First time in months.

  “You’ve come into my—” The word, bogged down in it, was like inches of revulsion spreading over me—”night.” The rattled crust of her hiss dissolves into a chasm of cold laughter.

  China Holiday

  Peter Cannon

  Peter Cannon is the author of Pulptime (1984), a Sherlock Holmes pastiche in which H. P. Lovecraft plays Dr. Watson to the great detective; Scream for Jeeves: A Parody (1994), a blend of Wodehousian humor and Lovecraftian horror with a dash of Conan Doyle; Forever Azathoth (1999), a story collection that was reissued in somewhat different form in 2011; and The Lovecraft Chronicles (2004), a novel that imagines a happier and longer life for Lovecraft.

  1

  Sign here,” said the young woman, pointing to a piece of paper that hadn’t been on her desk a moment before.

  “What?” I replied. My wife and I were sitting in the San Francisco offices of Yangtze Travel, where we’d been winding up arrangements for our trip to China with the agency’s pleasant, smiling representative, and now her tone had turned distinctly menacing.

  “Sign this statement saying that you will not publish anything critical of the Chinese government,” she said in her slightly accented English. She was no longer smiling.

  “Phil,” said Jan, avoiding my eyes, “I told Kim you were an editor who sometimes wrote freelance articles.”

  “Yes, but…” I was an editor at Food Industry Service and Supply, a monthly business-to-business magazine, which had nothing to do with politics. Likewise, my rare restaurant review for a Bay Area alternative weekly was utterly devoid of controversial content. I looked in turn at each female and decided it was no use protesting.

  “All right,” I said, and signed.

  On the street outside Yangtze Travel, Jan said, “I hope you don’t mind, honey, but when Kim asked me on the phone about your background, I had to tell her what you did.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Later I felt some regret that I, a citizen of a free country, had so cravenly bowed to this demeaning demand from a petty representative of a totalitarian regime. What I should have done, had I been prepared, was refuse, threatening to write all sorts of nasty things about the P.R.C. if they forced me to sign. Not signing would have been the price of my silence. But defiance no doubt would have meant no visas, and that would have disappointed Jan.

  Jan was eager to see China, where her maternal grandparents had been Christian missionaries during the 1930s. I, on the other hand, was too fond of First World amenities, like hot water and flush toilets, to go abroad except to the more prosperous parts of Europe. Furthermore, I was an insomniac who didn’t adjust well to time changes. After some back and forth, I had agreed with some trepidation to her proposal that we go to the world’s last important Communist bastion.

  There was, though, another consideration. Wed in ‘93, Jan and I were still childless after six years of increasingly aggressive fertility treatment. (Jan suspected her hypothyroidism was the biggest obstacle to conception.) China was a major destination for Americans seeking babies—girl babies, that is, since chauvinistic Chinese parents preferred males—and a vacation in the planet’s most populous nation might help us decide whether we wanted to adopt there. I still wasn’t too keen on the idea, but with Jan’s biological clock running out, our chances of producing a child of our own were fast approaching zero.

  Another attraction was that China was cheap—only about $100 a day, which included English-speaking guides at every stop, hotels, meals, and air transport within the country. We could set our own itinerary and were in effect a group tour of two. Jan decided we should spend three days in Beijing, two days in Xi’an, site of the terracotta warriors, then go to Chongqing, where her missionary grandparents had been stationed, to catch a boat down the Yangtze through the Three River Gorges, slated to disappear with the construction of the huge dam that was still years away from completion.

  In the weeks leading up to our June 1999 departure, Jan in her conscientious way checked out guidebooks from the library on China. Meanwhile, I fretted about getting sick from eating strange foods and catching exotic diseases. What did I know about China, its people or culture? What I remembered, as a boy, was a vertical wall chart in my bedroom of world civilizations from the start of recorded history to the present. Only China, varying somewhat in width over the centuries, ran as one continuous red band from top to bottom.

  2

  I took jet-lag pills for the long flight to Beijing, but I slept only an hour or so. At the airport we were met by a woman we guessed to be about thirty, “Patricia,” who escorted us through the terminal to a reserved parking lot. Our car was a black, air-conditioned sedan, up to American-limousine standard. Patricia explained that we should pay the male driver, who spoke no English, twenty-five dollars a
day for his services. We had come equipped with plenty of cash, as we knew U.S. dollars would be more welcome than the local soft-currency yuan.

  In Beijing, we stayed at the Rainbow, a first-class hotel with all the conveniences, including cable TV that got CNN. From our twentieth-floor room, we had a superb view of the vast city, diminished somewhat by the gray haze that hung in the sky, like Los Angeles at its most smoggy. The weather was humid and hot, daily temperatures rising to the 90s, comparable to what I understand New York City can be like in summer. Patricia said that northern China was experiencing an unusual heat wave.

  The highlight of our stay in Beijing was an excursion to a section of the Great Wall, where Patricia left us for the afternoon. Under a blazing sun, Jan and I hiked up the great, irregular stone steps of the wall. Few other tourists, I noticed, were foolhardy enough to do the same. We had the wall to ourselves by the time several helpings of sweet-and-sour pork I’d consumed for lunch began to churn in my stomach. Fortunately, the next tower we came to contained a W.C.—an open pit that was as deep as the wall itself and, to my relief, almost as odorless.

  Each morning we read the English-language newspaper left outside our door, China Daily. One article had the curious headline “Over Supply of Ceramics,” that is, “sanitary ceramics” or chamber pots. Evidently, while the supply of flush toilets was barely keeping up with demand, customers for the traditional chamber pot were increasingly scarce.

  One night we had dinner at one of Beijing’s fancier restaurants, which featured Peking duck. We heeded Patricia’s warning not to use the bathroom facilities, as even many upscale places lacked Western-style plumbing. The antiquated Beijing sewer system could handle only so much.

  3

  On the flight to Xi’an, the next stop on our itinerary, I was struck by a little incident as we boarded the plane. The female flight attendant standing by the gate suddenly shoved some obstreperous passenger trying to get ahead back in line. It seemed an oddly rude gesture in a society that prided itself on decorum. Over in a second, it nonetheless served to reinforce my uneasy feeling that the Chinese were careful to present a façade to foreigners, no less artificial than the stylized masks worn by the performers at the Chinese opera we had seen in Beijing.

  The Bell Tower, the clean, modern hotel where we stayed in the sprawling, haze-covered city of Xi’an, was, if anything, even spiffier than the Rainbow. Our guide, Cindy, reminded us a lot of Patricia—pleasant, polite, but distant, not someone you could expect to reveal what she really felt about her government or the rapid social and economic changes in China. As an educated, English-speaking Chinese, she was no doubt well paid and had no reason to complain.

  Cindy took us, with car and driver, to the site of the famous terracotta warriors. To get to the underground museum housing “the eighth wonder of the world,” one had to navigate a swarm of street vendors hawking everything from cold drinks to terracotta-warrior tee-shirts. At the curtained entrance sat an old man, one of the original farmers who in 1974 had happened upon broken artifacts on the site that suggested the existence of a vast archeological trove. Inside it was cool and dark. We first came to a large round room, where we watched a movie in “circle vision” that reconstructed the bloody events leading up to the construction and later destruction of the army. According to the English subtitles, Qin Shi Huang, the founder of the Qin Dynasty and first emperor of all China, had ordered the figures made for his mausoleum. Over eleven years starting in 246 B.C., his artisans produced more than 7,000 pottery soldiers.

  Then it was on to Pit No. 1, an enormous oblong area only partially excavated. A railed walkway ran in shadow around all four sides. Spotlights in the beams of the modern curved roof illuminated hundreds of gray clad figures (originally brightly painted, as depicted in the film) arrayed in battle-line formation below. Each had an individual face, except for a few wearing bulky helmets that hid the entire head. The army, even in this fragmentary state, was indeed an impressive sight.

  Pit No. 2 showed the figures in ruins, as they would have been unearthed. Pit No. 3, much the smallest of the three, contained the officers or “command center.”

  The final makeshift, possibly temporary display we viewed inadvertently, through a gap in a curtain at floor level. An ornate human figure, like all the rest larger than life size, stood slightly slumped in a horse-drawn chariot. Was this a high-ranking officer or even Emperor Qin himself? Through the light was dim, we could see that his face was veiled. Abruptly, a guard grabbed me by the arm and escorted us silently to the exit. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed as if the irregular bulges of the rigid folds of the veil hid some facial deformity. Outside the museum, when I asked Cindy about this mysterious warrior, she paused and looked almost embarrassed before saying that only scholars with the proper credentials had access to certain exhibits. She wouldn’t confirm that the figure represented Emperor Qin.

  The next day we arrived late in the afternoon at the airport outside Chongqing, formerly Chungking, the Nationalist capital. After meeting our guide, Larry, I visited the airport men’s room, which had one Western-style toilet besides the usual holes in the ground. Because of the hour, we would be going straight to dinner. I still felt queasy on the ride into the city, but fortunately the discomfort had passed by the time we arrived at our restaurant, where I was able to consume some tofu soup. The peaches served for dessert looked gorgeous, but, as elsewhere in China, they were rock hard and inedible.

  After our meal, Larry proposed that we drive up to the highest point in the city, where Chiang Kai-shek used to live. Like San Francisco, Chongqing is built on hills, and consequently we saw fewer people on bicycles than in flat Xi’an or Beijing. As we proceeded along the steep, winding road, we could peer inside modest Chinese houses without doors or windows. Many people were eating, and we spotted the odd dog or two, presumably pets and not tomorrow’s supper.

  At sunset we reached the top, where we entered a park that once was part of Chiang’s estate. The view was spectacular, Larry asserted, when it was clear—which was practically never. Our ultimate destination was a building on the park grounds that had on display a scale-model of the Three River Gorges Dam.

  The model proved of less interest than a mural charting the course of the Yangtze from Chongqing to the dam site. By a single artist, it ran more than a hundred feet across three walls. The cities and towns that would be submerged were shown, as well as where they would be rebuilt above high water. Painted in a fanciful traditional style, it depicted rather odd-looking anthropomorphic fishes and frogs frolicking along the fringes of the river.

  Since it was nearly 10:00 by the time we checked into our hotel, the Chungking, all we did was go to bed. Before we turned in, I asked Jan if she regretted not having scheduled more time in Chongqing, in order to explore the city where her grandparents had spent several years. Jan, however, had no idea where they might have lived. Family records from this period were nonexistent. Sad to say, their mission had ended tragically, with the death of her grandfather shortly after the Japanese invasion. Her grandmother barely got out of China alive. Pregnant with Jan’s mother, she resettled in New England and would never speak of her China experiences. She died when Jan’s mother was small. I met Jan’s mother only once, shortly before her early illness and death.

  4

  We were up at dawn in order to board our cruise ship by 8:00. The Richard M. Nixon was the flagship of the China-American line that plied the Yangtze. The brochures proclaimed it the equivalent of a four-star hotel. All passenger cabins were above the waterline. While we waited for our baggage to be delivered to our cabin, we inspected the framed photos on the walls of the main deck. These mostly depicted the president of the China-America line, a Mr. Ty, shaking hands with other executives and greeting dignitaries. Once settled in our little cabin, where we stayed until the boat pulled away from the shore around 9:00. Then we descended to the dining deck for an orientation meeting.

  Our American tour director, Tim, wh
o looked to be in his early thirties, and his Chinese counterpart, Carl, whose age could have been anything from thirty to fifty, introduced themselves, each in his respective language. Like most of the crew, they wore neatly pressed white uniforms. They alternated speaking, though Tim did so in a halting, nervous manner that seemed odd for someone who presumably had a lot of experience addressing people. He said he was originally from Massachusetts, had majored in Chinese studies in college, and had lived for the past seven years in China. On the four-day cruise, the boat would stop at several places along the river, including the dam construction site. Our final destination would be the city of Wuhan.

  Jan and I soon figured out that all the other Americans passengers were part of a tour group, predominantly female teachers from the Midwest, except for one other couple, Jean and Fred, with whom we shared a table at lunch. Jean, a vivacious type like Jan, and Fred, who didn’t say much but looked as if he lifted weights a lot, were New Yorkers. About the same age as us, they were taking a little vacation before adopting a Chinese baby. Jan was full of questions for them about the process of adopting in China.

  I managed to take a nap after lunch, getting up in time for our first shore expedition—to the so-called “ghost city” of Fengdu. On disembarking at what was a modest-sized town, we ran a gauntlet of limbless beggars before getting on a bus that drove us a short distance to a chair lift. One could walk up the mountain on a steep stairway, but no one took that option. At the top was a series of temples, along with the usual hawkers of souvenirs and artwork. A guide pointed out the site high on the opposite river bank where the new town would be built to replace the old.