Black Wings III - New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror Page 24

  I roll my mounds, huge purple slugs glistening with bumps and pricks of diamond, and I hold her fast, my bumps fitting hers as puzzle pieces fit together. I press her against the cliff, where the copper dust blows. She coughs, and I’m forced to detach her from the rock so she can get her breath. She gasps now, sees me, shrieks. And I see her, the face with shredded skin, the contacts long gone and the old lady’s eyes dim and dark, one gouged.

  What have we done? Tatania, my only friend…

  My flesh suckers to the rock, and something pulls me closer, I can’t detach, I don’t want to detach. For a moment, I struggle against the power of the rock, but in the end, I submit to it and spikes of pleasure wash through me.

  Tidal waves of ecstasy, flame consuming my heart, I can’t let go of this, I can’t, and my soul transcends and surges into the rock, into the rain, into the clouds, everywhere at once, merging with the birds, the fish, the rock,

  and

  Tatania! no no no no no

  Tatania! ooze ooze ooze ooze

  and

  isn’t it always like this,

  and isn’t it?

  Her skin, stretched so thin, bursts open, and she screams once, a flash of a scream, and she’s no longer attached to me. My body is one with the rock. Iridescent bubbles on the cliff above me reflect her body as she falls to the sand. Everywhere, walls glow and cradle me in purple and bumps and the musk of rotting lopes and peaches. Pressed inside, wrapped in warmth, I belong.

  Tatania isn’t with us. She’s beyond the rock, still on the beach.

  I’m inside now, where I belong,

  inside the cliff, where my bumps swell and cling to the bumps surrounding me. All of us, we belong, one with Yog-Sothoth, who dwells in the higher planes and comes to us in glistening wonder. Behold us, for we are the Old Ones.

  We heave, our hearts one giant heart, together. We breathe, our lungs one giant lung, together. We whisper like angels, we sing like birds, we’re softer than the gills of fish.

  We are. It’s as simple as that. We are.

  Clasped in each other’s arms, bracketed by life and death that no longer touch us.

  We are. We give ourselves to the whole. We are.

  Y’ai ‘ng’ngah Yog-Sothoth

  Yog-Sothoth ‘ngah’ng ai’y zhro

  I drift beyond the boundaries of time.

  I float in the crevices of space.

  I remember things I’d rather forget.

  Tatania’s second husband, Arnold, the type of man I thought I might finally attract. He weighed about a hundred forty pounds, tall and skinny as a scratch, bald with thick gray hair on his back and shoulders, a caved-in face with squashed nose and rosebud mouth: not a pretty man by anyone’s standards. Except perhaps, mine.

  But Tat wouldn’t have it. She wanted Arnold for herself. He was rich, and she wanted more than Cole had given to her.

  I wasn’t jealous. I never got jealous. Tat deserved everything good. I was lucky to have her as a friend. She stole money from Arnold, filched it from his “accounts,” whatever that meant, neither of us really knew. But I was already riddled with disease and broken bones, and nobody wanted to hire me to do anything, and Tat was all I had.

  Faithful friend.

  Tatania.

  I love you, Tatania.

  Over meatloaf one night, Arnold threw down his fork, plate clatter skit across floor, and fury in his little knot of a face, he accused his wife of stealing from the company.

  Lump of meatloaf choking my throat, grab for water, one thumb and two fingers on my hand, my arm a bone encased in scabs. Slash slash alone at night late at night I slash my arms yes I do and why I tell you why godammit I will tell you

  if only you ask

  but you never ask.

  “I give all the money to Cass.” Tat’s voice was honey smooth, her eyes soft and loving as she looked from her husband to me and back again. She lowered her head. “I give it all to Cass,” she repeated. “What else can she do, if I don’t help her?” As if I wasn’t there with meat in my throat.

  But I don’t mind, I never mind.

  “Oh, poor Cass,” said Arnold, immediately relenting, “you are so dear to both of us, and Tatania, my sweet sweet wife—”

  And so we replayed it.

  “No, I’m the lucky one, dearest…”

  Ooze. Ooze.

  Ooze ooze ooze ooze

  I didn’t see her for awhile, he was so high on her due to her beauty and the constant kindness she’d shown to me all those years.

  Me.

  I was responsible for bringing Tat and Arnold together.

  When they divorced and she got half of his fortune, quite substantial, she came back to me.

  Like she always did.

  I need to belong.

  Push

  I love you, Tatania.

  push

  Finally, I heave my bulk back through the rock and pop to the other side, the exposed cliff where the storm rages and Tatania is unconscious on the sand.

  I roll her onto me again, my beloved Tatania, and her bumps grip mine, and together we roll toward the crashing surf.

  Wave high above, black lip, dog-rabid froth,

  Tatania flickers in and out of consciousness, face almost gone, lips flapping in the wind, her mouth a giant hole, her teeth bigger than I remember.

  Conjoined twins. I won’t leave her here to die.

  Glued to my upper mound by the bumps, she doesn’t wobble or fall as we slide beneath the steel wave and bob on the turbulence.

  Waves cresting, crashing, slide beneath the muck and the foam, float float here

  where I belong

  where we are

  My strength flows from my bumps to hers, conjoined twins, and I nourish her. Gummy strings, umbilical cords, form between her bumps and mine. We bob like this for I don’t know how long, and then Tatania’s breathing steadies and her heart picks up.

  Why have you always been so kind to me, Tatania? I think it, and she answers, “I felt sorry for you. I liked having a faithful puppy. You made me look good. I got three husbands, the money. I came with you to a beautiful island and walked to a beach. I didn’t realize it would be hell. You came on a lot of my vacations. Riviera, Rio, St. John.”

  True, because we’ve always been friends. I just want her to accept me as I am. Don’t want her pity, don’t want to be her faithful puppy, just want her affection. If only, after all these decades, Tatania would truly be one with me, nobody else, just me.

  There’s no hell, Tatania, no life, no death, no angels, nothing. Only that which is elusive and humble. Give yourself to me. Here, drink and let me nourish you.

  “You’re sick! Disgusting and sick!” she cries, but she lets my energy flow through the umbilical cords and bumps, and then a wave surges and slams us against the cliff. My bumps bolt us to the rock, and Tatania hangs off my outer side, glued securely to me but howling for release. Her fists beat me.

  “Cassandra,” she spits my name, “you’re not even The Deformed! You’re a total freak, a monster!”

  The wind pounds me against the cliff, it’s a hurricane blasting into the cove, and I beg her,

  be one with me, nobody else, just me

  admit it, that it’s me and only me you love, Tatania.

  She’s hysterical, calling me terrible names, even worse names than the bullies used all my life. She’d rather die than be anywhere near me. I’m grotesque. She’s always known it. I’m the monster. I’m the reason she lost her husbands, me, all my fault, they couldn’t stand being around me anymore, could they? Yes, all those years she took care of me, out of pity, yes, but why does it matter? She took care of me. I’m the monster. And she’d rather die…

  We’re held together by bumps. Only bumps. I realize there’s nothing else between us. Not really. She never saw the real me, and she never appreciated what I gave to her. She always cast me aside for those men, time and time again, she just used me to make herself look good,

  and
isn’t that so,

  isn’t it?

  She was my friend when it suited her. Her affection, it comes and goes. Riviera, Rio, St. John: only when she was old and lonely. She isn’t real. She’s false and phony. She’s human.

  “I got you shelter, gave you food. I was your friend, Cassandra, and you were nothing but a fucking ingrate monster pathetic whore spawn of shit should be beaten into a pulp you fucking ugly THING—”

  If I could cry, I would, but I can’t cry, so I do the only thing I know how to do. All my umbilical cords snap like Dollar Store threads.

  Her body thumps down the cliff, tattered pieces snagged on rock, and then she shatters into a blast of wind. What’s left of her fizzes into the muck below.

  My bumps shudder from the release. If I still had lips, I’d smile. Maybe I’d even laugh, because I get it now. For the first time, I actually get it.

  I belong. She’s never had anyone but me. She’s alone. She’s the monster. She’s the fucking ingrate monster pathetic whore spawn of shit that should be beaten into a pulp, fucking ugly THING—

  No longer skating through the higher dimensions of space and time and merely looking into the human world, the Old Ones are what matter. We’re clean and pure, we’re true beauty. We have no need for botox and diamonds and plastic surgeries and prissy skirts and other human nonsense. The Old Ones are the diamonds, and the humans are The Deformed.

  We are. It’s as simple as that. We are.

  Clasped in each other’s arms, bracketed by life and death that no longer touch us.

  We are. We give ourselves to the whole. We are.

  And as the winds settle and the sun torches the blackness from the sky, Tatania’s remains dissolve, and I slip back through the iridescence and into the cliff to join the others.

  The Turn of the Tide

  Mark Howard Jones

  Mark Howard Jones has had dozens of short stories published on both sides of the Atlantic. His novella The Garden of Doubt on the Island of Shadows (ISMs Press, 2006) drew praise from Ray Bradbury, among others. His latest collection is Songs from Spider Street (Screaming Dreams, 2010). Jones has also edited the Lovecraftian anthology Cthulhu Cymraeg (Screaming Dreams, 2013). He lives in Cardiff, the capital of Wales.

  At first none of us could work out why the tide was so strange that evening. It rushed at our feet, devouring them in a fuss of foam, when the tide tables said it should have been nearly a half-mile away across the beach.

  We wandered up and down the shoreline, scanning the sky and sea as if an answer would suddenly present itself, and we could all laugh and sigh in relief before going home.

  But by the time darkness began to close in, and Rosemary had to leave to begin her drive back home, we were still none the wiser.

  The following morning, when Kate returned from her customary walk, she was nearly in tears. Ed and I stood and listened, leaning forward now and then to hug her, as she told us of the disturbing flotsam she had come across on the beach.

  There was a fish, she said, that was all fins. Just fins and a mouth; no eyes that she could see. It was lying dead by the big rock.

  Then further on she’d found two birds, each with just one wing. One was flapping helplessly, cawing loudly in distress, the other was dead. “It was like they’d been one bird and someone had pulled them apart somehow…and just abandoned them. But all the life was left in just one of them. It was horrible!”

  After a sit-down and a strong cup of coffee, the three of us bundled up and went down to the beach. We looked for a long time, but there was nothing.

  Kate turned to us: “They were here!” Ed suggested that maybe another freak tide had come and gone, taking the strange things with it. I nodded in agreement, not believing a word of it.

  I had hoped that Kate’s suggestion of three weeks in a cottage overlooking a picturesque old fishing harbour might be good for all of us.

  It would also serve to give my ex-wife, Rosemary, a break. She’d been acting as Kate’s guardian ever since the accident that killed her parents. That was two years ago and I could see more strain in Rose’s eyes every time we met up.

  There was a small gleam of hope in the back of my mind that I might get some worthwhile work done myself. Spending time with two unpaid models (though I was paying the rent) might lead to some interesting drawings, I’d hoped.

  But now this incident with Kate had me worried. Perhaps it was a glimpse of what Rosemary had been struggling to cope with.

  My pencils and sketch pad remained in the back of the car for the time being.

  On the local news last night they showed pictures from a farm about twenty miles away. A lamb had been born, more or less inside out. Yet it was still alive, running around in the field.

  Ed looked squeamish, while Kate hid her eyes and made little noises of protest.

  The item made the national news too. They should have issued a warning beforehand. The pictures were revolting, truly disturbing. Something inside me wanted to scream out at how wrong they were. To me, they seemed to be the worst sort of pornography; nature inverted, mocked, life turned so obviously into a sick joke.

  We didn’t need our faces rubbed in it, did we?

  Kate had arrived with nothing more than a small bag and a pile of wormy old books, which I presumed were for her thesis (I could never remember what she was studying, but it was something to do with archaeology).

  In contrast, Ed had almost filled my car with half the contents of his flat. It was a good thing Kate had driven down with Rose, or she’d have had to sit on the roof for the whole of the journey.

  The town was tiny, more of a village really. It sat on a promontory with the old harbour visible from the living room of the cottage. There was a long, pale gold beach back down behind the cottage, reached by a maze of narrow, steep streets.

  It was never really busy, but at this time of year the place had already waved goodbye to most of its tourists.

  Ed and I have both been enslaved by Kate’s deep green eyes and sweet lopsided smile. We both do whatever she wants with little protest, knowing that whatever sacrifices we have to make will be more than compensated for by the time we spend with her. Whichever of us she chooses, whichever night.

  Perhaps we are both fools. Or just keenly aware of how lucky we are.

  I think of them lying together, their bodies smooth and unblemished, maybe sleeping with their limbs entangled. But I don’t feel I have the right to feel jealous; she should be with him.

  God knows why she’s even interested in me, this sad old sack of raddled flesh. Perhaps because, to her, I’m so old that I represent some sort of continuity, the lie of permanence, and the hope that there is something left when the flash and dazzle of youth have gone.

  Well, she got what she wanted—me and my nephew together here at the bitter end of summer. I wonder what she’ll do with it?

  Towards the end of our first week there, Kate spent two nights with me.

  On the second night I’d grown accustomed enough to things to notice that when she reached climax, she muttered some phrases in an unfamiliar language.

  When we were lying together afterwards, I asked her about it. She was evasive and denied that it was some obscure old European language like Basque or Welsh. Soon afterwards we both drifted off to sleep.

  The next day I gathered my courage and asked Ed if she did the same when she was with him. He seemed embarrassed and uncomfortable, which was unlike him. He denied that she did. “She just says my name,” he insisted. Though I can always tell when he’s lying. Just as I can with his father.

  A few days later, Kate and I were talking in the lounge of the cottage. She’d been fascinated by reports in the newspapers of the events at the nearby farm earlier in the week.

  She said she thought someone or something was changing things, experimenting with them. “You know. Making them better.”

  I was puzzled how she could think that way, be so calm, after how upset she’d been. I flopped down int
o a chair. “What? You mean nature?” I asked, knowing full well that evolution was a game played over thousands and thousands of years, not a matter of mere days.

  She stood looking at me with her green eyes, clutching one of the old books she’d brought along, her mind working around the idea. “No. Not nature. But something like that.”

  I puffed in frustration. “There’s nothing like nature, Kate. There’s just nature.”

  “We don’t know that, do we?” she said rhetorically before turning on her heel and walking into the kitchen, my sarcastic ‘Oh, I thought we did’ left unsaid. She added, “I’m going to find Ed” as she left.

  She knew he would give credence to her irrational idiocies, if only because he was so besotted by her.

  I’m normally an early riser. Ed and Kate are not. I had discreetly made sure that Ed and I slept as far away from each other as the cottage allowed, but I had to pass his door to get downstairs.

  As I crept down to breakfast one morning I could hear Kate sobbing in his bedroom. I suddenly felt angry that he’d upset her. What had the little idiot done to her?

  For a second I wanted to burst into his room and confront him, but then common sense prevailed. I settled instead for some guilty eavesdropping. The voices were muffled, of course, but I managed to catch a few of Kate’s sentences.

  “… miss them so much, Ed. You don’t understand, do you? I was wrong. I just want them baaaaack.”

  Content that it wasn’t Ed who’d upset her, I gathered up my guilt and sneaked downstairs as quietly as I could manage.

  Late that afternoon I found Ed at the back door, a pair of binoculars held up to his eyes.

  “You’d be better off waiting for dark if you want to catch any unwary blondes stripping off.” He ventured a half-laugh but kept the eyepieces pressed to his face.

  I endured a further minute of silence, then asked: “What are you looking at?”

  He lowered the binoculars and handed them to me, pointing at the hill that rose just beyond the houses. “Up there. Something seemed unusual about that hill. Look at the trees.”