Black Wings of Cthulhu, Volume 3 Read online

  The pot in which she had heated the soup lay overturned across from her on the table, and she picked it up and looked at her reflection in the greasy metal surface. Aside from the spaces left by missing teeth, her visage was marred only by bleary jaundiced eyes, a puffy nose clogged with mucus, and a lunar landscape of facial pustules the color and consistency of rancid mayonnaise. Her hair, such of it as she still possessed, hung in miserable muddy strands like a soiled mop, and her cheeks and neck were wrinkled into saurian folds like those of an especially ill-preserved hundred-year-old woman. Cindy was seventeen.

  Well, what if her face had lost a bit of its charm, its blossom of youth, and what if her clothes smelled of urine, and what if her breath did have the aroma of raw sewage? Was that any reason why she should be crying? But no, wait, it wasn’t she who was crying. It must be the baby, off in the other room. Cindy had forgotten about her.

  Actually the baby didn’t so much cry as moan, her usual low, lethargic moan that somehow seemed to fit her emotionless little round face with its muddled and incurious eyes. Looking at this wan face, one might almost have thought the child was brain damaged, and if she had been, it would have been a matter of small wonder.

  Cindy faltered her way into the other room, retrieved the baby, and brought her back to the kitchen table, where she began spooning what was left of the mushroom soup into the tiny mouth. For possibly the second or third time, she wondered who the baby’s father was—not that it much mattered, she supposed. It could have been Carl or Lester or Jimmy or Earl or any of a couple of dozen other guys, all meth-heads of course, since she didn’t know anybody else. At times she hoped it wasn’t Jimmy, since the chemical mix he liked to pump into his veins was an especially scary kind of brew. At least Cindy generally stuck to the plain-vanilla sort of meth lab, not putting anything into her body much more bizarre than kitchen cleansers and creosote and lithium battery innards. Jimmy, on the other hand, had always gone for the labs that used ingredients like lighter fluid, paint thinner, and silver polish, and he had forever been babbling that mystical-sounding drivel of his as well.

  It had something to do with an ancient book his grandfather supposedly used to read to him from, about the Old Gods or some such nonsense. Jimmy always seemed to take it pretty seriously, even reciting some of what his grandfather had told him. “Make strong the power in the blood,” he had intoned, “taking into yourself the mighty salts and fluids, and know the woman who has made her blood not unlike your own in strength, for then shall you bring forth a child who shall be an instrument in opening the gates for the return of the Old Gods. Many sacrifices needs must be made, and the child shall do much to bring them to pass.” Thinking about it now, Cindy emitted a wheezing and cheerless little laugh. What a load of crap. Anyway, if Jimmy was so damned smart, why had his friends found him stone-dead a couple of days ago, his entrails half putrefied and his face fallen in like a rotted pumpkin?

  Cindy was too nearly rotted away herself these days to consider more than momentarily the probability that Jimmy’s and her respective explorations into the chemical enhancements of life must have produced some pretty ponderable genetic changes, and that any baby of theirs was likely to have an uncommon genome. Cindy thought rather less about such matters than about her next snort of meth. One had to keep one’s priorities straight.

  She wasn’t altogether unmindful of her baby, though. She could scarcely understand why she hadn’t had an abortion, but now that she had the little brat in tow, she needed to think of a good way to get rid of her without going to the slammer.

  At some unconscious level her chemically bemused state of mind proved to be more resourceful than a lucid state might have been, even had she still been capable of having one. Somehow she found herself driving to the local mega-store with the baby beside her on the seat. She barely knew what she was about, but a sort of formless compulsion seemed to be drawing her toward a course of action.

  Once she had parked the car, grabbed up the kid, and made her way into the huge store—passing the inevitable greeter, who in spite of himself wrinkled his face up in obvious disgust at seeing what looked like a girl-zombie carrying a baby—she gravitated toward the toys department, only now consciously realizing what it was she was going to do. She was groggily aware, on the way, of passing lighted trees and tinsel hangings and hearing the familiarly tedious strains of holiday music, so she gathered Christmas must be coming. Well, she thought, arriving among the tawdry shelves of plastic toys, she was about to give herself one fine Christmas present.

  After wandering up and down the aisles for a while, peering at the contents of the shelves, she found what she needed. There, on one particular shelf a little below eye level, was a cardboard display box that bore the inscription DIMPLY DOLLY DOOFY and contained a rather lifelike baby doll with outstretched pudgy arms and legs and a piquant little face out of which blue plastic eyes stared giddily. This was just what Cindy had hoped to find. She looked up and down the aisle; nobody was watching.

  Setting the real baby on the floor at her feet, she plucked the plastic doll out of the display box and tossed it, end over end, little rubbery arms and legs jiggling, into a rolling trash bin the cleanup staff had left unattended a few feet away. The doll settled with a quiet little puff of dust into the bottom of the bin, where dirty rags and paper towels collapsed around and over it. Cindy then retrieved the real baby off the floor and placed it in the display box, doing what she could to arrange the arms and legs to look like the pose of the original doll. As usual, the baby was so phlegmatic that it barely moved at all, showing no surprise in its impassive little face. It just sat there in the box, staring out as the doll had, almost as if it had done a quick study of the doll and followed its example.

  “Well,” Cindy said, coughing and wiping her runny nose with the back of her hand, “at least now you have a name.” And she wandered off toward the store entrance, cheerfully leaving the baby to its own devices. Who knows, she thought, maybe when they find out it’s not a real Dimply Dolly Doofy, they’ll mark the price down. In any event, two weeks later Cindy would be dead of an overdose.

  SHORTLY AFTER CINDY’S LEAVING THE STORE, TWO teenage boys stopped in front of the Dimply Dolly Doofy display. One of them poked the baby in the arm, and it emitted a sharp little cry. “Ow.”

  “Hey,” the boy said to his friend, “that stuff feels like real skin. And it sounds like a real baby.”

  The other boy laughed. “So I’ll buy it for you for Christmas. I know you’ve always wanted one, right?”

  The first boy rolled his eyes and shook his head. “C’mon, let’s go grab something to eat.”

  BEFORE LONG, MORE SERIOUS CUSTOMERS, PUSHING shopping carts, paused in front of the doll display, where the baby sat motionless and quiet as before.

  The woman read aloud from the advertising copy on the display box. “‘Take Dimply Dolly Doofy home to love and care for. Feed her, hold her, hear her cry, dry her tears.’” She turned to her husband. “Tom, we’ve got to buy it. I think Marcia will love it.”

  The husband took the box with the baby off the shelf and placed it in the cart. “Right you are.”

  AFTER LITTLE MARCIA HAD GONE UP TO BED, MOMMY and Daddy worked at getting the Christmas tree ready for tomorrow morning. Presents were arrayed in profusion under the tree, and in the midst of them Dimply Dolly Doofy sat in her store display box, looking out upon the magnificence of tinsel and wrapping paper with eyes that evinced no reaction. Her time on the toy shelf at the store had taught her to be very, very quiet.

  “Amazing how real-looking they make those things now,” the father said, pointing at the baby. “You know, you’ll laugh at me, but I could almost swear I saw the thing move a minute ago.”

  The mother patted him on the cheek. “That’s how things look sometimes, my dear, after three Scotch-and-sodas.”

  He shrugged, grinning. “The answer to that is, have another one. Join me?”

  “Okay,” she said, “but th
en I think we’d better turn in. I have an idea a certain little girl is going to be getting up pretty early.”

  They had their drink and climbed the stairs, leaving the living room in darkness except for the pale glow of the Christmas tree lights.

  Finally, then, after waiting and listening some little while to be sure they were all asleep in their beds up there, Dimply Dolly Doofy stretched her chubby little arms and legs and heaved a sigh. There was no hurry. At length she pushed herself out of the display box and began crawling, first over the mounds of wrapped presents under the tree, then slowly across the carpet. All was quiet. Feeling a remarkable strength in her little frame, she began her patient way up the stairs. When she had reached the top and crawled up onto the upstairs hallway floor, she craned her tiny neck to look up at the receding bedroom doorways, then inched toward the nearest one.

  She had things to do.

  IT WAS THE GRANDMOTHER WHO FOUND THEM ALL in the morning, coming over as she always did on these occasions to help with the holiday breakfast. What she found when she called, and had no answer and went upstairs, was unspeakable horror in the beds—three throats torn out, three bodies savagely chewed and nearly drained of blood. Whatever had dined on the blood and the flesh had vomited chunky gobbets of the stuff here and there, apparently to make room to eat more.

  The sacrifices had begun.

  THEY SAY NOW ON THE STREET THAT WINOS AND BAG ladies sometimes see an odd little form, foraging through garbage bins or scuttering out of sight around corners and down dark alleys. Once two street people sleeping in the rear doorway of a laundromat woke to see a grinning baby sitting in the space near them, and one of them managed to get up and stumble away while the tiny form reached out and parted the throat of the other man.

  Now the scattered reports of grim and unaccountable deaths seem the most prominent around All Hallows’ Eve and Walpurgis Night, but one can never really tell when and where they may occur. Whether some cosmic cycle of sacrifice and prophecy has tumbled into motion, no one can say for sure.

  But somewhere in the night, in the restless dark, two little eyes glow with a fever and a nameless nest of secrets all their own.

  The Hag Stone

  RICHARD GAVIN

  Richard Gavin has written four acclaimed collections of nightmarish and Lovecraftian fiction: Charnel Wine (Rainfall Books, 2004), Omens (Mythos Books, 2007), The Darkly Splendid Realm (Dark Regions Press, 2009), and At Fear’s Altar (Hippocampus Press, 2012). He has also published nonfiction works on the macabre and the esoteric. Richard lives in Ontario, Canada, with his beloved wife and their brood.

  PAMELA HAD BEEN BORN TOO LATE. HAD SHE BEEN the product of a distant era, she might have viewed the conditions of that night—pyres blazing where the cold lake shored pale sands, the endless effusion of wine, the shouting, the music—as ceremonious; an Arcadian revel; a spirit-call spelled out in an alphabet of laugher and stifled lust. But she was a child of her age, and so to her this scene was merely a beach party in late spring—an event she seemed only too happy to stray from.

  Although I was also a product of my time, I somehow did know that the night was auspicious. Not because of the bonfires or the drink, but because I knew Fate had delivered me to that ruckus in order to show me my future. And see my future I did, the very moment I spotted Pamela.

  She was a stranger to me at the time, but the glimpse of her I’d chanced when the crowd shifted was enough to prove that all those age-old notions of first-sight love were not mere literary tropes.

  My sighting of her came swiftly and, to my horror, seemed to be ending equally fast.

  Through the haze of the fire’s heat and the ever-milling crowd I watched her rise from the log where she’d been seated and saunter off into the darkness.

  What inspired me to toss my drink aside and follow her was not lust, but panic that the Fate that had presented this woman to me might also dissolve her like a mirage. I wormed my way out of the crowd, relieved that I was still able to discern the peacock-like pattern of her skirt billowing like vibrant plumage in the night.

  She settled at the base of a birch tree. I stopped pursuing, realizing that I was running the risk of frightening her. I wanted our initial meeting to be perfect, so I stood scrambling for something to say. It didn’t need to be witty, but I couldn’t let it be foolish.

  Pamela plucked a bit of driftwood from the rocks and began to poke stippling patterns in the sand.

  “Is everything okay?” My first words to her. They spilled out almost unexpectedly, but they would have to do. Pamela seemed more confused than heartened by my concern. She told me she was fine.

  “Crowd getting to be a bit much?” I asked.

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “Well, I can’t blame you for wanting to get away. I’m not much for parties myself.” I advanced a step and extended my hand. “My name’s Mason, by the way.”

  She set down the stick and filled my hand with hers. It was warm and delicate, like the petal of a hothouse flower. “Pamela,” she said.

  “Mind if I join you, Pamela?”

  And so it began.

  I settled beside her in a nook where neither the stars nor the bonfires could light. I talked to her and I listened to her. Our conversation was for me so uncharacteristically natural that it almost seemed scripted, as if she and I were actors who’d been preparing for this scene our entire lives. We delivered every line with organic ease.

  Being twenty at the time, I was just old enough to have accumulated all sorts of tensions over the opposite sex. But that night they lost their hold on me. Everything about our meeting was… apt.

  We erected a tiny Chichen-Itza out of beach stones—an emblem of what we were building between us, one stone at a time.

  It was this activity that led to Pamela’s discovery of the stone that would forever change our lives.

  The rock had been interred in a shallow grave of sand. Pamela had freed it only after we’d used up all the stones that were lying on the surface. When she noticed that the flat rock had a hole bored through its center, she gasped a little.

  She told me such stones were often known as hag stones, that they were auspicious and believed by some to be magical. The discovery of them was a rare blessing. The finder, she explained, could peer through the hole in the stone and see into the spirit realm.

  “Is that so? I said. “Well then, it looks like you’ve been blessed tonight.”

  Pamela smiled and told me that she could have told me that already. I loved hearing her say that.

  “Should we try it out?” I suggested. Pamela seemed reluctant. “What? Is using a hag stone considered bad luck or something?”

  “No,” she returned, “it’s not that. I just get a little nervous playing around with things like this.”

  “Who says we’re playing? We’re just seeing if it works.”

  The hesitation in her gestures was noticeable, but eventually Pamela did lift the stone to her eye. After a few seconds she switched to the other eye before finally shrugging and slipping the hag stone into the pocket of her skirt.

  “Didn’t work?” I asked.

  “Maybe I’m not doing it right,” she said, smiling.

  After a while we took notice of the fact that many of the revelers had fled the beach. The bonfires had sunk down to heaps of jewel-like embers, and the deepening night was growing cold.

  We eventually found our way back to Pamela’s tiny apartment for tea.

  We found our way to her bed with the same effortless manner. Our lovemaking was a seamless extension of our meeting just hours earlier.

  There was such ease and simple joy in those early days that we both accepted that we’d been destined to be together. Time rolled on, and although Pamela and I were not immune to the customary trials and hardships of any relationship, that sense of cosmic determinism never faded. It may have occasionally gotten silted in beneath overdue bills or term papers, but it was our rock.

  Ironically,
this belief in hidden forces, however beneficent, was also our undoing.

  I used to chide Pamela that the only reason she was pursuing a degree in archaeology was because she wanted to dig up people who had been as superstitious as she was. She always preferred to call it her “spiritual side,” but it was this aspect of her personality that led her to sleeping with the hag stone under her pillow. She’d been inspired to undertake this practice by, of all people, H. P. Lovecraft.

  Down the road from our little apartment was an occult shop called New Aeon Books. Every so often we’d stop in, usually just to browse, though occasionally Pamela would come across a charm or paperback book that piqued her “spiritual side” enough to sacrifice whatever pin money we had that week. One night after dinner at a cheap noodle house we made a quick detour into New Aeon, though only to escape the rain.

  We stumbled into the store, wet as sewer rats, and giggling loudly. We hadn’t noticed that the shop’s lights had been dimmed, or that a small cluster of people had congregated at the rear of the store.

  The rotund man stationed at the plywood podium looked at us with displeasure. Pamela and I stifled our laughter. I pushed my soaked hair off my face and nodded apologetically. I wondered if the pressure of speaking publicly, even to an audience of seven, was too much for him, for his hairless cranium was glistening with perspiration.

  Next to the podium, an easel-braced poster advertised the subject of his presentation: H. P. Lovecraft: Sorcerer of Starry Wisdom. Beneath the title, which had been printed in a suitably mysterious-looking font, was a large black-and-white photograph of a man I presumed was Lovecraft. The austerity of his clothing and his expression was contrasted by the distant stare of his black eyes. The poster’s background was a tangle of glowing tentacles and ugly stars.

  Pamela took my arm and led me to a pair of vacant folding chairs. I muttered something about not wanting to stay. She whispered that we’d already been rude enough for one night. The presenter cleared his throat loudly, which caused the fold of flesh beneath his chin to flap like a turkey’s wattle.