Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror (23 page)

  It was this last part of the book that spoke most directly to Brad, because it explained the author's attempt to find some explanation for his father's last years. The book Brad held in his hands was an artifact of two generations of pathology, and, as such, it was sadder and more profound than its clichéd, sensational subject initially suggested.

  There was no mention of the swarm attacks, and Brad assumed that such attacks were a more recent phenomenon.

 
 
Brad's health improved, and he ceased to rely on the wheelchair. The cast came off his leg, and his ribs were protected by a more flexible, shower-friendly fiberglass cage. With the help of a cane—he'd never had any success with the crutches, which promoted a form of locomotion too unnatural to be taken seriously—he was able to hobble to the kitchen and back to the bedroom, exhausted at first but slowly regaining his stamina, reclaiming his will.

  He had much time for solitary reflection, because Meta, on his urging, had returned to her job at the UT library. In the evenings, she'd talk to him about her day, her voice his only window on a larger world.

  Brad found his attention straying from her words. His mind, his heart was otherwise occupied: he was waiting (every day, every hour, every second) to feel, again, her presence. Since the accident, she had turned invisible . . .
and
opaque. Both words described her, despite their warring definitions. She was a ghost in his mind when out of his sight. His psychic compass could no longer find her. She could be anywhere, pursuing any activity—and he imagined her in the strangest places: curled amid warm towels in a clothes dryer; hanging upside down in a closet; smiling with her eyes open while underwater in the upstairs bathtub—and when she was in front of him, he did not know her. She seemed to study him with cool interest and an absence of any binding emotion. Even her voice had altered, and he found himself marveling at how skillfully this woman reproduced his wife's sounds, failing only in recreating certain resonances that were within the province of her soul.

  He should have been afraid, but he was not—not, that is, until he received a call from Sheriff Winslow, who informed Brad that Michael Parkington had left Silo, abruptly and without notice. The date of his departure was uncertain, since he kept to himself. Only when Parkington failed to show up on the first with the rent check did anyone (i.e., his landlord) evince interest in his whereabouts.

  Brad was wondering why he had been called, since he had only met the man once, but the sheriff must have been anticipating this question, because he answered it before Brad asked.

  "I called because we don't know whether the man is dead or alive, and he may be dangerous." Winslow explained that, on entering Parkington's apartment, they had immediately been confronted with a wall of photographs and newspaper clippings, and while the bulk of these items had yet to suggest anything relevant to the man's disappearance, the investigation had discovered an interesting and disturbing connection between four people (one woman and three men). These people were all the subjects of hometown newspaper articles (newspapers in Newark, El Paso, Phoenix, and Santa Fe) and had all, prior to the appearance of these articles, been interviewed by Dr. Parkington.

  "We also discovered a small digital recorder and listened to your interview," Winslow said.

  "I still don't understand why you called me," Brad said, mildly irked, again, for having allowed Parkington to record him.

  "Those newspaper articles are about people who have disappeared. They are the people Parkington interviewed. Since they all disappeared between one and four months after he interviewed them, and since he took the trouble to track those clippings down and stick them on his wall, it is likely those vanished folks are connected, in some way, to Parkington. I wanted to call and give you a heads up, in case he comes knocking on your door. You might not want to open it."

  "You think he killed those people?" Brad had difficulty envisioning a homicidal Parkington.

  "I don't know what to think. Do you?"

  Brad didn't, and he promised to call if Parkington showed up in Austin.

  After he replaced the phone in its cradle, he went to the refrigerator and got a beer. He drank half of it and decided to call Meta at work.

  "She left early today," someone told him. "A couple of hours ago, I guess."

  Brad sat in a kitchen chair and drank the rest of his beer. He had no idea where she was.

  But he did. He realized he did know. Not in the way he had always known, not with that magical (gone and now precious) lost sense but with the new cold logic that had replaced it. She was on her way to Silo, the town where it had all unraveled and where, now, some accursed force awaited her.

  He set off at once, driving toward Silo, stopping every hundred miles or so to empty his bladder and take on gas and supplies (which consisted primarily of beer and snacks). He wasn't up for such a trip, not fully recovered from the accident and emotionally exhausted by Meta's betrayal, her retreat from his love and protection into the arms of some monstrous Casanova from Atlantis—and, yes, he admitted that he now swallowed Parkington's nutcase scenarios, and they went down easy; there was something out there in the mountains—under
the mountains—
that had reached out and wrecked his marriage and was now dragging Meta toward its lair.

  But he was exhausted and would be no good at all unless he rested. So, on the far side of midnight, miles away from morn ing, he pulled into a rest stop and turned the engine off and slept.

  The sun was up when he woke, and it was late afternoon when he drove down Silo's Main Street. It was a lean town, not given to airs, saturated with the sun's weight, sidewalks cracked by time, two old men on a bench in front of Roy's Restaurant, the Silo Library next door, then a barbershop called Curly's Quick Hair. Brad parked in front of a bar, B&G (which he knew, having eaten lunch there with Meta on a therapeutic outing from the hospital, stood for Bar & Grill, minimalist humor or the lack of it).

  Brad wasn't a drinker, and his overindulgence of the day before was now taking its toll. So he went into B&G and sat at the bar counter. He ordered a beer and a fried egg sandwich from the barmaid, a middle-aged woman of undecided hair color with a tattoo on her shoulder that said "Dwayne" over a heart. Under the heart, clearly the work of a less skilled artist, it read: "Stinks." It made Brad sad, that tattoo. He thought of the entropy inherent in all relationships, and he ordered another beer. He considered a plan of action.

  He didn't have one, he realized. The certainty that had brought him here had drained out over the miles, and he was left with a panicky sense of abandonment. Who did he know in town? No one. Well, Sheriff Winslow, but what could he say to him? Nothing relevant. He'd sound like a madman.

  
Am I?
he wondered. But it was the truth itself that was mad, and how could it help but irradiate him, taint his own sanity?

  His musings were interrupted by the barmaid, shouting "Musky! Hey Musky! Wake up! Come on. I got a couple of beers for you if you take out the trash."

  She was leaning over a man and shaking his shoulder. He stirred, raised his head like an ancient bloodhound scenting a rabbit, and said, "Trash." He was a bearded man with a pocked face and heavy-lidded eyes stained yellow, the same color as the bar's smoke-saturated walls, and he had been sleeping in a corner booth, the only other patrons an elderly couple who were dancing to tinny sounds from the jukebox, the sort of music you could make with a comb and a piece of wax paper.

  Brad watched the man lumber past the bar counter and through a door that must have led to the alley in back. Brad called to the barmaid, and when she came over, he asked her who she'd just been talking to.

  "You mean old Musky?" She looked a little incredulous, a little suspicious. "Musky?"

  "That's his name?"

  "It's what he answers to, yeah. Why you want to know?"

  Brad hesitated. "I thought he might be somebody I heard of recently. But I believe that person's name was Charlie."

  "Ain't nobody calls him that anymore. But that's what he was born. Born Charlie Musgrove, the light of his momma's eye, and as full of promise . . . you won't credit this, 'cause he looks about a hundred years old now, but we were in high school together."

  "What happened?" Brad said.

  "Shit," the woman said. "Ain't that what the bumper sticker says? Shit happens. He drank up all his opportunities 'cept the opportunity to drink more." She backed up and narrowed her eyes. "Why you want to know about Musky? What makes him any of your business?"

  Brad explained, starting with the wasps that had attacked him and his wife in the desert. He did not mention Atlantis under the mountains or the alien theft of his wife's soul, however. He did tell her how Charlie Musgrove figured in the narrative.

  "Rattlesnakes!" she said. "You want old Musky to tell you about them rattlesnakes that tried to get him!"

  "Yes," Brad said, not wishing to explain, in detail, what he really wanted.

  "Hell, he's been hard to shut up on that subject. You won't have any trouble there. If you say the magic words, you'll get an earful. I guarantee it."

"What are the magic words?" "Can I buy you a beer?" she said.

 
 
"
urn here," Musky said. They followed a winding road into the mountains. The car leaned upward, as though the stars above were their destination. Musky took a swig from the beer bottle and lurched into song again: "Away in a manager no crib for his bed, the little Lord Jesus was wishin' he's dead. No . . . "

  It hadn't been hard to elicit the rattlesnake story from Musky—who hadn't responded to Brad's initial
Charles Musgrove?
query—and Musky had a few things to say about Michael Parkington. "That fellow told me I didn't see no rattlesnakes, said I
lucinated
them. I didn't tell him I'd read that fool book he wrote. Yep, found a copy in a dumpster, autographed to Cindy Lou with his cell phone number, but I guess that didn't work out. That book was a lot of crap, all that Atlantis stuff."

  "You don't believe there is some alien force in these mountains?"

  Musky finished the beer and threw the empty bottle out the window, which made the Austin-environmentalist in Brad cringe when he heard the shattering glass. "Oh, there's something awful and ancient in these mountains. My grandfather knew all about it, said he'd seen it eat a goat by turning the goat inside out and sort of licking it until it was gone. He said it was a god from another world, older than this one. He called it Toth. A lot of people in these parts know about it, but it ain't a popular subject."

  He opened another beer and drank it. "Anyway, I think those rattlesnakes were real."

  They bumped along the road, flanked by ragged outcroppings, shapes that defied gravity, everything black and jagged or half erased by the brightness of the car's rollicking headlights.

  "Okay! Stop 'er!" Musky said. Brad stopped the car. Musky was out of the car immediately, tumbling to the ground but quickly staggering upright with the beer bottle clutched in his hand. Brad turned the ignition off, put the key in his pocket, and got out.

  Brad followed the man, who was moving quickly, invigorated, perhaps, by this adventure. The incline grew steeper, the terrain devoid of all vegetation, a moonscape, and Brad thought he'd soon be crawling on his hands and knees. Abruptly, the ground leveled, and he saw Musky, stopped in front of him, back hunched, dirty gray hair shivered by the breeze.

  "There's people who would pay a pretty penny to see this," he said, without turning around. Brad reached the man and looked down from the rocky shelf on which they stood. Beneath them, a great dazzling bowl stretched out and down, a curving motherof-pearl expanse, a skateboarder's idea of heaven—or imagine a giant satellite dish, its diameter measured in miles, pressed into the stone. No, it was nothing
like
anything. He knew he would never be able to describe it.

  He felt a sharp, hot ember sear into the flesh immediately above his right eyebrow, brought his hand up quickly, and slapped the insect, crushing it. He opened his fist and looked at the wasp within. Its crumpled body trembled, and it began to vibrate faster and faster, emitting a high-pitched
whirrrrr.
It exploded in a purple flash that left an after-image in Brad's mind so that, when he turned toward the sound of Musky's voice, part of the man's face was eclipsed by a purple cloud.

  "I always bring them up here," he said. "Toth calls 'em and I bring 'em the last lap."

  "You brought my wife here?" Brad asked.

  "Nope. Just you. She wasn't savory somehow. She had the chemicals in her, and it changed her somehow. Wouldn't do. Mind you, I ain't privy to every decision, I just get a notion sometimes. I think she was poison to it, so it didn't fool with her."

  "But it changed her," Brad shouted, filled with fury, intent on killing this traitor to his race.