Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror (43 page)

  "David. My God, what are you . . . down here again! Listen to me! Get upstairs right now!" Her voice echoed among the foundation posts.

  "I . . . can't," I said. "Not until you come."

  Grandfather got up from the chair, took me firmly by the hand, and they both led me up the basement stairs.

  "Come on, David!" said Grandmother.

  "I'd better stay," said Grandfather.

  "No!" I yelled.

  "Better help me get him upstairs," said Grandmother. "It won't take but a few seconds."

  We three came out of the basement and rounded the landing halfway to the second floor while I slid my hand miserably along the railing.

  I was put to bed. The room was black except for a bit of light that shafted under the door, illuminating a few floorboards. I listened intently for my grandparents, wishing the time forward. I fought to keep from calling out, and the window shade next to my bureau seemed to symbolize what had been kept from me. After a time, I fell asleep.

  Our ability to confirm the memories of childhood is often based upon cruel or doubtful reconstructions, but it was in the confusion that followed that I learned how tenuous our grip on reality can be.

  I was awakened by a frightening noise.

  A thunder sound, coming up from far below, tore at my senses. I'd never heard a sound like it—or was I dreaming?—the sound of thick concrete cracking deep down in the basement. The building shook slightly, as if in an earthquake.

  I jumped out of bed and rushed into the living room, where my aunt grabbed onto me. Ripping my pajama top, I wrenched free of her and ran out into the upper hall. I had to find Grandfather. I heard his familiar voice coming up from the stairwell.

  "Timing!" he yelled angrily, his voice distinguishable amid the noises of people shouting and running in the hallways.

  I ran barefoot down the stairs, my aunt yelling after me. I got to the first floor. My grandfather was standing at the entrance to the cellar door. Huge cracking sounds, as of thick concrete snapping, wooden supports breaking, came from below. Mr. Sorensen was handing Grandfather cans of gasoline that he then poured down the cellar stairs. The other people in the entry hall, including my grandmother, began to run back up the stairs or out through the front door. People were yelling "Fire!" They ran through near or far exits of the building. Mrs. Schulte stayed behind. She was holding two unlit torches. One of these she passed to Grandfather, who tensely lit it with a cigarette lighter and then threw it down into the cellar. Flames quickly roared up through the cellar door as Grandfather and Mrs. Schulte backed away. Grandfather turned, saw me standing there, ran toward me, picked me up in his huge hands, and, without seeming to think, bounded back up the stairs with me in his arms.

  He set me down on the second-floor landing.

  "Stay here!" he yelled at me. "I was supposed to be on the first floor!"

  I grabbed onto him. "No!"

  He got loose from me and stumbled back down the stairs to the entry hall. The hot flames burst across the downstairs ceiling and licked up into the stairwell. I heard a commotion. I looked up, and there were other tenants, the familiar faces I knew, peering down from the various landings toward Grandfather, who yelled up at them from below. "Get to the fire escapes!" Then he turned his attention to a red-framed glass box on the wall. I'd seen it many times before. He grabbed the little hammer and smashed the glass. The alarm, which was attached to our apartment house, rang fiendishly in the alley out by the garbage cans. Now Mr. Sorensen, holding two more cans of gasoline, rushed by me on the landing. Grandfather came up the stairs to meet him, and together they poured the gasoline, which sloshed down the stairs, splashing onto the walls and railing.

  The cans were almost empty when we heard what sounded like the floor below breaking all along the length of the building. We heard people yelling "Fire!" and banging on doors in the distance. Mrs. Schulte, from a few steps up, handed Mr. Sorensen the second handmade torch, this time already lit. Grandfather tossed it down onto the stairs where the gasoline pooled and dripped into the soaking carpet. The stairwell exploded in a tempest of heat and flames. The walls, carpet, and woodwork caught fire all at once. While I was dragged up to the fourth floor, I looked down into the roaring conflagration. People die in fires, I thought. Die!

  An acrid smell filled the air.
In the flames and smoke I saw
something alive.
Something monstrously white was writhing in or behind the waves of heat, fire, and smoke roaring up the stairwell. A second one appeared. Then up into the mid-air blackness, screaming, I was lifted and carried into our apartment. Grandmother, Grandfather, Aunt Evelyn, and I made our exit through the big double-hung kitchen window and out onto the fire escape. We descended amid the sounds of the fire station alarm and the apartment alarm. Other tenants did the same. A fire engine roared around to the front of the apartment building while we huddled on the lower escape landing. Grandfather lowered a metal ladder—an object I'd always failed to see because it had been part of the metal grid. We climbed down to the pavement.

  The old people gathered near the fire station wall. They whispered to each other in the darkness; then, in a group, they moved down the alley and out to the street in front of the old apartment building.

  I watched the firemen point their brass-nozzle hoses toward the orange flames that beat out of the second-story windows like tattered rags in a harsh wind. People were talking, shouting, while the alarms continued to sound. I stood on the cool pavement while the fire spread upward.

  That building, which on the outside looked like one of Poe's haunted mansions and on the inside like a tomb, was now engulfed in flames. The firefighters had been right next door, but the fire had started so quickly and spread so fast that even the advantage of location was minimized, and in the glow of the fire people were expressing astonishment all around me, now pointing toward the burning roof. The alley was soon blocked by policemen, and I could only stand with my bare feet on the pavement and gaze at the tall brick walls. High up, at the fire escape landing, smoke poured through our broken kitchen window. I heard the sounds of breaking glass and hissing steam; and finally, as the fire was at last extinguished in that huge sooty building, the survivors remained huddled together, the crowd thinned out, and within the hour I could hear the lonely sound of dripping water.

  There was the familiar face of John, the fireman, from Station No. 7, standing next to us, looking upward at the black windows, annoyed and bewildered. He looked at the dozen anxious wrinkled faces in the darkness.

  When he spoke, some unaccountable fragment of confusion clung to his words. "How'd it start?" he asked quietly.

  Grandfather looked at John for a few seconds, watching his youthful face, seeming to ponder an act of trust that I later realized might have been planned, but in the end he said nothing.

  John removed his helmet and ran his hand through a tangle of thick brown hair. He was uneasy, frightened, looking back at my grandfather's silent expression, visions perhaps of something incredible retreating in the flames. He looked at the old faces.

  "What in God's name were they?" he asked.

 
 
It was swept into the past, all the unacceptable facts or fantasies, but I stayed the rest of that night and all the next day in the fire station. Our dark blue 1940 Ford miraculously contained family treasures—photo albums, jewelry, clothing, a few books, some phonograph records, and even some of my toys—all the important things that had been placed in it by Grandmother and Aunt.

  My mother found out about the fire. She returned and took me away to the suburbs, where I went to grade school. No one ever admitted starting the fire, so it was attributed to persons unknown. Aunt Evelyn eventually moved to Boise, Idaho, while my grandparents went south to California.

  My mother tried to make me forget what she called a cult of delusion and the fantasies told by my grandfather of his days in the Hudson tubes. It was a story concocted to scare off non-union workers, she said—and in time I might have begun to question the reality of my dreams and the accuracy of my memories.

  Yet, even as she spoke, the Seattle papers printed the story of unexplained tunnels under the old apartment building, nearly vertical tunnels that had collapsed into unaccountable depths.

  City officials chose not to speculate as to the origin of the passages, the men of Fire Station No. 7 declined comment, and the mysterious holes were eventually filled by many tons of earth and rock.

  My grandparents passed away, and Aunt Evelyn, now eightysix, has not reported any bad dreams. Yet I wonder if workers in some underground project will make a new report. Has some shift in habitat or consciousness started to bring the worms to the surface? Given what I have seen, and what we know of their tiny brethren on our planet, their number may be too horrifying to contemplate.

Annotated by Ramsey Campbell

Ramsey Campbell is one of the most distinguished authors of supernatural fiction of his generation. He published a collection of Cthulhu Mythos tales,
The Inhabitant of the Lake and Other Unwelcome Tenants
(Arkham House, 1964), at the age of eighteen. His second collection,
Demons by Daylight
(1973), was a landmark in the history of weird fiction. Among his later collections are
Dark Companions
(Macmillan, 1982),
Waking Nightmares
(Tor, 1991),
Alone with the Horrors
(Arkham House, 1993), and
Told by the Dead
(PS Publishing, 2003). Among his many novels are
Incarnate
(Macmillan, 1983),
Midnight Sun
(Macdonald, 1990),
The Long Lost
(Headline, 1993),
The House on Nazareth Hill
(Headline Feature, 1996), and
The Darkest Part of the Woods
(PS Publishing, 2002). Most of his Lovecraftian tales were gathered in
Cold Print
(Tor, 1985; rev. ed. Headline, 1993). PS Publishing is to publish the definitive set of his Lovecraftian short fiction.

 
 
n 1968 August Derleth was sent a number of letters that had apparently been received by H. P. Lovecraft. The anonymous parcel bore no return address. Although the letters had been typed on a vintage machine and on paper that appeared to be decades old, Derleth was undecided whether they were authentic. For instance, he was unsure that someone living in a small English village in the 1920s would have had access to issues of
Weird Tales,
and he could find no obvious references to Nash in any of Lovecraft's surviving correspondence. Derleth considered printing some or all of Nash's letters in the
Arkham
Collector
but decided against using them in the Winter 1969 issue devoted to Lovecraft. Later he asked me to think about writing an essay on Lovecraft for a new Lovecraftian volume that might offer the letters a home, but the project was shelved. Intrigued by his references to the Nash letters, I persuaded him to send me copies, including the other documents. It isn't clear what happened to the originals. When I visited Arkham House in 1975, James Turner knew nothing about them, and he was subsequently unable to trace them. He did mention that in
Howard Phillips
Lovecraft:
Dreamer
on
the
Nightside,
Frank Belknap Long referred to an English writer who "thought it was amusing to call people names," by whom Lovecraft had supposedly been troubled for several years. Since Long was unable to be more specific, Turner deleted the reference. I reproduce all the letters here, followed by the final documents. Nash's signature is florid and extends across the page. It grows larger but less legible as the correspondence progresses.

7, Grey Mare Lane,

Long Bredy,

West Dorset,

Great Britain.

April 29
^th
, 1925.

 
My dear Mr. Lovecraft,

Forgive a simple English villager for troubling such a celebrated figure as yourself. I trust that the proprietors of your chosen publication will not think it too
weird
that a mere reader should seek to communicate with his idol. As I pen these words I wonder if they might not more properly have been addressed to the eerie letter-column of that magazine. My fear is that the editor would find them unworthy of ink, however, and so I take the greater risk of directing them to you. I pray that he will not find me so presumptuous that he forwards them no farther than the bin beside his desk.

  May I come swiftly to my poor excuse for this intrusion into your inestimably precious time? I have sampled six issues of the
Unique Magazine
, and I am sure you must be aware that it has but a single claim to uniqueness—the contributions of your good self. I scarcely know whether to marvel or to be moved that you should allow them to appear amongst the motley fancies which infest the pages of the journal. Do you intend to educate the other contributors by your example? Are you not concerned that the ignorant reader may be repelled by this commonplace herd, thereby failing to discover the visions which you offer? The company in which you find yourself reads like the scribbling of hacks who have never dared to dream. I wish that the magazine would at least emblazon your name on the cover of every number which contains your prose. I promise you that on the occasion when I mistakenly bought an issue which had neglected to feature your work, I rent it into shreds so small that not a single vapid sentence could survive.

  I am conscious how far any words of mine will fall short of conveying my admiration of your work. May I simply isolate those elements which remain liveliest in my mind? Your parable of Dagon seems to tell a truth at which the compilers of the Bible scarcely dared to hint, but I am most intrigued by the dreams which the narrator is afraid to remember in daylight. The quarry of your hideous hound declares that his fate is no dream, yet to this English reader it suggests one, brought on by the banal Baskerville investigations of Sherlock Holmes. Your narrator de la Poer dreams whilst awake, but are these reveries shaped by awful reality or the reverse? As for the descendant of the African union, perhaps he never dreams of his own nature because he has a
germ in
him—the same germ which infects the minds of all those who believe we are as soulless as the ape. But it is your
hypnotic
tale of Hypnos which exerts the firmest hold on my imagination. May I press you to reveal its source? Does it perhaps hint at your own experience?
¹

  As to myself, I am sure you will not want to be fatigued by information about me. I am but a player at the human game. However long I sojourn in this village, none of its natives will tempt me to grow
breedy
. While my body works behind a counter, my spirit is abroad in the infinity of imagination. At least the nearby countryside offers solitude, and it harbours relics of the past, which are keys to dreams. Please accept my undying gratitude, Mr. Lovecraft, for helping to enliven mine. If you should find a few moments to acknowledge this halting missive, you will confer existence on a dream of your most loyal admirer.

  I have the honour to remain, Mr. Lovecraft,

  Your respectful and obedient servant,

Cameron Thaddeus Nash.

7, Grey Mare Lane,

Long Bredy,

West Dorset,

   Great Britain.

August 12
^th
, 1925.

My esteemed Mr. Lovecraft,

I am sorry that you find New York inhospitable and that you have been inconvenienced by burglary. May I counsel you to reflect that such disadvantages are negligible so long as one's fancies remain unfettered? Your corporeal experiences count for naught unless they prevent you from dreaming and from communicating your dreams. Let me assure you that they have reached across the ocean to inspire a fellow voyager.

  I was sure that your stories which I have read gave voice to your dreams, and I rejoice to understand that other tales of yours do so. But why must these pieces languish in amateur publications? While the mob would doubtless greet them with brutish incomprehension, surely you should disseminate your visions as widely as possible, to give other dreamers the opportunity to chance upon them. I hope some of our kind made themselves a Yuletide present of your tale about the festival in the town which you had never visited except in dreams. I fear that any reader with a brain must have been seasonably inebriated to enjoy the other contents of that number of the magazine. How can it still neglect to advertize your presence on the cover? I remain appalled that the issue which contained your tale of Hypnos chose to publicize Houdini's contribution instead. How misguided was the editor to provide a home for those ridiculous Egyptian ramblings? Houdini even dares to claim that the tale is the report of a dream, but we genuine dreamers see through his charlatanry. I believe he has never dreamed in his life, having been too bent on performing tricks with his mere flesh.
²

  May I presume to pose a question? I wonder if Hypnos represents only as terrible an aspect of dream as you believe the reader could bear to confront, unless this evasion is born of your own wariness. For myself, I am convinced that at the farthest reach of dream we may encounter the source, whose nature no deity ever imagined by man could begin to encompass. Perhaps some Greek sage glimpsed this truth and invented Hypnos as a mask to spare the minds of the multitude. But, Mr. Lovecraft, our minds stand above the mass, and it is our duty to ourselves never to be daunted from dreaming.

  I wish you could have shared my midsummer night's experience, when I spent a midnight hour with the Grey Mare and her colts. They are fragments of an ancient settlement, and I seemed to dream that I found the buried entrance to a grave. It led into a labyrinth illuminated only by my consciousness. As I ventured deeper I became aware that I was descending into an unrecorded past. I understood that the labyrinth was the very brain of an ancient mage, the substance of which had fertilized the earth, where his memories emerged in the form of aberrant subterranean growths. One day I may fashion this vision into a tale.

  I have done so, and I take the great liberty of enclosing it. Should you ever be able to spare the time to glance over it, I would find any comments that you cared to offer beyond price. Perhaps you might suggest a title more fitting than
The Brain Beneath the Earth?

  I bid you adieu from a land which you have dreamed of visiting.

  Yours in inexpressible admiration,

Cameron Thaddeus Nash.

18, Old Sarum Road,

Salisbury,

Wiltshire,

Great Britain.

October 30
^th
, 1925.

Dear H. P. Lovecraft,

 
Thank you for your kind praise of my little tale, and thank you for taking the trouble to think of a title. Now it sounds more like a story of your own. Please also be assured of my gratitude for the time you spent in offering suggestions for changes to the piece. I am sure you will understand if I prefer it to remain as I dreamed it. I am happy that in any case you feel it might be worthy of submission to the "unique magazine," and I hereby authorize you to do so. I am certain that
Beneath the Stones
can only benefit from your patronage.

  I must apologize for my mistake over the "Houdini" tale. Had it appeared as
Under the Pyramids
by none other than the great Howard Phillips Lovecraft, I promise you that it would have excited a different response from this reader. I should have guessed its authorship, since it proves to be the narration of a dream. May I assume that Houdini supplied some of the material? I believe this robs the tale of the authenticity of your other work. Only genuine dreamers can collaborate on a dream.

  I was amused to learn that you had to devote your wedding night to typing the story afresh. Perhaps your loss of the original transcription was a lucky chance which you should continue to embrace. I trust you will permit a fellow dreamer to observe that your courtship and marriage appear to have distracted you from your true purpose in the world. I fervently hope that you have not grown unable to dream freely now that you are no longer alone. May your wife be preventing you from visiting sites which are fertile with dreams, or from employing relics to bring dreams to your bed? You will have noticed that I have moved onwards from my previous abode, having exhausted the site of which I wrote to you. I believe my new situation will provide me with a portal to dreams no living man has begun to experience.

  In the meantime I have read your brace of tales which recently saw publication. The musician Zann and his street are dreams, are they not? Only in dreams may streets remain unmapped. Is the abyss which the music summons not a glimpse or a hint of the source of the ultimate dream? And Carter's graveyard reverie conjures up the stuff of dream.
³
It rightly stays unnameable, for the essence of dreams neither can nor should be named. You mentioned that these tales were composed before your courtship. May I take the liberty of suggesting that they remind you what you are in peril of abandoning? The dreamer ought to be a solitary man, free to follow all the promptings of his mind.